Angels of the Workplace: Women and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Canadian Clothing Industry, 1890-1940 9781442657434

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Across The Great Divide
2. The Industrial Fields Of Activity: Send Forth Your Daughters
3. Worlds Apart: Women And Unions In The Needle Trades, 1890–1920
4. From Shop-Floor Action To New Unionism: The War Years And After
5. Taking A Stand: Civil War In The Needle Trades
6. ‘A Real Man’S Fight’: Clothing Battles In The Depression Years
7. When The Boys Get Together: Orchestrating Consent
8. After The Acts: Setting The Standards, Putting On The Pressure
9. Conclusion: ‘This Group Of Girls And Men…’
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Angels of the Workplace

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Angels of the Workplace: Women and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Canadian Clothing Industry, 1890–1940

Mercedes Steedman

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

Originally published by Oxford University Press Canada 1997 © University of Toronto Press 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-0982-2 Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Steedman, Mercedes Angels of the workplace : women and the construction of gender relations in the Canadian clothing industry, 1890–1940 (The Canadian social history series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–4426–0982–2 1. Women clothing workers – Canada – History. 2. Sex discrimination in employment – Canada – History. 3. Women in trade-unions – Canada – History. 4. Trade-unions – Clothing workers – Canada – History. I. Title. II. Series. HD6073.C62C37 1997

331.4'887'0971

C97–931365–1

Cover photo: Rose Dress on strike Montreal, circa 1937. Sally St Aubin, shop chairlady, walks with other members of Local 262. Rose Dress experienced several strikes in the 1930s. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archive, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University) University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publihsing program of the Canada Council fro the Arts and th eOntario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgements / vii Abbreviations / x 1 Introduction: Across the Great Divide / 1 2 The Industrial Fields of Activity: Send Forth Your Daughters / 12 3 Worlds Apart: Women and Unions in the Needle Trades, 1890–1920 / 53 4 From Shop-Floor Action to New Unionism: The War Years and After / 86 5 Taking a Stand: Civil War in the Needle Trades / 110 6 ‘A Real Man’s Fight’: Clothing Battles in the Depression Years / 142 7 When the Boys Get Together: Orchestrating Consent / 190 8 After the Acts: Setting the Standards, Putting on the Pressure / 219 9 Conclusion: ‘This Group of Girls and Men . . .’ / 254 Notes / 261 Index / 320

To Craig Heron

Acknowledgements

I guess I will always remember the day in June 1983 when I left Max Dolgoy’s apartment in North Toronto. I had gone there several times over the years to hear Max talk about his experiences in the needle trades, and I knew this would be my last visit. He had lived a rich life as a skilled garment operator, long-time union organizer, and founding member of the Communist Party of Canada. Yet the man I spoke to was an unassuming man, small in stature and modest about his significant achievements in the Winnipeg and Toronto trade union movement. That day as I pulled into traffic coming down Bathurst Street a mix of emotions overwhelmed me. I am immensely grateful to Max Dolgoy and to Eva Shanoff, who opened their hearts and their homes to me and with patience and generosity helped me to understand the complexities of their industry. And I am grateful to the other former garment workers and trade unionists who agreed to be interviewed over the years that I worked on this book. I also benefited greatly from history lessons of another sort. Eric Hobsbawm, my graduate thesis supervisor, helped me conceptualize this project within a larger historical setting than the one I had initially conceived. His sharp but gentle prodding on the many visits to his temporary home in New York became treasured times for me. Craig Heron also deserves the most special place in this book. For many more years than he cares to remember he read drafts of chapters, taking time from his own work to offer guidance and support. He became my unofficial supervisor and through him I learned there was a place for compassion in socialist scholarship. As members of the Women’s Press Collective in the early 1970s Catherine McLeod and I began to learn the lessons of women’s vii

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history. We spent many days in the Provincial Archives of Ontario reading room pouring over records of the garment union battles of the 1930s. What struck us both at the time was how the women workers, by far the majority at that time, had little voice in the political power struggles of those events. We wanted to know why. The quest to answer this seemingly simple problem drew me into many years of research. Along the road Catherine’s friendship and the friendship of so many others helped to sustain me: Anna Davin, Rosemary Donegan, Paula Fletcher, Charney Guetell, Joan Kuyek, Mick Lowe, Raymond Lalonde, Jamie Swift, Kate McLaren, Richard Marqhuart, Lori Rotenberg, and Richard Swift listened to my rambling on the topic, offered me free room and board, and gave me endless encouragement—all the while wondering, I am sure, if I would ever finish this work. Many colleagues and friends took the time to read parts of the manuscript and offer me research assistance. Thanks to Kathy Brankley, Gordon Darroch, Ruth Frager, Alice Kessler-Harris, Linda Kealey, Bob Morris, Pat Thane, and Danny Walkowitz. My friend and colleague François Boudreau translated the French texts. And a special thanks must go to a cherished friend, Dinah Forbes. Her gentle prodding and continued willingness to examine parts of the manuscript and to offer advice from her own knowledge of the publishing industry proved invaluable. None of this work would be possible without financial support. A fellowship from the Department of Labour Canada provided initial funding for my research and, most recently, Laurentian University’s financial assistance has helped to see it through to completion. The process of finding one’s way through the myriad documents housed in libraries and archives is another aspect of learning the lessons of history. Without the generous assistance of those versed in the ways of such institutions, it would be nearly impossible to locate and sort through, much less read and digest, the various pieces of valuable documentation left behind by the early garment workers. My thanks to the many librarians and archivists who made my research possible, especially Danny Moore at the National Archives of Canada, Bob Lazar, then at the ILGWU Archives in New York, David Rome, Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, and Judith McErvel, past archivist at the Eaton’s of Canada Archives in Toronto. The offices of the ILGWU in Montreal and Toronto, the ACWA offices in Toronto, and the Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association of Ontario opened their records and put me in contact with people they felt could assist this project.

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Greg Kealey, as editor and friend, assisted in moving the manuscript through the official hoops of the editing process. Phyllis Wilson, Managing Editor, Oxford University Press, and Richard Tallman steered the manuscript through the final phases of publication. My gratitude to Robert Clarke for his editorial work goes well beyond the usual support one would expect from an editor. Robert’s editorial skill has taught me much about the writing process. His friendship and assistance gave me the encouragement to finish this long overdue project. The words on these pages are as much his as mine. I cannot thank him enough! As always, the special thanks must go to those I hold most dear, my partner, Stuart Cryer, and my daughter, Alexie. They have never known domestic life without this project interfering in their lives. Holidays became research trips, weekends away were far too frequently postponed, and in the end it is their love and patience for which I am most grateful.

Abbreviations ACCL

All-Canadian Congress of Labour

ACWA

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America

AFL

American Federation of Labor

CIO

Congress of Industrial Organizations

CPC

Communist Party of Canada

CTCC

Confederation of Catholic Workers of Canada

ILGWU

International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union

ISA

Industrial Standards Act (Ont.)

IUNTW

Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers

JTUA

Journeymen Tailors Union of America

NIRA

National Industrial Recovery Act (US)

NRA

National Recovery Administration (US)

RILU

Red International of Labor Unions

TLCC

Trades and Labour Congress of Canada

TTLC

Toronto Trades and Labour Council

TUEL

Trade Union Educational League

UGWA

United Garment Workers of America

WLL

Women’s Labour League

WTUL

Women’s Trade Union League

WUL

Workers’ Unity League

1

Introduction: Across the Great Divide

In 1910 Montreal garment workers went into their first general strike. About 1,000 workers, slightly over half of them women, left their sewing machines and took to the streets to demand union recognition and wage increases. A newspaper report of the time noted that the women strikers in the group were asking, ‘Why should men demand and receive more than twice as much pay as we get, when our cost of living is equally high and we have the same skills in the trade?’1 This is a question that has since echoed down, unanswered, through the years. Women have worked in the clothing trades from the industry’s beginning, and their labour has always been an essential component. By the 1920s they dominated the workforce in much of the Canadian industry. Yet their participation in the trade has never led to anything like an equal share in the benefits of that activity. They have never achieved a position of partnership with the male workers. Some eight decades after that first Montreal strike, job classifications based on the gender of the worker continue to figure in the industry’s wage rates, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union continues to grapple with this same issue. For decades the various definitions of skilled work have been the focus of a gendered contest over equal wages for equal work. The overriding question has remained: Why has this seemingly innocuous demand been so hard to achieve? In 1990, when I talked to a woman garment worker who had started working in the trades in Montreal in the late 1930s, I asked her about the different jobs that women and men had done in the shops in those days. She told me that women were always considered to be less skilled than the men, and this was only ‘because they were women’. But that thoroughly established notion of a skill differential 1

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was contradicted by the evidence of actual practice in the workplace. ‘I saw in the shops where I worked when there was a special suit or coat to be made’, she said, ‘the boss always gave the job to a woman, because they say a woman is always more particular in her work than a man is.’ And it wasn’t, of course, only questions of skill that led to differentiation. Later, when this worker went into the children’s clothing trade, ‘The bosses were asking you, “are you married?” and if we were married we were getting less money than if we were not.’2 These and other dynamics of gender have been interwoven into the history of the clothing industry as inevitably and forcibly as the element of class, or the use of cheap immigrant labour, or the expropriation of surplus value. Early on, the sexual division of labour in the industry was so entrenched that the jobs women did—hand sewing and the finishing on garments, for instance—appeared to be ‘natural’ for them, pure extensions of their work in the home. In the factory, men— both fellow workers and management—were in control, just as they were in the home. In the first place, ‘good’ women weren’t supposed to be in the factories at all. They were supposed to be in the home, in the private sphere—the ‘angels of the home’, they were popularly called. The factory—the public sphere—was a male-centred domain. When these busy angels of the home moved into the workplace, in the eyes of the men there they may have endangered, even sacrificed, some of their heavenly essence in attempts to earn decent livings for themselves and their families. Still, they remained ‘angels’, despite their ever-increasing numbers in the trade. They were perceived as ‘angels’, the ‘other’, separated from the earthly hierarchy and expected to follow the bidding of the men who worked around them, although the evidence of those years and especially of their work and union activity shows them to be very much of the earthly realm. Engaged fully as highly skilled factory hands, women garment workers were ready to take action in the streets or factories, to do battle with the authorities of government and workplace, to become, as one female unionist put it, ‘pioneers’ of organized labour. Although the details of women’s participation in the needle trades in Canada have been thoroughly documented and analysed, locating the roots of the industry’s institutionalized gender discrimination has proved difficult. While it is relatively easy to assert that all of us live in a gendered class system based on the existence of capitalism and patriarchy, it is not quite so simple to explain how that system operates.3 The meanings we give to such binary oppositions as class/gender, male/female, and Jew/Gentile are not fixed forever in time and place;

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and in the specific context of work in the clothing industry the permutations of those meanings are particularly intricate and contradictory. For instance, recent writing on these dualistic constructs points to the difficulties of accepting the supposed ‘naturalness’ of gender categories and challenges us to question the fixed nature of such oppositions.4 Historians argue that the idea of men belonging to the public sphere and of women belonging to the private sphere originated in Enlightenment thought and in the middle-class male dominance of civil institutions of eighteenth-century society.5 As working-class men took their place in the civil society of the nineteenth century, they, too, claimed the public space as their own. ‘The working-class version of the ideology of separate spheres developed as particular working-class men led their communities’ battles for political and social rights’, Sonya Rose points out.6 Male artisan pride in work emerged as a central part of a political struggle against the deskilling of work, and these battles further shaped a working-class construction of ‘respectable’ male breadwinners as family men and of ‘their’ women as domestic support. On the rare occasions when women moved into work outside the home, as they did in the clothing industry in the nineteenth century, they moved in, not surprisingly, on terms constructed almost unconsciously by men. Although we tend to see women’s social and economic relations in the class system as being mediated by family relations, we rarely see men’s work relations analysed that way. Women’s economic dependency on men and men’s economic position of support for a family are important components of both of their class experiences, but they are not the whole of those experiences. Familial roles provide a key to understanding the gendered social relations within trade unions. The familial relations played out in both unions and the workplace indicate the significance of the relation between waged work and non-waged work. The crucial challenge is to integrate gender and class experiences so that those experiences are seen as changing and shaping the day-to-day lives of both men and women in the needle trades—at home and in the factory. As Alice Kessler-Harris observes, ‘In part of the world, for most of the 19th and part of the 20th century, wage work came to dominate and control the household: it did so by redefining power in gendered terms and in particular by constructing definitions of power that were exclusively male.’7 Much of the recent historical writing from this perspective has explored the meaning and experience of work through the use of discourse theory, which has made us more acutely aware of the construction of language and experience, of problems in defining agency

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and structure. The once uncritical reading of the concepts of class, gender, and ethnicity now becomes a matter of close scrutiny. Joy Parr, in a superb examination of industrial life in two Ontario towns during the period 1880–1950, challenges us to turn our attention to the concepts themselves: to refrain from treating them as natural and universal but to focus instead on the process through which they gain meaning. She states: By the urgency with which we seek out binary oppositions, so as to know private by what is not public, class by what is not gender, manliness by what is not womanliness, we lose sight of the multiple determinants that constitute any individual’s social position and access to power and also of the ways in which social identities are simultaneously formed from a multiplicity of elements.8 In the clothing industry, part of the explanation for issues such as the perpetuation of unequal pay for equal work rests in the gender construction of the skilled job classifications, which are myriad in the trade and part of a process of giving meaning to productive tasks. The ‘naturalness’ of skill forms an essential key to an understanding of the trade. Well-established practices in the trade conditioned the perception of the gradations between skilled and unskilled work. Those perceptions in turn helped to mould social practices and, along with their relational and structural underpinnings, determined gender relations and influenced how both men and women understood their participation in the industry. As Kessler-Harris aptly points out, a ‘central paradigm of labor history’ is the idea that ‘the male-centered workplace is the locus from which the identity, behavior, social relations and consciousness of working people ultimately permeates.’9 Kessler-Harris challenges us to ‘lay siege’ to this paradigm, noting that the workplace is part of a reciprocal relationship including social ideas and relationships developed in domestic life and in gender, racial, and ethnic identities. The household, then, becomes central to a labour analysis as we search for the construction of both femininity and masculinity and make room for a variety of cultural experiences—facets often rendered invisible by the focus on particular sexually and racially segregated workplaces. When we begin to break down the imaginary line between the household and the workplace, we can also begin to see how the links between gender ideologies and practices in each setting give shape and life to the workplace and collective action. For much of this century gender segregation and social inequality were facts of life for women in the needle trades. Trade unions

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offered working men and women a social and political home in a harsh world of work. As women struggled to make the garment unions compatible with their struggles for dignity and respect in the workplace, they came up against patriarchal structures that seemed determined to maintain the male dominance of the needle trades. Ties to family and community not only helped young men and women make sense of their working world, but also shaped the restrictive context of the work done by men and women—as well as influencing the gendered strategies developed by both sexes to ensure their places in the industry. The institutional structures of the unions themselves form a part of these links. The position of women in the needle trades—the construction of inequality—was shaped and legitimized by the process of collective bargaining. For much of the history of the trade, men provided the union leadership and organization. Men negotiated the collective agreements and met with the managers and government officials on behalf of the women. Women remained subjects of the discussion, rarely active participants. When women workers did become active, their positions as daughters and wives of workingclass men shaped attitudes towards their political behaviour, because it was believed that women’s ‘natural’ place was in the home, not in the workplace. Men were ‘naturally’ the public representatives of the working class, and their sense of manhood and respectability was based on their position in the workplace. This dichotomy of public and private spheres, established in the bourgeois thought of the eighteenth century and recast in the working-class culture of the nineteenth century, not only placed men and women in separate locations but has also resulted in a certain gender blindness in analyses of workers’ lives. As Rose warns, ‘By uncritically incorporating a nineteenth century distinction between public and private that constructed men and women as naturally suited to their respective spheres, labour historians miss both the ways that work was constitutive of the work and political identities of men.’10 Instead of accepting these separate spheres for men and women, we must examine how they are woven into the nature of work and trade union activity. Part of this means delving into the complex relationship of job classifications, unions, and management, and considering the gender and ethnic relationships that were the subtext of these negotiations. The garment trade has a long history of unionization, and trade union activism has helped to shape the industry. In Canada industrial unions

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developed in the needle trades soon after 1900 and have since played an important role in the economic development of the trade. In a highly competitive industry, Canadian manufacturers created products for a domestic market, which influenced their vision of the trade as they focused their vision on the immediate surroundings in Montreal and Toronto (and to a lesser extent Winnipeg and Vancouver). But the union men and women had a broader vision. As members of the internationals, they saw the economics of the trade in a continental context. Through the years of trade union struggle the unionists’ vision—a vision of the industry sometimes more informed than that of their bosses—came to dominate the trade. The organization of production in the needle trades was always based on the role of gender (with the ‘natural’ quality of this classification ensured by tradition), and as the production process was restructured the gender divisions became entrenched. While the meanings given to workplace tasks were renegotiated and restructured in the new industrial setting of the factory system, these negotiations did little to address the power imbalances in the workplace. Woman’s position in the separate domestic sphere and man’s position as breadwinner came to influence the meaning and outcome of industrial job skills and wages in the same manner as they had in the traditional craft shops. At first, subcontracting and ‘outwork’ (labour in the home of the worker) served to meet the industry’s demand, and female labour was drawn into unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in the trade.11 The sexual division of labour was organized and reorganized according to the patriarchal structures dominant within the early custom tailor shops. The skilled jobs that provided higher pay and more constant work went to men; less skilled work went to women, in keeping with the social view that their ultimate destiny as wives and mothers made them peripheral to the marketplace. The great divide between male and female work centred on this question of skill. But skill itself was not a neutral concept. Genderbased beliefs in skill levels were integral to workplace and trade union politics. Indeed, the trade unions’ and manufacturers’ bargaining process served to reconstruct definitions of skill. By formalizing workplace relationships through collective agreements and State regulation, male workers were able to develop strategies that enhanced their economic power in the workplace, and trade union activities often reflected male defences against the disreputable elements among the manufacturers. Skill levels were ultimately defined within this bargaining process, and women needle trade workers tended to

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defer to their male co-workers in the union negotiations for higher wages and better work conditions. The question of women’s trade union participation, then, becomes a key element in any understanding of class and gender relations in the trade, and a central question for the trade revolved around whether a woman could do a man’s job. If she did do a man’s job, could she do it as well as a man? Skill and gender were tightly tangled together. The gendered meanings that reaffirmed inequality in the workplace were not challenged by trade union activists. Yet, how could they be when they appeared in the first instance to be so ‘natural’? In addition, the gender relations were—and always are—integral to class relations. If, for instance, we try to explain women’s oppression in the workplace only by referring to reproductive relations in the family, our conception of the basis of patriarchal relations will remain outside the work environment, and we will be locating women’s oppression outside the traditional definition of the class system. When we leave class relations in the workplace, and men’s class relations and gendered position outside of the analysis, we tend to universalize male definitions of collective action and definitions of work as representative of all working-class activity. To link gender systems to class systems we have to ask a number of questions. Do the positions and situations of women and men in the family have repercussions in the workplace? What is the relationship between familial position and workplace social position? How can we explain the relationship of unpaid family work roles to paid work roles? Why were male needle trade workers so successful in shaping social, political, and economic relations in the workplace and in the trade union movement? And why were women left out of these decisions? Eva Shanoff, who had been a garment worker in both Toronto and Montreal, described her union activities in great detail. She had actively recruited trade union members, sat on price committees and on her local’s executive board, and assisted in strike activities. She had visited the homes of non-union workers to recruit them to the union. During her late teens and twenties, she had lived and breathed unionism. Still, when asked if she considered herself a union organizer, Eva replied, ‘Oh, I wasn’t a union organizer! I really wasn’t. There were many people like me that did that kind of work.’12 Like Eva Shanoff, other women activists often seemed to defer to the men who held the formal positions as organizers. As women’s workplace position was undervalued, so, too, was their union activism. In a way the language seen in the texts of collective agreements and in employment standards legislation crystallizes the experiences

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of men and women and serves to formalize and standardize the imposed relationships of gender, ethnicity, and power. In the garment industry the social and political connections of gender and ethnicity are especially complex, and the following chapters try to unravel the myriad forms that they take. The inequalities of power based on gender, ethnicity, and class relations, as reflected in the stories of people’s lives in the industry, provide a starting point for this work, but the central focus is on how these everyday experiences became translated into the relations of ruling, especially as we see them expressed in the documents that came to govern those relations. The ideologies of gender and ethnic relations were translated into the practices of trade union organizing and into the negotiation process for provincial labour legislation. These textual practices are now part of the historical framework for trade negotiations in the present-day industry, and they continue to order the life of workers and manufacturers in the Canadian garment industry. The garment industry provides a highly fertile ground for a study of gender and class in transition. In the early stages of industrialization in Canada, in 1881, 80 per cent of the workers employed in the clothing industries were women. By the turn of the century, when the proportion of women employed in industrial occupations amounted to about 30 per cent of all employed women, there were 37,847 women working in the needle trades—about 76 per cent of the total workers employed in the trade.13 Later, when the percentage of women in industrial occupations dropped to 17.8 per cent of all women employed in 1921, and to 15.4 per cent in 1941, women still represented about 68 per cent of all workers employed in the garment trade.14 Yet despite the large female labour force (or perhaps because of it) the industry was largely unmechanized until the 1920s. In that decade, industrial development, the growth of retail markets, and a restructuring of the production process allowed the garment industry to gain a place in the industrial world. Some indication of this can be gained from an overall ranking of the industry during the period. Basing his work on an examination of value added as a percentage of total manufacturing, economist Gordon Bertram ranked 23 primary and secondary industrial groups for the period 1870–1957. Clothing manufacturing ranked seventh in the list in 1870 and third in 1900, before falling back to eighth place by 1929—a sign of its continuing place in the industrial structure.15

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While one may speak of a Canadian clothing industry in a general way, it is perhaps more appropriate to talk of a Toronto and Montreal clothing industry. The industry relied heavily on new immigrants and young women as its source of labour, and as a result it tended to concentrate production in large urban centres where these labourers could be found. Both factory and custom work was located in Quebec and Ontario. By 1918, when factory production in men’s clothing had begun to gain a hold in the trade, only seven of the 147 Canadian factories producing men’s clothing were outside of Ontario and Quebec.16 Some 10 years later, only 15 of the 218 men’s clothing factories in Canada operated outside of these provinces. Quebec had the highest output, valued at $30 million, with Ontario’s production valued at just under $17 million. Together these two provinces represented about 95 per cent of the men’s clothing industry’s total production value for 1928.17 A similar pattern of concentration existed for women’s factory clothing production. By 1928 Quebec was home to 210 women’s clothing factories and Ontario to 196, with both provinces accounting for about 95 per cent of total Canadian production. By 1928, 9,953 of the 10,559 women wage-workers in women’s clothing were employed in Ontario and Quebec factories.18 While Manitoba and British Columbia did have some factory production, the two primary production sites were clearly Montreal and Toronto, and those two cities provide the focus for most of the evidence presented in this book. The special role and use of contract language in collective agreements and in industrial legislation provide an important site for this analysis of inequality in the clothing trade. Indeed, such documents offer a window into the institutionalization of the industry’s power relations. In a brief essay on how social history is represented, Geoff Eley cautions us to look beyond the ‘economically located notion of interest or social position’ to ‘pursue a discursive analysis of the language of class, its operational collectivity, in the sense of who got to be included, who set the tone, and who received the recognized voice.’ At the same time we must not abandon our focus on the ‘materialist framework of social relations and means of production’.19 His advice provides a useful vantage point for an examination of gender and ethnic relations in the workplace. Gender oppression in the workplace is a process, not a static condition.20 Although documentation on the bargaining process is incomplete, the separate bits of information from both trade union

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records and manufacturers’ association records provide valuable insights into issues of skill and job classification as linked to gender division. This examination in turn provides a key source for measuring gender oppression as a process. Correspondence between union officials, government men, and the lawyers who worked with each party helps to fill in a picture of the place of gender relations in the garment industry. In addition, oral accounts of work in the needle trades are a further source of documentation for an analysis of the construction of inequality. Men and women active in the clothing workers’ unions in the 1920s and 1930s offer insights into their work environment and into the lives that shaped that experience. Using these sources, I have tried to document the process of gender discrimination in the workplace. This study, then, tackles the general subject of female participation in the workplace from two vantage points, the workplace proper and the trade union movement, with one mirroring the other. As the industry developed, how did women participate and share in decisions that would change their workplace for better or for worse? How did these so-called ‘angels of the home’ fare in the workplace—and, indeed, were they ever ‘angels’ in either sphere? How does the broader reality of women’s lives play into this question? For one worker, Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, the lessons of trade union activism lasted a lifetime: On our lunch hours we would discuss our work from the shops. We would discuss politics. Some politicians would stand on the corner and speak about elections and if he was a right-winger we would ask him questions that he didn’t like. Left-wingers, the same thing. It was an interesting time for me. I learned an awful lot. I could never—when I started to work in the trade, I would not be able to stand up and speak in front of a lot of people. I got away from that. . . . Now I can come to a meeting, no matter how big the meeting is now and I will speak what I want to speak about. I learned an awful lot. I wasn’t just a union member, I was there for a purpose, to learn how to work with people, how to work with the boss and what I get out and what I can give.21 This, then, is a story of the lives of men and women who laboured in garment factories during the first four decades of this century. The book first examines the workplace and the labour process of garment production, then shifts to a discussion of unionization in the industry. It considers the categories of skill and gender as they are linked together in public records such as collective agreements and provincial industrial regulations—records that provide another opportunity

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to question the neutrality of language. Social policies constructed by fraternal brotherhoods of trade unionists, State officials, and manufacturers guaranteed rights for male trade unionists, but did they offer women the same protection? The book closes with an examination of provincial labour legislation that attempted to create a ‘New Deal’, Canadian-style, for all needle trades workers through the development of Industrial Standards Acts in Quebec and Ontario. In the process I examine how women fared when ‘the boys got together’ to negotiate a legislative package that would ultimately formalize what it meant to be a man or woman doing a specific task in the garment factories during the rest of the century.

