About Canada: Work and unions

Work and Unions

We are, in good part, what we work at. Work creates the goods and services that keep our economy and society going, and without which we would all be poorer and less secure. Most adult Canadians spend one third of their lives in jobs where they are paid a wage or salary. For most people, work is a source of pride and self - respect. From an early age, children focus on what they want to be when they grow up. Often people are identified with a certain kind of work because of their dress or an item they carry or wear -- construction workers with hardhats, police with uniforms or managers with briefcases, for example. Even our leisure time often reflects the influence that work exercises over us all. When not working, a person may spend time with fellow workers "talking shop" -- that is, discussing and arguing about work.

Work is a fundamental part of our lives. It is also complex and, at times, a cause for grievance and unhappiness. Factories, shops, mines, mills and other productive enterprises are owned and managed by some Canadians, and they are staffed and worked in by other Canadians. Because the two groups play different roles, their interests may conflict. Strikes and lockouts are one expression of this. Often one group or the other organizes itself into a union or association to gain more power to deal with their discontent. Frequently the relationship between the two is tense and angry.

This has long been the case. For many, the world of work in the 1990s seems unlike anything that preceded it. Advances in technology have changed what we do and how we do it. But while dramatic changes have taken place in the last two decades, the contradictions and conflicts that marked the last 100 years still shape people's work experience.

Yesterday's Work

The first Canadian workers did different work than those in today's advanced industrial plants and offices. Native people harvested furs, itinerant fisherman from Europe salted cod fish on the barren shores of Newfoundland, the habitants of Quebec and the frontier settlers of Ontario farmed, selling some of their produce to merchant traders, and loggers cut timber in the forests of the Canadian Shield and the Maritimes for export to Great Britain.

But by the mid - 19th century, there were growing signs of economic diversification. Small manufacturing enterprises, employing three or four workers, were springing up to supply a growing population with clothing, metal products, furniture, tools and other necessities. Gradually, the old ways of working gave way to larger, more impersonal factory - like settings. Those who practiced traditional skilled crafts found themselves competing with cheaper labour: unskilled males, women, or children. In some industries, machines began to replace human skills.

Wage work and growing mechanization imposed an unfamiliar discipline on individual workers. Factory workers no longer controlled their tools or their time; employers often laid down rigid rules and employees were fined if these were broken. Payment might also take different forms: instead of an hourly wage, workers might be paid by the number of pieces they produced.

Over the course of the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, these changes took place within a society racked by periodic depressions. Most employers were still small family firms dependent on local markets. Few had become national or international in their planning and marketing of products. During depressions, work was scarce as the owners closed their doors and tried to ride out the tough times. When this happened, workers were reminded painfully of their dependence on the wages paid by their employers. Half a century of industrial development meant that Canada was no longer made up mainly of small farmers and others who lived from the land. Instead, large numbers of Canadians suffered from economic forces beyond their control.

Early Unions

Not surprisingly, the transformation of work that resulted from Canada's industrialization gave rise to protests and attempts by workers to gain a greater degree of control over their fate. Strikes over wage rates and job conditions had been rare before the mid - 19th century. But grievance and resentment grew as workers recognized their new vulnerability and tried to reduce the rigours of factory life.

Between 1850 and 1890, Canadian workers organized the first labour movement in the country. Generally, it was skilled workers that formed local unions in cities like Saint John, Montreal and Toronto. By the 1860s, workers in these and other centres were establishing connections with international unions in which craft workers in Canada would be connected with workers in the same trades in the United States and Great Britain. The introduction of new machines undercut the position of these skilled workers and threatened their livelihood. As one retired machinist explained in 1886, "...it is by his skill that the skilled artisan lives." The effect of machines, he went on, was to "cheapen everything" and to "reduce the labour required." This movement of skilled workers put up strong resistance to the new order.

These years also saw the growth of a different approach to the problems of workers, in the form of the Knights of Labor, a workers' organization that included all workers, skilled and unskilled. Membership was open to men and women, and the Knights championed a broad reform of the social, economic and political life of the nation. In the Maritimes, there were some 35 lodges of the Provincial Workingmen's Association, a similar body. At one point, the Knights of Labour could claim almost 400 assemblies. But, despite its high ideals, the organization eventually disappeared in the second wave of changes sweeping through the Canadian economy.

A Modern Economy

From 1890 to 1940, Canada experienced unprecedented economic expansion and consolidation. The family firm faltered and was replaced by more impersonal corporations, governed by boards of directors and run by hired managers. Companies merged, and local employers were replaced by groups of businessmen who looked to national and international markets. The new organizations generated new jobs in the production of automobiles, pulp and paper, and chemicals as well as "white - collar" employment in department stores, banks, insurance companies and corporate offices.

