Latest Winners

The Eugene A. Forsey Prize
Julia Maureen Smith, “Organizing the Unorganized: The Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWUC), 1972-1986,” Master of Arts, Simon Fraser University, 2009.
Julia Smith’s Master’s thesis “Organizing the Unorganized: The Service, Office, and Retail Workers’ Union of Canada (SORWOC), 1972-1986” documents an important moment in Canadian labour history. Well-versed in scholarly and activist debates about gender and class, Smith explores the successes and challenges of building a union for unorganized workers expressly committed to socialist feminist ideals of community, equality and grassroots democracy. In doing so, she both reinvigorates debates rooted in experiences of the labour and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and reminds us of the ongoing challenges of imagining a union movement more capable of organizing the unorganized, particularly in service industries.