2

The Industrial Fields of Activity: Send Forth Your Daughters

After the war broke out we opened wide our factories, banks, and [women] entered into commercial life in this country. Male labour was scarce. . . . Now gentlemen, we have to deal with the hundreds of thousands of ­soldiers whose places have been taken by women. I am told women like the industrial fields of activity. Will they be prepared to go back to their homes, and again become, as the French people say, ‘The Angel of the Home’? Premier of Quebec, Trades and Labour Council ­Meeting, Report of the Proceedings of the 34th Convention, Sept. 1918 During the second half of the nineteenth century, in the early phase of industrial development in Canada, men were not the only workers changing their livelihoods and occupations and moving in great numbers from farms and villages into the dusty and dingy factories and workshops of the cities. For many working-class women as well it was a time of transition. Women had long worked for the welfare of their families by doing numerous repetitive and endless chores— ­tending gardens, raising chickens, or making clothes for the family, for example—and by going out of the home to do similar domestic work for others who could afford to pay. With increasing urbanization, women took in boarders or arranged to make or wash clothes in their own homes. With industrialization, the momentum to work for a cash return increased.1 By the end of the nineteenth century a great many working-class women—most of them young, most of them single—worked outside 12

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Making Eaton Brand clothing, 1912. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph ­ ollection, Archives of Ontario) C

and inside the home. When they worked outside the home they took on tasks that were clearly demarcated ‘for women only’—jobs almost always linked to their roles and work in the home itself, to their restricted social role as young girls or women. In 1891 the Canadian Department of Labour listed the 10 leading paid occupations for women in Canada as servant, dressmaker, seamstress, tailoress, saleswoman, teacher, farmer, housekeeper, laundress, and milliner.2 That same year 73,652 women worked as domestic servants and 14,787 as teachers. Still, a significant number of women were in industrial occupations—57,283, or 19.5 per cent of all women in paid employment, a figure suggesting a surprisingly high rate of women’s employment as a whole.3 For the most part these industrial workers were limited to a few poorly paid, low-status occupations, and within these sectors there were clear conceptions of ‘women’s jobs’ and ‘men’s jobs’. If we jump forward five decades, to 1941, we find that the pattern of women’s employment did not substantially change: more than half

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of all women who worked outside the home were in 10 leading occupations: stenographer and typist, sales clerk, maid and related service work, school teacher, tailoress and related work, waitress and bartender, nurse, nursing assistant and nursing aide, telephone operator, and janitor and cleaner. To be a teacher, nurse, domestic worker, or waitress was clearly to take up functions closely related to a girl’s or woman’s unshakeable duties and chores in the home during this period. In the home women looked after and instructed the children; they cared for the sick, whether young or old; they cleaned and maintained the household; they prepared and served meals; and much more. When they stepped into the outside working world, working-class women and girls took with them skills and talent acquired very early on in the home. In the world of paid work they did the jobs—they were given the jobs—that women were expected to do, the jobs that it was felt women could do. As manufactured goods began to replace goods made in the home, employers drew upon skills learned and practised in the home.4 Still, women’s positions in the job world outside the home were not solely determined by their position in the domestic economy, any more than men’s job selection can be explained on the basis of gender relations in the household economy. In all instances of employment, both men and women entered the paid workforce not just as non-gendered workers but as men and women from specific ethnic and cultural backgrounds. While women’s factory jobs frequently reflected household tasks, the jobs they did also came to be ascribed with a certain gendered character. Furthermore, certain jobs were held almost exclusively by particular ethnic groups, so that recruitment for them came to be based on ethnicity as well as gender.5 As part of the new industrialization, the fledgling clothing industry in Canada developed, as elsewhere, by expanding the labour force, by taking on ‘extra hands’ rather than through greatly advancing mechanization. Most of those extra hands were women and children, because their labour came most cheaply. Women entered the industry early on, in roles defined by gender, with their positions and status remaining relatively constant over five decades. The jobs they did became ascribed with lower status simply because women did them. As William Lyon Mackenzie King—the future Prime Minister, but then a young economics graduate and labour ‘expert’—noted in a study of the clothing production process in the 1890s, ‘By far the great majority of workers in the clothing industry are women and girls.’ King commented, ‘Female labour has, in this industry at least, never received anything like the compensation which has been given to male labour, however inadequate this labour may appear.’6

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As Sonya Rose observed in her study of the factory hosiery industry in Leicester, England, in the late nineteenth century, women ‘formed an elastic labour force because gender ideology portrayed them as primarily concerned with domestic responsibilities and as dependants who could be paid low wages.’7 Women were denied opportunities for apprenticeship training, which in turned restricted their access to certain types of work, helped to deny them positions of control within the shop, and in the end determined how ‘skill’ was defined in the workplace. American historian Alice Kessler-Harris stressed this fact when she stated, ‘While workers with similar traditions and roots share many work values, the “cultural baggage” associated with gender enters into a woman’s sense of “dignity” or “honour” at work, ordering her perceptions of what she is willing to tolerate, and what violates her sense of dignity.’8 To a large extent skilled work became work that men did, and semi-skilled work became work that women did. The meaning given to a job was as important as the job itself, because even as jobs changed and production altered, the gendered meaning remained, naturalized in customary practices in the workplace. As historians Alvin Finkel and Margaret Conrad aptly comment: Certain jobs are treated as requiring special competencies or training while others are not. In the 1890s this meant that printing, though it required little talent or training, was a well-paid ‘skilled’ occupation that excluded women, while dressmaking, which required considerable skill, was a poorly paid ‘unskilled’ line of work that employed many women. Although women were the food manufacturers at home, in a candy-making factory such as Ganong Brothers in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, only men were confectioners. Women were hired at low wages only to decorate the prepared centres of the candies and to put the candies in boxes. The gender dynamics in the clothing industry, then, as in other industries in Canada and elsewhere, were formed and solidified early on. But the gendered language used to structure occupational categories in the needle trades was still in flux during the first few decades of factory production, and the creation of order in this disorderly industry was to be a constant and very real challenge.

Immigrant Labour and the Family Way In the nineteenth century the growth of a domestic ideology had tightened the boundaries around male and female roles and resulted in the establishment of ideals for women’s behaviour—ideals shaping

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women’s position in the family and how society viewed their contribution to the world of work.9 These ideals would restrict their wage ­levels and possibilities for participation in trade unions and apprenticeship programs. More generally, the ideals would restrict their work within the industrial and service sectors of the economy, limiting them to female job ghettos. The type of work within the female ghettos was moulded further by ethnic origin. For example, in her study of Jewish women in the clothing trades in the United States, Susan Glenn found that ‘By 1910 tailoring, especially “finishing” men’s clothing, in New York was the preserve of southern Italian women and children.’ Jewish women homeworkers were concentrated in the production of straw hats, women’s neckwear, and fancy bows.10 Women were the lowest-paid workers in most job classifications and more likely to be employed in seasonal and temporary work because a patriarchal society saw their participation in the paid workforce as a temporary phenomenon, a short step in their progression towards the expected adult roles of wife and mother. From the earliest stages of industrial capitalism, these ideals of womanhood interlocked with the capitalist productive process and maintained a differentiation by gender within the labour market.11 Cultural influences shaped by ethnic backgrounds added another dimension to the meaning and content of the work experience of women and men. The ideal of femininity presented young women with two contradictory messages: firstly, that good and responsible daughters went out to work to avoid being a burden to their fathers; and secondly, that a woman’s ‘true calling’ was as a wife and mother.12 Popular literature reaffirmed the importance of this ‘true calling’. Popular advice books directed at young middle-class women provided counsel on the type of work suitable for young ladies and on social conduct, always reinforcing the virtues of motherhood. A book published in 1903 offered a typically romantic prescription for the ideal mother: Woman’s life is made up of little pleasures, of little tasks, of little cares, and little duties, but which, when added together, make a grand total of human happiness; she is not expected to do any arduous work; her providence lies in gentleness, in cheerfulness, in contentment, in housewifery, in management of her children, in sweetening her home. These are emphatically a heritage, her ­jewels, which help her to make her crown of glory.13 Given the impact of ethnicity as well as social class on their experience of femininity, not all women received this collective wisdom with the same sense of urgency.14 Decisions about labour-force

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p­ articipation—about which family members would go out to work, and which type of work they would seek—were not simply economically driven, but also based on cultural factors. Given the continuing depressed state of working-class family economies in the period 1890–1940, extra wage-earners were a necessity, and the young women who went out to work sent or brought their earnings home, contributing much of their incomes to the family economy.15 A 1913 study prepared for the National Federation of Settlement Houses in New York observed, ‘The tradition that the daughter is a family ­possession to be relinquished only at marriage, is as strong among the working class as it is among the well to do.’16 Most women workers continued to live at home or, if they had moved from the country to the city, with relatives. Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, an immigrant garment worker, reflected this pattern. She arrived in Winnipeg in 1922 as a 13-yearold who knew nothing of her new country’s language. Within a year she made six grades and passed into grade seven with first-class honours. As she remembered it: ‘I started grade seven in September and during the high holidays, I knew that I couldn’t go to school. I didn’t even have five cents for a scribbler, there were no grants at that time. So I went to look for work and my mother didn’t even know that I went to look for work. I was 14 going on 15.’17 Jewish women’s experience of wage work was shaped by their cultural backgrounds. In her study of Jewish working-class life in Toronto, Ruth Frager cautions us to rethink our assumption that the ideal of Victorian womanhood applied equally to all groups of women. She notes, ‘Jewish women were not confined—either in terms of the ideal or the realities of their lives—to the private sphere of domesticity.’ Both Frager and Glenn stress that the role of Eastern European Jewish women in traditional Jewish culture actually encouraged work outside the home.18 Frager further suggests that it is likely that the middle-class notions of womanhood were a more ­powerful influence on Anglophone and Francophone Canadian young women and that this may have undercut the initial willingness of those women to participate in trade union activities.19 Once out in the workforce, because they were paid from 40 per cent to 50 per cent less than men, most working girls remained unavoidably dependent on their families. Their relationship to the family in turn made it possible for employers to keep their wages down. ‘Women’s work rarely provided the means to true economic independence’, Leslie Woodcock Tentler noted in her study of working women in the United States in the early twentieth century. ‘This

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meant a fundamental change in women’s status in the family could not occur. The women’s wage confined the vast majority of women workers to the family; and life within the family shaped most women in conservative ways.’20 A Chatelaine article published in 1930 took a surprisingly hard-nosed approach to the issue. ‘The excuse is often offered that men are paid more than women because men are married, expect to marry or are supporting a family’, remarked writer Helen Gregory MacGill. ‘But my personal observation is that the employers usually pay what they must, rather than according to the size of the actual or potential family.’21 What employers paid reflected a belief in the secondary stature of women’s work. As Bertha Blugerman put it: ‘There wasn’t such a thing as equal pay for equal work . . . there ­wasn’t a Women’s Lib movement then. It was taken for granted that this is the way it is. The man has to earn more, he’s got a family, he’s got to provide and this was taken for granted . . . and there wasn’t that many married women at that time in the trade.’22 Membership in a particular ethnic group also influenced rates of pay and the types of jobs taken up, and gave another meaning to that sense of work and gender in the workplace. For example, French-Canadian women working in Montreal’s garment factories were paid less than the ­Jewish women and men workers. Manufacturers capitalized not only on gender assumptions but also on ethnic assumptions when they tried to regulate wage rates in the labour market. Social relations in the household influenced work patterns as kinship networks helped family members locate jobs and select particular work within the factory itself. The social network within the extended family often served as a basis of recruitment into the factory, and young women relied on family networks when they went out to seek work.23 The permeability of the boundaries between household and workplace is seen in these social networks. Indeed, women often continued to work next to family members in the workplace. In Mont­ real, according to garment worker Aline Champagne and members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ilgwu), relatives already in the shop recruited new employees. Usually the oldest women would take on a new girl as a ‘learner’ to teach her the job, a practice acceptable under government regulations.24 But in the early years, this ‘learning’, as Christine Stansell puts it, was ‘a debased form of apprenticeship’ that ‘corresponded to the relation of parents and children in family labor’ and came to limit job mobility. ‘In exchange for the crudest training, girls worked for tailors, seamstresses, dressmakers, and milliners either for their keep or for a few pennies a day.’25

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If a girl had relatives in the shop, they would teach her the job. ‘I came to Montreal with my husband,’ Champagne said, ‘but I could only get a factory job because I didn’t speak English. My cousin worked in a factory, so she encouraged me to come and work there. I went to the shop where my cousin was and I worked half a day. There were 25 women working in that shop. I worked as a finisher and after a couple of weeks I learned it, then I worked full days for pay.’26 Rose Kamarofsky, a garment worker in Winnipeg in the 1920s, said she was told of openings at Jacob-Crowley, Winnipeg’s largest manufacturer of women’s coats and suits (known as a ‘cloak manufacturer’), when ‘a fellow near auntie told me to go there.’27 Toronto factory worker Sophie Mandel explained, ‘Well, in the Royals, when I started to work in the Royal Cloak, the fellow that owned the shop, his brother was my uncle. He was the foreman and he took me up to work there.’28 McGill University researcher Mary Aikman found that her sample of Montreal women factory workers in the 1930s used similar methods of locating work.29 For immigrant women without family connections, finding work was often more difficult. But even in such circumstances, ethnicity shaped their choices. One new arrival, Eva Shanoff, a Jewish sewingmachine operator employed in the women’s clothing industry, told how she spent day after day going around knocking on the doors of garment manufacturers, looking for a job as a sewing-machine operator without knowing anything about dressmaking. No one would hire a woman without experience and connections, she found, until finally one day she made the right connection, a ‘job for helping out newcomers’—Jewish girls, workers who couldn’t speak English. ‘They had an English foreman and I was able to speak English a ­little, so I sort of translated and that’s where I found my chance to learn. Maybe they would have fired me because I didn’t know anything about the dressmaking, but it worked out so that I was a help in the shop.’30 A young woman seldom strayed far from her family circle, and her selection of work was limited by a commitment to the primacy of family life. For the most part the women workers were young and single. Certainly, by the time working-class women had reached their late teen years they were usually employed. In Canada in 1921, 23 per cent of all gainfully employed women were under 19 years of age—though by 1931 the percentage had dropped to 20 per cent, and by 1941 it had declined further to 17 per cent.31 More specifically, in Ontario’s men’s clothing factories in 1911, 68 per cent of the women workers were under 24 years of age—compared to only 35 per cent of

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the men.32 As the century wore on, the age of those employed in the garment industry increased. By 1921 in Toronto the percentage of women below age 24 had declined to 37 per cent, and it continued to drop slightly over the next few decades.33 In Quebec, where women’s labour was cheaper than in Ontario, the youth of the labour force was more pronounced. In Montreal in 1921, 64 per cent of the women in clothing factory work were under 24 years old.34 By 1931, 48 per cent of women working in Montreal’s textile and apparel trades were under 24 years old (about 25 per cent of the males employed in these industries were in this age cohort).35 While the proportion of young women to older men altered over the decades, the needle trades tended to employ young women with a short-lived attachment to the labour market, mainly because most women left the workplace soon after they married. In 1921 some 82 per cent of all gainfully employed women were single, and 87 per cent of the 105,332 women working in manufacturing were single, with another 6.6 per cent widowed or divorced. In the textile industry itself, 83 per cent of the women workers were ­single, and 89 per cent of the clothing factory workers in particular were single women.36 In calculating the marital status of Toronto’s women garment workers for the years 1924 to 1932, Frager found that for 1924, 15.7 per cent of women under 50 years of age were married. By 1932, when the Great Depression was beginning to have an effect, 25 per cent of the female garment workers in Toronto were married.37 Yet by the 1940s the percentage of married women in the labour force had risen only slightly.38 It was almost universally accepted that a woman’s stay in a factory would be brief, that she would leave as soon as she could get married. This expectation shaped women’s behaviour inside the shops and ultimately sabotaged their interest in sustained union activity, giving men privilege to speak for women. Early on, in 1891, factory workers tended to be Canadian-born and to come from families of unskilled workers or craft workers. But the Canadian government’s open-door immigration policy between 1900 and 1920 drew new labour into the cities, particularly the urban ­centres of Toronto and Montreal. Toronto had become an immigrant city by 1890, with 50,861 foreign-born citizens in a total population of 144,023. In Montreal at the same time the foreign-born comprised 31,843 of the total population of 182,695.39 While the influx of immigrants to Canada’s largest cities declined dramatically as World War I progressed, the cultural and social life of these new immigrants shaped the character of inner-city life. In 1931,

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41.6 per cent of Montreal’s immigrant male population had been in Canada less than 10 years, while 38.5 per cent of immigrant women had been in Canada less than 10 years. Ontario immigrant residency shows a similar pattern.40 Immigrant men and women were both attracted to the manufacturing sector. In 1921, 54 per cent of ­Quebec’s 1,848 immigrant women working in clothing manufacture were born in continental Europe, although in Ontario European-born women made up less than 17 per cent of the 5,221 immigrant women clothing factory workers. The largest single immigrant group was from the British Isles. Immigrant men made up over half of the labour force in both Ontario and Quebec in 1921 (63 per cent in Ontario and 50 per cent in Quebec). Quebec’s immigrant numbers were highest among men employed as tailors, where 49 per cent of all male tailors were born in continental Europe. This same pattern is also found in Ontario, where European-born immigrant men comprised 48 per cent of tailors working in the clothing industry.41 Immigrant communities provided a social and cultural basis for survival during the first few decades in Canada, but immigrant women, limited by language and cultural differences, had a narrow range of occupational choices.42 They gravitated towards work in their own communities and tended to take employment in occupations already dominated by their compatriots: Italians in the clothing and textile industries, Jews in the clothing industry, and Irish women in domestic service.43 Some 42 per cent of all Hebrew women who worked in 1931 had jobs in the manufacturing sector, 32 per cent of them in textile production. The next largest ethnic group in manufacturing was Italian women: 35 per cent were in manufacturing, 20 per cent in textiles. The clothing trades had long attracted Jewish immigrants, and their participation in the industry expanded as their numbers among the immigrant population grew.44 Immigrants found it easier to adjust to life in a new country when they were able to work in their own language, and new Jewish arrivals gravitated to work in the needle trades to join others already at work. The Jewish Eagle, a Yiddish newspaper published in Montreal, estimated that in 1909 there were 15,000 Jews in the needle trades in that city. According to Samuel Landers, an organizer for the Jewish needle trade workers at that time, in Mont­ real only one large pant shop was not in Jewish hands and half of all clothing workers were Jewish.45 As late as 1931, 83 per cent of the 7,242 Montreal Jews engaged in manufacturing worked in the clothing industry.46 Writing in 1931, Vera Shlakman pointed out the ­distinctions in work organization:

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Cutting, trimming and pressing is performed by men. These are mostly Jews, but there are also many French Canadians and Italians in this branch of the trade. Machine operators are mostly women, a large number of whom are French Canadian, although practically every other immigrant nationality is represented. Taking the trade as a whole, the women workers make up more than half of the labour force. The owners are practically all Jews, and very many of them [have] arisen from the ranks of the workers.47 Both men and women from the Jewish community worked in the trade, but the rest of the Montreal workforce consisted of FrenchCanadian Catholic women for whom the tightly knit ethnic community and its labour activism were anathema. For the most part Canadian-born and Anglo women continued to dominate the trade. By 1921 about 54 per cent of Ontario’s women clothing factory workers were Canadian-born, another 35 per cent had been born in the British Isles, and 7.5 per cent had been born in Europe, although there was a higher proportion of immigrant labour among men in the trade.48 Frager estimated that 61 per cent of the men and 30 per cent of the women working in Toronto clothing industries were ethnically identified as Jewish in 1931.49 The Quebec clothing industry, which relied on French-Canadian workers, had a higher number of Canadian-born women (89 per cent). By 1941 the ethnic origins of women garment workers in Quebec were: 80 per cent French (90 per cent of women workers were Canadian-born), 10 per cent Jewish, and a smaller number of Italian, Polish, and other northern European nationalities; some 58 per cent of the male workers had been born in Canada, and 37 per cent in Europe.50 Much of the influx of Canadian-born women into the trade was due to the movement of women from rural areas. French-Canadian women were highly concentrated in the textile sector, although overall they dominated the service sector: in 1931, 62.7 per cent of all FrenchCanadian women who were wage-earners worked in the service sector as opposed to 21.5 per cent in manufacturing; almost 11.9 per cent of those in manufacturing were in textiles.51 The pattern of immigrant employment in the clothing trades was influenced by both gender and ethnicity. Certain jobs, such as sewing-machine operator or tailor, employed larger numbers of immigrant men or women, but even this pattern of employment varied from province to province. Employment in the clothing trades was complex and varied, as the immigrant population that influenced the character of the trade remained in flux throughout the first 40 or 50 years of the industry’s development.

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The Early Years Several systems of production co-existed in the clothing industry that these young women were entering during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Custom work, homework, and factory work all flourished at the same time, each holding prominence in specific sectors of the trade. From their inception, some tasks done almost exclusively by women in one sector of the trade were carried out by men in another sector. Gradually the introduction of new products, new production methods, and new machinery transformed the trade: it went from an industry reliant on the work of skilled artisans ­(custom tailors, tailoresses, and dressmakers) to one requiring less skill, with an oppressive emphasis on speed. During the nineteenth century, dressmakers and custom tailors (including some women tailors, known as tailoresses, who specialized in women’s clothes) produced most of the clothing for middleclass and upper-class Canadians in the cities. The domestic clothing needs of the working class and people living in rural areas were satisfied by female family members or, when families could afford it, by local dressmakers and custom tailors or by second-hand purchases. The establishments of tailors and dressmakers were small, catering to local needs and producing garments on a made-to-measure basis. The tailor’s trade was essentially a single craft in the early production process, with a minimum of workshop division of labour; men worked alone or in small groups with other men. At first tailors maintained control over production of the more complex garments, such as suit jackets and coats, and gave out vests, pants, and linings to be made up by less skilled workers—a division of labour that enhanced their own position. The tailoresses made women’s cloaks and suits, garments that tended to be constructed of heavy material and were much too complex to be produced by women in their own homes. The process of production in both men’s and women’s clothing was much the same. The material was cut, sewn, pressed, and ­finished. The same person—the tailor or dressmaker—did most of the work of pattern-making, cutting, and sewing of the garment. Helpers—often women or girls either in the family of the tailor or hired to assist in the tasks of garment-making—worked as ‘finishers’, sewing hems, adding buttonholes and buttons, and then, for the finer garments, doing any hand-stitching required. Susan Glenn described a similar production process used in New York in the late nineteenth century, although it was one that generated a more intense work process.

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The ‘task’ or ‘team’ system . . . was a common feature of the small Jewish-run coat shops that sprung up on New York’s Lower East Side. Working together as a production unit, a sewing machine operator, a baster, a presser and a finisher (usually the only woman) completed the various operations associated with making a coat. What distinguished the task system from other methods of production was that each team worked on a collective piecework basis, with wage determined not by what an individual operator or presser accomplished but by the number of coats the group turned out.52 A small team could usually manage the work, which was originally organized to fill specific orders for clothes. In the clothing industry the essence of craft control did not disappear as quickly as might have been expected. A semblance of artisanship remained long after the real craft skill had all but disappeared.53 There remained a sense of control, of legitimacy, in the workplace. Some workers were able to maintain their positions of authority and status in the shops even when the nature of their jobs had been altered. This was most obviously true in the case of tailors and ­cutters, which were men’s jobs. While at first a tailor was responsible for making up the whole garment, women did the finishing work under men’s supervision. As the job was broken into its component parts, the tailor retained the right to make the jacket, but the pants and vests were given out to less ‘skilled’ workers. With this right the male tailor also retained the power to supervise and regulate the pace of production for the rest of the workforce. The fact that men held these jobs had the appearance of following naturally from their position of authority in the family; they had been prepared at home to take on the responsible positions in the shops, just as the women had been prepared to accept the authority of men at work, and just as women accepted the control of their brothers and fathers at home.54 The hierarchy established in the shops was not only imposed from above by manufacturers, but also followed traditionally defined gender roles in the wider society, and was indeed shaped by the workers themselves.55

Transforming the Labour Process By the late nineteenth century, with a growing national market for ready-made clothing created by increased western settlements, developments in transportation, and the influx of immigrants, custom

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t­ailors expanded their production by farming garments out to people working from their homes. By World War I, a brief report on the trade noted, ‘Tailors have given up by degrees the back-shop or the shop on the premises where clothes are made. The usual procedure now is for the order and measurements to be given in the tailors shop, for cutting to be done there but for the actual making up of the work [except in coats in some cases] to be done outside the shop.’56 But it was the wholesale dry goods merchants who pushed the clothing industry into factory production. By 1872, Montreal wholesale clothiers such as Hollis Shorey and James O’Brien had opened up sewing rooms at the back of their stores, where they employed cutters to cut the fabric. They then sent the material out to homeworkers to be fashioned into garments.57 Lionel Rubin of Rubin Bros. Clothiers described these early factories as ‘essentially cutting rooms that prepared bundles of cloth and lining and trimming to be sewn together by the inhabitants of farm houses in the surrounding country-side.’ According to Rubin, this system held dominance in the trade until the turn of the century.58 At the same time, some custom tailors became tailors-to-the-trade, selling made-to-measure suits directly to consumers, while the manufacturers opened retail outlets to market their own brand names. As demand for men’s suits grew, custom ­tailors either made arrangements with wholesale made-to-measure firms or expanded their own shops to increase production.59 The women’s coats and capes in fashion around the turn of the century were made with heavy materials, and as these garments were much too complex to be produced by women in their own homes, much of the market had been supplied by imported finished goods, as reported in 1905 by Industrial Canada.60 In 1907 Ontario factory inspector Margaret Carlyle observed that it was ‘astonishing’ how rapidly ‘workshops become factories’ and ‘factories become large factories’ and how ‘machines supersede hand labour and slow machines give way to automatic feed motions and appliances take the place of human attendants.’61 As early as 1905, 80 to 90 per cent of men’s clothing in Canada was factory produced.62 The production of ready-made clothing consisted mainly of men’s coats, pants, vests, and shirts. Women’s ready-made clothing, which grew more slowly, consisted of shirtwaists (blouses), skirts, under­ garments, dresses, suits, cloaks, and coats. As urban demand for ready-made clothing increased, each sector of the trade expanded. But the path to large-scale factory production was not straight and narrow, and a combination of production processes continued to be used.63 Gerald Tulchinsky, in documenting the early period of clothing

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production in Montreal, suggested that early factory production in both the men’s and ladies’ wear sectors was limited even after the invention of the sewing machine and the introduction of cheap electrical power in Montreal.64 The Canadian Textile Directory of 1885 listed 8 clothing manufacturers and dealers in Hamilton, Ontario, 14 in Toronto, and 25 in Montreal. These firms manufactured a variety of products: coats, suits, shirts, collars, and overalls for men; and shirts and mantles (cloaks) for women.65 In 1901 custom tailors represented about 60 per cent of the capital invested and 51 per cent of all Canadian output in men’s clothing, but by 1905 it was estimated that ‘The proportion would be rather more than reversed, for the evolution of the factory-made suit has been decisively marked since 1901.’66 In 1891, 7,066 dressmaking establishments had 17,191 employees, but by 1901 the numbers had dropped dramatically, to 334 employing 5,260 workers.67 In other words, there were far fewer shops, each employing five times as many workers—reflecting also a trend away from family work establishments to small factory shops. Production of clothing was separated into units based on specialized products. In the men’s clothing industry, for instance, separate production units were often established for making different items of clothing: vests, pants, and suit jackets. By 1900 several women’s cloak manufacturers had set up in Toronto and Montreal, but perhaps no more than 20 per cent of the women’s coats (mantles or cloaks, as they were then called) were manufactured in Canada; most were imported from Germany, ­England, and the United States. S.F. McKinnon of Toronto and Thomas May and Company of Montreal were the first manufacturers of mantles in Canada. By 1909 Canadian women’s factory clothing manufacturers were able to expand production, and coats and suits were more frequently Canadian-made.68 The economic situation where, as Marx suggested, ‘one capitalist always kills many’ has never accurately applied to the needle trades, because both small shops and large ones continued to define the character of the trade until the end of the 1930s.69 But for the most part the industry was dominated by small shops, where competition in its crudest form held sway. At the same time the boundary between worker and small capitalist was flimsy at best, and the business ­frequently provided an economic opportunity for skilled, usually male, immigrants. The skilled workman often moved from being a worker to being an owner and back again; many workmen dreamed of some day becoming small-shop owners. Since the small manufacturer’s hold on the title ‘manufacturer’ was so precarious, he often

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saw ­ himself as having very little in common with the large-scale ­ anufacturers. Small shop size and low levels of mechanization m enabled early manufacturers to maintain high levels of productivity and keep labour costs down.70 The small shops were often able to weather the fluctuations in styles and seasons, coming into existence only when demand was high, disappearing when the conditions altered, and reappearing the next season when conditions again ­warranted it. Their instability was both a problem and a function of the economic demands of the industry.71