This transformation of the Canadian workplace inevitably affected both the workers and the nature of work itself. The expansion of office employment caused by the "administrative revolution" meant that women entered the work force in staggering numbers as clerks, stenographers, typists and receptionists. Between 1890 and 1930, the number of office employees increased by almost 300%. The swelling ranks of "white - collar" and "pink - collar" clerical workers tended to see themselves as different from their "blue - collar" counterparts who laboured on the shopfloors of the factories.

Both groups, however, faced new conditions as employers increasingly adopted the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American who believed work could be "scientifically managed." Taylor thought that by subdividing tasks, by timing workers with a stopwatch, and by using bonus payments, production could be increased and work made more efficient. The result, as one business journal observed, was that the modern office became much like the modern factory: "Work has been standardized..., [and] with the increasing division of labour, each operation becomes more simple."

Similar changes were taking place on the production line. Henry Ford pioneered the use of mass production using assembly lines in the automobile industry, and the idea quickly spread. Mass production and mechanization wiped out many of the old 19th century skills. Instead, more and more workers were unskilled or semi - skilled machine - minders and factory operatives. The result for the worker was often poor wages and monotonous routine. Meanwhile farming, traditionally Canada's biggest employer, declined as agricultural workers fled drought and depression to look for work in the growing cities.

The New Unions

Mass production industries, with their use of unskilled labour, left trade unions with little bargaining power to protect workers. Although skilled workers put up strong resistance to the new organization of work, their efforts largely failed. More than 1,300 strikes were recorded by the Department of Labour between 1901 and 1911, and by the end of World War I Canada seethed with work - related discontent. A wave of strikes from British Columbia to Nova Scotia led up to the huge Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which grew out of the protests of the metal trades workers. The Canadian government, which had set itself up as the mediator in disputes between workers and employers, sided with the Winnipeg employers and the strike was crushed.

The labour movement was thus in difficult times, and things got worse when the economy crashed in the Great Depression of 1929. Many Canadians could not find work, and those who did had to settle for bad conditions and poor wages. In their search for answers to these problems, some workers turned to "industrial unionism," which tried to organize all the workers in a single industry rather than by their individual trade or craft.

Industrial unionism had existed in Canada before the Great Depression. The Knights of Labour, for example, were organized on the industrial model. But skilled craft unions generally set the pattern for Canadian labour organization until the decade of the 1930s, when American answers to mechanization and mass production spread across the border.

In the United States, John L. Lewis founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 to champion the cause of unorganized workers. Inspired by Lewis's success, Canadian steel workers, miners, auto workers and others set up CIO - style unions to back demands for better wages and union recognition. Sit - down strikes, a favourite tactic of industrial unions, began to spread and union membership expanded rapidly. Victory in the General Motors strike at Oshawa in 1937 seemed to demonstrate the potential power of industrial unionism to improve workers' lives.

But industrial unionists also faced stiff opposition. Aside from employers, who were determined not to bargain with the new unions, industrial unions were suspected by many, including Ontario's Premier Mitchell Hepburn, of being a form of communism. In Quebec, Premier Maurice Duplessis passed the notorious Padlock Law and conservative Catholicled syndicats, or confessional unions, resisted this foreign threat to their position. Elsewhere, clashes between industrial unionists and the older craft unions divided a labour movement struggling to win recognition and legal rights.

That battle would not be won until the end of World War II. During the war, union membership grew rapidly. Following the war, a massive strike wave rocked the nation as workers demanded legislation to protect the right to bargain collectively. In Windsor, Ford Motor Company workers blockaded the automaker's plant with their cars in a dramatic protest. The government finally intervened in the confrontation by appointing Mr. Justice Ivan Rand as arbitrator. What became known as the "Rand formula" established ground rules for future employer - employee relations. A "rule of law" had finally arrived in the Canadian workplace.

Prosperity and Consumerism

With new legislation and an expanding membership, unions entered the 1950s confident that their members could claim a greater share of the fruits of their labour. The next two decades would bring an unprecedented prosperity to Canada; for many, these years became a "golden age" for Canadian workers. The discontents of work, so strong in the past, seemed to fade as consumer goods accumulated. In little more than 20 years, the average family head's real wages roughly doubled. The comforts of life, once far beyond reach, could actually be bought by the ordinary wage earner; the luxuries could even be dreamed about. Cars, gasoline, houses and land all seemed relatively inexpensive compared to wages, which raced upwards.

The service sector provided one engine of growth, expanding from 28 per cent of the labour force in 1901 to nearly 70% in 1981. These numbers also signalled the dramatic change overtaking the Canadian workforce. The explosion of "white - collar" work changed the face of the typical worker. More often than not, the new workers were employed by the government. Public sector workers -- those employed in government offices, schools and other institutions - - shared in the expansion of the economy in these years. One measure of the change was the upsurge in public employee unionism. By 1986, the three largest unions in Canada -- the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the National Union of Provincial Government Employees and the Public Service Alliance -- were all public sector bodies.

