Immigrant women's conditions of work have worsened with new government and managerial strategies to restructure the Canadian apparel industry. Changes in occupational health and safety legislation have both given and taken away tools that immigrant women workers could use to improve the quality of their working lives. The author outlines a methodology for eliciting the health and safety concerns of immigrant women workers.

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Based on a comparison of two garment factories in the Toronto area, this paper examines historical changes and the transitional character of garment manufacture where craft methods of making the whole garment exist alongside newer methods involving technological innovation. With the view to testing Richard Edwards’s typology of managerial control, the paper offers insights into labour process theory by focusing on issues related to skill, gender and ethnicity. It highlights new directions in the structure and organization of the union from craft unionism toward industrial unionism, with specific reference to the implications for women’s participation.

One of the most significant challenges to socialist theory and strategy in little more than a decade has been the reemergence of a feminist movement. The &dquo;problem with no name&dquo; identified by Betty Friedan in Feminine Mystique in 1963 has generated much political debate and enthusiasm culminating in the beginnings of a women's liberation movement that shows no signs of disappearance.Women and Revolution is a collection of essays published by South End Press, an American publishing collective committed to socialism and concerned with &dquo;the totality of oppressions&dquo; (p. ix) including race, sex, and class. This book is the second in the political controversies series and highlights the lead article by Heidi Hartmann, &dquo;The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,&dquo; an earlier version of which appeared on the pages of Capital and Class. The other essays in the volume take account of the ideas presented by Hartmann to provide an intellectual forum for the controversy surrounding the interrelationship of gender and class. The authors include journalists, academics, reseachers and political activists.Critical of the economism of Marxism, Hartmann compares the unequal relationship of Marxism and feminism to English common law marriage in which feminism is subsumed in the struggle against capital. &dquo;Either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce&dquo; (p. 2) declares Hartmann. She claims that the categories of Marxism are &dquo;sex blind&dquo; (p. 2) since they fail to explain how and why it is that women are oppressed as women both inside and outside of the family. On the other hand, feminist analysis is ahistorical and &dquo;insufficiently marterialist&dquo; (p. 2). What is needed is a synthesis drawing on Marxist methodology to address feminist objectives. Her main problematic is to identify a material base for patriarchy.The latter is defined as &dquo;a set of social relations between men which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enables them to dominate women&dquo; (p. 14). The material base rests on men's control of women's labor power by excluding women from access to &dquo;essential. productive resources&dquo; (p. 14) and by restricting women's sexuality.Economic production and the reproduction of people in the sex/gender system are seen as two intertwined systems. Changes in one system create &dquo;movement, tension, contradiction&dquo; (p. 17) in the other, although there is no necessary connection between changes in one aspect of production and another. This is demonstrated by the transition from capitalism to socialism, which has not eliminated patriarchal relationships.To illustrate her argument, Hartmann examines the effects of industrialization on the relationships between men and women. The fight on the part of the male working class for protective legislation and the family wage system provided men with better jobs and higher wages than women, thereb...