• A set of 8 postcards of workers in Ottawa during the 40s, 50s and 60s that includes hydro workers, a teacher, bricklayers, meat inspectors, laundress, workers collecting streetcar and bus tickets, men repairing streetcar tracks and the Salvation Army trucks collecting items during the war.
  • This 100-minute video, 50 years of the Union of Taxation Employees, is a celebration of the achievements of a labour organization and their members on their 50th anniversary. The organization began as the Dominion Income Tax Staff Association in the 1940s. It became the Taxation Component of the Public Service Alliance in 1966 and was then renamed the Union of Taxation Employees in 1987. Over the years, the union became known for its militancy and effectiveness, but also, for establishing good relations at every level with their employer, the Canada Revenue Agency. Definitely something to celebrate.
  • "Fifty years ago, the leaders of many different, often competing, associations came together at a convention to formally establish a union for federal government workers. This represented the culmination of years of struggle to achieve what other workers outside the federal public sector had enjoyed for decades. It was the first step to bringing about real change in our members’ workplaces. It helped families and built communities. In 50 years, our membership has grown to include public sector workers in the north, university teaching and research assistants, workers in Indigenous communities and more. From the beginning, PSAC recognized the need to reach out to the broader labour movement, working in Canada and internationally to build solidarity with the struggles of working people around the world. As we celebrate our first 50 years, the work of building our union goes on."
  • This fifty-year history is a celebration of the achievements of a labour organization. It is also an attempt to preserve the union’s record for future generations of members and activists. The book opens with the Taxation Staff Association, founded in 1943; this became the Taxation Component of the Public Service Alliance of Canada in 1966. As the Component became ever-more successful, it changed its name to the Union of Taxation Employees in 1987. Over the years, the union became known for its militancy and effectiveness but also, remarkably, for establishing good relations at every level with the employer, the Canada Revenue Agency. Truly, something to celebrate.
  • The 2021 calendar is a 14-month calendar celebrating workers who live and work in the Ottawa Valley on both sides of the Ottawa River.
  • Woodworkers have used chisels to cut and shape wood since Neolithic times, and designs have changed little over thousands of years. Most chisels have rectangular cross-sections, with the end ground to a square, sharp edge, and with a wooden handle. Gouges are chisels with a curved cross-section for cutting curves. This set is from a collection belonging to Gus Hatfield (1916-1981), whose name can be seen incised on many of the handles.
  • Among the countless small objects left behind in a supervisory office was this set of keys that once controlled access to clocks, cabinets and pumps. While unremarkable at the time they were photographed, a visual record of such basic workplace technology as it existed in the early twenty-first century and earlier might not be preserved were it not for the efforts of the Workers' History Museum and its volunteers.
  • Then for a brief few years, a steam passenger train service once again reappeared in Ottawa. It featured this locomotive, built in 1907 in Sweden. Starting in 1992, the Hull-Chelsea-Wakefield Steam train took locals and visitors on a day trip up the Gatineau River to Wakefield. It used tracks originally built by the Ottawa and Gatineau Valley Railway in 1891. Taken over by the CPR, the route had seen passenger and freight service until the late 1960s, after which the town of Chelsea had preserved the line in anticipation of an opportunity such as the steam train. Sadly, flooding in 2011 damaged the line beyond economical repair and ended the popular excursion. The passenger coaches were scrapped, but the locomotive can still be seen in the Dalton Ecological Park in Gatineau, Quebec.
  • This somewhat misleading image was published to accompany an article by a correspondent to one of the many French popular weeklies of the 1870s. Since the artist was working "d'après le texte", he presumably had never been to Canada, much less a lumber camp. This may be why the tidy and well-groomed lumberjacks are accommodated in a remarkably spacious, well-built building with fine dishware on the table. In fact, everything about the image suggests a French village inn of the period. Still, it is a charming depiction of how Europeans envisaged the life of Canadian lumbermen as it might have been.
  • This traditional press, still in use in Croatia to entertain and educate tourists, represents the second stage of olive oil production.

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