This collection of essays offers a comprehensive examination of the working class experience in British Columbia and contains essential background knowledge for an understanding of contemporary relations between government, labour, and employees. It treats workers' relationship to the province’s resource base, the economic role of the state, the structure of capitalism, the labour market and the influence of ethnicity and race on class relations.

Using different analytical categories and based on primary research, the individual studies provide new assessments of the development of capitalist relations of production; the way new economic developments changed old and traditional cultures; the connection between the demand for labour and the immigration policy; the impact of technology on work relations; and the various responses of labour to the policies of the state and capital groupings.

Articles focusing on episodes from the 1870s to the present deal with major staple industries such as the early fur trade, fishing, mining, and forestry and with the struggle of labourers against their employers in communities such as New Westminster and Fraser Mills and in specific sectors such as telecommunications and education. Many of the analyses show that ethnicity acts both as a focus of integration and resistance against external forces in the larger society and as a point of division and antagonism internal to the working class.

The activities of the working class and its relationships to other parts of society are of primary importance in explaining social and economic change in the province and in the country. Workers, Capital, and the State in British Columbia will be of interest to students of class, labour, and community relations.