This vast productivity undoubtedly promoted the prosperity and well-being of the country. Between 1840 and 1900 the standard of living went up, measured by the yardstick of what one dollar would buy; it probably bought about 25 per cent more in 1900. The dollars may have been slightly harder to come by in 1900; that is impossible to measure. Certainly the worker was less self-sufficient in the city than he had been on the farm. He had to buy goods and services from someone else. In the shift from farms to cities, the supposition was that the living was better. But it was probably an uneven process; city rents were high, and it is possible that, once having come, a family could be trapped in the city by bad times, unable to return to the farm. Still, there was no doubt that factories multiplied productivity enormously. Consider shoes, for example. A shoemaker of the 1840s could sew two pairs of shoes a day; in the 1880s, with the new sewing machine, a workman could, in effect, make a hundred. That is, he would make parts of a thousand pairs, and nine other workmen would make the other parts. Output rose steeply; prices fell.
There were also drastic changes in technique. The movement from the craftsman of the 1840s to the factory worker of the 1880s resulted in jobs that were much more routine. The pride of the craftsman was clearly diminished in the factory, for factories no longer required skilled and experienced workmen who had learned their trade over fifteen or twenty years. Most jobs could be mastered by unskilled labour— or by boys and girls. This kind of labour was much cheaper. Child labour, of boys under twelve and girls under fourteen, was prohibited in both Ontario and Quebec in the 1880s, but the law was impossible to enforce. In Nova Scotia boys had to be at least ten years of age before they could be employed and could not work for more than sixty hours a week until they were twelve! Child labour was not the creation of wicked capitalists alone: it was a conspiracy of parents and employers. The child needed training, the parents needed the money the child brought home, and the employers needed labour. This did not make child labour any less reprehensible, but the blame has to be apportioned. And the city family was an offshoot of the farm family; children worked long hours in both places.
Take the case of Theophile Carron, journeyman cigarmaker, age fourteen. He was apprenticed at eleven years of age, almost certainly by his father or mother, under a duly notarized indenture. After three years’ work he became a journeyman, and in time he would be a full-fledged cigarmaker. Such young workers were hard to control.
And factory foremen were not always very nice about the rough-and-ready discipline they dispensed. Young apprentices who showed the least breach of factory discipline could be incarcerated in the factory’s own prison. It could be suggested that if labourers did not want to submit to such conditions they did not have to. They had the option of getting out. But it was not as simple as that. You could store grain; you could store money; you could not store labour, any more than you could put hunger on the shelf and forget it. Labour and capital were not equal in bargaining force. Labourers had to work to eat. Capital just sat there, a bit devilish, seeming to spin money out of itself.
Post Office and Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, Ontario, 1901 (?).
Sickness was worse. If you were ill on the farm, usually someone could take care of you and your work. In the city, if you were not well enough to work you earned no money. There was no safeguard against fate or bad luck. Despite this, workers continued to come into the city from the farms, exchanging the discipline of farm work, often long and ill-paid, for the tighter, more exigent discipline of the factory, but at least getting cash pay and a holiday on Sunday. The changes were not easy. In a factory town like Marysville, New Brunswick, north-east of Fredericton, workers rose by the whistle of the cotton factory. You went to work by it, ate your lunch and tea by it, and after a ten-hour day went home by it. On the farm, animals had their own routines, but within their constraints and those of the crops, you were to some degree your own boss. In a factory you were drilled into a routine that was not yours. The poet Archibald Lampman, raised in the countryside, came to hate many aspects of the new city of the 1880s:
And toil hath fear for neighbour, Where singing lips are dumb.
An early example of the new (1889) snapshot, done with George Eastman’s new roll film and a hand-held camera, speed being probably ‘As of a second. With this new technique, instead of being stiff as a poker for several seconds or more, people could be photographed laughing, as in this family portrait of Sir John Thompson, Canadian Prime Minister, on holiday in Muskoka with his wife, family and friends, July 1894.
And life is one long labour, Till death or freedom come.
One unhappy certainty was the reduction of wages in the winter. Winter was traditionally the slack season, on the farms and in the cities. Long after the railways came, workers continued to be laid off at the ffeeze-up. When more people sought work, employers were able to reduce wages. At the very time when you needed money the most, to buy clothing for your family, wood or coal for heating, your wages would be reduced. In the country winters were a social season; in the cities they could be brutal. And there was little protection for working classes, or middle classes either, against bad luck, misfortune, illness, or accident. A poor family in Montreal ran up a bill for $11 for groceries. (You paid your grocer every month or quarter-year in those days.) The wife became ill after only $7 had been paid off. The husband wanted time to pay the $4 remaining. Time was refused, perhaps by hard-bitten lawyers who sometimes took over accounts for collection on commission. A court judgment was got for the $4, plus $15 costs. The man’s wages were garnisheed, and despair of it all drove him to suicide.
Labour unions tried to provide some kind of collective shelter against vicissitudes like wage cuts, or too long hours. Their success depended on their leverage. The strongest, the earliest, were among craftsmen whose skills either could survive mechanization or were part of it, such as, respectively, printers and train drivers. Less
Hamilton—Procession of Nine-Hour Movement Men. The Canadian labour movement has its roots in heavily industrialized “blue-collar” cities like Hamilton, Ontario, whose steelworkers are seen here marching for a nine-hour day. Note the painted trade-union processional banners. Engraving from a photograph in the Canadian Illustrated News (June 8, 1872).
Strong were manual labourers; in fact there was a hierarchy in labour
As in so much else. The skilled trade unions were not always anxious to pull chestnuts out of the fire for their less skilled brethren. One union organization tried, for a time successfully, to bridge this gap—The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labour in North America. It included all kinds of labour in its ranks, even small businessmen. Many of the Order’s struggles were over not only wages and hours, but basic union recognition. They had some real successes. One of their first encounters was with the Toronto Street Railway in 1886. Senator Frank Smith, the president, said no union man would be hired. There was a strike; the settlement that emerged was based upon the right of the men to belong to the union.
The issues of labour and unions, of toil in the city, were, one can safely say, the eastern, industrial side of Macdonald’s National Policy: it was effective, busy, but carried with it concomitant social problems. Canadian cities were growing rapidly; Montreal’s population doubled between 1871 and 1891. Doubling a city’s population quadruples the strains on its institutions, fire protection, sewage, law and order, housing. On the western side the strains on Winnipeg were even more drastic: from 240 souls in 1871 the population soared to 25,000 in 1891. But then the West was in this, as in so many ways, quite a different story.
World History