The Fragmentation of the Industry In 1896, when Alexander Whyte Wright was appointed by the federal government to examine the ‘sweating system’ in Canada, he spoke of the great diversity in the production systems at that time: Some manufacturers, though only a few, have all their work done in factories of their own; some have their work done by contractors who have their own workshops; others give it out to people who make it up in their own homes, while still others, and the greater number, have it done partly in all of these ways . . . except in Montreal and Halifax and in some smaller towns, as Clinton, Ont., for example, there is, proportionately very little factory work done; while only in Hamilton and Toronto does the contractor’s shop system obtain to any extent.72 The increased demand for ready-made clothing led both merchant manufacturers and custom tailors to reorganize their production processes. To expand production and keep labour costs down they turned to outwork. Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work, a study of the ­politics of homeworking in the United States, notes that in the early years of garment production ‘many manufacturers developed the ­contract system to protect themselves from the uncertain economy of the 1870s’ but that homework was also ‘built upon the preference among some Jewish immigrants to work at home and took advantage of social and cultural constraints in the labor of married women with dependents.’73 In Canada, similar structural dictates also shaped homework. The use of farm women and children as homeworkers was most extensive in Quebec, where a faltering agricultural economy freed up large numbers of farm labourers. In the 1880s Montreal merchant manufacturer Hollis Shorey reported to the Royal Commission on the Relations between Labour and Capital that over 90 per cent of his workers were homeworkers.74

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When Mackenzie King studied clothing production in the 1890s, he found only a small number of ‘inside manufacturers’ and described three methods of organizing production: ‘the home, the shop, and the factory; but for the purposes of more accurate descriptions as well as because of its important bearing upon other conditions, it is well to add a fourth, which is a combination of the first and second of these, and which may be termed the “home-shop” method.’75 In a report prepared for the Department of Labour, King expounded on the use of homework: ‘In no instance did I find that the clothing which was the subject of contract had been made up entirely upon the premises of the firms which were awarded the work. In every instance the system of sub-contracting prevailed.’76 The nature of the labour process in clothing production was suited to the use of homeworkers. With the introduction of the sewing machine into the home it became possible to separate the cutting process from sewing; and in the homework system the traditional gender division of labour found in the task shops began to break down, because the tasks defined by gender in the custom shops were not followed in the homework system. Fragmentation of the labour process allowed for decentralization of the labour process, and further divisions of ­production were introduced: men’s tailoring was separated into the making of coats, pants, and vests, and each became almost a separate trade. The fragmentation of production and use of homeworkers served to keep labour costs to a minimum. The work of women in their homes came cheap, despite a wide variety of garments that the women had to handle. The Montreal tailor James O’Brien testified before the Royal Commission on the Relations between Labour and Capital of 1889 that he could not know how much his outside workers were making because the work was done by entire families. Mothers and daughters were working together and being paid by the piece.77 The competition created by the availability of hundreds of independent and isolated homeworkers served to drive the prices for clothing production down. The production costs were reduced even further by a practice of fining homeworkers for imperfect work and by making them pay for thread, scissors, lighting, fuel, and other expenses incurred in their own homes.78 Work was frequently returned to homemakers when the contractors felt it was improperly done, with the homeworkers having to redo it at their own expense. The traditional sexual division of labour had separated women and men in the custom shops. With the advent of homework the sexual division of labour defined work done inside a factory—‘inside

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work’—as men’s work. Outwork or homework became women’s work. The sexual division of labour was no longer based simply on the task or skill, but also reflected the location of the work. As homeworkers, women were paid less than male workers in the shops and less than inside workers in factories. But as the demand for ready-made clothing increased and custom tailors and dressmakers were unable to meet the demand, the use of homeworkers went into a slow decline. Production using home­ workers was not flexible enough to meet the growing demand for finely crafted clothes. In a study of the Montreal men’s clothing industry, Michael Davidson estimated that custom tailors produced 90 per cent of men’s clothing in Montreal in 1870, but only about 34 per cent by 1898.79 The dressmaking and millinery trades experienced the same decline in custom work. As homework declined, an almost parallel system of contracting work out to smaller production units prevailed as a logical extension of the decentralized production methods established by the merchant manufacturers and tailors and dressmaker shops. The contract system allowed manufacturers to continue to relieve themselves of the ­burden and responsibilities of production and to reduce their labour costs, while offering them a system whereby control and supervision of labour could be instituted to ensure a better product. The tailormanufacturers were able to maintain control over the sectors of the trade that required greater levels of manual skill (the making up of coats and suit jackets), and they hired contractors who in turn hired women and semi-skilled immigrants as sewing-machine operators. Contracting out offered tailor-manufacturers a new way of organizing labour, and skilled workers (men) were able to open their own small shops to take contracts from the manufacturers. Both the men’s clothing and the women’s coats and suits trade were marked by this ­distinction between inside manufacturing firms, which cut, sewed, and shipped garments from one central factory, and outside contractors, who received the precut bundles to be made up to specifications set by the manufacturers. Given the limits of the available technology, the most time­consuming step in the production process was the assembling of the garment, and contracting out this work allowed manufacturers to shift the cost on to the contractor.80 To lower their costs of production the manufacturers had the material cut on their premises and then passed the cut bundles to the contractors. In turn, the contractors parcelled out these bundles to their own workers or to homeworkers at a much reduced rate per piece. The system meant that inside manufacturers

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did not have to be responsible for the wages or conditions under which the work was performed; they could avoid direct exploitation of the workers. The system also provided a way of cutting costs for machinery, heat, and electricity. Small manufacturers often tried to save on yardage during the cutting, so that the women had to spend time piecing together the garments.81 Contractors and outworkers also provided the manufacturers with a reserve pool of labour during rush seasons. This sweatshop system became firmly established, and by the 1920s perhaps a third of the clothing industry workforce was hidden away in contract shops.82 In 1898, writing about the sweating system for The Herald in Montreal, Mackenzie King pointed out: It has been estimated that about 75 per cent of the clothes worn by men and boys today is ready-made, and of this amount it is ­questionable if over two or three percent is made in factories or wholesale house. The great bulk is made up on a system of subcontracting, and the real places of manufacture are the hundreds of small workshops and thousands of homes grouped chiefly in the cities, yet scattered more or less thickly in the country.83 Manufacturers, hypocritically, professed ignorance of the conditions under which their contractors worked and procured the outside labour. Tailor James O’Brien called the subcontractors ‘true entrepreneurs’, because they employed their own workers. ‘There are many of these, especially Jews, and some employ ten to twenty or thirty workers.’84 Under this system the worker became a ‘subproletarian’ because her employer, the contractor, was himself a worker.85 Because the new tailor-manufacturers (and the skilled cutters) were able to move from the position of worker into that of employer, the social position of men in the needle trades was further enhanced, while the position of women in the trade was downgraded. Increased immigration of skilled tailors and cutters from Europe and the presence of tailors displaced from custom work also helped create conditions for an increase in contracting. Opening a small shop was an attractive proposition, for in a sense it offered quasi-capitalist status to workers in the trade. Bertha Blugerman described the situation: ‘Because what do you need? You buy a machine and you have a corner in your basement and you start working and you enslave yourself day and night and when you have a little cash you rent a dump some place and you open up a shop. So the employers in the needle trades most of them came up from the ranks, and they worked up and they know how to exploit.’86

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By the early twentieth century the fragmentation of production was well advanced. The industrial labour force was dispersed in the countryside in private homes and in the city in small contract shops. The separation of the labour force was further exploited through the social division of labour by gender in all manner of clothing production. King observed this phenomenon in men’s clothing production: The heaviest [work] is that of operating the machines and pressing. This is done largely by men, though the number of female operators has been steadily increasing, the women do mostly the felling and other hand work. In some shops women are exclusively employed. Where men are employed their wages are as a rule from two to four times as much as that paid to the women, and this fact doubtlessly explains why women are so largely employed in the shops, and almost entirely in the homes.87 In both women’s and men’s wear, work was divided on the basis of gender, but there were few consistencies in the type of work labelled men’s or women’s work. In the dress trade, sewing the garment was a woman’s job, while in the men’s suit trade sewing was a man’s job. These differences seem to be tied more to the separate histories of each sector than to the skill levels of the jobs. The allocation of gender status to jobs in the industry was extremely complex and depended on a number of factors: the sector of the trade (men’s suits, women’s dresses, women’s coats); location of the shop (country or city); whether the shop was a contract shop or an inside shop; whether the work was done by homeworkers or factory workers; the position of the task in the labour process in the shop; and the availability of female labour. After the turn of the century the variety of clothing products made within factory walls increased immensely. Each type of clothing required a variation in production method that in turn altered the boundaries between skilled and unskilled work. As the industry evolved, contractors and manufacturers came to specialize in the production of certain garments, further fragmenting the industry. The two sectors of the clothing industry, women’s wear and men’s wear, developed in different ways, each coping differently with production demand, competition, and product variations. The relative importance of the technical process of production in relation to the commercial process of selling varied in relation to consumers’ demand for ready-made products. In addition, the work environment and wages in outside contract shops offered the workers a distinctive shop culture, preserving ‘features of work associated with the

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Men working as tailors in Eaton’s factory, circa 1904. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

t­ raditional artisan’s shop’—closer to ‘what tailors had known in the shtetlekh of Russia’ than to ‘the modern American industrial establishment’.88 It was a shop culture that gave specific meaning to ­gender and ethnic relations. To adapt to seasonal and fashion demands, dress factories remained small, specializing in a specific grade of garment. The lower cost of production was ensured through the use of more female labour. Because they often opened for business on the basis of a single order and were in existence only for the peak season, the factories kept production and maintenance costs to a minimum. Compared to other sectors of the garment industry, the dress sector required little capital. The precarious nature of dress manufacture meant that the life expectancy of most firms was less than seven years.89 The contract shops, with their direct connections to larger manufacturers and the intense competition among them, remained small, and as their ­numbers increased, competition between them ensured that they would remain small.90 The very fragmentation of production, while immediately useful to the manufacturers, created conditions of intense ­competition, so that by the 1920s manufacturers were finding

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Women machinists making shirts at Eaton’s, circa 1904. It was not the machine but the sex of the worker that determined their place in the factory. Making suits was clearly a man’s job, while making shirts was a woman’s job. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

that the process of contracting was getting out of control. Contractors had begun to undercut the prices of ‘legitimate’ manufacturers, because large retail firms had discovered that they could turn to contractors to obtain garments more cheaply. While both homework and contract work had flourished as methods of production during the 1890s, between 1900 and 1920 their use was slowly curtailed. This decline came about partly because of increased demand for clothing and partly because of the efforts of trade unionists and middle-class reformers—the use of contract shops was limited in certain sectors, such as men’s clothing, that had been unionized—but these were not the main reasons. Laura Johnson, author of a study of homeworking in the Canadian clothing industry, states the case: The homework system was abandoned by employers when it ceased to meet their needs. For many this point was reached when the efficiencies of factory labour outweighed the cheapness of home labour. The immediate cause might be the introduction of

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Women doing hand work on men’s suits in Eaton’s factory, circa 1904. Most hand work was considered women’s work. (T. Eaton Historical ­Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

new machinery, the efficiency of assembly-line production or even the inconveniences of giving out homework. As unions and governmental regulations became more effective, various aspects of homework were increasingly restricted in ways that, though they could not prevent its use, made it less attractive to employers.91 Most of the changes in the clothing industry made room for more women workers and further feminized the clothing trades. As early as the 1890s observers were noting, ‘The development of the readymade industry by the sub-division of labour has rendered unnecessary the employment of so great a proportion of specially skilled handicraftsmen and made it possible to give employment to less skilled and cheaper labour’—meaning, mostly women.92 Although the replacement of tailors and tailoresses by semiskilled factory workers increased the numbers of women in the trade, the transformation was not simply the first phase of a deskilling process, because even in the traditional artisan craft shops women’s work had been defined as less skilled than men’s. Dressmakers had considerably less status than tailors, and tailoresses were restricted to

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Pressers working at Eaton’s in 1907. Both cutting and pressing were ­considered skilled jobs and as such only men were allowed this work. With these gas-heated irons, one man was able to do the work formerly done by six men. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

­ orking on lighter garments. But while a clear separation of men’s w and women’s work was built into the needle trades from the beginning, as Glenn suggests the garment industry’s labour market—with its mix of ethnic cultures, shop sizes, and production methods— ­‘created a situation of fluidity and amibiguity rather than a fixed, dead-end place for female wage earners.’93 The very complexity and ambiguity of the labour process may have offered an advantage to new immigrants and young women. For instance, as a young woman learning the trade in Montreal, Marie Leblanc began her training in a ‘cheap-line dress shop’. She said, ‘When you don’t have experience, you don’t go to a dress shop that is too good.’94

Life in the Factories: Patriarchy and Exploitation After women entered the factory the work climate continued to ­reinforce the patriarchal familial relations they had experienced at home and in the broader society. A 1916 description of the social

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norms for industrial work highlights the qualities that employers hoped to find in their prospective female employees: After she has entered the factory . . . she should be polite and respectful to her superiors, ready to obey promptly, quick to understand and to anticipate orders, and observant of all that goes on about her. She will begin as a floor girl . . . then she may be given simple hand work . . . later she will be taught to run a machine. . . . When she has learned to run her machine, the girl is in danger of stopping her progress.95 For young girls limited by education, family poverty, ethnicity, and geographical locale, the move to work outside the home only reaffirmed their dependent status and reinforced their familial responsibilities; and in the factories their youth and naïvety made them vulnerable to exploitation. Employers often found ways to circumvent laws on wages and length of the working day. Young women unfamiliar with the laws that supposedly protected them were easy targets for unscrupulous employers and sexual exploitation. Because the skill levels required for much of the factory work were easily available in the labour market, manufacturers were able to hire very young girls as learners and then fire them when they came of age, replacing them with another group of readily available 14- and ­ 15-year-olds. Seasonality also affected many of the trades women worked in. The hours in mid-season production were often long: 50 to 60 hours a week were not uncommon during the rush season in the garment trades in the 1930s. However, knowing that they would be out of work when the season came to an end, women complied with employers’ wishes to evade the laws. ‘The hours were long, eight in the morning until six at night, Friday until noon, sometimes to three or four in the morning’, confided a Montreal pensioner from the clothing industry. ‘They used to lock the door, in case an inspector turned up, and work until the middle of the night. The workers didn’t mind, they wanted the money and they wanted to get the orders out.’96 The Garment Worker, a union publication published briefly by union activists in Winnipeg, reported on a typical case of exploitative labour. ‘The g.w.g. is one of the worst sweat shops of its kind in Western Canada, when you think of the number of girls, mostly beginners working for $5.00 to $6.00 a week in the dusty factory, lucky if after being there six months to make from $12.00 to $15.00 a week, and having to rush like mad to make that.’ The report cited wage cuts in all types of work, so that the workers now had to ‘kill

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themselves with speed’ before they could make a living wage.97 A Sarnia garment factory reported to the Industrial Standards Board in 1937 was paying $11 a week to ‘girls’ working a 50-hour week. ‘But there are few employed at that, since the firm finds it more convenient to hire girls every six months, the minimum wage for beginners being only $9.00 for 50 hours work.’98 A key in this workplace experience, as feminist theoreticians have pointed out, is the domestic economy’s relationship to the capitalist mode of production.99 Patriarchal familial relations influenced daughters’ and wives’ behaviour as wage labourers. Writer Judy Lown suggests that bosses, interpreting workplace roles in familial terms, used the dependent personalities of the young women to control female behaviour in the workplace. Lown argues that unequal power relations of age and gender form ‘a central axis of historical and social change’.100 The historical division between the home and the workplace has obscured the relational impact of gender, ethnicity, and geographical ties that span both familial and economic relationships. But by positing economic and familial relations as a continuous process, recent feminist social historians have been able to extend their analysis of the influence of gender on work relations to provide the missing piece in the equation: the idea that men’s work relationships are also shaped by their position in the family and the home. In Theorizing Women’s Work, Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong point to the significance of this rethinking of the relations between production and reproduction: ‘People experience class not just as individuals in unequal productive relations that are divided by both sex and class, but also as members of household units characterized by unequal relations between the sexes. The search for profit not only shapes the environment, but also interacts with household relations and household strategies for ­survival.’101 Eileen Boris emphasizes the importance of the domestic sphere for the early campaign against homework, telling how the National Consumers’ League in the United States ‘linked disease to lack of labor standards’. According to the League, homework was ‘a curse’ because ‘it invades all the privacies of life; it robs the child of schooling, its parents, its very home.’ Boris concludes, ‘This metaphor of invasion, of the factory entering the home to destroy ­private life, pervaded reform discourse.’102 Male heads of households controlled the labour power of women and children in their homes. Subservient within the family, women and children remained subservient members of the labour force when they left the confines of the familial environment. As Mary Aikman

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The Baldwin Garment Company, circa 1912. The National Consumers’ League in the United States developed a label campaign to identify goods ‘made under clean and healthful conditions’. As Eileen Boris explains, ‘this strategy played upon the fears of consumers in order to improve the conditions of producers.’ (Boris, Home to Work, 83.) (Metropolitan Toronto ­Reference Library)

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commented: ‘The factory girl appears invariably as a family member, first as a dependent member, later as a contributing member.’103 This connection between home and work is important to an understanding of the gender dynamics of the workplace. Bettina Bradbury, a ­historian of Canadian working-class women, suggests: We have to reconceptualize the working class to include not only those who sell their labour power, but also those who reproduce it, ideologically and materially, and those who are largely dependent on the wages of others. This does not simply mean adding women as a variable, it means thinking about how the relationship between wage workers, non-wage workers, and their dependants influences work-based struggle and strategies and vice versa as well as unravelling differences within the working class over time.104 Many of the women also contributed to the support of others outside of their own household.105 Married women tended to remain in the home, but they often contributed to family income by taking in boarders and doing homework.106 Women on their own, including sole support mothers, were among the hidden poor. In other words, gender and social class are integrated forces, and the constructions of masculinity and femininity shape ideas of what constitutes a ‘worker’ or a ‘wage’.107 Their particular relationship to the labour market made women especially attractive to manufacturers in seasonally controlled industries. In 1916 an investigation of unemployment among factory girls stated the functional nature of women’s willingness to work in ­seasonal manufacturing industries: In seasonal unemployment, the woman factory operative is not necessarily out of work during the slack time. Seasonal employment is convenient to many women, at least in a financial way. . . . Women who pick fruit, workers in canning factories, the seasonal employees of the Christmas trade, generally speaking, women whose other occupations allow them to earn money during short periods of paid employment. The young milliner calculates on seasonal employment, and is able to tide over the slack period at home, or in some other occupation. . . . There is a certain amount of interchange between women’s seasonal employments. The woman factory operative often becomes a waitress in a summer hotel, and women teachers are sometimes engaged in picking fruit in summer.108 Familial ideology was also used to justify pay differences between men and women. The subordination of women in the workplace was

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not a mere by-product of capitalist development, for in women’s ­subordination resided men’s superiority, and the justification for both resided in familial relationships set in place by ideological and social definitions of men’s and women’s places in society. A woman could be paid less than a living wage because she was a secondary wageearner, while a man had the ‘right’ to be paid more because he was supporting a family. Therefore he should be paid a family wage. As US researcher Martha Mays argues, ‘The family wage represented a dual claim to subsistence and industrial justice to its early advocates: workingmen, organized in trades’ societies and unions, demanded both sufficient wages and the rights due the industrious producer in a republic.’109 When the class issue of justice for the working class and the need for a subsistence wage were both connected to the status of men in the working-class family, the initial link between work and gender was made: the family wage issue was linked to the defence of the working-class family.110 Men’s rights, power, and authority resided in their conception of themselves as working men, not as non-gendered members of an asexual working class. The self-respect of working-class men resided in their ability to sustain a family by their work, whether this was in practice possible or not.111 Skilled men often justified their demands for higher wages by suggesting that if they were paid properly, women would not have to leave the home in the first place. Men became accomplices in the reduction of women’s wages—and ultimately in the reduction of their own, because the paying of lower wages to women also led to a downward pressure on the level of men’s pay.112 As the numbers of women workers increased and the industrial workplace grew, industry’s dictum of placing the individual before the collective contributed to increased competition between the sexes. In the end the family wage issue would be transformed into a matter of gender privilege, which served to enhance the division between the unequal worlds of working men and women. The stereotyping of jobs by sex provided the opportunity for employers to play men and women off against each other; and when the defence of working-class masculinity in the workplace became tied to men’s patriarchal position in the home, employers in the garment factories were able to manipulate both men and women garment workers more effectively. However, because the garment industry displayed a complex and often contradictory sexual division of labour, ‘fluidity rather than rigidity characterized women’s earning power.’113 Men generally earned more than women. In both women’s and men’s clothing ­factories in 1918, less than 18 per cent of the men earned under $15 a

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week, whereas 83 per cent of the women were below that mark. Women fared marginally better in the women’s sector, where 55 per cent of women earned between $10 and $15 a week, while in the men’s sector 45 per cent of women earned that much.114 Patriarchal attitudes influenced wage rates and job selection, and the large gap between male and female wage-earners can partly be attributed to the exclusion of women from the highly skilled and well-paid jobs, such as cutting, but different wage rates also occurred in jobs where men and women did the same work. As a consequence, men and women had differing expectations about the work they were entitled to do and how much they should be paid.115

The Rise of the Inside Factory System In a 1910 year-end review of Toronto factory conditions, an Ontario inspector named Mrs A. Brown reported that ‘The ready-made clothing manufacturer has invaded with amazing rapidity, the exclusive field of the custom tailor, and as this class of goods becomes ever more popular, greater care and attention is paid to the finish and style, and every known “trick of the trade” is used to please people.’116 The quality of handiwork in ready-made clothing had improved to the degree that manufacturers claimed: In style and fit the customer is usually satisfied to take his chances by paying 30 per cent to 50 per cent less than the same cloth would cost him made up by a tailor. In quality of goods the custom tailor has but slight advantage, as ready-made now consists of the very best output of domestic looms and in some cases are made from imported works. Many suits are made by a combination of custom tailoring and factory work.117 In 1901, 26 establishments employing 2,747 hands produced women’s factory-made clothing. By 1911, 93 factories employed 10,519 hands and produced a value of products at $15,083,345, while the value of the product in the custom sector had dropped to 40 per cent of the value of factory production. By 1920, when factory production was valued at $52,874,568, custom work was only 6 per cent of the value of factory production.118 Capital investment continued to increase during the 1920s, reaching $28,493,549 in men’s factory clothing and $25,087,862 in women’s factory clothing by 1929.119 By the 1930s clothing production in the women’s wear industry included a large variety of products: coats, suits and skirts, dresses and blouses, children’s wear, undergarments, sportswear, rainwear,

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kimonos, and a large number of other products as well. The men’s and boy’s industry included the traditional men’s suits and coats, ­separate coats, trousers, smoking jackets, and rainwear; the work clothes sector of the industry produced uniforms, overalls, work pants and shirts, work coats, and jumpers. In addition to these main areas of manufacture, men’s furnishings (collars and cuffs), caps and hats, and a separate branch for shirts and children’s blouses were all in production by the mid-1920s.120 The production process in each sector was different. Variations in style, construction, and material created a situation in which manufacturers tended to specialize in a particular garment. However, the ­production process in men’s suits and women’s cloaks was similar enough that these two sectors shared a similar historical development and a similar division of labour. Tailored garments made for men and women were traditionally seen as ‘men’s industries’, while work on untailored garments, particularly clothing worn by women, came to be seen as ‘women’s industries’.121 While opportunities for women in the so-called men’s industries were limited, they often found more freedom in the ‘women’s industries’, where work was considered less skilled. Both men’s shirts and women’s blouses were simple enough in construction that much of the work was considered semi-skilled, and in those branches women workers dominated. The shirtwaist trade, under way in Canada by the turn of the century, initially produced skirts and blouses, but as the silk dress became popular the industry moved into manufacturing dresses as well. The progression from ready-made shirtwaists to ready-made dresses was gradual, and dress production did not become thoroughly viable until dress fashions became less complex than they had been at the turn of the century.122 Inside factory production was more common in parts of the industry that had standardized work. In some sectors, such as shirts, uniforms, and work clothes, centralization of production began early; in others, such as men’s suits and coats, skilled tailors maintained their position in production, despite the range of production processes from family task shops to back-shops to inside factory production.123 The boom in ready-made work was reflected in a rapid increase in workers in all branches of the trade. The 1900 year-end report of the Labour Gazette stated: In the ready-made clothing trades, the demand for hands has been exceptionally good, more especially for women employees. The trade is centering more and more in Toronto, where better sanitary conditions prevail, than in some of the smaller places where it has

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been carried on. In the cloakmaking and ladies tailoring branches the trade is slack, but activity prevails in the manufacture of overalls and shirts. Wages, however, continue far from satisfactory in many cases.124 Much of the initial expansion of ready-made production was achieved through the increased use of semi-skilled women operating sewing machines. ‘Whitewear [underwear] has become a large feature of the clothing trade’, Industrial Canada reported in 1905. ‘Improved high speed machinery has cheapened the making, always comparatively cheap, owing to the abundance of thrifty female help. In five years (1900 –1905) the “whitewear” branch of the trade has doubled.’ 125 As technology was improved and demand increased, each of the three stages in clothing production—cutting, sewing, and pressing— became more and more refined and broken up into sections. In the dress operation there was little point in subdividing the work, because labour costs were lower than in the men’s clothing industry and manufacturers had to change styles too frequently to allow for subdivision of work. But in men’s clothing and women’s suits, the production process was continually broken down, with each step becoming a separate job. An item passed through the hands of seamers, fellers, pocket-makers, and buttonhole-makers, and at each stage the garment was pressed and returned for further sewing. By 1935 there were an estimated 115 different operations on a man’s coat, 45 on a vest, 62 on a pair of pants, and 168 on top coats and overcoats.126 With the introduction of each new division, work in the shops was redefined as either skilled or semi-skilled, wages were adjusted accordingly, and women were moved into the new work as the early gendered occupational divisions were reaffirmed. Some of the work was performed strictly by men, often isolated spatially from the rest of the production process, while other work was done by men and women alike. The position each person took in the labour process determined to some extent his or her bargaining power in the shop and prospects for future job training. For example, in the cutting trade an informal apprenticeship existed. Young boys who worked as sweepers in the cutting rooms, cleaning up the bits of material off the floors, were from time to time allowed to work at cutting bits of material. In this way they became proficient cutters and soon learned to cut the more valuable cloth. The informal apprenticeship systems reinforced gender divisions in the shops, for as young girls and boys entered the trade they were streamlined into work either as sweepers (boys’ work) or as helpers (girls’ work). Girls’

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The cutting room at Eaton’s, a man’s world, circa 1904. In the years before World War II women’s exclusion from this trade was complete. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

exclusion from the task of sweeper effectively excluded them from apprenticeship in the trade. Sewing-machine operators usually started their training as helpers and basters working alongside skilled operators. Marie Leblanc, a sample-maker in a Montreal dress shop, described her training: ‘I worked two days on rags, just learning the speed of the machine. Then I did straight seams, then collars, under the guidance of a ­ sample-maker who was working time-work. They used to do it very nicely in the old days.’127 Gradually such women moved into machine work on their own, but frequently their training was only for a specific sewing operation. In most trades (dressmaking was a notable exception) they rarely learned to make whole garments. The gendered character of the tailoring trades was initially most clear in the small shops: women’s work was handwork, and men’s work was machine work.128 The sexual division of labour in both ­factory and outside work in the ready-made trades mirrored previous gender divisions in the custom tailoring trade, which in turn replicated

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the gender divisions within the household. By the 1920s, when ­collective bargaining in the men’s trades had been well established, each one of the new jobs had a wage, a task, and a gender. The institutionalization of ‘an infinite variety of labour costs’ gave manufacturers great leeway to reduce labour costs wherever possible within the factory setting.129 With each technological advance, fragmentation of the labour process increased and the sexual division of labour was reaffirmed.

