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Alvin Finkel

Biography

Alvin Finkel was born in Winnipeg's North End in an immigrant working-class family in 1949. He did his first degree in English Literature at the University of Manitoba. His first career was in journalism. After being blacklisted by the corporate media, he worked for 18 months as assistant editor at Canadian Dimension magazine, a left-wing journal that still publishes today though only on-line. He completed his Masters degree in History at the University of Manitoba and then his PhD at the University of Toronto in 1976. After teaching as a sessional for several years at a number of universities, he became a full-time history prof at Athabasca University, a distance-learning university, in 1978 where he taught until his retirement in 2014. Politically active in labour and other social causes, Alvin served in a number of executive positions in his faculty union over several decades. He also became something of a publishing machine, with books, book chapters, and articles on labour history, the history of social policy, and the collaboration of the British and French elites with Hitler. His co-written 2-volume textbooks, History of the Canadian Peoples, were the first survey texts to focus on the social history of the country. His latest book is Compassion: A Global History of Social Policy.

 Alvin became active in the Alberta Labour History Institute from its founding in 1999 and has served as its president since 2016. He served as principal author and editor of Working People in Alberta: A History, a book published in 2012 to commemorate the centennial of the Alberta Federation of Labour. He writes an annual themed calendar for ALHI and has also authored a booklet on Alberta during the 1919 general strike wave in Canada.  He has also served as book review editor for Labour/Le Travail from 2000 to 2011 and president of the Canadian Committee on Labour History from 2009 to 2015.