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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
There have been a number of ambitious studies on an international scale in recent years attempting to identify and compare “industry patterns” or “national patterns” of industrial conflict in different countries. Outstanding among these have been two analytical surveys, “The Inter-Industry Propensity to Strike,” by Kerr and Siegel, and Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict, by Ross and Hartman. One of the findings in this latter study, incidentally, was that, among the fifteen countries surveyed, there has been a relatively high incidence of strikes in Canada—second only to the United States, in fact.
This paper is based on the premise that, in Canada, the individual province, or perhaps better, the region, is the most fruitful unit for studying such phenomena as industrial conflict. For regional differences in several respects are more pronounced in Canada than in most comparably industrialized countries, so that the portrayal of behaviour patterns in terms of national averages or configurations can lead to highly misleading conclusions.
British Columbia, next only to Quebec, perhaps, offers a particularly interesting area for research in this field, because it is a separate and distinct industrial complex, and has experienced patterns of industrial conflict that differ markedly in certain important respects from other major regions of the country.
It is not my intention, however, to emphasize the unique or special features of the labour scene in British Columbia. The field of industrial relations in general has suffered too much already, perhaps, from a plethora of detailed descriptive studies of matters of purely local scope and interest.
Paper presented at Annual Conference, Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, June 11, 1961.
1 Kerr, Clark and Siegel, Abraham, “The Inter-Industry Propensity to Strike: an International Comparison” in Kornhauser, Arthur, Dubin, Robert, and Ross, Arthur M., Industrial Conflict (New York, 1954)Google Scholar; Ross, Arthur M. and Hartman, Paul, Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict (New York, 1960).Google Scholar
2 The word “strike” is used in the generic sense in this context, to include what may be classed technically as “lockouts,” as well as supplementary tactics such as picketing and boycotting.
3 Ross and Hartman, Changing Patterns, chap. v.
4 Kerr, Clark, “Collective Bargaining on the Pacific Coast,” Monthly Labour Review, 04, 1947.Google Scholar
5 One index of this fact is that British Columbia is the only province in Canada, and the only regional political unit on the North American continent, in which, between 1941 and 1956, the population of the main metropolitan areas grew less rapidly than the population over the province as a whole.
6 “Inter-Industry Propensity to Strike.”
7 Ibid., 193.
8 Jamieson, Stuart, Industrial Relations in Canada (Ithaca, 1957)Google Scholar, chap. I.
9 Department of Trade and Commerce, Ottawa, Private and Public Investment in Canada, Regional Estimates, Series, 1952 to 1958.Google Scholar
10 Ibid.
11 Industrial Relations in Canada, chap. IV.
