| This thesis examines in detail the consequences of restructuring for ethno-racial women bank workers from one of Canada's major financial services institutions. It asks the primary question: What are the consequences of restructuring for ethno-racial women bank workers in the Canadian financial services industry? This is followed by three additional questions: How do ethno-racial women bank workers define restructuring? How do social differences, particularly race, class, gender and ethnicity mediate restructuring? and, How do ethno-racial women bank workers comply and contest the dominant restructuring practices and processes of this organization?;This study draws on a wide range of literature and theoretical and discursive concepts and perspectives, primarily integrative anti-racism and anti-colonialism, to reveal how restructuring is a historically situated political process that is imbued with social relations and open to contestation. Specifically, the findings of this thesis illustrates how issues of equity, social justice, difference, diversity, identity, knowledge and power rooted in Canada's colonial history as a 'white settler society' and its racialized, gendered and classed political economy are at the heart of restructuring in Canadian retail banking. It is hoped that the study will cast further light on the relationship between restructuring and the unequal functioning of global capital, the imperialist agenda of Canadian financial institutions and the role of ethno-racial women bank workers in maintaining and challenging these oppressive systems, institutions and practices.;The answers to these questions comes from the data collected from interviews with twenty-two ethno-racial women bank workers from eighteen different Greater Toronto Area (GTA) branches of a major Canadian financial services organization. Based on their knowledge, experiences, opinions, ideas and beliefs on restructuring in this organization from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, this thesis interrogates the dominant instrumental, economically rational restructuring paradigm to show that this is an inadequate framework from which to understand the consequences of restructuring for ethno-racial women bank workers in the Canadian financial services sector. |