A Community of Women: The Work Experience In 1912 a Toronto journalist using the pseudonym ‘Videre’ wrote a series of articles about her experiences in factory work, providing some of the best descriptions of such work. Videre described her encounter with a young girl in a Toronto box factory: She had been there less than a year, and was not making very much, somewhere between $4.00 and $5.00 a week. ‘I used to work upstairs,’ the young girl said, ‘but there was only three girls up there and two of them left, and I didn’t want to be the only girl up there working among the men, so I asked to be put downstairs.’ 130 ‘In modern workplaces there are not only men’s and women’s jobs, but also men’s and women’s spaces’, Joan Scott commented in her essay on technology and women’s work.131 Female workers tended to work in homogeneous units in which they made up the majority of workers in that job category. For example, in 1931 women made up some 65 per cent of the workforce in clothing production, yet they formed 87 per cent of those working as sewers and machine operators (outside sewers were 95 per cent female). Because of the social codes of conduct for feminine behaviour, women felt more comfortable in an all-women environment, in a ‘community of women’. Perhaps because the work environment was so homogeneous, women tended to put emphasis on the social aspects of the work environment. ‘There was a friendly atmosphere, a much more friendly atmosphere amongst the people that worked then. More socializing than you find now’, recalled Bertha Blugerman.132 The women seemed to take advantage of every possible situation to develop friendship and co-operation among their workmates. Winnipeg cloak finishers stressed the importance of sharing work in shops that paid through piecework payment schemes, which put some women at a disadvantage. Rose Kamarofsky said, ‘If I had two coats, I would share one, because if the other girl was new, she was slower and she

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brought home less money. When you worked on better coats you made a few more cents. The work was easier, the material in the lining was finer. So you shared the work.’133 Despite attempts by employers to limit and control social life in the shops, the young women persisted and through their common experiences often developed close and lasting friendships. ‘You make friends’, recalled Sophie Mandel: I have a couple of Russian girls working with me. I became very friendly with them. Especially one girl, she used to invite me even for Christmas dinner. And after I left the shop, she remained there, and she used to phone me and I used to phone her. We were very good friends, her name was Sophie, too. We used to sit at the tables and speak Russian most of the time, especially if we didn’t want anybody to know what we were speaking, so we used to speak Russian.134 The type of work done sometimes limited the sociability of the workroom, but somehow the effort to make friends was always there. Videre described her experience in a factory making whitewear. She was ‘greatly hampered’ in her investigations there because there was no sink where the girls could meet and chat. ‘There had lately been made a regulation, that girls were not to walk about to the others’ machines during working hours. I should think this a wise regulation on the part of the firm, though as one . . . girl said, “It rests you a lot if you can get up sometimes for five minutes and go around.” We talked, of course, to those on the machines near us, though you have to speak loudly, for the factory is very noisy.’135 Some women found that one of the attractions of the piecework system (although bought at a price) was that since they set their own pace they could move about the shop more. ‘I like to work on my own time, the way I feel like working. Sometimes I feel like working harder, sometimes I feel like taking it easy’, Eva Shanoff said. ‘Of course,’ she cautioned, ‘they don’t like to see you fool around, but . . . you can cheat a little bit.’136 A finisher described a similar situation on piecework. ‘When I finished my coats, I could do whatever I wanted. I used to go to the operators and kibitz around. I used to go for coffee and wait until the other coats came out.’137 So despite the tension of speed-up inherent in piecework, the system also offered women a degree of freedom to socialize in the shops. But it was at best a limited freedom, with an unlimited price attached.

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Technology, Gender, Skill—and Deskilling In the capitalist mode of production, new methods and new machinery are incorporated within a management effort to ­dissolve the labour process as a process conducted by the worker and reconstitute it as a process conducted by management.138 At first, because production levels in the needle trades could be increased through the use of cheap female labour in the form of outwork and, later, through the contract system, the push to mechanize the industry remained limited to improvements on existing machinery (such as sewing and cutting machines) and to innovations (such as the introduction of buttonhole machines and zipper machines). When improvements were made to existing technology, the nature of control over the job at hand was not altered and the levels of required skill did not change significantly. When the sewing machine was used in the inside shops as a tool to improve output, it was initially seen as a man’s machine, resulting in a higher-status male labour.139 When the machines came into regular use in the factories their operation gradually shifted from men to women, although the sewing machine remained essentially a craft tool; because the operator had to adjust the work piece to the sewing head, the operator remained the final determinant of output.140 Sewing innovations tended to centre on eliminating the most skilled part of the work: guiding the material through the machine at a fast pace. Improved sewing machines allowed workers to sew more stitches per hour; some sewing machines were adapted and made more efficient for a particular job. Sewing machines increased their efficiency from 2,500 stitches per minute to 3,500 stitches per minute in the period 1890–1940.141 Similarly, new cutting machines allowed cutters to greatly increase the number of layers of cloth they could cut at one time. At first, with the control of the machines remaining in the workers’ hands, the true intensification of work depended on the ability of management to introduce forms of incentive, such as the piecework payment system, to increase worker output. In general, this type of technological change tended not to occur in male-dominated jobs, such as cutters’ and pressers’ work. The innovations, however, tended to alter the gender of the worker doing the job in question. The introduction of buttonholers and zipper machines lessened the skill required to do the job, allowing manufacturers to standardize work and break down the production of a garment into several distinct tasks. Whereas tailors traditionally made complete suits, now a

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worker might do only separate operations, such as sewing seams, hanging sleeves, putting in the lining, or making pockets and buttonholes. This meant that male tailors could be replaced by cheaper female labour. In addition, the traditional handwork done by women finishers could be eliminated, replaced by machine work. As it developed the garment industry became riddled with occupational divisions. The division of work into small tasks was particularly pronounced in the men’s clothing industry, which had 32 separate job classifications by 1915. The use of new or improved machinery altered each of the stages in the labour process, at the same time reaffirming the already established gender labelling of the work through a complex mix of skills and tasks. The end result was a sex-typed occupational structure that challenged rational explanation as it changed from one locale to another, from one product to another, and was influenced by the gender and ethnicity of the worker assigned to the job. Whatever the task, attitudes and beliefs concerning who could best do the job influenced job selection. While men and women working in the garment shops had opinions about which work was theirs, manu­facturers’ expectations of job assignments also shaped occupational divisions in the labour process. The two groups did not always agree on these issues. In turn, as Susan Glenn argues, the contemporary accounts of occupational classifications were also the cultural products of the particular period, based on ideas about the kinds of work a ‘lady’ might undertake and about the particular ‘occupations that befitted the social and physical characterisics of masculinity and femininity’.142 Glenn observes that social investigators tried to find a physiological relationship between the sex of the worker and type of work they performed. Men worked on ‘heavy’ materials used in cloaks and suits, while women worked on the ‘lighter’ fabrics used in dresses and shirts. Thus the descriptions of the labour process are based on these ideas of acceptable norms as much as they are reflections of work that women and men actually did in the needle trades. Although the existence of skilled work became a pivotal issue in this labour process, use of the term ‘skill’ remained vague. In fact, the distinction between jobs was based less on skill than on control or power in the workplace: when a worker maintained control over an aspect of the job, that job retained its status; and when, as often happened, a job’s designation as skilled was retained, the actual skill itself was not necessarily retained. For men—‘craft workers’ especially—prestige in the workplace was signified by higher wages, by ‘time-work’ (where workers are paid on an hourly or weekly basis, as

Collar Padder

Busheler Fitter

Basting Puller

Pocket Maker

Shaper

Lining � Finisher, around Arm-hole

Canvas Baster Baster and Fuller of Stay Tape

Button Sewer

Collar Finisher Garment� Examiner

Padder � of Lapel

Operator � who sews in Sleeves

Bar Tucker Lining Baster

Presser of � Entire Coat

Operator

Joiner of � Collar to � Lapel

Lining Maker Lining � Operator

Presser on Sleeves Collar and Sleeve Baster

Sleeve Maker Edge Baster

Lining Presser Sleeve Presser Edge Cutter

Operator for Shoulders

Sleeve Baster around Edge

General Busheler and Hanger Sewer

Button-hole� Maker

Button-hole� Cutter

Edge Presser

Lining Baster � for Shoulders

The occupational division of work in the men’s clothing industry. (Adapted from Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America [Washington: Smithsonian ­Institute, 1974], 405)

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Arm Hole � Baster

Seam Presser

Presser

Button Marker

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opposed to piecework), and by the extent of their shop-floor privileges. The price they paid to retain these privileges was their collusion with the manufacturers against the less skilled workers. This ensured a divided labour force in which the wages of the other sector workers remained low, piecework prevailed, and shop-floor privileges for semi-skilled or unskilled workers were minimal. The nature of women’s work also meant that they were more expendable and easily replaced. Most young women learned to embroider and sew from other women family members; this was considered to be part of their domestic skills, and as such they were skills that were not highly valued in the marketplace. Indeed, because women were seen as simply bringing along their skills from home, they were considered unskilled and interchangeable with other women desperate for work. Their household skills were degraded, and the social and economic significance of family life was indirectly trivialized. Certainly, the function of skill in any workplace depends on a number of factors: job autonomy (control over product and process of production); the degree of routine in the work; the range of tasks performed; the knowledge required to do the job (general versus specific knowledge); and job learning (including both time spent learning on the job and prior expertise).143 The historical development of jobs in the clothing industry also brought a distinction between the job requirements and the capabilities of workers doing the job, between (de)skilled workers and (de)skilled jobs.144 In the needle trades the deskilling process was tightly connected to both the sex of the worker and the politics of the workplace. Skill was defined and redefined on the basis of the political power of the workers in their relationship with the bosses. For instance, the job of cutter changed considerably over the period 1890–1940, but its classification as ‘the’ skilled job in the industry never wavered. Because cutters never lost control of the tasks of cutting cloth, even when the skill required to do the job was altered by the introduction of new machines and by changes in the scale of production and organization of the work, they continued to hold a privileged position in the ­production process. Job control and social definitions of skill were indelibly linked. The sexual divisions in the trade, as a whole, also provided a basis for gender-influenced definitions of skill. Cynthia Cockburn argues: ‘The sexual division of labour in society is of great antiquity: men and women tend to do different work. Over very long periods of patriarchal time women’s particular abilities and work processes have

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been arbitrarily valued lower than those of men.’ Into this mix comes the idea of skill. According to Cockburn: Skill is not only a class political weapon. It is also a sex/gender weapon. Skill as a political concept is more far-reaching than the class relations of capitalism—it plays an important part in the power relations between men and women. . . . It has been a twoway process: women’s inferiority has rubbed off on their activities and the imputed mindlessness of the activities has reflected on women.145 Occupational segregation by gender served to regulate skill distinctions even in the most skilled jobs in the trade. Tailors, who made up an entire garment in the men’s clothing industry, were considered skilled craftsmen. Dressmakers, who similarly made up the whole garment in the women’s clothing trade, were considered to be semi-skilled or unskilled workers. Unionized men would produce men’s garments, but non-unionized women would produce women’s ­garments. By ‘objective’ measures of skill the tasks involved in the men’s and women’s clothing sectors were much the same. But in the men’s clothing sector unionized male workers argued successfully for the maintenance of the label ‘skilled’, on the basis that the cloth they used was heavier and that women would not be able to manipulate it skilfully. In fact, the lighter weight of the garment made by the operators in the dress trade did not make it easier or require appreciably less skill to manipulate. A factory inspector in 1912 reported that although the dressmaking work was ‘generally regarded’ as light, ‘in reality’ it was ‘hard and most exacting. Women engaged in it are liable to have to work overtime more frequently than in other trades, and if workrooms are not overcrowded, they are usually as full as the law permits.’146 But as women’s clothing styles changed, becoming less detailed and more simplified in design, the ‘skilled’ work of dressmakers was less in demand and the availability of the supposed skilled work for women diminished. The social meaning of skilled work was heavily influenced by the age and ethnicity of the worker doing the job as well as by gender. When a job was done by English-speaking white males it tended to carry a higher status and be considered skilled. At the same time, both men and women commonly accepted that skilled jobs should be done by older men. If the work was done by older Italian immigrant women, it was by definition less skilled. Occupational opportunities were shaped by notions of rightful place for women and men within the factory system. The exclusion of women, or specific ethnic

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groups, from particular occupations was justified on cultural or social grounds. Certain jobs became male preserves, or the preserves of English-speaking workers. When collective agreements and later government legislation tried to take these unwritten laws and formalize their practices, the social meaning of words such as ‘skill’ became political dynamite. Conflict over transformations in control and skill in the workplace was often shaped by gender and ethnic competition, which manufacturers exploited to ensure the lowest possible wages. Sometimes the resolution of the conflict lay in the recognition by trade union men and manufacturers alike that the jobs themselves should become gendered; this further sectioned the work and segregated the workforce.147 Attempts by skilled male workers to retain their power in the shops could assist manufacturers in their attempts to break work down into different pieces. In some instances the bosses had the assistance of skilled males in redefining work categories, for those workers wanted to ensure that their own skilled jobs could be retained through negotiations. In effect the issue then became which set of workers was best able to resist the deskilling process—an issue that becomes at least partly determined by the familial ideologies that dictate gender-appropriate behaviour. Cockburn defines skill in her examination of the historical development of the labour process in the printing trades: Skill itself consists in at least three things. There is skill that resides in the man himself, accumulated over time, each new experience adding something to a total ability. There is the skill demanded by the job—which may or may not match the skill of the worker. And there is the political definition of skill: that which a group of workers or a trade union can successfully defend against the challenge of employers and of other groups of workers.148 The last sense best illustrates the position of women in the needle trades. Definitions of skill are shaped in the historical battle for control in the production process and are intricately tied to the sex of the worker. Simply put, when a women does a job, the job loses status. Loss of status is perceived politically and socially as loss of skill, and loss of skill inevitably means loss of pay. In the 1930s, when trade union officials and government men would finally sit down at the table to discuss job classifications and negotiate industrial standards in the trade, these issues would take on a renewed significance. Not surprisingly, when that happened women would be relegated to the periphery of the bargaining process.

3

Worlds Apart: Women and Unions in the Needle Trades, 1890–1920 Women have in the past lacked training necessary to carry on such unions, and were often altogether ignorant of the nature of labour conditions. Since women on the whole do not remain long in employment, benefit and superannuation schemes in connection with the unions were not much appreciated. Moreover, there does not exist that ‘class spirit’ among women in employment that is necessary to organized progress, and men with reason complain that it is difficult to operate plans of any sort which require unselfish action among large bodies of women. Jean Thomson Scott, 1892 In the second decade of the century, in a series of great strikes, hundreds of young women in Canada marched on the picket lines outside garment factories. Most of them were not drawn to the streets by an especially fervid interest in labour activism and labour issues. In the years of the strikes—1910, 1912, and 1913—those concerns were considered to fall largely within the male domain. Rather, the women came out in large number to protest against their immediate, everyday working conditions. The common daily experience of young sewing-machine operators was a heavy mix of stress, noise, long hours, speed-up, and unfair work distribution—all at unreasonably low rates of pay—creating a work life that caused many of them to end their days in distress rather than any sense of achievement. Their male co-workers faced these 53

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conditions less often. For both women and men, much of this experience was mediated through gender. To protect themselves from the harshness of workplace exploitation, women relied on the men to speak for them, and speak for them the men did—as fathers, brothers, and uncles—that is, patriarchally. But the men spoke first to protect their own jobs and futures; reducing exploitation of the women in the industry came second. As one union organizer pointed out: Many of them [the bosses], for instance, in the cities of Toronto and Montreal (I know quite a few of them) started as workers and they had been very militant. But we knew. We worked with them in the union, some of them had been members of the Executive of the union. But at the same time they would in private say ‘I’m not going to stay in this shop very long. I’m not going to work for this lousy boss. I can be a better boss than him and treat my workers better than he does.’1 Skilled male workers could at least entertain the possibility of one day being the boss, but women could never do so. This sharp difference shaped developments on the shop floor (as well as in the unions), often acting as a mechanism of control in the workplace. Women deferred to men in the shops, for men were most likely not only to be family breadwinners, but also to be potential contractors or manufacturers in their own right. It is small wonder, then, that the battle to determine the limits of management prerogatives in the workplace through the collective bargaining process sometimes resulted in alliances between trade union bureaucrats (usually skilled male workers) and manufacturers, and that these alliances were harmful to the semi-skilled (usually women) workers. The social distance between workers and management was more pronounced in sectors of the trade that could support larger factories. The transition from manufacturer to the techniques of modern industry did occur in the needle trades, but not in all sectors: it very much depended on the product market. In the men’s clothing industry and later in the sportswear sector, with their larger factories, it was possible to standardize production, and the introduction of scientific management techniques served to formalize relations between employers and employees. In the dress sector, where shops needed to remain small and flexible to produce a large variety of styles, manufacturers made very little use of the scientific management techniques characteristically associated with economic advancement in industry. They

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preferred to recruit cheap labour and did their best to avoid unionization, often by moving production into the countryside, where access to cheap non-union labour was plentiful. Small shops and large factories offered workers different social contexts for shop-floor culture. Susan Glenn argues that many Jewish women ‘disdained the traditional workroom environment common to the small neighbourhood shops run by immigrant contractors, preferring instead to labor in larger, more modern factories.’2 In the small contract shops, ties of family and ethnicity often made work relations unstructured. The atmosphere was informal, with everyone on a firstname basis. Workers were either family or like family and, like members of a family, women were expected to be dutiful, self-sacrificing daughters. The contractor ‘knew how to encourage their loyality by expressing a fatherly concern for their welfare: lending money to impoverished greenhorns, helping to underwrite ship passage for a relative, and otherwise offering advice and of course, providing a job.’3 In the larger shops, authority relationships were formalized and a wider range of job opportunities for young women existed. This was particularly true in the so-called ‘women’s industries’. The modern factory offered immigrant women a community among women, a chance to learn the ways of a new world. The blurring of class lines between manufacturers and skilled male workers further influenced the ability of workers’ organizations to resist manufacturers’ control. The male bosses were often members of the same ethnic community as their workers, which made for community ties in the broader needle trade community, but also muddied the divisions between classes.4 The sometimes close connection between worker and employer could lead to problems, with small manufacturers living precariously, often moving from the role of manufacturer to worker and back again. A fund-raising appeal for a new Jewish Labour Lyceum published in the Yiddisher Zhurnal in 1924 noted the close ethnic ties of community among employers and workers in the Jewish community: ‘The Jewish businessmen of today are the workers of yesterday. Most of us have not broken our relations with the mass of workers; if we are not tied to them through business, we are belonging with them in various societies and organizations. In each family there are male and female workers.’5 This close connection created a certain tension in the relations on the shop floor, but on the other hand it provided the trade unionists with a great deal of knowledge about life as a boss. The experience of a young cutter at Guarantee Clothing in Montreal epitomized this connection.

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One day, we started getting back to work after one o’clock. But the trolley of my cutting machine, the wire got caught on the trolley, so I got up on the table to make sure that the trolley would work properly and while I was there I started dancing on the table because The Happy Gang had just started on the radio. But it so happened that Mr. T., who was the owner of the company and a very close friend of the family . . ., he was just going up the back elevator, the freight elevator. . . . So he caught me dancing. He called out, ‘Mortilah, Mortilah, dance dance’, and I jumped off the table and I knew that he would come down and see me. . . . He did come down and he comes over to me and he says, ‘Mortilah, you know we are not busy, and I know we are not busy, but when we are not busy I am going to tell you what to do. Go to the bin, get a bolt of cloth, unroll it, slowly, then roll it slowly. Then take it to the bin and hide for 10 minutes, then take the same bolt of cloth, unroll it slowly and the same procedure and take it to the bin. But never, never, let me catch you dancing on the table again.’ . . . I was scared like hell at the time. . . . He said, ‘As long as I am paying you, make sure you are doing something, but you are not going to fool me, but you should be doing something constructive.’ But dancing wasn’t beneficial to the company. I never forgot that as long as I lived. And when I was in business for myself, my attitude was the same as his.6 The workplace was a training ground for social values as well as social skills. At times this worked in favour of the union’s control of the labour market, and at other times it made it difficult for workers to be sure which side they were on. One result was that when the bosses and male trade unionists sat down to negotiate skill levels, they had some sympathy with each other and tended to see women as ‘other’.

Issues, Alliances, and ‘Women’s Plight’ In the strikes of the 1910s women commonly complained about sexual exploitation, either through harassment on the job or through favouritism in the distribution of work. As a result, the labour movement conducted moral campaigns to focus public attention on these evils in the shops and engineered parades of what were seen as ‘pitiful young girls’ in the streets of Toronto, Hamilton, and Montreal, shattering the period’s romantic ideal of female domesticity or at least, with some help from the sensation-seeking press of the time, capitalizing on the contrast between the ideal and the reality. The

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labour movement in the needle trades appealed to the public for justice in the workplace, and its appeal was greatly strengthened by the tales of exploitation of women workers. Masculinity and femininity in the working-class movement of the early twentieth century made frequent reference to a romanticized family life, where women would be free of wage work, safe at home raising their children, and men would be able to work and support their families. Thus, when working-class women (and children) entered the factories they were seen as being defenceless against the exploitation of factory owners. This class exploitation was frequently framed in the ‘language of violated domesticity’, as Boris notes with reference to homeworkers.7 Women may have been welcome attractions on the picket lines, and their stories of sweatshop degradation became fodder for the angry disputes of the time; but they had no place in the union structure or in the negotiation of agreements, and they were absent from union leadership. Male trade unionists made sure that they spoke for women in negotiations with the manufacturers, and in playing this role they helped the manufacturers continue the sexual division of labour. Conservative trade union men joined with the manufacturers in a common goal—stability in the industry at any cost—which in part depended on waging an effective fight against the small sweatshops. For both sides, this meant maintaining and controlling a regular workforce. Such a strategy made trade union staff and company executives (all men) temporary allies in the needle trade community with a common agenda: to maintain the hierarchical structure in the shops by controlling the numbers of women allowed to enter the ‘skilled’ trades. All trade unionists of the period fought similar workplace-control issues: wage cuts, technological change, section work and speed-up, and union recognition. But within that struggle other important issues such as reduction of the hours of labour, abolition of homework and contracting out, and worker control of alterations in the wage form became the focus of workplace confrontations. Strikes were most frequently against wage cuts, but they were also against the new forms of management that were restructuring the nature of work in the manufacturing sector.8 The priority given to specific issues depended on the interests of the male trade unionists who shaped the issues and on whether these issues were perceived as affecting their own workplace power. In general, workers attempted to maintain control over the work process through price committees, grievance procedures, and control

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over the distribution of work. Women used their position on price committees in the shops and took part in strikes, and when the economic climate was favourable they simply quit a job that was unsatisfactory and went to look for another that offered better opportunity. While men also used these tactics, they were likely to use formal institutional structures such as the union representatives or the collective agreement to reinforce their control in the shop. A basic problem was the men’s conviction that women should not be employed at all. Until 1915 the platform of principles of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLCC) included a call for the ‘abolition of child labour by children under 14 years of age, and of female labour in all branches of industrial life, such as mines, workshops, factories, etc.’9 In 1916, when the Toronto Trades and Labour Council discussed the employment of women in a munitions factory, it concluded: ‘They should receive the same wages as men, but on the conclusion of the conflict should return to their natural place, the home.’10 The attempt to limit women’s industrial work continued even as trade unions were arguing in favour of minimum wages for women and legislation to protect them on their jobs. Male trade unionists held two conflicting views of women’s place in industry: they wanted to exclude them from all industrial work; and they wanted to protect them from the intensity of exploitation that existed in many workplaces. The lasting tension between these two views of women’s role in the labour force had a common result: the reinforcement of women’s primary association with the home and the perpetuation of their secondary status in the public realm of the marketplace. Because men (and women) believed that women should be in the home in the first place, women’s plight as workers did not seem to be a just cause, or at least a cause worth any great deal of time. The main problem with women, from the point of view of male workers, was the menace they posed to the level of men’s wages. In 1918, when the TLCC pushed for a minimum wage for women of $12 a week, it argued, ‘The evolution of women in industry is taking the places hitherto held by men,’ and ‘Such employment of women in some cases, is being used to lower wages.’11 Moreover, the fragmented unionism of the time added to the difficulties of women who wanted to play a role in improving conditions. Pre-World War I unionism was not in the hands of a centralized union bureaucracy. Benjamin Schlesinger, president of the ILGWU in 1915, described the situation from the American perspective: ‘It was not the Union that controlled the prices (piece-rates) but 2,000 separate “unions,” each shop acting independently of the other.’12 As part of

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this fragmentation, both women and men saw women as a separate community with a special place in the trade union movement. Alice Kessler-Harris suggests, for instance, that the push for separatism by both men and women ‘rested squarely on the notion that women were different from men: not that they were unequal, but that their actual or potential motherhood gave them special claims to a woman’s sphere.’13 This conception provided space for women to explore actively different strategies of organizing within a ‘woman’s culture’, but it also served to isolate women from political power in the unions.14 At the time, few women union activists spoke about women’s consciousness, and trade union records offer only veiled evidence of women’s lack of interest in trade unions.15 A report on organization among Toronto cloakmakers in 1924 mentions that the 800 or so English-speaking workers (probably almost all women) were used as strikebreakers, with the manufacturers capitalizing on ethnic tension between these workers and the largely Jewish union local.16 The same wariness of ‘unladylike behaviour’ that held many women back from becoming involved in active union membership may have also served to keep those who did become members from taking on leadership and roles as spokeswomen in the union movement.

