History of Canadian Labour - Article Example

History of Canadian Labour Whilst craft workers were trying hard to improve their situation in a changing situation, many other workers were just trying to survive. By the late nineteenth century, having to deal with meager pay, long hours and the danger of serious injury or loss of life on the workplace, general labourers welcomed the support of the Knights of Labor, a new union that started assemblies (union locals) and protected their interests. Even though the success of the Knights was short-lived, it gave an example for other labour unions connected with protecting workers' rights. These associations helped bring about changes that enhanced conditions for those employees who had the least amount of power, as well as women, children and immigrants. The Knights did things differently from the previous craft unions, which had limited their membership to only the most experienced of workers. The Knights welcomed everyone into their assemblies; in fact, they formally expelled only bankers, lawyers, gamblers, and saloon-keepers from membership! As a result, thousands of workers earlier excluded from the labour movement found a home in the Knights. Women now came to the union movement for the first time in our history. In another further thinking step, the Knights allowed separate local assemblies for French and English workers in Montreal. However, this grace did not expand to Chinese and other Asian workers, in particular in British Columbia. The Knights in Canada were part of a bigger movement that had appeared in the United States in the 1860s. This was not unexpected since workers all through North America faced the same problems. Fraternal ties between workers in the two states gave the impression of making good sense. The Knights' assemblies in Canada, however, emerged first and principally out of local conditions. In small communities like Galt and St. Catharines, Ontario as well as in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and other larger centres, workers established assemblies to address local grievances in their workplaces, as well as the general health of their communities. Concerned with the effects of an increasingly competitive labour market and poor living environment in their towns, the Knights attempted to moderate this situation that appeared to go hand-in-hand with industrialism. In response to such concerns and worries, the Knights called for restrictions to be placed on free-market competition. They stressed in their speeches and literature on the necessity to defend communities from dishonest manufacturers. But use of the strike to reach these purposes was viewed as a last alternative, at least by the leadership. First, the Knights argued, ethical persuasion and petitions to governments for better regulation must be undertaken. The Knights' stress on community and government regulation found more expression in their attention to municipal politics. In cities and towns thoroughout Canada, the Knights launched Canada's first independent labour parties. In another new response to business monopolies, the Knights experimented with producer and customer co-operatives in their search for options to large business. Nevertheless, in the end this concentration on local conditions left little time and energy to construct a strong national organization. This partially accounts for the collapse of the Knights in the late 1880s. Factories were becoming even bigger, some now employing thousands of workers. The assembly line became the symbol of the new era of mass production. The rising use of machines that followed the Second Industrial Revolution produced demands for employees with new types of skills. Semi-skilled machine operatives were in huge demand. Rising company offices and service companies produced thousands of clerical and retail workplaces. Women occupied lots of these positions. And the number of labouring jobs accessible continued to grow to help build two new continental railways, increase the resource industries, and erect private and commercial buildings in the flourishing cities. Many people wondered where all the needed workers were to be found. Canada's answer was to search for immigrants across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe. 'In the first ten years of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of immigrants moved to Canada. In these few short years, they altered the face of the Canadian working class. Semi-skilled employees and labourers made their way to Canada from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Ukrainians, Poles, and Italians migrated to Canada to take up many of the labour-intensive and hard jobs in building and industry. The large railway and other infrastructure projects of the time employed large numbers of immigrants. On these sites in Western Canada, Europeans were joined by thousands more workers from Asia, especially from China' (From the site of Canadian Museum of civilization and corporation, 1999, par.10). So-called "gendered racialism" took place at the Knights of Labour and during the World War I. Though over half of the labour force in the Toronto garment industry were women, there were few female activists, and women were worse organized than men. Women faced dreadful obstruction to union involvement: they were vulnerable as low-skilled workers, they had little job experience comparing to men, they had domestic responsibilities and the disatisfaction of relatives, and they were neglected by the masculine culture of the organization. Unions failed to create special strategies to organize women workers or to address women's issues: unions did not challenge the domestic division of labour, address male-female pay differentials, campaign against sexual harassment, or fight occupational segregation by gender. Male unionists in the first four decades of the twentieth century did not consider women in the same way that a feminist would in the last two decades of the century. This is not shocking, and it shows the risk of using the standards and problems of the present to understand the past. There was an apparent tendency of at least some class unity to gender-specific. Homophobia and the exclusion of women through practices like the use foul language characterize the male group, at the same time that stereotipes such as boys' hockey teach women that male free time comes first, and they are to play a supportive role. A tendency of masculinity in the workplace explains dust, hazard, and boredom as a challenge, not as exploitation. Dunk traces the roots of this form of masculinity to the region of Northwestern Ontario and its characteristic types of employment in resource and transportation industries, and hints at its antinomies: it is a source of solidarity that can be a basis for collective action, but also a barrier to wider class solidarities and an ideology that reconciles male resource workers to exploitation. Scientists who studied Canadian working class have always came to grips with the ethnic variety of Canadian workers, either as a trick to class integration or, more recently, as one of many possibilities in the smorgasbord of post-modern identities within the context of the more severe realities of