Separate and Unequal: The Experience of Canadian Working Women and Canadian Labour Unions
This paper will contend that unions have systemically - for most of their history - underrepresented working women because of a deep, structural patriarchal bias against working women. As will be seen, due to a complex array of forces in the industrial ideology that has defined the Canadian workplace and Canadian labour from its earliest days, women have been systematically denied their rights as contributors to the Canadian economy and Canadian labour. From this perspective, to understand the undemocratic sexism in Canadian unions, and the significance of unionized women's contemporary struggle for pay equity, we must understand the history of sexism in Canadian labour. 11 pgs. 19 f/c. 8b.
