Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada the Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada - Softcover

Baskerville, Peter; Sager, Eric W.

9780802081445: Unwilling Idlers: The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada the Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late Victorian Canada

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802081444 ISBN 13: 9780802081445

Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr, 1998

Unemployment has been, and remains today, a critical policy issue, yet many studies on the subject offer only cursory historical preambles. To better understand unemployment and its ramifications, it is first necessary to discover how the issue and the discourse surrounding it emerged within our own past.

Unwilling Idlers looks at the unemployed and their families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. The authors provide a social profile of the men and women who identified themselves as unemployed, relate the phenomenon of unemployment to family characteristics and life cycles, and explore the importance of geographic location and seasonal occupation as defining characteristics of the unemployed. The authors assess the impact of unemployment on living standards, and show how workers and their families tried to cope with the problem.

This is the first book to focus on the unemployed in the period of Canada's 'industrial revolution.' Its interdisciplinary focus gives it broad appeal, and it will be read by social and economic historians, labour and family historians, sociologists, and geographers.

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About the Author:

PETER BASKERVILLE is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria and author of The Bank of Upper Canada. ERIC W. SAGER is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria and author of Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914.

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