Jeremy Milloy and Joan Sangster, eds., The Violence of Work: New Essays in Canadian and US Labour History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2021)

This relatively thin volume consists of eight chapters drawn from two centuries of North American history. The case studies begin with an assault against a sex worker in 1830s Montreal and end in the contemporary labour struggle to protect Chicago hospitality workers from gendered violence. I applaud the editors’ decision to take the long-view and bring this history right up to the present time. One gets a strong sense here of the continuity in violence, though editor Jeremy Milloy observes a shift from group to individual forms of violence over the course of the 20th century. I am not so sure, but I will return to this.

The particular strength of this volume is in excavating the history of gendered violence in the workplace. This should be no surprise to readers of Labour/Le Travail, given the book is co-edited by Jeremy Milloy, whose monograph Blood, Sweat and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry sets the standard on the study of workplace violence, and Joan Sangster, one of Canada’s leading labour historians, who has done much to make gender analysis, and women’s history, central to the study of work.

Gendered violence has a face and a name in this volume. We are thus introduced in the book’s opening pages to Margery Wardle, a heavy equipment operator in Nepean, Ontario, who experienced sexual harassment at work; then, to Sarah Noxon, a Montreal sex worker, brutally assaulted in 1830, who, Mary Anne Poutanen reveals so well, could find no justice despite her assailants being known. There is also Sarah Jessup’s important account of Ontario nurse Lori Dupont who was murdered in a hospital by a co-worker, a medical doctor, and so higher up in the workplace hierarchy; a case that raised important questions about the intersections of workplace and domestic violence. Together, these, and other chapters reveal the persistence and pervasiveness of violence against women in the North American workplace.

Not every chapter, however, focuses on gendered violence. One of the most intriguing is Aaron Going’s account of early 20th century labour organizer Billy Goal of Aberdeen, Washington, who is remembered as the “Ghoul of Grays Harbour.” It is a case of local history being written by the victors, in this case employers. Over time, strikers’ solidarity and militancy were re-cast as the work of a violent gang that murdered dozens of innocents, throwing their bodies into the harbour. Another interesting piece, by Chad Pearson, considers the links between the 1830s-1840s removal of Florida’s Seminole people and the 1901 racially-driven kidnapping and forced expulsion of Florida strikers by employer D. B. McKay. It is an intriguing idea, as the ideological foundations of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-unionism are shown to be shared. It represents a promising line of inquiry, especially given the failure of labour historians to take settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession seriously, as recently argued by Fred Burrill in this journal.

Violence at work, as examined here, ranges from bullying to sexual harassment, assault and murder as well as the “group violence” of strikers and anti-union employers. The centre of gravity in the book is located in inter-personal violence rather than the “nothing personal” structural violence of corporate capitalism. Only the chapters on the violence of shift work in a Wyoming open pit mine in the 1970s, by Ryan Driskell Tate, and Robert Storey’s excellent article on the violence of Ontario’s Workers Compensation system, which reduces people to numbers, are centrally concerned with the wider ideological violence of capitalism.

When I agreed to review this volume, I had expected more attention to Fordism and other capitalist processes of labour extractivism. The factory floor, oddly, is largely absent. I understand the need to expand our understanding of work beyond the classic male proletarians of the industrial age, but to leave the industrial workplace and factory floor largely out of this history represents a missed opportunity to put these histories into dialogue. The work of Scottish oral historian Arthur McIvor, for example, speaks of the ways that working-class culture fostered a “high risk threshold” that led workers to accept the everyday violence of the workplace. In my own work, I have shown how shopfloor dangers were imaginatively contained in work-life narratives of paper workers.

Relatedly, I was disappointed by the absence of any chapter on the structural violence of layoffs, industrial closure, or deindustrialization. The scale of economic displacement in the last three decades of the 20th century, especially, is staggering, leaving most working-class communities in ruins. Industrial ruination is a violent process, though it is not often understood as such. Milloy’s suggestion that there is a shift away from “group violence” to “individual violence” over the course of the 20th century thus serves to further obscure the slow violence of capitalism itself, and is based on a too-narrow conception of workplace violence. Where we see “violence” and where we do not is of course highly political. I’ve published extensively on the politics of recognition in this regard, including the 2015 edited volume Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, which placed the structural violence of capitalism (with notable contributions from Robert Storey and Arthur McIvor) into conversation with studies of mass violence, which are typically associated with the racial and political violence of war and genocide. This kind of political boundary work is essential in my view.

Despite the otherwise strong introduction by Milloy, the absence of any conclusion to this edited volume represents a missed opportunity to reflect further on violence at work as a field of research and where it needs to go now. I would have also been interested in hearing more about how the American and Canadian historiographies compare. As a result, the case studies are largely left to stand on their own. What this all means is left largely to the reader.

Steven High

Concordia University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2021v88.0017.