Crossing Fonds

Case study one investigates women’s labour in the restaurant sector in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1970s, considering historical precedents, and the broader context of work, society, and labour organization. These decades were chosen because of significant differences in sector demographics, working conditions, political formations; and forms of labour organization, such as craft, industrial and independent feminist, and Indigenous unionism. Our research examines the ways that communities are constructed around, support, or intersect with the sector; issues of race and exclusion; as well as correlations between the restaurant and domestic work. We examine the ways that restaurant workers exert a presence within archives (government, academic, and community-based). What collections are contained there, who were the collectors, who described the fonds and what networks exist between collections that can inform the subject?