Garment Workers’ Unions: The Beginnings The first steps towards a strong trade union movement in Canada were taken under the umbrella of US unionism. The waning of the influence of the Knights of Labor by 1900 in Canada and the hallmark decision of the 1902 Canadian Trades and Labour Congress to give its support to international (or US) unions under the jurisdiction of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) meant that organization in the Canadian clothing trades would continue to come under the influence of a pragmatic American style of unionism influenced by Samuel Gompers, the head of the AFL.17 In 1902 about 1,000 unions affiliated to the AFL existed in Canada, and their members included most of the 60,000 to 70,000 organized trade unionists.18 By 1914 the number of Canadian locals had risen to 1,775.19 A few years later, in the period 1916–20, trade unions had 273,100 members in Canada, with about 75 per cent of them in unions with international affiliations.20 The AFL clearly dominated the labour movement in both the United States and Canada in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the clothing industry itself, independent organizations of custom tailors existed in Canada before the 1890s, but the first significant

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unionizing effort came under the auspices of the craft-based Journeymen Tailors Union of America (JTUA).21 The locals were usually small, with less than 20 men on average and few immigrant workers. The unions were also often short-lived, and a large percentage of workers continued to remain outside the union movement. In 1903 less than 18 per cent of the estimated 400 men and 500 women in the Toronto clothing trade were in the JTUA, and most of those members were men. Women were not actively recruited and seemed to have shown little interest. This was partly because union membership carried a greater financial benefit for men. The difference between non-union and union wages for women was only 15 per cent, while the Bureau of Labour reported union membership meant wage increases for men of 50 per cent.22 The JTUA fought for the abolition of sweatshop conditions in the trade, struggled against attempts by master tailors to make use of homeworkers, and tried to maintain union shops. The struggle to eradicate homework received uneven support in the trade union movement. Toronto locals of the Journeymen Tailors placed resolutions on the homework issue before the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada every year from 1914 to 1922, but they could not convince the TLCC of its importance.23 Rather than focusing on the cheapness of home labour and its effect on factory wages, the JTUA based its campaign on the danger of homework to public health, arguing that ‘wearing clothing made up in homes where disease or illness occurs’ carried sickness to the general population—a tactic that drew on public concern as a method of controlling sweated labour.24 It turned out to be a poor long-term strategy because it came at a time when the incidence of small pox and scarlet fever was beginning to decline and home conditions were improving slightly.25 As clothing production became less artisanal and more industrial, and as the increasing number of workers in the factories provided an opportunity for trade union growth, the JTUA became more and more involved in jurisdictional disputes with other unions in the readymade sectors.26 Ethnic conflict also disrupted the union’s efforts, as custom tailors watched immigrant Jewish workers take up work in shops that had introduced section work. The Jewish workers, often skilled tailors in their countries of origin, found that the only work they could get was in the section shops. Members of the JTUA, largely English-speaking Canadians, resented the deskilling process but were unable to attract the Jewish workers into their union.27 A second mode of organization, industrial unionism, was launched with the arrival of the United Garment Workers of America (UGWA) in

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1891 and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in 1900. Both unions were based in the United States and quickly moved into Canada. The earliest unions in the women’s clothing sector were in women’s cloak and suit production, with its heavy reliance on male skilled labour. By 1904 both Toronto and Montreal had small ILGWU locals composed mainly of skilled (male) workers. Cutters, pressers, skirtmakers, and waistmakers were all in the same local.28 By 1913 the ILGWU’s Canadian membership was about 2,000 workers, and it stayed at that level until the 1930s.29 Rather than using workplace militancy to wrench concessions from employers, the ILGWU and the UGWA both adopted a cautious strategy of relying on the ‘union label’—meaning that union struggles were mediated through an appeal for public support and recognition of the moral righteousness of their cause.30 Trade union efforts went into a publicity campaign to get the public to buy only unionmade garments, rather than into organizing strikes or using the strike tactic in the workplace. Bonds of skill continued to be the basis for unionism within the newly evolving industrial unions in the garment industry, as they had been in the JTUA.31 While the overall union structure encompassed both skilled and unskilled workers, union locals were organized on the basis of occupation within the industry—cutters, pressers, operators, and so on. The unions attempted to segregate occupational groupings within a hierarchical trade union structure, which often resulted in a narrowing of issues to focus more overtly on sectoral issues of concern to specific occupational groups. The locals composed of skilled (male) cutters took the lead in organization and policy decision-making. The cutters were the first to organize, and in 1920 US authors James Budish and George Soule remarked on their role, noting that they passed through stages ‘similar in some respects to that of the general labor movement’. At an early period, when the passage from the cutting craft to the employing class was somewhat easier, [cutters] practiced the welfare type of unionism, with benefits, vague idealism, ceremonials, etc. Later they had craft locals, businesslike, conservative, and aloof. Even after the internationals were formed they retained a certain separatism within the organization, considering themselves a sort of aristocracy.32 The new recruits performing increasingly fragmented tasks in factories were not initiated into the ways of the craft and showed little of the expected social ‘respect’ or interest in the traditional craft

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unionism practised by the ‘aristocrats of the trade’. As a result the craftsmen, who had dominated the early union movement, were not able to attack directly the changes that occurred in their own labour conditions until it was too late.33 The UGWA, formed in New York by a group of skilled male workers determined to fight sweatshops and homework, eventually had its jurisdiction restricted to the men’s clothing industry.34 Its first Canadian local was established in Toronto in 1894, followed by others in Montreal, Hamilton, and a few smaller centres.35 The union’s membership grew steadily, at least until the founding of the rival Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in 1913–14. In 1913, after a major UGWA strike in Rochester, women workers had insisted on a permanent presence in the union structure. When the UGWA refused to recognize women as an active and permanent part of the union structure—able to participate as shop chairs, business agents, and organizers—Rochester union women became part of the leadership that pulled away from the UGWA to form the more militant ACWA, which took in disaffected members of the UGWA until, by the time of the historic 1914 convention in Nashville, only one local was still in support of the UGWA.36 By 1915 the UGWA forces in Toronto had dwindled to two locals and 200 members, and the union had ceased to be of any significance in Montreal. Across Canada, by 1922 the UGWA had been reduced to 11 branches with a membership of less than 700 workers.37 Ethnic tensions as well as skill differences shaped local trade union politics. As Frager points out, the UGWA’s lack of success in Toronto was due in part to its members’ anti-immigrant attitudes, in particular their attitudes to Toronto’s Jewish garment workers. In Toronto, cutters, mainly English-Canadian men, did not join the ACWA, preferring to remain with the UGWA rather than mix with the ACWA’s immigrant Jewish workers.38 The Toronto ACWA tried to resolve some of the ethnic tensions by setting up separate locals based on ethnicity. Toronto’s ACWA wrote to the union’s head office to explain the need for a separate Gentile local that was not based on craft divisions: ‘The only distinction seemingly can be made that they can not under any circumstances meet with the Jewish Speaking element; to them it’s a matter of moral prestige.’39 During the 1880s the Knights of Labor had established women’s locals and experienced some success in organizing women, but it had made little headway in the ready-made shops of the needle trades. Both the ACWA and ILGWU had recognized the need to organize women and had granted approval to the organizing of women factory operatives into industrial locals. The ILGWU chartered locals in several

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of the women’s trades shortly after its formation in 1900.40 At its 1902–3 convention the ILGWU gave a favourable hearing to a motion to organize women workers: ‘The unorganized condition of the Women Wage Earners in all trades, and in the Cloak Industry, in particular, has always tended to keep down the standard of living, which organized labor has endeavored to elevate, be it resolved that, the ILGWU at its Fourth Annual Convention, decide to make special efforts during the coming year to organize the women wage earners of all ladies’ garment industries.’41 About a year later the Toronto cloakmakers local, all men, assured the New York office, ‘We are still working for and hope in the near future to have the co-operation of the women and girls, who form such a large percentage of the craft here.’42 At the time the Toronto women’s cloak trade employed about 1,100 workers: 500 women and 600 men. But according to researcher Roger Waldinger, the ILGWU’s early ‘fledgling locals’ for women workers ‘were shortlived, and the union proved unwilling to invest resources in organizing waist-makers or white-goods-workers.’43 The UGWA also made an effort to recruit women, partly because union regulations required all employees in a shop to be union members before headquarters would accredit the shop. Women were organized into mixed locals of operators, finishers, and assorted semi-skilled jobs, or into separate locals based on their gender rather than skill in the workplace. Kessler-Harris notes that while male trade unionists were initially sceptical of separatist demands, they soon began to admit women ‘as weaker members in need of protection’.44 The distinctive nature of gendered social and cultural activity meant that both groups—wage-earning women and trade union men—each felt more comfortable among their own peers. In 1899 the Winnipeg UGWA established its first separate women’s local.45 Until 1903–4 the union as a whole continued to follow this policy of organizing women separately, but as women soon came to constitute a significant percentage of the total membership, trade unionists began to question the wisdom of maintaining separate locals. Still, the separation of men and women in the union continued after 1904, albeit in a less overt form. In the UGWA men frequently assumed leadership in the women’s locals, and they often overlooked the women workers’ interests, as Phillip Foner points out: ‘Often when union leaders demanded that manufacturers pay higher wages and shorten the hours of work, they requested such improvements only for the cutters and operators, skilled jobs held by men, and ignored the women buttonhole makers and finishers, who worked longer hours for lower wages.’46

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Locals based on specific skills or crafts, often more conservative than the industrial locals, continued to dominate the union hierarchy and union politics, although they represented only a small percentage of the membership.47 The tension between these two elements finally broke into open warfare in 1913–14, tearing the UGWA apart and causing considerable upheaval in the ILGWU.48 In the ILGWU a cautious union strategy reigned in the general executive board in New York, where skilled men in the trade controlled a strongly conservative union central. Their views of unionism were at odds with those held by the majority of workers in the industry, many of them immigrants imbued with socialist ideas.49 Throughout the period to 1920 the ILGWU in Montreal and Toronto was largely organized by Jewish workers, many of them socialists, and trade union politics in Canadian locals reflected the political tension of divergent views.50 The increased presence of Jewish socialist organizations and newspapers during this period provided a fertile base for union organizing.51 Partly because of these differences between leaders and the membership, and partly because of the ambivalent relationship to its female membership, the ILGWU remained internally divided through the first decades of the twentieth century. Its Canadian locals reflected this weakness and continued to struggle for their survival.52 As trade unionism in the expanding garment industry overtook the traditional craft unions, craftsmen were unable to see that they had common cause with the women working in the early factories or in the outwork system. A strong sense of pride and dignity was also at stake in the workers’ struggle against the sweatshop conditions that were all too prevalent at the turn of the century. The fight against homework and the contracting-out system became a focus for trade union political struggle in both the women’s cloak and men’s suit sectors of the trade, but over time piecework payment became a central issue dividing men from women, left from right, and one union from another. Time work had hitherto been the rule for male skilled workers, and they were opposed to the introduction of piecework, which often meant an increase in the number of jobs open to women. When trade unions took up homework and piecework issues they had to come to terms with the presence of women in the shops—and in the homes.

The ‘Problem’ of Organizing Women At the 1922 ACWA convention, union president Sidney Hillman introduced Anna Shapiro, one of the founding members of the Chicago organization at Hart, Schaffner and Marx. ‘There are certain notions

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accepted by the labor movement’, Hillman said, ‘which examination would show to be fallacies instead of facts. One of the notions is that women can not be organized.’ As Hillman presented Shapiro to the convention delegates, calling her ‘the leader of the revolution of 1910’ that started the strike that ultimately led to the forming of the ACWA, a delegation entered the hall and presented flowers.53 Flowers were about all the women unionists received, and only one woman, Mamie Santora, was elected to the general executive board that year. In her speech to the delegates Santora self-consciously noted that she was the only woman on the board. The union movement was a culture defined by males, and in the needle trades it was frequently a culture defined by Jewish men. During the years 1910 –13, when the first real effort to organize women workers in the ready-made trades began, no clear definition had as yet been formulated to indicate how women and men should relate to one another in the workplace and in the trade union movement. Although men would eventually come to represent the trade union movement in the needle trade—to the virtual exclusion of women—by 1910 the male legitimacy as sole spokespersons for the trade had not yet been established. Trade unionism in the needle trades was in flux; neither men nor women had much experience of industrial unionism. In these early days of union organizing, the struggle for unionization was not simply a one-dimensional struggle of manufacturers and workers; it was also a struggle centred on the terms of reference of trade unionism. Women’s right to political enfranchisement was being hotly contested in actions and debates that placed the women’s question on the national agenda. The new factory system was just taking shape, and while jobs were genderdefined the industry had not clearly established which future jobs would be held by men and which by women. Into this situation came the call for equal work for equal pay, with a community of middleclass women, with new organizational structures, adding their strength to the unionists’ voices. The outcome of these struggles would determine how future strikes and other forms of trade union activity would be conducted. From the inception of unionization in the Canadian needle trades, the recruitment of women into the ranks of organized labour had proved difficult. With the growing numbers of women in the trade, there was an obvious need to bring them into the bargaining process. But both men and women—such as Jean Thomson Scott, who studied the role of women in labour closely in the 1890s, and US labour organizer Nellie Andrews—were often frustrated by the lack of interest in

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trade unionism they found among women.54 It seemed that women were irritatingly ‘unorganizable’. In The Trade Union Woman, published in 1915, Alice Henry suggested that much of the problem of organization rested in the differences between the social lives of men and women. Men preferred to hold union meetings in bars during the evening, and young women were not likely to frequent such places.55 Yet during the ACWA strikes of 1916 in the shops of Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia, women workers showed enthusiasm and provided constructive participation in union activities. In that case, the male trade unionists seemed unwilling to recruit women members actively, and the women union activists ‘launched a campaign to compel the men to recognize that the union could not survive without the full co-operation of the women’.56 In general, according to Foner, ‘The few women’s unions that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century were, in most cases, organized by women workers themselves, sometimes with the help of a settlement house.’57 One of the problems was organizing across the ethnic divide. Montreal garment unions experienced the same anti-Semitic attitudes, frequently fuelled by the press referring to the UGWA as a Jewish union and calling union activists ‘foreign agitators’ in an attempt to drive a wedge between the union activists and ‘nativeborn’ workers.58 Such language was used by oppositional forces as a discursive strategy to drive a wedge between Jewish garment workers and French Canadians. By constructing the garment workers’ unions as ‘other’, outside the normative world of French-Canadian culture, those forces made social relations on the shop floor problematic. In 1918 the ACWA described the special problem posed by the presence of young French Canadians in Montreal: Montreal, like every other clothing centre, has a polyglot industrial population. At the beginning it looked as if the French Canadians, the English, the Italians, the Jews, etc., with their different languages, sympathies and antipathies, would fail in the efforts to form a cohesive body for a single purpose. But they succeeded wonderfully. . . . The conditions of the French Canadians were particularly pitiful because of the large number of exceedingly young girls among them. The workers among the other nationalities are practically all immigrants and, therefore, adults. The French Canadians are natives, born and brought up in Canada.59 The large number of French Canadians in the trade became a justification for the lack of cohesive organization in Montreal, and this difficulty would remain a problem over the next two decades. A

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French-Canadian woman who started working in dress shops in Montreal in the late 1930s as a young girl of 16 points out that the French-Canadian ‘girls’ were always harder to organize, for one thing, because the union was ‘imported’: It was not from our milieu, you know, and we were not used to dealing with strangers. At the time that I started to work . . . girls would go to work until they got married, but they saw marriage as a thing that took them away from the working place, and it was hard to start to work as a French Canadian because most of the businesses were English and Jewish. It was hard to find a place where when you go out of the house you could speak French. As soon as we had to walk out of the house we had to speak English. I saw that when you go and see about a job you should be able to address yourself in English to the boss, and I remember I had that feeling as soon as I walked out of the house I had to speak English.60 As early as 1904, Montreal unionists had complained about being unable to organize the young French-Canadian women. According to an ILGWU report that year, the shirtmakers’ shops were not ‘thoroughly organized because French Canadian girls are principally employed in the trade. It is very difficult to get them into the organization.’61 The largely Jewish union continued to have difficulty attracting members from the ranks of the French-Canadian workers. The Roman Catholic Church, which saw the international unions as ‘agents of the devil’, did its best to discourage the young women from joining organized labour.62 Some of the French Canadians were undoubtedly organized in a middle-class professional women’s club, La Fédération nationale Saint Jean Baptiste, although the impact of this body inside the shops was minimal.63 In 1907, as the Société de Saint Jean Baptiste, it began organizing women into labour unions. By 1912, when La Fédération nationale Saint Jean Baptiste was chartered, it had 1,200 members, most of them in the rural areas. But the Fédération strongly disapproved of the strike weapon and handled most of the work problems as women’s problems rather than as problems of working people.64 Toronto unionists had problems dealing with gender as well as ethnic boundaries. A largely Jewish, male membership faced the task of organizing a largely Gentile, female labour force. Their organizing methods certainly did not make the task an easy one. In 1909 the Toronto cloakmakers’ union included all crafts, and meetings were

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often held in Yiddish. For years the Toronto ILGWU locals requested an English-speaking woman’s organizer from the head office, but to no avail. After one of these requests, in 1914, the head office responded that it couldn’t send any help because it ‘had numerous strikes which required the attention of every organizer in the field’.65 Although women represented a growing proportion of the readymade clothing labour force, they were underrepresented in the bureaucracy of the unions and pushed to the periphery of an infant trade union movement, frequently made ‘invisible’ in the historical record-making.66 This positioning of women workers in the language of the period is significant: documents of the time indicate that women workers’ presence was acknowledged only when it could be linked to their domestic place or physical appearance. In the meeting records, women appeared infrequently as speakers at trade union conventions. Local union minutes rarely addressed issues that directly involved women workers. When their presence was acknowledged it was usually in reference to their bravery on the picket line or, as Frager notes, to comment on their physical appearance. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, women unionists were often given bouquets of roses, but never offered power. In a labour movement shaped by class politics, the woman question was of little interest. Even women trade union activists placed their allegiance to class before any question of women’s rights. In her account of Jewish women activists in the Toronto needle trades, Frager points out that while some women had a limited awareness of being treated as second-class members of the working class, this limiting situation ‘was not a concern they emphasized’ and not something they fought to change. Unionization had begun before women had an institutionalized political voice, and because they did not have the right to vote their voices lacked the forcefulness of their trade union brothers’ voices. In a discussion on language, gender, and working-class history, Joan Scott states: The masculine conception of class also affected the labour movement’s definition of workers’ problems. Since women were not considered to have property in labour, it was difficult to find a solution, other than removal of women from the work force, to the competitive crisis created for certain male trades by the employment of women at very low wages. It was not the lack of imagination or male chauvinism that prevented serious defense of the position of women workers, but a construction of class that left women out.67

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The social construction of what was considered a responsible trade union member had somehow bypassed them.

The Needle Trades on Strike The success of two key ILGWU strikes in New York—the shirtwaist strike of 1909 and the cloakmakers’ strike of 1910—forced a reevaluation of the union’s direction. The 1909 strike, the so-called ‘uprising of the 20,000’, had changed a small local of some 100 or so shirtwaist-makers into a local of 10,000, 80 per cent of them women. This new, more militant membership shifted the power balance in the union central, and the organizing of women workers took on a new significance. The renewed sense of urgency quickly spread to Canada. In the first two decades of the century in Canada the intensity of struggle in the garment industry resulted in industry-wide general strikes encompassing all the workers in a specific sector in one city or district. In August 1907 the UGWA struck against several large men’s clothing manufacturers in Montreal, calling for union recognition, shorter hours, and an end to subcontracting.68 The ILGWU mounted a strike in Montreal in 1910 among workers involved in the manufacture of women’s clothing. Then the United Garment Workers of America had general strikes in Montreal in 1912 and Hamilton in 1913. Amalgamated Clothing Workers resorted to a general strike in 1917 in Montreal, as did the ILGWU. After an unsuccessful ILGWU strike of Montreal cloakmakers in 1917, the ILGWU achieved its demands in 1919 in strikes in both Toronto and Montreal. Strike activity in Canada rose sharply up to 1912–13, when it involved about 40,000 workers, and culminated in 1919, when it took in nearly 150,000 workers.69 Historian Charles Lipton has estimated that between 1900 and 1914, 40,000 clothing workers took part in 158 strikes. The time lost in these strikes amounted to 10 per cent of the total of all strike time lost between 1900 and 1915.70 Industrial strife continued to increase, as shown by the number of strikes in the industrial sector: 168 strikes in 1916, 222 in 1917, 305 in 1918, 428 in 1919, and 459 in 1920.71 The large urban centres of Toronto and Hamilton experienced 47 per cent and 22 per cent of the strikes respectively, involving over 50,000 workers.72 The ILGWU General Strike: Montreal, 1910 The industry had its first general strike in Montreal, a city the UGWA called ‘the worst organized in America’.73 Conditions common in the

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Women working in the shirtwaist section of the Eaton’s Toronto factory. This required detailed hand work, which was considered women’s work. (T. Eaton Historical Photograph Collection, Archives of Ontario)

trade provided a focus for much of the discontent: long hours (60 hours a week), low wages, and an expanding number of contract shops. To reduce labour costs, manufacturers were increasingly using the cheaper labour of women and children. As a result, women became a driving force in the movement towards confrontation with the employers. It had been only 10 years since the ILGWU had been formed in New York, and unionizing efforts in Montreal had gained little ground.74 A small local of cloakmakers and costume tailors established in 1904 encompassed most other skilled workers in the cloak shops, but it had collapsed by 1910. Shirtmakers’ shops had remained outside the organization, because they were composed mainly of the ‘unorganizable’ young French-Canadian women.75 At the time of the strike, the ILGWU had only an informal organization of cloakmakers, cutters, and pressers in Montreal. The general strike was precipitated by a strike in a factory owned by Abe Sommer, who had been in business since 1900 producing high-grade women’s cloaks, coats, and suits. On 8 February 1910, after Sommer had refused to grant a demand for increased wages, his

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workers went out on strike. Sommer replied by sending his unfinished garments out to other manufacturers. Acting as contractors for Sommer, these other firms finished the work and sent the garments back to him to sell, thereby enabling him to keep his factory orders and avoid being financially hurt by the strike. When it became clear that other local manufacturers were helping Sommer break the strike, the ILGWU called a general meeting for 22 February 1910. The meeting, reported in the newspapers as ‘one of the stormiest of Montreal’s history’, lasted until well after midnight. When a motion for a general strike was finally called, the deciding factor was the presence of the women. A Montreal reporter noted: ‘There were nearly 1,000 workers at the meeting last night, and the way the women clamored for a strike had a decided influence. When the talk would die down for a moment, the voices of the women would be urging their male friends on and telling of the advantages to be gained by a general walkout.’76 By 23 February about 1,000 workers from 26 other shops—some 600 women and 400 men—had taken to the streets in sympathy with their counterparts in the Sommer shop.77 Soon after the strike began hundreds of French-Canadian women as well as men were signed up by the ILGWU. The strike demands quickly moved from simply calling for an increase in wages to the more basic issue of union recognition.78 Manufacturers, unaccustomed to such displays of militancy, saw the strike as a contest of wills.79 Although many of the smaller employers quickly signed a union contract, larger manufacturers held out. Sommer vowed that he would not grant the strikers’ demands. ‘I can not stay in business and allow their organizers to come in and out through my factory and tell me how to run my business’, he declared.80 The strike caught the imagination of social reformers of the day, and during its first few weeks local newspapers were filled with tales of sordid working conditions. Reporters told of deaf mutes, orphans, and children working long hours for three to eight dollars a week. According to the Montreal Star: ‘One delicate-looking 16 year old child said she worked 90 hours a week and generally made $8.00. She said she worked by the piece, and of course the harder she worked the more she made. Her wages, she said, were generally spent before she received the money.’81 The consensus among all who defined themselves as speaking for the ‘midinettes’, as the women workers were called, was that conditions in the shops were a threat to the moral fibre of society. Behind the moral indignation was a sense that the labour conditions violated women’s dignity and honour as future mothers. Reports vividly described the conditions of the young women, suggesting possible immoral consequences from the long

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hours and low wages. ‘It is quite natural that we should have a great deal of vice here when girls are paid only $3.00 a week in some factories’, observed May Odell, convener of the Suffrage Society. Newspaper reports presented an image of ‘besieged innocence’.82 Stories of exploitation were cloaked in emotionalism. ‘Brutality by certain employers was related by many of the care-worn looking young women as the bitter tears rolled down their emaciated cheeks’, wrote one reporter after attending a meeting of women strikers.83 The threat of immoral conduct and the thought of women being ‘dragged into the net of the white slaver’ served as an emotional backdrop to the strike itself. Boris documents a similar discursive strategy. In efforts to expose the evils of the US sweating system of the 1890s homeworkers were portrayed as desperate, hopeless seamstresses and as chattel slaves. Unsanitary working conditions were seen as moral threats to the purity of women and to their potential roles as mothers. Boris argues that the response of middle-class reformers to the plight of working women was immersed in this form of language.84 Another key dimension to the strike was the alliance of middleclass women and the strikers, an alliance related to a feminist view of trade union membership as one component of a women’s suffrage struggle for legitimation of women’s political rights in the workplace.85 But the commitment of social reformers to working women was tentative, partly because the reformers felt a mixed allegiance to the cause. Although they wanted to aid the cause of other women, their support for the primacy of motherhood made them lukewarm to the concrete demands expressed by working women. The middleclass social reformers saw paid work as a threat to women’s ability to perform properly their most important function. They were not so much concerned with life in the factory as with the effects that factory work had on women’s potential as future mothers. In considering the relationship of social reformers to the question of homeworkers in the US clothing trades, for instance, Cynthia Daniels argues that their concern for how homework degraded family life was imbedded in a particular view of motherhood: ‘This dominant ideology drew a sharp distinction between home and work, between mothering and breadwinning.’86 Members of the Montreal Women’s Suffrage Society were prominent among the social reformers who became involved with the women workers.87 The suffragists were, according to writer Carol Lee Bacchi, ‘true paternalists who found it difficult to let women workers do things for themselves, generally opposing strikes and unionization, and recommending instead palliatives like factory legislation to

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remove the most blatant evils of the industrial system.’88 These divergent views again reflect the contested nature of femininity that resulted from the changing definitions of public and private relations.89 The fact that the suffragists were predominantly English added a further dimension of paternalism to the equation. The Montreal general strike seems to have drawn these middleclass women into firm support for their working-class sisters, and despite their general opposition to unionism they decided to take on the task of organizing the women into a union. With the intervention of this group, women’s issues became a focus for the organizing drive among the women, and equal pay for equal work became a prominent theme.90 Rose Henderson, on behalf of the Suffrage Society, explained: The necessity of organizing among the women workers was patent to all who desired to improve the status of women and through them the status of men. Through their lack of organization, they disorganized the labour market and weakened the hands of the male trade unionists. Some women belong to trade unions but only to those run for and controlled by men, and the men find that such members are loyal to the union and punctual with their dues but every trade union realizes that a separate organization is required for the women.91 While the suffragists saw organizing the women workers as acceptable, supporting the strike action was less so. They were ‘determined to take no active part in the present strike which might give the impression that they were siding with the strikers against the employers.’92 Harriet Bullock, president of the Suffrage Society, stated their position: ‘Our part is to organize the girls so that they may take their share of the benefit which comes from organization. We believe that when a women does the work of a man she deserves a man’s pay. But so far as this particular dispute is concerned we do not wish to judge the issues.’93 Instead, they asked the women workers ‘to do everything they could to obtain votes for women, for since they had been driven from the home into the stores and the factories, they should be on equal footing with the men.’94 The suffragists, who were ‘well-known Montreal ladies’, took on the responsibility of organizing separate meetings for the women strikers and preparing educational leaflets for distribution on the picket lines, but they did nothing to raise money for strike support. While they may have supported unionization, in this case they had difficulty with its consequences. They saw strikes as inappropriate

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behaviour. The ‘ladies’ of the Montreal Women’s Suffrage Society saw the issues as moral rather than political. Still, their intervention provided women workers with the opportunity to speak out on issues of concern to them. ‘Why should men demand and receive more than twice as much pay as girls whose cost of living was equally high and who were as skilled in the trade?’ asked the women.95 Despite the demand for equal pay, union (male) officialdom continued to run the strike on other, unrelated issues. Their focus was on the right of a business agent (paid union official) to enter shops at any time and on gaining a 50-hour workweek, time and a half for overtime, and double time for legal holidays; these were the main points in union agreements signed with the firms.96 Unfortunately, while the participation of the Suffrage Society highlighted the conditions of women working in the needle trades, it also served to divert attention from the necessity of building a viable union local for the women, and it may have inhibited the growth of working-class leadership among the women themselves.97 Strike leadership was handled by the men. The issue of equal pay was certainly attractive to the women workers, but their perceived allegiance to their union required them to stand firm with the men. The union’s program for union recognition and wage increases did not go as far as equal pay for women; yet the women, in their identification with the union, accepted the men’s voice as their own. Their position, according to a report on the strike in the Montreal Star, was that ‘the present was not the time to quarrel over this phase of the question, and the determination to stand together in the present crisis was heard on all sides.’98 Because much of the women’s leadership had come from the suffragists, who had no intention of confronting the employers, it was difficult to organize a common trade union front of the men and women in the shops. Instead, two parallel struggles—one for union recognition and one for equal pay for women workers—were fought out at the same time, with little overlap. While the assertion of a separate culture had served to mobilize the women into the union, that detached culture also isolated women within the union. At the same time, because the union leadership had in the past been all male, the union had been defined as a man’s space. The men in the union— mainly English-speaking and Yiddish-speaking—must have been content to allow the women—mostly French-speaking—to be organized separately. This made the task of organizing a lot easier. Furthermore, the separation of the sexes allowed the men to avoid coming to terms with the gender differences in their membership.

