Hello Girls

I recently conducted an interview with a mother, a former temp worker struggling to get compensation for a workplace injury, and her son. The stress had caused considerable trauma—debt, depression and family breakdown. In particular, the mother’s relationship with her elder son had soured: he was “union” and did not understand their ordeal. The divide between the two worlds—union and non-union—is now deeper than ever. Today, just around 15 percent of private sector workplaces in Canada are unionized, while unstable, contract and temp work is the order of the day. Those on the outside—the precariously employed—look in and resent the privileged few. Those on the inside look out and, in an age of austerity, circle the wagons around the old guard.

That is why Joan M. Roberts’s Cracked: How Telephone Operators Took on Canada’s Largest Corporation … and Won is so refreshing. It is a first-person account of a compelling moment in history when the labour movement...