Unemployment has been, and Remains Today, a Critical Policy Issue, and yet many studies on the subject offer only cursory historical preambles. To better understand unemployment and its ramifications, it is first necessary to discover how the issue and the discourse surrounding it have emerged. Unwilling Idlers looks at the unemployed and their families in six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. The authors provide a social profile of the men and women who said that they were ...
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Unemployment has been, and Remains Today, a Critical Policy Issue, and yet many studies on the subject offer only cursory historical preambles. To better understand unemployment and its ramifications, it is first necessary to discover how the issue and the discourse surrounding it have emerged. Unwilling Idlers looks at the unemployed and their families in six Canadian cities: Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. The authors provide a social profile of the men and women who said that they were unemployed, relate the phenomenon to family characteristics and life cycles, and explore the importance of geographic location and seasonal occupation as defining characteristics of the unemployed. The authors assess the impact of unemployment on living standards, and show how workers and their families tried to cope with the problem. This is the first book that focuses on the unemployed in the period of Canada's 'industrial revolution.' Its interdisciplinary focus gives it broad appeal, and it will be read by social and economic historians, labour and family historians, sociologists, and geographers.
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