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At the final rally, held on 28 February 1910 in Montreal’s Standard Hall, the women’s isolation from the men was clear. The union hall was filled to capacity, yet the women remained on the periphery, sitting in the gallery and not in the main hall with the men. There were speeches from socialist orators, trade union activists, and women from the Suffrage Society. The newly elected president of the local, a Mrs Olin, a worker from Sommer’s shop, appealed to the women in French to join the union, while Mrs Odell of the Suffrage Society reported on an interview with the archbishop, who had been approached for strike support.99 Yet most of the women remained spectators at an event held in their own interests. The traditional divisions in the workplace had been incorporated within the ILGWU. By 24 February 1910 the newspapers were reporting that Sommer had ‘only two men and a couple of girls left working in his shop’.100 A day later the papers reported that 600 workers had returned to their benches after many of the manufacturers signed a union agreement.101 However, A. Sommer and Company had dealt with union members before and was not so quick to give in; about 300 of the Sommer workers remained on the picket lines. In late February financial support from the Hebrew Trades and Labour Council and the Montreal Trades and Labour Council continued to prop up the strike, but over the next few weeks the strike dwindled and workers either returned to the shops or found jobs elsewhere.102 By May the Labour Gazette was reporting that ‘industrial conditions ceased to be affected by the dispute’.103 While the women’s militancy had provided energy for the strike action, control of the union remained in the hands of the skilled male workers, much as in past decades. Members of the three existing locals—cloakmakers, pressers, and cutters—formed a general committee to handle negotiations with the employers. There was no representation on the committee of women shirtmakers, who were all new to the newly formed union structure—none of the shirtmakers had been involved in union activity before the strike. A local of skirt operators and finishers formed during the strike could not sustain itself afterward. The union was unable to hold their loyalty. The women’s forceful spirit had been required to run the strike: ‘When it comes to a call for volunteers to do duty as pickets at the various shops, there are plenty of just such girls ready and willing to do the task’, a union representative said.104 Yet after the strike the women’s presence was not seen as a necessity, and women’s post-strike activity was minimal.105 The lack of organization among the women was attributed to their character and/or ethnicity. As always, they were

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seen as difficult to organize. Trade union requests for a Frenchspeaking organizer for the ‘little local’ were made repeatedly to the New York office, but none was approved and the local continued to struggle along. The Montreal cloakmakers were unable to retain the gains made at strike time, and general membership in all the locals declined.106 The strike had been called in an atmosphere of trade union militancy, socialistic speeches, red flags, and calls for equal pay for women workers, but the ILGWU would not try to organize the cloak trades in Montreal again until 1917.107 The UGWA Strikes: 1912 and 1913 Two years after the ILGWU general strike in Montreal, the UGWA conducted a general strike in the men’s clothing industry, beginning 10 June 1912 and lasting until the end of July.108 Over 4,000 garment workers paraded the streets of downtown Montreal with ‘red flags and socialist emblems’, demanding a shorter workweek, regulation of apprenticeships, control over contracting out, and the abolition of piecework.109 But there had been little union activity before the general strike, and now the union faced the struggle with ethnic tensions in its ranks, a lack of consensus over the merits of the demand to abolish piecework, and paternalism among the leadership.110 Jingoistic speeches on the part of large manufacturers and threats against ‘foreign agitators’ were common fare throughout the nine-week strike. The Globe report on 10 June 1912 set the tone, declaring that ‘Most strikers are Russian Poles, Hungarians and similar foreigners, and they give promise of a turbulent time.’111 Throughout the strike manufacturers claimed the action was led by foreign agitators, and they vowed to stand firm rather than ‘be interfered with by foreigners’. At the same time companies tried to break the strike by importing men from the United States to replace striking male tailors from their shops.112 The summer in Montreal was particularly hot, and as the city heated up, so, too, did the strike. Large manufacturers threatened to close up their shops and move to the rural areas, where cheaper nonunion labour was available. When the manufacturers began importing scab labour, initially from Toronto, the newly recruited workers turned out to be union members. Instead of turning up for work they reported to the union offices. The manufacturers then imported scabs from New York, Brooklyn, and New Jersey.113 Assault charges began appearing daily in the local papers, and threats on the lives of scabs and other harassment escalated as the heat wave continued.114

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As part of its trade union strategy, the UGWA appealed to public sympathy by sending 300 young women strikers into the streets to collect money for the strike. Young women and children were placed at the front of strike marches to raise public concern. According to a Montreal Star report, ‘Little girls walk with strikers in large parade. . . . The little children were all dressed in their Sunday best, while the young women were all smartly gowned.’115 Later, the union again sent 300 young women onto the streets in a tag-day campaign to raise funds from ‘downtown men’.116 But although the women were on the front lines, the men led the strike and handled all the negotiations. As before, the women were organized separately and turned their attention to socials and leading the strike parades as the men got on with the business of running the strike. On 27 July 1912, when a strike settlement was reached, the union could claim only a partial victory: hours of work were to be gradually reduced from 55 to 52 a week and then to 49 hours a week by 1 November 1912. Other demands were not met by the employers.117 The UGWA leadership, in the habit of making arbitrary decisions for its membership, had settled with the manufacturers without consulting the strikers. Still, local union official Harry Rosenblum expressed his hope that the manufacturers ‘will themselves see the wisdom of granting some of [the demands] at least, especially with regard to the apprenticeship system.’ Rosenblum reasoned, ‘Reforms are bound to come in time.’118 But for the moment the manufacturers were victorious, and union loyalty declined almost as soon as the strike was over.119 A 1913 strike of men’s clothing workers in Hamilton revealed a marked pattern of sidelining women workers. On 15 April 1913 the tailors in Hamilton’s four largest firms led 2,000 garment workers out on strike for higher wages.120 On the first day of the strike the headquarters were packed with strikers, but the men and women met separately, with Margaret Daley of the United Garment Workers’ New York office looking after the women. Most of the 500 women who joined the picket lines that day were new union members. A press report on the women’s participation reflected the patronizing attitude expressed towards the women’s trade union consciousness. The girls and women, apparently not realizing the seriousness of the strike and seemingly enjoying it greatly, gathered in the streets. One good looking young woman cried, ‘I was never in a strike before,’ as she shoved into a crowd of girls in John Street, ‘it’s lots of fun isn’t it.’ ‘It won’t be so funny when we don’t get our paychecks on the weekend,’ said another, then they all laughed.121

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Once again the women were put in charge of arranging the entertainment, ‘so they [the women] will be provided with some form of amusement during the continuance of the strike.’122 The press also noted that in one shop the ‘girls’ had gone back to work and the union was going to talk to them. The representation of women workers active in the pre-World War I strikes was shaped by assumptions about women’s primary roles as future wives and mothers. Women were not to be taken seriously as trade unionists. The language in the newspaper report gave women’s strike activities a radically different meaning than what would have been the case for male strikers. The discussion ranged from their need for male protection to descriptions of their physical appearance on a picket line, and the language used continued to represent women as temporary members of the paid labour force. By 26 April, after 10 days out, the union had won a partial victory, which would have been impossible without the full participation of the women. Yet, again, the union local disintegrated shortly afterward.123 Like its counterpart in the ILGWU, the Hamilton local made continual requests to the New York office for an organizer in the local market, but in vain. Canadian attempts to attain local autonomy failed, and one of the consequences was a loss of women’s locals, which required more concerted organizing efforts if they were to last beyond the duration of a strike. The Eaton’s Strike: Toronto, 1912 The Toronto ILGWU had gained support among Toronto cloakmakers by 1911.124 It had revived the cloak Local 14 and was looking to draw in more recruits when a labour dispute at the T. Eaton Company dramatically altered its plans. By 1911 the clothing industry was the largest employer of labour in Toronto, with 13,828 workers, roughly a quarter of them employed by Eaton’s, a national retail chain.125 Eaton’s had started to manufacture goods for its own stores in 1890, and by 1900 its Toronto store and factory were employing 2,200 to 2,900 workers engaged in all types of clothing production—suits, coats, dresses, and more—‘according to the season’. Eaton’s had been able to establish a large factory system, which was atypical of the trade as a whole, because it could guarantee the sale of all goods produced. A fully integrated establishment, the company had come to symbolize Canadian capitalist enterprise, as R.P. Crawford expressed it in Forbes in 1925:

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You can buy almost anything at Eaton stores. Its factories make clothing of every description for men, women, and children— knitted goods, corsets, furs, neckwear, thread, and embroidery, and harness, furniture, flavoring extracts, toilet preparations, drugs and even schoolbooks—in fact, the Eaton company prints the school readers for the provinces of Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.126 In 1899 Eaton’s public relations brochure boasted of its clothing production: ‘We use 480 machines running on electric power, employ 729 persons in this department alone, and turn out about 4,500 garments everyday, all sold over our counters. Lighting, heating, ventilation, etc. is the best that modern ingenuity can provide.’127 Four years later another public relations brochure announced the addition of 1,040 sewing machines to its downtown factory, which by that time was making about 6,000 garments daily.128 Much was made of the firm’s image as a benevolent employer of labour. In 1908 the company assured its public that while ‘Some people do not like the word “factory” because they associate it with sweatshop methods, perhaps, or with a constant whir of dust and noise . . . our factories are simply gigantic workrooms where the best designers, cutters and operators, 3,000 strong, gather everyday in the pleasing occupation of making the very best of wearables for men, women and children.’129 As part of this ‘pleasing occupation’, Eaton’s pushed its workers to the limit and restructured the labour process to increase speed and maximize output. With its long hours, low wages, unsanitary conditions, child labour, and unequal distribution of work, Eaton’s had become a symbol of anti-union sentiment, and the strike at Eaton’s became the first major challenge mounted by the ILGWU in the Toronto market. The issue was a restructuring of the labour process in cloakmaking, in which men had been given ‘women’s work’. The dispute began 14 February 1912, when 65 men were discharged for refusing to sew the linings in coats as part of their machine work. Work on linings had traditionally been women’s handwork; Eaton’s hoped to do away with these finishers by having the male operators do the job by machine for no extra pay. The cloakmakers, some of them members of the small ILGWU local, called on the union for support. The protest quickly snowballed, and what was to have been a small Labour Temple meeting of union officials and the 65 discharged men, called for 5:30 p.m., grew to 1,700 workers by 7:00 p.m. the same evening. The issues in the strike touched both men and women. Men were being asked to do women’s work as well as their regular jobs, with no

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Cartoon on the cover of local newspaper, published during the Eaton’s strike of 1912. Although known for its rather xenophobic attitude, this paper supported the strike of a largely Jewish workforce and ran a series of articles exposing the hardship of the work in Eaton’s factory. (City of Toronto Archives)

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increase in pay, and women’s jobs were being eliminated. ‘The reasoning of the men who worked at Eaton’s was a simple one’, said Joseph Salsberg, a Toronto labour activist at the time. According to Salsberg, the men didn’t want to have to take over jobs that women had been doing, such as sewing in linings by machine. ‘The fixed rate for those operations was always traditionally lower’ because women had always done them, and the men feared that ‘maybe their wages will come down’.130 In a militant mood, the Eaton’s employees from four different departments put forward resolutions demanding that the men be reinstated. The next day some 500 employees quit work in sympathy with the cloakmakers, and Eaton’s managers duly locked them out. About 200 of them were women. Very few had been union members before the strike; they simply joined up the day of the lockout. Their action was more a rebellion against Eaton’s labour practices than an act of trade union solidarity. For the first time in its history, the Toronto Trades and Labour Council emptied its coffers to support the garment workers’ strike.131 The men’s solidarity with the women finishers underlined the strike support, because the alteration to the labour process affected the men directly. It was, according to Salsberg, the first big strike in which the Jewish tailors struck ‘in defense of undzere shvester—our sisters’.132 It was an alliance of necessity. The Toronto Trades and Labour Council, in its resolution of support for the striking Eaton’s workers, objected to the lockout of workers who were refusing ‘in the interests of their sister workers, to do work which did not belong to them’.133 Again, the union made a public appeal for fairness and decency for women workers. When Gertrude Barnum, an ILGWU organizer from Chicago and a leading member of the Women’s Trade Union League, addressed a meeting of strikers on 22 March 1912, she drew to public attention a very different picture of Eaton’s than that provided by the popular press of the day. ‘I propose to tell what I know of child labour, home work, low wages, lack of proper sanitary conditions, insults to young and pretty girls, favoritism in the distribution of work and petty graft’, she said. ‘These so called model factories cover plenty of grievous wrongs.’134 In its house publication from New York, The Ladies’ Garment Worker, the ILGWU charged the firm with ‘graft for foremen’, ‘careless distribution of piecework’, ‘insults to girls’, and the use of homework.135 By 27 February the Labour Gazette was reporting that 594 men and 288 women were out of the shop, and Eaton’s Montreal employees also struck in sympathy.136 Again the ILGWU union men defined the issues differently from the women. The ILGWU focused on union

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recognition, although the main issue for the strikers was the alteration in the labour process. Women workers, especially, were concerned by conditions in the shop as they took to the streets to complain of the loss of their work; union recognition was not foremost in their minds. Rush seasons, long hours, and homework—conditions that strikers argued were common in Eaton’s factories—were the concerns that galvanized them.137 Male and female self-interest somewhat oddly coalesced as women fought to retain their jobs and men fought to avoid doing ‘women’s work’. In a large parade of supporters and strikers held in March, a third of the parade’s 2,200 strikers and supporters were women. By May, when 845 workers were still on strike—despite a paltry strike pay of only three to five dollars a week—women were continuing to turn up on the picket lines.138 The Globe reported that when the ILGWU organized a strike parade and mass meeting, ‘Many of those in the long line of three abreast who tramped through mud and slush were young girls.’139 Again the march divided the strikers into separate groups, by gender: ‘In the women’s union were some quite old and many young girls. . . . The same diversity of age was shown in the men’s union, many young boys being in the parade.’140 The separation of men and women into their communities was characteristic of all the pre-war strikes. The ILGWU’s response to the women workers was mixed. An ILGWU organizer, Gertrude Barnum, ‘severely scolded the union men for not being true to themselves and not co-operating more with the women. If they worked together with the women, she said, they could make any employer of labour come to terms.’141 Even with such unity victory was unlikely in this instance, but in any case women remained separate and distinct from men in the movement—a fact that both helped their organization and handicapped their cause. The need for women’s communities in the labour movement was used as a method of isolation once again. An appeal to the broader women’s community drew interested women from the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Society. In March, Alice Chown, a radical Toronto suffragist, organized an appeal for funds for ‘displaced working girls’. The Suffrage Society offered support to the women, but was uneasy about overt association with a strike against Eaton’s for fear that its ‘pet cause would be hurt’ by being linked with an unpopular cause.142 Chown reported: ‘I tried to interest the various clubs, but I was amazed because they had no sympathy with the strikers unless I had some tail [sic] of hardship to tell. . . . I had to tell them over and over the old, old story of the bosses who favoured the girls whom they could take out evenings, girls who had to sell themselves

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as well as their labor to get sufficient work to earn a living.’143 Instead, the suffragists asked women in their role as consumers to boycott the store. The boycott proved most effective among the women in Toronto’s immigrant Jewish community, suggesting that the suffrage women’s influence was minimal.144 As Frager observes, the ‘unpopularity of the striker’s cause in Chown’s circles no doubt stemmed, in part, from the fact that the vast majority of Eaton strikers were Jews. In these years, the Canadian women’s movement, like many other facets of Canadian society, was steeped in nativism.’145 Eaton’s held firm, refusing to budge despite mediation attempts in March by Rabbi Jacobs, Magistrate Cohen, and Mayor Geary. Timothy Eaton quickly made clear where he stood: When men are engaged for us, they must remember they are paid by us not by the union. When the union attempts to dictate in such cases it is utterly beyond its rights and I claim that it has no business to interfere. This interference is nothing but a hold up game, which on the highway would be a criminal offense. . . . Now they are out, they are out the door for good. Not a single man will be reinstated. Rather than do so we will shut down our factories. We can afford to do it and we will, and if the rest go on strike, it will be safe for you to put into type that 2,000 will be out of work.146 Eaton’s insisted that strikers sign a statement saying the union’s version of the reasons for the strike was false and that ‘they regret all that has happened to hurt Mr. Eaton’s feelings and beg him to take them back to work.’147 When the strikers finally decided they were in a losing battle and agreed to do the disputed work for an increase in pay, Eaton held out for an apology. By the time of the ILGWU convention in June, the strikers had been out over 16 weeks. Eaton’s had imported a hundred female strikebreakers—‘working girls from Yorkshire’—and used troops to break up the picket line.148 It was a battle the union had been drawn into, not one it wanted to fight. The ILGWU had committed the New York trade to a no-strike position. The last thing the ILGWU wanted was a strike in Toronto, but it was not able to stop it. When the conflict was over the company had won, and yet again new union members faded away. The ILGWU did not regain its fighting strength until 1919, and it would leave Eaton’s alone until 1934. But for months the effort had drawn together the progressive Toronto community and the trade union movement. The strike changed the face of labour in Toronto, and its demonstrations and marches marked a turning point in Toronto’s labour history. An alliance of craft and industrial unions, the support of the Trades and

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Labour Council, and broader community support from such diverse associations as the Toronto Women’s Suffrage Society and the Associated Hebrew Charities had made the strike an event in its day.149 As Frager points out, much of the community support came from within the Jewish community itself. Fagel Dordick, 13 years old at the time, recalled the events: I lived with my sister, she was 10 years older. She joined the Socialist Party when she came here from Kiev. Wherever she went she took me with her. I remember there was a strike at Eaton’s. I remember that in the Labour Temple on Church Street they used to have people who were public speakers from their organization, they all spoke about how to inspire the people that were on strike. Then I remember we had a parade. We all had badges that said we don’t patronize the T. Eaton company. So of course, I was marching together with my sister in that parade.150 The ILGWU was defeated by Eaton’s, as The Ladies’ Garment Worker reported at the time, because the union had trouble moving the strike beyond the Jewish community of Toronto: ‘Those affected [by the dispute at Eaton’s] are almost entirely Jewish: and the chief slogan by which it was hoped to cut off public sympathy was the report . . . that this is “only a strike of Jews.” The appeal to race and creed prejudice has succeeded, too, in so far as it has prevented the Gentile Cloak Makers from joining in the sympathetic strike.’151 Garment manufacturers, especially the larger men’s clothing manufacturers, many of whom were English, always did their best to pit Jewish workers against non-Jewish workers, portraying the Jews as ‘aliens’ and a threat to the Anglo-Canadian way of life. Such fragmentation of trade union solidarity weighed heavily on the strike outcome. It seems that the union considered the Gentile women workers of Toronto to be just as much of a problem as the French-Canadian women of Montreal, for after the strike local union members attributed the lack of continuing organization to these women, who they said were largely unorganizable. In 1914 the local asked the international headquarters for an English woman organizer, yet by 1917 the president, Benjamin Schlesinger, was recommending a reduction in the organizing effort in Toronto because the majority of the workers were ‘women, and largely gentile, and consequently not an organizable element’.152 The situation offered the ILGWU a rationale for its failure and a reason to ignore Toronto workers again. By using the ‘women’s problem’ as its justification, the union made its lack of success palatable to trade union men.

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In the early labour disputes in the clothing industry, then, when the time came to bargain with the bosses the trade union men assumed responsibility for the welfare of women workers. They spoke as representatives of the union movement, and as such they spoke for all members of that movement, irrespective of gender. Because they represented the class, their right to speak for all went unquestioned. This acceptance of male leadership had far-reaching implications for women’s position in the trade. The sexual division of labour, perpetuated through later trade union negotiations, was a result of these commonly held assumptions of men’s legitimacy as leaders of the unionization drives. The idea that men were the natural leaders in both social class and trade unions, and that women’s nature was ill-suited to the tasks of leadership and collective bargaining, would persist for decades. In 1936 Fannia Cohen, a US organizer for the ILGWU, penned an article for the union newspaper Justice entitled ‘Can Women Lead?’ Cohen stated, ‘Women have been traditionally taught to accept men as leaders. As a result, they are more critical of leadership of their own sex. Consequently, even in a labor organization in which women predominate, they must meet the competition of men in order to attain recognition and retain their positions of leadership.’153 But like it or not, women formed a large and continuously growing part of the garment industry workforce, and the union movement continued to be plagued with the ‘problem’ of organizing them. Union organization mirrored and helped to perpetuate the hierarchical structure of the workplace, with its sexual discrimination and job segregation based on an increasing sectionalization of work in the shops. When it came time for strike action, social dynamics structured union relationships between men and women as surely as they structured class relations between the manufacturers and their workers.

4

From Shop-Floor Action to New Unionism: The War Years and After Patriarchy is the process of politically differentiating the female from the male, as man from woman. Patriarchy in this sense is the politics of transforming biological sex into politicized gender, which prioritizes the man while making the woman different (unequal), less than, or the ‘other.’ Zillah Eisenstein, 1988 In 1912, after a small local of shirtmakers—all women—had been established in Montreal, the head office of the ILGWU ignored a request from its Montreal locals for a French-speaking appointment to the Montreal Joint Board.1 Two years later a Brother Groban of Cincinnati was appointed as special organizer in Montreal for nine weeks. At the end of the stint he reported: ‘If not for the French workers, whom they are powerless to organize, the locals would be in excellent condition.’2 A French organizer hired by the ILGWU to assist Groban resigned after a few weeks, saying he had ‘been unable to move these people’, referring to the workers. Brother Groban concluded that the union should ‘abandon this work for the present’.3 Yet many of these women must have been among the large numbers who had joined the 1910 ILGWU general strike in Montreal, and the local of French-Canadian women established during that strike must have remained in existence for some years, because it was mentioned in the convention proceedings of 1914. By 1916 about 3,000 women worked in the Montreal dressmaking and shirtmaking trade, yet the ILGWU presence among them was limited to its ‘little 86

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local organization’ of shirtmakers.4 The union made little further effort to hire a French-speaking organizer to mobilize the women. That small local of women shirtmakers was typical in many ways of problems that afflicted organizing in the garment industry. Before World War I men regarded women in unions as something of a novelty. The separate world of women in the workplace allowed them to draw on resources from a broader women’s community, but at the same time set them apart from their brothers in the movement. Belva Herron reported that in 1905 women made up more than half the workers in the trade, but only one-sixth of the ILGWU members. ‘They officer their own locals and two women were sent to the 1903 convention, but they aren’t represented on the General Executive Board or among the general officers’, she said.5 Because men and women held different positions in the workplace, the transformation of the labour process affected men and women in different ways; and men and women would have distinct relationships to the union movement. In 1903 women made up one-third of the UGWA’s total membership of 25,000, the largest proportion of women members of the AFL affiliates.6 In 1920 the UGWA had 31,000 women, about 60 per cent of its membership.7 In the same year the Amalgamated Clothing Workers claimed a membership of 167,200, with 66,100 or 40 per cent of them women. But even though over the years women earned a more integrated position in the unions—at least during strikes—the suspicion of female members persisted and was carried over into their treatment as potential leaders of the unions. In 1920 none of the unions in Canada had women on their staffs. Their executive memberships were largely male, and their business agents were all men. The voices of women were rarely heard.

Women in Unions: Unequal Opportunity In 1905, when New York women established Local 25 of the ILGWU, the local, made up of waistmakers and dressmakers and referred to as the ‘girls local’, had enough size and strength to make it New York’s largest. Most of its membership was drawn into the union in its major strike in 1909. Much of the progressive middle-class women’s support for the garment workers’ union was focused on this group, and many of the local’s members were associated with the Women’s Trade Union League. In a 1926 study of women in trade unions in the United States, Theresa Wolfson observed that Local 25 ‘has developed women leaders, has initiated and successfully carried on strikes, and has been responsible for the formulation of union policies. But

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although women have been an integral part of the executive board of the local it has always been officered by men since its inception.’8 The 1909 ‘uprising of the 20,000’ in New York illustrates some of the features of women’s participation in the needle trades unions. It was an immigrant women’s strike, and three-quarters of the women employed as shirtwaist-makers were immigrants or daughters of immigrants, and most of them were under 20 years of age. The strikers, mainly Jewish (21,000) and Italian (2,000) women, ran every aspect of the strike, except, of course, negotiations with the manufacturers, which were carried out by male trade union officials. Although the Italian women were not as active trade unionists as the Jewish women, their participation grew in the years following the strike when the union hired Italian organizers and made a more concerted effort to draw them into the local.9 The 6,000 or so men on strike were almost all Jewish, and like their Jewish sisters they were active in the union. The most reluctant unionists were the US-born women (about 1,000), who largely returned to work within the first few weeks of the strike. This pattern of ethnicity and trade union activism, which placed Jewish unionists among the most militant, was common to Canadian garment unions as well. Frager argues that in the Toronto locals of the needle trades Jewish women were always in the forefront of labour activism. In a union movement largely led by Jewish men this is not surprising, but there is more to it than that. As Frager points out: Jewish workers tended to be more militant than non-Jews, partly because the activism of the Jewish workers was deeply rooted in a vibrant Jewish working-class culture. The Jewish workers’ loyalty to their unions was further reinforced by the ways in which the Jewish unions served a number of special functions for them, over and above the function of collective bargaining. These unions addressed specifically Jewish concerns, such as relief work for Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe and protests against the rise of world fascism. The unions also served as social and cultural centres for Jewish immigrants in the strange New World.10 Frager also points to another feature of union activism that served to build trade union support among women: the need to provide a social and cultural base that would serve to make new union members, and especially young women, feel they belonged. In the early years of the garment unions, social and cultural events largely addressed only the interests of Jewish workers, and the union offices were places for men to gather, play cards, and talk politics. Only at strike time did the union halls open up their doors to women workers and provide

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gathering places and social activities that women were able to plan and participate in. Women came to the union halls then, but as soon as the strike was over, the halls reverted to business as usual, an environment unlikely to attract any but the most militant of women. In 1914 an ILGWU activist, Catherine Denmark, noted, ‘It seems almost a tradition in the children’s cloak local that women are confined to the condition of “being organized”.’11 While union organizers encouraged women’s participation, women were rarely given leadership positions.12 According to Belva Herron, although women usually held one or two positions on the UGWA executive, they ‘have had little influence in the determination of the general policy of the union; in the conventions they rarely take part in discussions of questions of broad interest or in particular cases except where they are immediately concerned as expert witnesses on special conditions. They speak to the point, and they perform valuable supplementary work and have contributed to the orderly character of the meetings.’13 Life in the ACWA was a bit better for women. The ACWA had formulated a policy to organize women with women organizers and created a women’s bureau to further the organization.14 Mary McNab, one of the few women to be hired by the ACWA during these early years, came on as an organizer in the Hamilton shops in 1917. As a woman she earned half the amount paid to male organizers. Despite achieving success in a strike in Dundas, Ontario, she found her work undermined by a male ACWA organizer, who told the membership that ‘she did nothing but take money out of the Local for nothing.’ The chilly atmosphere pushed McNab to resign, although she later took up work with the ILGWU in Toronto.15 By the 1920s the ACWA had jurisdiction over clothing workers in the men’s fine clothing subsector of the needle trades. That subsector was mainly producing men’s and boys’ suits and coats, but it also included the work garments, shirts, and underwear subsectors as part of the broader classification of men’s clothing. Apart from the workclothing subsector, which was under the United Garment Workers of America, the other subsectors were either non-union or under AWCA control. Women workers were mainly employed in the production of separate pants, vests, and shirts, and while they were also employed in men’s suit and overcoat production, their work in those areas was usually as finishers. By 1922, 35 per cent of the membership of Toronto’s ACWA locals (or some 800 workers in all) were women.16 When Wolfson reviewed the position of women in the ACWA and the ILGWU in the United States, she found that despite their large female membership these unions had few women as officers. ‘In the

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needle trades, women business agents are the exception rather than the rule’, she noted. Yet the business agent was one of the key strategic players in the union, an official who acted as mediator between the workers and the bosses and transacted most of the ‘business’ between the two. Only in the position of shop chair did Wolfson find any great number of women active in union affairs. She concluded: ‘The tendency in the clothing industry seems to be for women to participate in making local agreements for the shop or even for a small local community, but they have no share in the formulation of agreements on a larger scale between the manufacturers’ association of a clothing market and the international unions.’17 Trade union leadership tended to fall on the shoulders of the skilled male workers in the shops. They were the first to organize into unions, and they frequently took on the leadership roles in the bureaucracy of the union movement as well as at strike time. Women’s trade union activism was more likely to come at the shop level, where a woman could be a shop chair—a union’s representative inside the shop—or serve on shop-floor or price committees for their particular craft. Price committees were established inside each shop to negotiate piecework prices for particular production tasks; the committees were composed of elected representatives from each trade, who were then delegated to negotiate prices with the bosses for each change in garment design. Especially since most women worked as pieceworkers, with all the fragmentation, tension, and potential abuse that system entailed, it is not surprising that active women unionists focused their energies on their own shops. Shop-floor issues could, it seemed, be best addressed by the elected members of the internal shop committees. From these positions women could most effectively influence the labour process. They could look for more immediate resolution of disputes over production levels and wage scales. It took strong women to do the job. Eva Shanoff recalled her time on the shop-floor committee: Every time before a price committee meeting in the summer, I used to get butterflies in my stomach. You know, to go and argue with the boss, a nickel here, a nickel there. You were the troublemakers. Sometimes I would go back to the others [workers in the shop] and they didn’t like the prices. I would say, ‘Go, if you can get better, go and get.’ But they never went back to the boss. It’s aggravation, it’s not really work. You’d spend time, especially in our shop, we used to lose time, we didn’t get paid for it.18

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With jobs in the garment industry tending to be sex-segregated, women were elected from among other women who did the same job. In this way women began to participate in union activities, but they were rarely encouraged to move beyond the narrow confines of shopfloor activism. Most women were not schooled in the value of trade unionism and, unlike the male craft workers, they had little long-term attachment to the labour movement or the workplace. The utility of trade union action had to be immediately apparent, or it was unlikely to have a great appeal to most women working in the needle trades. On a few occasions women organizers had been sent from New York to help with women’s union activities, but these visits were rare. Since women were usually absent from the meetings where key decisions were made, business agents and executive board members could continue to overlook women’s concerns. More often than not women were used primarily to arouse public sympathy for the strike causes—placed at the front of marches during strikes, as in the 1912 UGWA strike in Montreal. When the unions sat down to the bargaining table, then, they did so without a representative from the women members. Collective agreements continued to reflect gender-based pay differentials. Strike pay and union fees initiated by the unions themselves also reaffirmed the disconnected and subordinate position of women in the needle trade unions. As a result of the unions’ relationship to their female membership before 1920, few women managed to make their way into the union hierarchy. Third-party bargaining ensured agreements that covered the whole trade, but in the process of setting up such a mechanism the union drew further away from the shop floor, the only place where women had a voice.