racism. Ethnicity is a vivid feature of Palmer's contribution to Canadian working-class history, from intractable Irish in the 19th century to the large-scale immigration of workers of different ethnic background in the twentieth century. Palmer highlights the question from the perspective of barriers to solidarity; in most cases, "ethnic" workers are treated as problems, whether as purposes of racism that skewed class conflict in British Columbia (Palmer,125, 266), 'as solvents of working-class unity' ( Palmer,225, 221-3), or as groups that "retreat" into their ethnic cultures (Palmer, 162,228). It is necessary to note that anti-Semitism as the form of racism was widespread in Europe. Jewish traditions in contrast to the Victorian "cult of true lady," initiated women's activism while estranging Jewish women from the main events of Anglo-Canadian feminism. Nevertheless, language and cultural differences did make it hard to bring together Jewish and non-Jewish workers in the same union, and the rooting of radicalism in a vivacious ethnic culture permitted employers to stigmatize it as "foreign" in the eyes of English-speaking garment workers, who were more traditional than any of the political groups within the Jewish labour movement. Ethnicity was used by employers in other ways: the economic sources of ethnic opposition lay in the use of immigrant Jewish workers to deskill the garment trades and dismiss the previously leading English-speaking workers. As a final point, ethnicity's cross-class aspect is showed, even though ethnic ties between labourers and employers did little to weaken Jewish labour intolerance or industrial conflict. The question of racism toward Native peoples is in mainly a regional one, most noticeable in districts where there land-use conflicts or large Native populations took place. The most initial level of class experience is subordination to capital and the state--the way of industrial development (and to a more narrow extent of regional politics) have divided Canadian workers and labour movements. Regional distinctions in the labour movement were caused by differences in economic development, and perhaps, in ethnic composition and regionalism is considered the sourse of weakness as regional difference did not united people. The large gap in consciousness of rural and urban workers was considerable, also it depended on skill, gender and ethnicity, for instance , Canadians and European immidrants were more aware of their situation then their Asian collaborators. Women had resstricted rights and freedoms,so they knew less about the problem then men. 'Some of the great episodes of class confrontation in Canada reveal a conjunction of class and regional issues--in the period leading up to 1919, which despite it national scope, was most powerful in the West; in the 1960s, when national and class grievances fuelled each other in Quebec. Like skill, like gender, like ethnicity, region's implications for working-class formation are ambivalent: it is a source of division in the working class, but potentially also a source of resistance'(Journal of Canadian studies,1995). Working-class culture was an important barrier to the labour movement. Culture has a noticeable place in Working-Class Experience. Workers' use of the symbols and rituals of paternalist authority to struggle and ignore the fact that authority is emphasized. In the 1920s, working-class culture play the role of the meeting-point of three cultures: widely spread mass culture, popular ethnical culture connected mostly with religion, and what can be called movement culture. It is necessary to distinct the uneven influence of these cultures on parts of the working class determined by gender, age, skill, income, and ethnicity, as the impact was different. On Palmer's opinion, 'in the 1920s and 1930s it had little impact outside the ranks of English-speaking, skilled, respectable, urban, central Canadian workers, but still, we cannot know for sure because Frager has not really asked'.(Palmer, 297) On the other hand, local culteres and mass culture were merely spontaneous, in addition cultural assimilation took place immediately after immigration, so it is difficult even by now to explore properly their influnce on the behavior of the labour class. In fact,there took place conjunction of Canadian mass culture and the ethnical cultures, both of which were opposed to the 'high', 'aristocratic' culture. Beyond any doubt, labour class differentiated itself, mental work (and'petty-bourgeois culture') was opposed to the manual one (labour class culture), and there existed a large gap between the representatives of these two groups. Ethnic cultures were based merely on the appropriate religion, so the absence of confessional buildings was one of the most important causes of assimilation in the dimension of religion. Nevertheless, the great dissatisfaction of labour class had a well-known outcome -the Winnipeg strike of May, 15, 1919. 'The workers' demands included higher wages and union recognition. Employers simply refused to negotiate with the metal and building trades councils. This rejection propelled the explosive issues of union recognition and workers' rights to collective bargaining to the fore'(From the site of Canadian Museum of civilization and corporation, 1999, par.21) Employers there had almost unlimited rights and literally paid their workers as musk as they (directors) wished. The huge vote for strike action astonished even the most optimistic labour leaders. They supposed to get solid support from railway, foundry, and factory workers, but were taken by surprise with the equally strong support coming from other unions. 'For example, city police voted 149 to 11 for strike action, fire-fighters 149 to 6, water works employees 44 to 9, postal workers 250 to 19, cooks and waiters 278 to 0, and tailors 155 to 13'(.From the site of Canadian Museum of civilization and corporation, 1999, par.22) According to Heron, the service sector played surprisingly large role in the strike, as their proffesions established not so long ago and they have less rights comparing to builders or railway workers. Unfortunately, the strike was badly coordinated, it's leaders were imprisoned and it's participants were demoralized. The effects of the strike were crucial for lots of workers: some of them lost their lives, others were prevented from returning to their jobs and those who had more luck found conditions unchanged. It would be another generation before the labour movement would regain the popularity it enjoyed in this era. This movement was the widest movement in Canada. It liquidated ethnic and gender distinctions to a significant degree. But more action was required in this direction if labour was ever to create a strong movement in a changing industrial world. Reference list 1) Journal of Canadian studies. (1995) http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/44/238.html 2) MacDowell, L.S., & Radforth, I.(Eds.) (2000). (2nd ed.) Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press 3) Palmer B., Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986) 4) Site of Canadian Museum of civilization and corporation (1999) . http://www.civilization.ca/hist/labour/labh17e.html Read More