“The Dresden Story”: Racism, Human Rights, and the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada.

ID:	HARP-265
Title:	“The Dresden Story”: Racism, Human Rights, and the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada. “The Dresden Story”: Racism, Human Rights, and the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada
Source:	Labour/Le Travail, Spring 2001 p43
Parties:
Dispute Resolution Organ:
Year:	2001
Pages:	0
Author(s):
Keywords:	Canada, discrimination, economic, social, and cultural rights, employment, human rights, labor management, non-discrimination, political economy, religion, second world war, Jewry, Ontario, civil and political rights
Abstract:	CANADIAN HISTORIANS have usually ignored the role of organized labour in the post-war struggle for human rights. Bryan Palmer’s survey textbook, which refers to most of the current labour historiography, contains no references at all. There do exist a few published articles which link organized labour to the fight for female equality in the workplace, and several other works on human rights touch upon the post-war activities of organized labour. Yet the best sources of information are unpublished theses, primarily in areas other than history, such as political science or social work. This paper is one attempt to help redress this benign neglect. It demonstrates that organized labour was a central element of the post-war Canadian human-rights policy community. It also shows that one of the key actors in this community was a body called the Canadian Jewish Labour Committee (JLC), the director of which, Kalmen Kaplansky, played a significant part in the struggle against racial and religious discrimination. To illustrate this, the paper includes a case study of one of the major JLC successes — the passage of the Ontario Fair Accommodation Practices Act and the struggle to apply it in the Ontario town of Dresden.
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