The expansion of service work and the growth of government employment also changed the face of the typical worker in another way. Changes in social values, especially the so - called "sexual revolution" of the sixties, created new employment opportunities for women. Meanwhile, as inflation eroded the gains of the 1950s and 1960s, the need for larger family incomes brought these women into the workplace in ever larger numbers. If the new worker was usually wearing a white collar, that new worker was also very often female.

Working Women

Women have always worked to sustain and nurture families. They worked on frontier farms and in city neighbourhoods, in outports and in mining camps. They coped with the endless responsibilities of the households where they lived as daughters, wives and mothers. But for much of our history, paid work has been only a small part of Canadian women's lives.

Times, however, have changed. In 1946, only one in four Canadian women worked outside the home. The number of employed women began to climb in the 1950s and early 1960s; by 1966, one third of all women worked for wages. From the mid - 1960s on, the number of women who worked outside the home grew very rapidly. For the first time, in 1980, more women worked for pay than those that did not. The changing gender of workers represents one of the most significant transformations of the workplace in Canadian history.

What sort of work did women do? Some filled managerial, professional and other familiar positions. But because service work has been the fastest growing occupation since the 1970s, many of the new jobs filled by women were in this sector. As a result, women tended to be more poorly paid when compared to their male counterparts in blue - collar industrial jobs. Since more than half the new jobs created in the 1970s were part - time rather than full - time positions, a large percentage of females could find only part - time work, often seasonal and at low wages, offering little in the way of security and benefits.

The arrival of large numbers of women in the factories and offices of Canada challenged many of the existing stereotypes, and raised a series of new issues ranging from problems of sexual harassment to questions of day care, maternity - paternity leave, and pay equity. Leadership of unions, traditionally composed of male workers, found themselves grappling with these and other concerns in an effort to extend fundamental protection to female workers.

The problems of both unions and women in responding to these issues were complicated by changes in the Canadian economy. These changes frequently translated into increased unemployment, layoffs and resentment of competition for the diminishing number of jobs. With little seniority, women often fell victim to the usual principle of "last hired/first fired." With the decline of the traditional family, single mothers found themselves forced to accept piecework or home work, in order to care for their children. Meanwhile, the spread of computers changed the work women did in offices and stores. The 1980s and 1990s would prove to be tense and difficult for workers of both genders as the Canadian economy was restructured by technology and world competition.

The Microchip Revolution

The new numbers of female workers became so noticeable, in part, because the traditional male - dominated smokestack and resource industries were disappearing at a frightening rate. As reductions in tariff barriers and advances in technology transformed the national economy into a global economy, Canadian corporations found themselves forced to compete with Third World producers. Plant closures and layoffs destroyed once secure jobs and workers' lives.

Faced with the loss of markets and declining revenues, employers demanded wage cuts and concessions in work conditions. Many collective agreements in the mid - 1980s froze wages or cut them back. Each contract negotiation has seen employers attempt to curb the economic demands of the workers; productivity and output have become the major concerns. Employers have also used the economic climate of tough times and uncertainty to recapture some of the concessions made to organized workers in more prosperous times.

Meanwhile, once - powerful unions find their memberships shrinking and their strength eroding. The demand for wage restraint has meant both unionized and unorganized workers have found it impossible to improve their lot. Unions are clearly on the defensive. Strikes are resorted to less frequently and often result in little or no gain. Unemployment remains at crisis levels, as microchip technology has eliminated whole realms of work. Robots on the assembly line replace auto workers, while machinists and printers find their skills duplicated by computerized lathes and desktop publishing. Cash machines at the local bank branch do the jobs of tellers, while computerized checkouts have wiped out the need for many sales clerks and stocktakers.

Public sector workers have also suffered, as government has cut the civil service, consolidated classrooms and reduced the number of hospital beds in its struggle to lower the deficit. Word - processing and fax machines mean that much work can be contracted out, saving on the costs of pensions and benefits. At the same time, the government has intervened increasingly in the collective bargaining process, imposing wage controls that have been followed by the private sector.

Work in the 1990s

Large numbers of Canadians face an uncertain future as they approach the end of the century. Will they have jobs, and if so, what sort? Where will they work and what will their relationship be to their employer? There are no easy answers to these questions. The changes and restructuring of the last decade have destroyed many of the understandings and assumptions about work and about relations in the workplace.

While unions struggle to redefine their role, management experiments with profit - sharing, Japanese - style "quality circles," and the introduction of greater democracy into the workplace. Workers wonder how the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among Canada, the United States and Mexico will affect their jobs. Meanwhile, the recession of the late 1980s lingers on, adding to social tension and stress.

It remains to be seen what work will become. One thing is certain: work makes our world go around. Jobs, no matter how low in status and pay, give people a sense of pride and accomplishment. Work defines individuals as productive, worthwhile and valuable. The shape and nature of work may change, but its importance to Canadians remains the same.

Copyright Canada and The World Feb 1994
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