Public Works : State Formation, Class Composition, and the Making of Ontario’s Public Sector
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This dissertation examines the role of labour in the formation of a modern public sector in Ontario. Specifically, I explore how the public sector has been rendered intelligible and administrable through strategies of ‘government at a distance,’ which have aimed to disentangle labour from its strategic location in vital infrastructural networks, enabling its regulation through increasingly centralized administrative structures. I draw from three historical case studies in developing my argument. First, I examine how civic employees’ unions contributed to the reconfiguration of sanitation work in early twentieth century Toronto. Second, I explore how the federation of public sector unions on a provincial and national scale in part provoked the emergence of regional governance structures across the province in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, I explore how interest arbitration was taken up as a means of depoliticizing the bargaining process in Ontario’s hospital sector through the 1960s and 1970s, galvanizing new understandings of the public sector as a distinctive domain. In each of these cases, I explore how new forms of expertise were developed which aimed to impartially calculate the value of public work and render it comparable across disparate sites. In this sense, I draw from Foucault in viewing the formation of a public sector as a process of ‘governmentalization’ -- setting up an economy at the level of the entire state. While a great deal of literature in governmentality studies has tended to focus on the role of state officials in this process, I emphasize how workers, at various times, have been able to build leverage through their critical position in the provision of services, and change the scale at which their labour is framed through establishing new levels of organization. In this sense, I argue that the formation of the public sector a uniform and coherent domain has in many ways been the outcome of struggles from below. In other words, workers have played a very active role in the production of the public sector.
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Copyright © 2014 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.
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