Carmela Patrias. Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945.

Molinaro, Dennis

Carmela Patrias. Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.256 pp. 12 Images. $25.95 sc; $62.00 he; $24.95 EPUB.

Studying race and racism in Canadian history has become a mainstay of the discipline. There are numerous studies detailing all manner of how racism operated in Canada's past and what effect it had on the Canadian nation and identity. Even still, works that detail how racialized groups battled against this discrimination and hostility are not as abundant. In Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945, Carmela Patrias investigates race and racism during the Second World War and how it operated as a barrier to employment for immigrants and Canadians of various ethnic backgrounds. But Patrias goes further than documenting examples of racism in employment, she also demonstrates how people who faced racism organized and fought back against it. Aside from some minor issues around the organization of some of the content, Patrias' book excels at demonstrating how marginalized groups had a voice and how they used it to fight against the barriers they faced.

The book is divided into four parts with the first two examining the job discrimination immigrants and racial minorities faced, while the others explore the Anglo critics and allies of government racial policy. The book is at its best when detailing the discrimination and racism immigrants and minorities such as blacks, natives and Jews experienced during the war when labour demands were high, when these workers tried to fill that demand and when they fought back. A key element to Patrias' study is her reminding readers that immigrants of different ethnicities today were considered different races in the past. Different 'Slavic' peoples were considered races and were often barred from working in war industries. Foreigners faced workplace barriers and social ones as many were labeled as unpatriotic or dangerous. The state often did not prevent employers from firing or refusing to hire workers because of their race and was even complicit in the practice. Patrias outlines how the National Selective Service (NSS) and Unemployment Insurance Commission, groups created with the purpose of maximizing civilian labour for the war effort, used "racial origin" information to discriminate against minorities and support stereotypes. Even though unions reported that Chinese workers were doing well at a Ford plant, the NSS was instead moving them to work in the laundry or restaurant industry. When African Canadian community organizations complained about the low rate of hiring black workers, the head of Montreal's NSS replied that "I can't do anything for your people, their I.Q. is too low (33)." Another strong element of the book is the resistance workers put up against this discrimination. Patrias reveals how workers took militant action such as when Polish workers went out on strike during the Kirkland Lake Gold Miner's strike in 1941-42. Many of the strikers were also women and the determination of the foreigners in maintaining this strike helped inspire the labour movement in Canada. As well, Patrias documents the fluidity of race and racial categorization such as when eastern Europeans asserted their "whiteness" when faced with workplace discrimination.

While historians are certainly well acquainted with the racism expressed towards Asians in Canadian history, Patrias does well at documenting how significantly disenfranchised groups like Asians, blacks and Natives resisted the discrimination leveled against them by employers and the state. Barred from joining most trade unions, Chinese workers created their own organization, the Chinese Trade Workers' Association in 1942. Chinese workers also became militant in demanding equal pay for equal work. Fifteen hundred Chinese shipbuilders and shingle workers threatened to strike in 1943, demanding the same pension benefits for their families that white workers received. Three CIO unions intervened on their behalf, averting the strike and offered support to resolve their grievances. While discrimination against the Japanese during the war is also well known, Patrias reveals how Japanese fought for their right to vote through groups such as the Japanese Canadian Citizens' League (JCCL). The group would go on to have more support after the Japanese relocation. Patrias documents too how Natives organized to defend their right to be free from job and societal discrimination, forming the North American Indian Brotherhood (NAIB). Their labour allowed them to seek demands for equality from employers, such as agreeing to help with the harvest on Western farms provided their wages would not be cut and that they would not face discrimination.

Where the book tends to stall is in the second half that deals with the Anglo-Saxon critics of discrimination but particularly in chapter 5 when Patrias looks at the mainstream Anglo critics like Silcox, Gibbon, Kirkconnell, Graham, Angus and England. While she rightly points out that these critics have often been overlooked in studies because of their Eurocentric focus (which sometimes led them to being considered racist too) and their social conservative ideology which blinded them to workplace discrimination, Patrias doesn't seem to make a strong case for including them in this study either. In her examination of them, they are portrayed as racist, even though she is attempting to demonstrate how they shifted the discussion of race away from biology to environment and how Canada should focus on cultural diversity. Her separate examination of them also causes the chapter to lose coherence as one bio after another is given and then the chapter just ends after a page and a half of analysis. The next chapter also tends to be rather fragmented in its individual analysis of groups that made up the left-wing in this period, though not to the same degree as chapter 5. When Patrias returns to examining the federal programmes and agencies that tried to integrate minority groups in chapter 7, the book resumes its strong focus and coherence. A notable absence throughout the book is the lack of attention given to the Defence of Canada Regulations which was in place during the Second World War. This was one of the most severe series of laws in terms of limiting freedoms in society, but it receives no attention from Patrias. A reader sometimes tends to forget that the country is in a state of war and state of emergency as well. One has to wonder how these forms of resistance played out with such draconian laws in place. Did the Regulations restrict how far people could take their demands and how much they could fight? Were the Regulations not as severe in limiting freedoms as historians have assumed? These issues are not dealt with at all in the book.

Jobs and Justice: Fighting Discrimination in Wartime Canada, 1939-1945 by Carmela Patrias is a much welcomed and needed addition to the study of race and immigration in wartime Canada. Despite its minor shortcomings in organization in two chapters, the book excels at what it was intended to do: illuminate the discrimination workers faced because of their race; the fluidity of race itself; and the ability of workers to fight back against this discrimination. Jobs and Justice wonderfully demonstrates that in wartime Canada the 'voiceless' had a voice, and they used it to demand the equality and justice they so rightly deserved.

Dennis Molinaro

Department of History, Trent University