Wartime Battles and Arbitration Decisions The neglect of women workers by the international unions was compounded by a continued neglect of Canadian locals in general. Time and time again Canadian locals of the international unions had called on their executive boards to hire organizers for the Canadian markets, and each time the unions put off these requests. Within this context, getting special organizers for the women workers remained only one component of a larger problem. After their defeats in the pre-war strikes, the Canadian locals of the international unions fell into despair. The rank and file in Canada continued to be frustrated by the lack of response from the executive of the ILGWU towards Canadian organizational concerns and attempts

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to co-ordinate strike tactics in the Canadian clothing markets. At the same time the conservative head office bitterly complained of the militancy in its Canadian locals.19 After visiting Montreal in 1914, president Abe Rosenberg even moved to change the union constitution to centralize control over the locals, but Canadian locals continued to press for action.20 At first, with unionization efforts limited to cloakmakers, variations in economic conditions between Montreal and Toronto required a systematic organization of both markets at the same time. Unless wages in the two cities were equalized, a unionized Toronto would quickly see its work transferred to the small non-union shops of Montreal. Because of this, Canadian locals of the ILGWU were asking for autonomy and for at least one vice-president on the executive to be a Canadian.21 But the New York-based executive was not about to let go of any of its control. It had already had enough trouble from its US locals, which had been fighting increased central control in the union for several years.22 Rosenberg asserted, ‘We cannot have as part of the constitution something that compels each convention to elect a Canadian man.’23 The UGWA had exhibited the same lack of interest in the Canadian situation, and Canadian locals complained bitterly.24 Throughout the pre-war period the ILGWU and UGWA, racked with internal strife, had tried to gain control over rapidly growing memberships. But inside and outside Canada after 1913 the wave of militancy collapsed as the economy went into a recession that led to a decline in the cloak trade and a resulting high unemployment. When World War I broke out, a war economy, with its demand for war goods, produced a recovery, but for the garment industry the upturn was slow in coming. The industry was not able to capitalize on war contracts for military uniforms for several years, and the economic boom of the war years only slowly took effect. The ILGWU described the first year of the war as one of ‘gloom and evil’ in Toronto: ‘The women’s garment trades had been greatly affected in Canada, and our people were in many instances eking out their existence at work on military garments, the production of which had suddenly assumed very large proportions.’25 In Montreal conditions were worse. The 1916 ILGWU convention reported that locals in Montreal had fared differently from those in Toronto. ‘Apparently the dislocation in the cloak trade in Eastern Canada was of a more serious nature, and the consequences that the war has caused made a more injurious inroad into the standing of our Montreal locals than in Toronto.’26 The decline in the cloak trade was felt more strongly in Montreal because most shops there were small, and thereby unable to adapt to the

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changes in styles or to lobby for war contracts as effectively as the larger Toronto shops. By the spring of 1915 employment in the needle trades was high, a direct result of high demand for labour as enlistments cut into the oversupply of labour that had existed before the war. By 1916 a labour scarcity allowed garment workers to better their conditions in the shops, and most shop disputes ended in victory for the employees.27 Although the cost of living continued to rise during the war, full employment and increases in wages made conditions in the trade more tolerable and unions began to prosper. One sign of growing strength was an increase in membership. Membership in international unions in Canada rose from 114,700 in 1915 to 260,200 in 1919.28 In 1916 the ILGWU convention gave the executive board a mandate to campaign for a general strike to enforce the union’s demands for a weekwork system in the Canadian cloak, shirt, and dress trades. Because of the different conditions in Toronto and Montreal, the union decided to develop different tactics in its campaign for each city.29 It decided none the less to adopt a single focus: the fight against piecework. For years the cloakmakers had watched as piecework moved into every shop in the trade, with devastating effects on workers. Continual haggling with employers over prices often resulted in low shop morale. The system seemed to thrive on competition between the shops as price negotiations varied from shop to shop and consistent prices for the same work could not be maintained. The ILGWU wanted to be the sole arbitrator for wages ‘in all shops alike, small and large, sub-factories as well as inside shops’.30 A weekwork system seemed to be the best answer. The cloak trade in Montreal called a general strike in August 1917, while a Toronto effort to organize on a shop-by-shop basis met with some success.31 A bitter nineweek strike in Montreal over the use of piecework rates resulted in some concessions in a few shops, but an overall defeat had a disastrous effect on the union membership. For the next two years, once again, Montreal union membership went into decline.32 The attempt to fight piecework was badly timed, for even if the union could win in the ladies’ cloak shops across North America its success could not hold: the cloak trade itself had begun a slow decline into oblivion, and the growth of the dress trade, largely unorganized and staffed by women workers, was based almost entirely on the piecework system. Without a strong organization in the dress trade, the fine sentiments of the cloakmakers were doomed to failure. Montreal manufacturers had controlled the wage systems in their shops from the beginning of the trade, and in a highly competitive

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market with so many small contract shops, they were not about to give in to the union. With a renewed militancy in 1919 the Canadian ILGWU decided to again make the weekwork demand a key issue. Although the success of this venture was short-lived, a series of strikes served to revitalize a flagging trade union. On 2 July 1919, the ILGWU pulled workers out of shops in both Montreal and Toronto for a general strike.33 In Montreal the settlement was quick. The union had already shown its strength there in the cloak sector, when a May 1919 strike at A. Sommer and Company, the city’s most influential cloak firm, had resulted in victory. The introduction of weekwork ‘was sweeping every cloak centre in the country’, the executive asserted in its convention report in 1920. ‘And no obstacle could be strong enough to withstand it, particularly in places where organization embraced 100 per cent of the workers, as in the city of Montreal.’34 In Toronto 2,000 workers, 500 to 600 of them women, struck for a 44-hour week, wage increases, and time and a half for overtime. The question of weekwork was the contentious issue, and although the union asserted that it desired ‘nothing more, nothing less than the abolition of the piecework system’, it was unable to persuade the manufacturers to concede the issue. The strike lasted more than 11 weeks. Although arbitration reduced the hours of work and increased some of the wages of pressers and cutters, the issue of piecework was left untouched.35 The union continued to push for a weekwork system with the employers, and by 1920 the employers conceded the issue. Again the victory was short-lived. By 1922 the ILGWU reported local membership had fallen to half of its 1919 level, and control over the trade was lost. The manufacturers intended to re-establish piecework at the first opportunity, and they did not have to wait long. With a rapid inflation rate after the war and a decline in the trade, the companies that had survived into the 1920s had time on their side. Toronto continued to operate on a piecework system. Montreal manufacturers immediately began to pull back from their collective agreement, complaining that the competition from Toronto was ruining their business, and soon the ILGWU was fighting the battle all over again. In the men’s trades, efforts by the newly formed Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America met with more success. Soon after the breakaway from the UGWA in 1914, two branches of the new union were set up in Montreal, and in 1916 another was established in Toronto. By late 1916 the ACWA had a membership of 7,000 in its Canadian locals and felt ready to take on the manufacturers in a

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general strike.36 The Montreal trade was in a deplorable state, as Abe Shiplacoff of the ACWA recalled 10 years later: ‘You have no idea what Montreal was like in 1916. The shops here were fairly filled with children. You would not know Montreal from some of those towns in the South as far as child labour was concerned. I have seen several hundred children come out of the shops here in Montreal in 1916 and it looked more like a kindergarten let loose than a shop.’37 Anti-union employers had forced wages down by 40 per cent after the 1912 UGWA strike in Montreal. Unionization picked up after the arrival of the ACWA, and soon the union represented locals of operators, pressers, cutters, and buttonhole-makers, including a local of French operators. The battle lines were clearly drawn after the ACWA successfully won a series of small-shop disputes in 1916.38 On 17 January 1917, 3,000 workers walked out of 13 Montreal shops under ACWA control.39 By 14 February the union was calling the initial lockout a general strike, with 69 firms now involved in the dispute. The strike resulted in a substantial loss of work time; 400 per cent more ‘man-days’ were lost in 1917 than in any other year for the 1914–17 period.40 According to M. Brecher, an industrial relations specialist, the strike accounted for one-third of the total ‘man-days’ lost through work stoppages in the industry for the period 1914–53.41 The pivotal issue was workplace control, fought under the guise of union legitimation. The union contended, ‘At bottom, the dispute was the old one, the right of the worker to belong to this organization.’ Recognition, the ACWA hoped, would lead to co-operation in the workplace. The dispute struck at the core of manufacturers’ control of hiring and firing, because union shops required manufacturers to hire workers through their office, to allow shop delegates to intervene in workplace disputes, and to regulate dismissals. Manufacturers would have none of it. ‘Manufacturers must retain the right to employ such efficient workers and increase or decrease their number, as the need of his business dictates’, they argued.42 The union professed innocence: ‘It was not true, as the employers said, that we wished to dictate to them how they should run their business.’43 Manufacturers tried to capitalize on patriotic sentiment for the Great War. Alfred Wood of the Semi-Ready Company claimed that striking garment workers in his factory were ‘dupes of GermanAmerican influences trying to prevent uniform making’. Wood assured the newspaper that the strike was not over wages and hours of work. Instead, the ‘trouble arose because we declined to discuss our affairs with alien outsiders.’44 A New York union official denied the charges, stating, ‘In Germany I would have been known as a damned

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Jew and it seems rather strange to come to Canada and be called a German.’45 The form of the discourse of ethnic conflict altered with the war, but its presence as a strategy to divide the workforce was an old one. The strike’s timing did not favour the union, for the business season was slow and the winter cold. The 5,000 striking workers had to be fed and clothed for several months. Finally, in early March 1917, the two parties signed a memorandum of agreement establishing a committee of inquiry into the dispute. The committee recommended time and a half for overtime, a 46-hour week, and a wage increase of one dollar a week as a minimum to be adopted by all manufacturers in the dispute. The plan conceded union shops, the real issue of the strike, and called for the establishment of shop committees to negotiate shop disputes. In addition, the committee recommended an arbitration board to deal with future problems in the trade.46 The ACWA attempt in 1917 to establish a conciliatory mechanism in the Montreal trade proved unsuccessful. But by May 1919 the union had managed to obtain an agreement on the use of third-party arbitration to settle differences—marking a key point in the history of collective bargaining, the first step in the breakdown of adversarial employer-employee relations. Negotiations that fall put the new arbitration system to the test. When no agreement over wage scales was reached by 1 October 1919, both parties agreed to turn the matter over to a nine-member arbitration board with an impartial chair from the Rochester market. The board set a wage scale for the industry, and both parties then set up a permanent arbitration board. The new board, to be sure, had its work cut out for it, and over the next few years it rendered decisions on individual shop disputes, set wage scales for the trade as a whole, and dealt with production levels in the shops. In effect a small group of men—lawyers, manufacturers, and trade unionists—produced written judgements that embodied workermanagement relationships with all their ‘gendered’ connotations intact. Moreover, the written judgements privileged legal reasoning over the political strength of collective bargaining. Legal discourse on wage rates and job classifications now had a more central place in employer-worker relations. The decisions took the pressure off the union and allowed its members to focus their energy on the virulent anti-union shops in the city. By 1922 the ACWA had moved against the small contract shops as well. The Toronto ACWA locals were able to capitalize on the victory in Montreal, and Toronto became the first market in North America to achieve a 44-hour week.47 In Toronto the focus was on several large

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firms producing men’s suits, and collective agreements in the trade bound trade unionists and manufacturers together at a time when changes in the industrial structuring of firms and the increased presence of contractors threatened the control of larger manufacturers over the market. A successful organizing drive stabilized the industry and helped out both parties, with the ACWA’s form of unionism offering a palatable alternative to industrial anarchy. An agreement with the newly formed Associated Clothing Manufacturers of Toronto in August 1919 set out scales for uniform piece-rates in the Toronto market and tied the union to a contract with most of the major manufacturers in the city.48 The scale became the basis for future negotiations, and Toronto avoided strikes in the men’s suit sector. Here, too, the ACWA introduced the principle of third-party arbitration, as it established an impartial chairman system of dispute settlement as part of its agreement.49 As in Montreal, both union and management could now turn their efforts towards control of the small contract shops. The use of arbitration machinery in the clothing trades highlighted wage differentials in the industry. The decisions of the boards clearly specified wage differences based on gender of the worker rather than on the task performed. For example, the impartial chairman’s decision in the ACWA shops of Montreal on 29 April 1920 outlined wage increases: $5 a week for men and $3 a week for women; $3 for men earning less than $18 a week; $2 for women earning less than $10 a week. The only job-based wage increase mentioned in the decision went to the cutters (usually males); they received an increase of $7 a week.50 Such arbitration decisions left the particulars of wage scales out of the equation, assuming that part of the decision could easily be left to the individual shops. This pattern of arbitration decision was common in all parts of the needle trades, and the assumption of wage differentials based on gender of the worker was not an issue. Significantly, the announcements of wage settlements in collective agreements used this gendered shorthand of wage differentials, while the actual collective agreements do not. As the wage differentials became translated into practice, the gender differences became imbedded in the job categories themselves and depended on whether the job was a woman’s or a man’s job. Then again, given the limitations of Canadian labour law during these years, collective bargaining agreements depended on the goodwill of the parties involved to make them function effectively. By the close of the war years the international unions had managed to obtain a secure collective agreement only in the Toronto

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men’s clothing trade, and while union membership in Toronto stabilized, the rest of the clothing trade faced the decade of the 1920s in a weakened position. Lasting success would elude the unions in Canada until 1935, when a provincial decree signed in the Quebec men’s clothing industry ensured union recognition and established common wage rates for the province.51

The Politics of Organizing Women At the 1915 TLCC convention, delegate Helena Gutteridge proposed an amendment that established the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work for men and women’.52 But if trade union men agreed to push for minimum wages or equal pay for women, it was for the sake of their own competitive edge in the labour market. In 1917, for instance, a motion came to the TLCC to appoint a committee of men and women to work continuously upon the question of women in industry in Canada, with the view of co-operating with the National Women’s Trade Union League in order to hasten the organization of women workers, whose exploited condition is pitiful in the extreme, besides forming a continual menace to the existing standards of their brother wage earners.53 In the United States, the Women’s Trade Union League was an important part of the effort to organize women workers. Its support for the New York garment workers in 1909 had gained it much respect in the US union movement. The involvement of middle-class and upperclass women gave prestige to the working-class struggles, providing a link between the largely immigrant female workforce and the American public.54 This kind of strong, ongoing relationship was largely absent in the Canadian labour movement, which meant that the specific predicament of women workers was not brought to the attention of the public in Canada as effectively as it was in the United States. Susan Glenn noted: ‘The league was particularly adept at calling public attention to “female” issues in the garment strikes. Portraying women and girls as hapless victims of industrial abuse, they publicized employers’ violations of womanly virtue. Attempting to rouse the public conscience, they stressed how poor sanitation, sexual harassment, and overwork threatened the “future motherhood” of young female workers.’55 The Canadian social reformers who on rare occasions did assist women garment workers used similar language to rouse public support. In the 1910 strike in Montreal and the

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Toronto strike of 1912 at Eaton’s, middle-class women’s support helped in a limited way to bring women’s working conditions to public attention, but without the concerted effort and structural support of a Canadian WTUL, the efforts had little impact.56 The male unionists were not overly concerned about women’s work issues. A request at the 1915 TLCC convention for a woman organizer was only ‘taken under consideration’ and not acted upon for years. In 1917 and 1918 calls were made for placing a woman organizer in the field, but again no action was taken. In 1918 the 34th convention of the TLCC in Quebec City decided to ‘take under consideration the question of placing women organizers in the field’.57 It was not until 1922 that the union hired Kathleen Derry of the London Boot and Shoe Union and placed her on its executive.58 In early 1917 ILGWU president Benjamin Schlesinger took over a campaign to organize the shops in Montreal and Toronto. The concerted effort paid off in the cloak sectors, where a larger number of men were employed. In 1918, handicapped by lack of funds and still without a Gentile organizer, Toronto locals tried to organize the dress and whitewear branches of the industry, which together employed some 6,000 men and women, 95 per cent of them Gentiles. The Toronto ILGWU increased its membership from 400 to 1,800 and established a branch of non-Jewish women workers.59 But most women remained outside the union, and by 1921 the union had again dwindled to ‘a small group of faithful workers’.60 The lack of organization for women was compounded by the US neglect of Canadian locals. By 1920, of 20 organizers on the ILGWU payroll, only four were women. None of the women and only one of the men were resident in Canada.61 Canadian locals feared that their US counterparts were unable to understand the nature of Canadian working conditions and the Canadian market. The international continued to send in men from the New York office to assist in Toronto and Montreal, but these efforts only managed to ward off a total loss of union presence in the cities, because the unions all experienced setbacks in the 1920s. The US headquarters of the ILGWU was unable or unwilling to tackle the gap of ethnicity and gender. The other unions fared no better in hiring women organizers. It was 1920 before Montreal’s French-Canadian local of the ACWA was able to hire two women to assist in a drive among the women.62 In many cases unions tried to institute policies of minimum wages for women at the same time as they were practising exclusion or segregation of women in their trade union locals. In 1921 the AFL discussed a motion to limit the right to

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trade union membership on the grounds of sex. Although the resolution was rejected, a toothless compromise carried the day: national and international unions that did not admit women workers to membership were required to ‘give early consideration to the question of their admission’.63 In the clothing industry, while the ACWA adopted resolutions supporting the principles of equal pay for equal work and equal opportunity for women at its 1922 convention, the union was quick to add, ‘except in so far as this will interfere with health and future welfare of the sex’.64 These sentiments of protecting women because of their attachment to the domestic sphere governed the policies of the AFL.65 Still, until 1920, what organization there was among women occurred mainly in female-dominated industries such as the garment industry. In the United States, in 1920, 43 per cent of unionized women were in the garment industry.66 In Canada women’s trade union membership in the clothing trades remained small, although no reliable figures exist from the years before 1919.67 Dramatic year-to-year fluctuations in women’s union membership suggest substantial potential for organization among the women; at the same time the fluctuations indicate their temporary place in the labour market.68 By 1924, with a total female union membership of 3,966, women made up only 2 per cent of the total membership in international unions.69 By 1926 there were 2,770 women in unions in Canada, 1,196 less than in 1924, at a time when there were about 400,000 working women in Canada. The unions obviously had a long way to go.70 The problem of organizing women continued to plague the union movement, and finally the central bodies of labour decided to deal with the issue. In 1924 the executive council of the American Federation of Labor called a special meeting to consider the issue of unorganized women. After asserting, ‘It can be stated without contradiction that as yet no successful methods of organizing women workers have been found’, the AFL decided to set up an executive committee to coordinate organizing women among its affiliates.71 Women’s militancy in the workplace remained largely outside of the trade unions, except at strike time.

Wages vs Family: ‘A Woman’s Place’ Given the divisions of gender combined with divisions of age and ethnicity that served to create a divided workforce, the unions in turn used the problems of cultural and gender differences to justify their failure to organize women workers. The problem became more than

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simply one of organizing women; the ‘problem’ of French-Canadian women or Gentile women was used to explain away the limited efforts made to unionize women workers. For the men, the ‘women’s problem’ in the unions seemed insurmountable. Within the trade unions men saw women as different from themselves. Ideas of femininity and women’s place in the domestic sphere also influenced methods of organizing women. Separate organizational methods were used to attract women to unions. Male trade unionists often perceived women workers as being in need of protection, and they used the language of patriarchy to affirm these views. Men became surrogate fathers and brothers in the workplace and in the union halls. In the trade union family, members referred to their ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ in the union, and as in a family the men carried out their patriarchal roles as protectors and guardians of the ‘girls’. Indeed, the way women garment workers were positioned as ‘little sisters’ conveyed much about their social position in the trade union movement. This positioning of women in the language of gender relations, shaped by the dominant views of domestic roles for men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, problematized women’s place in the labour movement and privileged men as women’s natural protector. In 1918, for instance, an ACWA organizer in Montreal went to speak at a shop meeting and found, according to the union report of the time, ‘an audience of young girls, some of them still below their teens, their children’s locks hanging over their shoulders and their dresses barely covering their knees. The union representative, being a father himself, and thinking of his own pink-cheeked little girl while addressing those child slaves, cannot help renewing his pledge to fight the cannibalistic industrial system.’72 Faced with these child workers, the men responded from the context of their own familial experiences. A Toronto woman, a retired trade union activist, described her experience: When I tried to bargain as a union member, when I went into the Toronto Cloak, my uncle and his brother were partners and he used to tell me with him I have to bargain different than with the other bosses. I used to say, ‘When I’ll come to your house, I’m your niece, but in the shop I’m your worker.’ He used to go and complain to my auntie, he’s got an enemy in the shop.73 Male trade unionists took their social responsibility seriously, ‘protecting’ the women from the conflict at the bargaining table, where they fought manufacturers’ attempts to alter the labour

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process. Labour organization in Montreal proceeded under the guidance of ‘father figures’ in the union movement. ‘For many reasons, we feel like proud parents’, reminisced Sam Liberman of the Montreal Cloakmakers Union (ILGWU). ‘We fought side by side and encouraged the midinettes in their early struggle for recognition. When they were hungry, we fed them, although we were pretty lean ourselves; when they were discouraged, we played big brother, often hiding our own scars, and our own trembling hands.’74 Men redefined the issues and did the bargaining, leaving the ‘girls’ to walk the picket lines while the ‘men’ went off to boardrooms to settle the contract issues with the manufacturers. Courtesy and complacency in women workers and respectability for the men had implications for their conduct in the workplace and in the unions. It made men cautious in their fight for better work conditions, while women were left feeling ambiguous about their relationship towards trade union politics.75 For working-class men, dignity—as respectable working-class males—was a key. During the early years of unionization, masculinity was frequently used as a vehicle in their workplace struggles to control production. In the debate over the introduction of piecework in the factories, male trade unionists argued in favour of weekwork, because it allowed them a greater sense of decorum and respectability: ‘Piecework, you’ve got to work in your shirt sleeves, without a jacket, and rush. Week work, you’ll be able to work with your jacket on, with your collar and tie, you’ll be respectable.’76 The reclassification of men’s jobs as women’s jobs led to disputes between workers and manufacturers. On one such occasion, John Pasto of B. Gardner and Company, Montreal, filed a complaint with the Arbitration Board over wages he had received in the shop. Originally he had been employed as a shoulder baster (a man’s job), but when there was nothing else to do, he did armhole basting—‘which is done as a rule by young women, who are employed at much less.’ The factory closed down for a while, and when it later reopened it reassigned shoulder basting to women. Pasto appealed for reinstatement at ‘a man’s wage’. The board decided against him, arguing that because the job had been reclassified as woman’s work it was now not appropriate work for a man.77

Women, Class War, and Mutual Interest Given that women’s work in the industry was considered to be generally less skilled, ‘the girls’ in the shop could be more easily replaced at strike time. Men in the supposedly more skilled jobs of cutting and

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tailoring were, it seemed, less easy to replace. But despite the precariousness of women’s position in these shops, they did use strikes as a way of resolving workplace disputes. In fact, women workers turned to sit-downs and strike strategies even when there was no formal union relationship to back them. These actions were usually short-lived, dealing with the immediate resolution of shop grievances. In some instances women acted first and then sought union assistance for their grievances. The fact that most women worked as machine operators in the dress trades and as finishers in the cloak trades proved important to the formation of shop-floor unions. Both of these jobs took place at points in the production process at which the workers were not able to maintain much control over speed and output. The work was generally repetitive, and while they needed a degree of skill to manipulate the cloth under the machine heads, workers who made a mistake in the operation could always redo the work. The key element was the speed of accomplishing the task, and workers were paid by the piece to ensure a maximum speed. The job of cutter, done mostly by men, came towards the beginning of production, and it took a certain skill to place the garment on the cloth so that there would be as little wastage of cloth as possible—a mistake at that point in the production process was irretrievable. The necessity for that skill gave cutters a considerable degree of power over the bosses. The bosses did not want to rush them, and cutters were generally paid by time rates. As a result cutters had a high degree of power in their work, and the machine operators did not. The problems of work speed-up and its concomitant day-to-day tensions were most likely to fall on the operators’ shoulders, and a union based on the shop floor was better able to deal with the constant concerns brought about by stress and speed-up and negotiating piecework rates. The traditional craft-based union was more concerned about increases in wage rates for cutters and other male skilled workers and in regulating the union shops through trying to keep its members at work and disciplining misdemeanours. Efforts to create a class-conscious unionism and industrial democracy at the shop-floor level met with considerable resistance from a developing union bureaucracy that saw trade union organization solely as industrial arbitrator in a cutthroat trade. Local activists continued to challenge the authority of their executives, but their militancy was most frequently seen at strike time. The problem was succinctly described in the president’s report to the UGWA convention in 1912:

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Past experience teaches us that many of the workers, especially in the men’s clothing trade, join the union either because the firm adopts the union label or when oppression by the employer becomes so great that it is beyond endurance. Those who join voluntarily come in usually before or during a strike. If the strike is successful, they do not realize the need for continuing their membership. If it is lost, with failure goes their loyalty to the union.78 Seasonal employment—and therefore seasonal unionism—plagued the trade, and union locals could not sustain their membership. Continuing union activity was orchestrated by skilled male workers, and the gap between them and the women in the shops caused difficulties. Men saw the entrance of women into the union movement at strike time as an exceptional case, which led to a qualitative difference in treatment. The process by which women were differentiated from the men was decisive, ensuring men’s privileged position in the unions and establishing patriarchal control both in the unions and in the workplace proper.79 Time and time again, when women garment workers demonstrated their militancy, their actions did not result in an acceptance as equal

Women on the picket line, Spadina Avenue, Toronto, 1931. (Globe and Mail Collection, City of Toronto Archives, SC 266–23261)

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partners in the working-class labour movement. After all, with militant men and women tending to define their actions in terms of working-class struggle above all else, with no great sense of issues as related to gender, the question of women’s place on the front line of class struggle was rarely asked. Working women’s support for their class and for the trade union movement was to be expressed in their role as potential wives or daughters of the working class. As such, they felt a need to offer support to the men who acted as the spokesmen of the movement. In essence, women had not yet found a home in the labour movement. The conservative leadership did come to realize that to be effective at the bargaining table they would have to be able to show manufacturers they could sustain and control the membership, and that meant integrating the large numbers of women workers into the locals. The strategy of creating a separate trade union structure for women workers had proved to be a double-edged sword, as KesslerHarris points out: While such tactics had the advantage of developing unity and strength among women, they carried new risks. To represent a female constituency effectively—to draw on women’s own sense of honour—required women to stimulate and lead the kinds of activities that male unionists labeled irrelevant in periods of quiescence and perceived as a challenge to their leadership in periods when they felt threatened. Allegiance to women and their modes of organization could be of itself subversive because it risked creating dual loyalties.80 In the end the needle trade unions were ambivalent towards their women’s locals, and the results were not surprising. According to an issue of the Labour Gazette in 1912: ‘Women’s unions, until the last generation at least, have been ephemeral, being usually organized in strikes and frequently disappearing upon their settlement. They have been influenced by leadership from outside the ranks of wage earners to a greater degree than those of men, and have consequently been drawn away from plans for immediate advantage to more remote schemes for universal reform.’81 Within the growing union movement two distinct trade union strategies had emerged. Socialist ideas of class war prevailed among the early founders of unions in the garment industry; they saw a need to organize workers into class-conscious unions that would take control of the system of production.82 The approach they took, however, was mainly rhetorical, because ideas and strategies concerning

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the role of trade unions in the class struggle were themselves relatively underdeveloped in the pre-war trade union movement.83 These unionists did serve to extend labour organizing beyond the individual or craft bargaining process. Their demands for the abolition of piecework and for the establishment of the eight-hour day extended the vision of unionism to a broader working-class constituency. By 1919 attempts had been made to develop an umbrella organization of all clothing worker unions to co-ordinate political action in the trade. While these efforts were unsuccessful, they illustrate a broadening of trade union perspective. But very quickly another view of trade unionism took shape: that the needle trades were a community in which all parties had to do their part if the industry was to grow and prosper. The ILGWU secretary argued in 1913: ‘It is as much in the interests of the legitimate manufacturer to have the costs of labour standardized as it is in the interests of the union.’84 Conservative trade unionists saw labour and management not as warring classes, but as partners in a war against marketplace anarchy. Co-operation was the key to success, as ILGWU officials suggested in 1914: ‘Our union can only make progress in so far as it will succeed in creating and maintaining and extending union standards and in equalizing the price of labour. But to accomplish this, the union alone is powerless. It requires the co-operation and goodwill of a strong employers’ association as well as a strong union.’85 The tension between these two positions—class war and mutual interests—marked the development of trade unionism over the first several decades of the century.86 With the ILGWU growing so rapidly, there was little opportunity for one faction to control the whole union, and no one political view came to dominate the organization. The power vacuum created by this membership growth and an increase in large-scale strikes meant that the two primary positions vied for hegemony in the unions. During these early years, an integrated trade union hierarchy was not yet in place, but there were the beginnings of a union policy and philosophy that later came to be associated with what we now call ‘business unionism’ and its contemporaries referred to as ‘new unionism’—a view of the needle trades as a community of interest between workers and bosses. The ‘Protocol of Peace’ established by the ILGWU in the New York cloak trades in 1910 meant, as Jesse Carpenter puts it, that ‘a new shuffling of industrial forces was in the making’ and marked the beginnings of business, or new, unionism. According to Carpenter, ‘The organized forces of both labour and management were about to combine against the unorganized forces of both labour and

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management. Through this alignment, effective bargaining in the needle trades was born.’87 The process of new unionism was one that no longer saw manufacturers and workers as adversaries; instead, they would be partners working together for the betterment of the trade as a whole. Because of the nature of trade union structures, the approach would be a partnership of men. But to be successful this new unionism required control at the local level, regulation of strike action from a central office, and standardizing of prices and contracts. The union’s control in the shops had to be such that employers could be convinced that union bureaucrats would deliver the goods. The success of the Protocol attempts also depended on manufacturers’ faith and trust as well as the ability of manufacturers’ associations to regulate and control their own members. Regulation of the worst aspects of the sweated trades required a united front of union locals and manufacturers, or so it would seem. Still, it would be many years before unions were able to convince the manufacturers that they really had the best interests of the industry as a whole at heart. In fact, although the ACWA gained the first solid collective agreement in 1919, other unions were less successful. The pre-1920 union movement, on the one hand, was a struggle by conservative general executive boards to gain control over their locals and to establish a ‘peace’ in the trade; on the other hand, it represented a fight by class-conscious locals to gain control of the leadership to achieve their own ends. In Canada, further conflict developed as Canadian locals fought for local autonomy at the shop and national level. While socialist women workers took part in the debate that ensued, none of these struggles integrated women workers into the trade union movement. For the trade union women, who had no place in the union hierarchy and were often the workers in the small shops, the alliance between large manufacturers and the male trade unionists did not necessarily serve their interests. For these women a union structure that focused attention on day-to-day shop activities would have been more to their liking.88 Undoubtedly, the different modes of organization displayed in the needle trades before 1920 had varying success. Craft unionism, represented by the Journeymen Tailors, was limited by its adherence to the traditions of skilled male workers. It offered little to semiskilled female workers in the ready-made sector. Industrial unionism held out the promise of a more integrated unionism, yet after the first few years of industrial organization the conservative politics of craftbased locals gravitated towards a policy that emphasized union label

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campaigns and shunned strike tactics. Again, this form of unionism offered little to women factory workers. In addition, gender and ethnic divisions among the workers created social and cultural barriers, while the lack of attention paid to the Canadian locals by the international unions created further problems. The issue of skill played a prominent role in all of this, because definitions of skill embodied the challenge of equality and co-operation in the trade. Trade unions fought changes in the labour process, including deskilling, but women would remain on the margins of these unions until well into the 1930s, when the dress trade, the largest employer of women, was finally organized.89 Later, the workers’ resistance was more against erosion of control than against deskilling, even though the resistance occurred under the rubric of ‘skill’. When the manufacturers attempted to control the speed of production by introducing machinery and fragmenting work, the workers’ first response came in the form of strike action. Later, their desire to maintain craft control in the workplace was articulated through negotiations, as well as strikes. It is in the bargaining process that competencies, techniques, and knowledge became selected and defined as skilled. Labour’s response to the evils of the sweatshops and the breakdown of skilled jobs in the trade was hampered by the unions’ inability to attract and sustain active female participation.90 Male trade unionists usually initiated the fights against these conditions and drew the women into the fight, but the prevailing social and economic conditions were a crucial force leading to women’s militancy and to their ability to be mobilized at specific points in the history of the garment unions. Pressure from women in the sweatshops gradually altered the ILGWU policy on the use of the strike weapon in collective bargaining and precipitated the rise of the ACWA, which challenged the jurisdiction of the UGWA over the ready-made men’s clothing industry. The ACWA was somewhat more effective in organizing women, but because women continued to remain outside of the dayto-day running of the unions, they would still slowly drift away once strike fervour had died down. The resistance of women workers to exploitation in the workplace was seen by their brothers in the labour movement as exceptional, shaped by the moment, and transitory, and women’s gendered status as different from men, as somehow other, privileged men’s trade union activism, presenting it as the normative standard by which all union activism was to be judged. In addition, middle-class women would only give support to their working-class sisters when the

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spectre of sexual exploitation was raised. The call for support from privileged women appealed to women’s moral outrage against the sexual exploitation of vulnerable womanhood, and this discourse, this sexualized conception of wronged womanhood, moved the workplace militancy of women garment workers even further away from the activities of their male counterparts. The fashioning of women’s issues as somehow standing apart from men’s trade union concerns for job security only confirmed women’s difference and separateness. Although other forms of resistance existed, in the end women workers would not have a permanent presence in trade unions until the late 1930s. For women, unionization remained only a dream, full of potential but lacking reality.

5

Taking a Stand: Civil War in the Needle Trades

The time has come when a definite stand must be taken in order to clear our organization of the poison that has accumulated. David Dubinsky, then secretary of the Credentials Committee, at the 1924 ILGWU convention, expelling the Trade Union Educational League For most of the capitalist world, including Canada, the two decades following World War I were years of ‘boom and bust’. A brief period of postwar prosperity was followed by a temporary crisis in 1920–1, which was in turn succeeded by a period of halting improvement that lasted until the collapse of 1929. The clothing industry went up and down with the rest of the economy, experiencing a strong recovery through most of the 1920s, with the promise of mass consumption prompting an increase in consumer demand and the development of new products. In the early 1920s, though, a contraction in commodity prices to 40 per cent of the 1920 prices had a grave effect on those working in clothing production. Many factories closed their doors, and unemployment increased sharply—to a peak, among trade unionists, of 16.5 per cent in the spring of 1921.1 Postwar inflation led to the downfall of fully a third of the companies that had been active at the close of the war. From 1924 to 1929 the value of production in both the men’s and women’s wear sectors made a steady advance. By 1925 the expansion of investment, new resources, and industrial development had helped 110

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the economy in general regain strength. Increases in both productivity and wages in the manufacturing sector meant that skilled workers were better off than they had been before the war, despite a rising cost of living.2 Despite this seeming progress, in an economically unstable environment, and with a shaky formal relationship to the employers, unionization in the clothing trades had a hard time of it. The legal status of trade unions was weakly defined, and most of trade union energy was spent trying to obtain recognition of the right to bargain on behalf of specific workers. Both the federal and provincial governments maintained a hands-off approach to collective bargaining relations, preferring to let the parties fight it out among themselves rather than providing a legal climate in which they could operate. Employer-employee relations were still largely shaped by the Trade Union Act of 1872 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which made picketing or otherwise engaging in activities that hampered the orderly running of business a criminal offence. Indeed, all trade unions faced court injunctions and arrest when they engaged in unionization efforts.3 In the early part of the twentieth century the federal government did initiate legislation for third-party intervention in trade union disputes, but these interventions remained limited to particular industrial settings. Under the direction of the federal state, this period of industrial relations represented, as sociologist Bob Russell suggests, ‘an appropriation of the negotiation process by state authorities on behalf of labour, but more importantly as representatives of a broader public interest.’ He notes, ‘This specific ordering, which witnesses a marginalization of labour in the negotiation process and the assumption of Janus-like positions by state authorities as representatives of both labour and the public, naturally placed definite constraints upon the outputs of the mediation function.’4 The Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907, focusing strictly on labour disputes in public utilities and coalmines, set in place ‘compulsory conciliation by means of a tripartite board, and the suspension of the right to strike or lockout until after the conciliation procedure was complete and a further waiting period had elapsed’.5 The Act in effect moved legislation into a new era, offering trade unions a legitimate place in collective bargaining while placing limits on their right to strike. By the 1920s provincial governments were informally using the system and unions hoped to gain recognition as the negotiating party for the employees at these tribunals, and thus to ensure legitimation of their rights in the workplace and at the bargaining table.6 Still, the labour law referring to

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arbitration would have no mechanism of enforcement until after World War II. While the clothing industry remained outside of the conciliation legislation of the early twentieth-century patron State, unions in the clothing industry tried to introduce forms of arbitration into their collective agreements. A situation of voluntarism prevailed, relying on the goodwill of both employers and employees. Still, the legislation enacted by federal and, later, provincial governments set the stage for the development of impartial machinery to intervene in disputes between employers and employees, and in such a hostile climate between manufacturers and the clothing unions the opportunity for arbitration looked good indeed. But in the clothing industry settlement through the introduction of third-party arbitration did not mean that the system was effectively used by both parties. During the 1920s the best thing the needle trades unions could hope for was the goodwill of provincial labour ministers. Minimum-wage laws passed in 1919 and 1920 in Quebec and Ontario governed factory working conditions and minimum-wage rates for women and girls, providing unions with a kind of governmental watchdog for the industry. These laws often proved to be the only means of controlling the more undisciplined employers. The clothing industry was not actually regulated by government order in Ontario until 1922—and in Quebec even later, in 1930. In 1922 the Minimum Wage Board in Ontario was given the ability to fine unscrupulous employers who were found to have violated the provincial regulations, as well as to investigate working conditions and establish minimum wages in specific industries. But the Ontario board had only five members to carry out its work, and the enforcement of such legislative directives was weak.7 In Quebec it was not until 1926 that a Minimum Wage Board was set up to administer the 1919 law, and it was in 1930 that an order pertaining to clothing was set in place.8 Complaints about the ineffectiveness of the minimum wage boards began almost at their conception. In Ontario, where much of the support work for women workers was carried on by the Women’s Labour Leagues, the Toronto League complained to the Toronto Trades and Labour Council that the schedule of wages had been set too low and that in any event the Minimum Wage Board was ‘unsympathetic in their attitude towards women workers of the province’. Representatives of the Minimum Wage Board invited to a meeting of the Trades and Labour Council argued in turn that these accusations were ‘unfair and that the Board was doing a great deal of work on behalf of

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women workers’. They protested that their activities were restricted by the law, which gave no control over hours of labour. In fact, wages set by the board had caused some employers to lengthen the hours of labour to keep up their own profit margins, and the board had little ability to enforce its judgements against unethical employers.9 As Bertha Blugerman recalled, ‘The smaller shops, some of them were dumps, fire traps, and the sanitary conditions were very bad.’ According to her, in most of those small shops, the health inspectors would tell the employers when they were coming around—‘that they would be in this day or that day’—and the company would ‘go ahead and sweep and wash the shop and the washrooms. It was the only time they were cleaned.’10 A Montreal pensioner from the garment industry reported, ‘I worked 20 years in the same shop and never saw an inspector.’11 A unionized workforce was the best guarantee of decent working conditions. By the 1920s, then, a legal framework for trade union recognition, negotiations and collective agreements, and the use of strikes and lockouts had begun to take shape, but the private rights of employers remained untouched. Employers’ powers to hire or fire workers and to run their businesses the way they pleased were rights not to be interfered with by either the union or the State. This rather free-form legislative framework provided a backdrop for the union activism of the 1920s. In the garment industry, trade union officials tried to wrest some of the employers’ arbitrary control of the workplace from the hands of manufacturers, especially through attempts to establish the principle of preferential shops. The right-wing and left-wing factions in the unions disagreed on how this goal could be achieved. One faction of the clothing unions (those most receptive to the ‘new unionism’ model of labour relations) tried to convince the employers that working relations in the industry should be a partnership of employers and trade unionists and that arbitration as a mechanism of handling disputes in the shops should become mandatory. Left-wing trade unionists had a different idea of how employer-employee relations should be conducted. With their view of employers as the class enemy, they believed that the most successful method of resolving disputes was the strike weapon. The left-wing elements in the union movement, then, had to wage a battle on two fronts: against the bosses, and against the new union movement’s conciliatory agenda. Meanwhile, the clothing manufacturers continued to seek more efficient ways of producing their goods—a search that led to an even greater reliance on the labour of women. And the industry continued

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to be plagued by the same problems as always: a frenzied, fragmented trade torn by competition and cost-cutting, combined with an ineffective labour movement. During the 1920s there was little cooperation among the manufacturers, and unions were generally too weak to have much impact on the disorganized state of the trade. Despite an apparent willingness on the part of the unions to cooperate with the companies, the manufacturers continued to maintain their right to control the production process autonomously. With both manufacturers and unions divided among themselves, regulation and control of the trade by either group remained elusive. Added to this stewpot in the 1920s was a new ingredient: activists affiliated with the Communist Party of Canada working for a more militant, effective labour movement—fighting battles the traditional unions had abandoned during the decade.

Contracts, Seasonality, and the Dictates of Fashion By the 1920s the clothing industry was a complex mix of elements. Two forms of manufacturing existed side by side, leaving both manufacturers and trade unions in a constant state of perplexity. On one hand were a few large, scientifically advanced firms using sophisticated equipment, each employing hundreds of workers to produce a fairly standard product. On the other, small backroom shops continued to operate, each with a few sewing machines and 5–10 workers. The persistence of both types of manufacturers in the same market had become a characteristic of the industry, and their symbiotic relationship reflected the competitive nature of the trade. Small shops increased the industry’s flexibility and helped it to meet seasonal demand and cope with the need for short runs of garments, which was especially important in the dress industry. Old and new forms of production existed alongside old and new technologies. Advanced machinery first used in the large manufacturing firms later found its way into the small shops as ‘hand-me-downs’. The growth of contract shops, the rise of mass buyers, and a rapid increase in the numbers of small dressmaking shops only increased the intensity of competition—and challenged the unions’ and manufacturers’ hold on the trade. During the 1920s larger manufacturers saw the need to control the growing numbers of small manufacturers and contractors that threatened their hold on the trade. An uneasy alliance existed between the large manufacturers and the smaller contract shops. Larger manufacturers, using the principles of scientific management, attempted to control production more closely through

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the introduction of section work, speed-up, and technological changes, all of which served to further deskill the work of operators in the trade. Small shops and contractors continued to resort to the old systems of exploitation—long hours, low wages, and a use of power that was personal, patriarchal, and often arbitrary. But the efficiency measures of the large manufacturers could not readily be introduced in an unstable trade in which so many small factories vied with one another for the one order that would keep them alive until the next season. To some extent the industry’s large and ‘respectable’ manufacturers were the creators of the little contract shops, as the larger manufacturers attempted to control production by contracting it out to small shops specializing in making up men’s pants, vests and coats, or women’s skirts (often after the material had been cut in the shop of the large manufacturer). Such contract shops operated on a verbal agreement with an inside manufacturer to produce a specific quantity of goods. In this way manufacturers were able to cut their labour costs and keep their plant size down, but could still manage to produce a large number of garments if demand should suddenly rise. Jacob-Crowley Manufacture Co. Ltd, Winnipeg’s largest firm during the interwar period, spoke to the Price Spreads Commission about the role of contract shops in the women’s cloak trade: It appears that garments for which 70 cents was paid to the contractor, who was supplied with manufacturing space and machines, would have cost $1.25 to $1.50 per garment for labour in this company’s own factory. The wide spreads in labour costs are said to be affected by the relative degree of efficiency of the employees, it being stated that the employees of the contractor were more highly specialized on low priced garments than the company’s own employees, whom it would be uneconomical to use on garments of that kind.12 The growth in the number of contract shops continued to cause alarm among the large manufacturers. When Thomas Learie, executive secretary for the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, described these shops to the Ontario Minister of Labour, he said: There is the class, and he sets the rate in his selling price, [who] would be glad to hire Canadian Labour at a Senegambian rate if he could get away with it. He is the ‘cursed’ minority—living himself on the smell of a rat, he expects those who work for him to do the same, operating from kitchen, bedroom, and shed shops, with no

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further assets than a pair of shears, a sewing machine and a bolt of cloth—and all three are likely on credit—he sets a selling price that is the ruin of the industry. Having no stake in the country or the industry he is a menace to both, because he adds nothing to the well being of one while he bankrupts the other.13 Both the ACWA and the ILGWU tried to capitalize on tensions between the small contract shops and the larger manufacturers, endeavouring to convince larger firms to join them in efforts to curb the growth of contracting out. The ‘legitimate’ manufacturers, frustrated by the competition from the small shops, tried to control their presence in the industry through their trade associations, which established a code of ethics and standardized wages and hours of work, and tried to stop small shops from undercutting prices. The first trade association was established in Montreal in 1908 to ‘foster the interests of those persons, firms and corporations engaged in the manufacture and sale of whole sale clothing in Montreal and vicinity’. The member firms from the men’s clothing trade were among the oldest established manufacturers in the trade, but by 1919 only 28 firms were on the membership list, less than 15 per cent of the total number of firms in existence in Montreal. This experience was typical of attempts to establish trade associations, and while several other smaller associations sprang up in the period before 1920, none was able to dominate the trade.14 Larger, more established firms saw the wisdom of forming associations to regulate problems of production, distribution, trade practices, and labour relations, but smaller firms were never very interested in such associations. As ever, style was the engine that drove the needle trade. Changes in style played havoc with some branches of the trade, causing rapid expansion in some sectors and decline in others. The character of the industry (small shops, homework, and contracting out) was to a large extent structured by changes or fluctuations in consumer or market demand, which in turn caused problems of stabilization. Men’s suits and coats had been the first factory-made products, beginning in Canada in the late 1880s, followed by the production of men’s furnishings, shirts, and work clothes by the 1890s. Women’s factory clothing began with the production of cloaks and mantles, which peaked during the 1910 –15 period. Women’s whitewear and shirtwaists, a precursor of the modern dress product, began at the turn of the century and continued to grow into the 1920s. Dress production began in 1910 with the production of house dresses, growing into a substantial industry after World War I.

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As fashions and consumer interests changed, certain products (such as dresses) came to be dominant and overtook older, established products (such as women’s suits). When this happened the new markets added new jobs, while the factories manufacturing older products were shut down, putting many skilled workers on the street. The oversupply of labour would then put pressure on other sectors of the trade. Product changes also resulted in the concentration of production in a few locations close to market outlets and a cheap labour supply. For garment workers, job opportunities narrowed considerably. Unregulated competition between the cities continued to cause the price of labour to drop. In women’s clothing the fashion dictates of production lines were more pronounced than in men’s clothing, making business more insecure as a result. Designers and sales departments could make or break manufacturers in women’s wear. According to Toronto cloak manufacturer Lewis Manley, the ability to sell product lines before the production season began depended on the manufacturer having a good fashion sense, a good designer, and skilled salesmen who could attract reliable buyers to the firm. The designer was the highest paid worker in a dress shop. Manley put it succinctly: ‘The designer can ruin a firm, for they create the image that customers come to expect of the firm. If the designer leaves, it is difficult to replace them.’15 In the dress trade, where fashion dictates necessitated more dramatic responsiveness to consumer demand, the selling process took on a greater importance. According to Joseph Said of Mabelle Dress, Montreal: ‘The success in the dress industry is at the market end. You have to merchandise first. We commit for 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the requirements early and gamble that the output will sell.’16 Success as a dress manufacturer meant having the right fabrics, making the right sales, and keeping inventory to a minimum. The variety of styles and grades of clothing in both the outerwear (women’s coats and suits) and dress trades often necessitated shorter production runs. As a result, workers in the dress industry had to be skilled in several operations, and manufacturers relied on maintaining an accessible pool of skilled labour because there was little time to train them. As Said put it, ‘In the dress industry you are in a fashion competition. Styles change so often you can’t operate on a section work system. Your operators have to be able to do three or four operations.’17 The dress trade required not only skill and speed from its operators, but also, for most manufacturers, cheap labour. For workers in the trades, the rapidly changing styles meant intense periods of work alternating with periods of unemployment.

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Even during the good years, workers could expect to be unemployed for two periods of the year. In the dress trade the busy season could be short and intense. ‘If you want to do a sizeable business you have to produce the majority of your output during the heart of the season’, Manley said. ‘Retailers demand quick delivery, before the end of July or early August, for the fall garments.’18 Manufacturers had to take production from what was virtually a standstill in the off-season to full production within a few short months. Spring lines had to be ready in May, so designers started work on them in December and plants began to take on operators in late December to early January. Fall lines were made up in June, July, and August, and by September the slack period began. For everyone in the trade, work was carried on at a feverish pitch in season, only to be followed by lay-offs until the next season began. Mass buying could also work to reduce the length of the season in the trade; when buyers placed large orders at the last minute, manufacturers had to produce the goods even more quickly, which led to longer hours and shorter seasons. ‘Hand to mouth buying’ would become more common during the early 1930s as stores wanted to hedge their bets when consumers were no longer flocking into the stores.19 With the great need for flexibility in dress manufacturing, shops in women’s wear remained small, with low capital investment. Of the 385 firms operating in 1926, only four had capital investment of more than $1 million, while the bulk—275—had capital investment of under $20,000 on average.20 As a result, women’s wear manufacturers increased in numbers. In 1920 in Canada there were 231 manufacturers in women’s wear and 196 in men’s wear. Some 20 years later the numbers of factories producing women’s clothing had tripled, while men’s clothing production had doubled.21 The increased competition between small firms meant that manufacturers very rarely co-operated with one another to regulate prices or wages. Buyers had to have confidence in the manufacturers’ ability to produce garments on time, and this confidence required cultivation on the part of the manufacturer. Before the age of large department stores, many small firms had competed with one another for sales to the small retail shops. Firms able to establish a variety of buyers survived, while those who sold to a very few buyers often went out of business within a few seasons. Because of the multiplicity of small firms there was always a good deal of undercutting of prices in sales, particularly in the women’s wear sector. The fragility of the manufacturers’ relationship to consumer demand put them at the mercy of large buyers. After World War I

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department stores grew rapidly, along with consumer demand. Some, like the T. Eaton Company, had their own factories producing many of the goods sold in the stores, while others relied on outside manufacturers. With the growth in department store sales, clothing manufacturers were often tempted to produce exclusively for that market. While this ensured a steady demand, it also made for dependency.

Unions in the 1920s Union organizers in the clothing trades continued to face a multitude of problems, under precarious economic circumstances. In an industry notorious for its economic instability and sweatshop labour conditions, just getting a foothold in the trade presented a severe challenge to the resources of the union stalwarts—and each sector of the trade presented a different challenge. At the same time, international unions were moving towards the professionalization and centralization of their bureaucracies. During the 1920s and early 1930s most union activity in the clothing industry centred on the men’s clothing sector, where in 1920 men and women wage-earners were in about equal proportions, often working in larger shops, many of them in existence for decades. Unions were weaker in the women’s clothing sector, where women workers dominated. In women’s clothing in 1923, with over 7,000 workers in Ontario and another 3,000 in Quebec, there were only 1,245 union members in seven Canadian locals.22 The factories of the women’s clothing trades, especially in dressmaking, had less economic stability. The different unions organizing in the men’s and women’s trades further fragmented unionization efforts. Union efforts in the men’s clothing trade focused on two familiar issues: the contracting out of work and the adoption of piecework. Both issues inadvertently pushed the unions into coming to terms with the growing presence of women workers in the shops. The 1920 ACWA convention established the principles of weekwork, standardized work, and a 44-hour week. Only a few years old, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers took seriously the mandate to organize garment workers in Canada and sent a staff person to do so. The need to co-ordinate efforts to fight the movement of factories to small towns and develop organization in the larger centres led the union to hold an all-Canadian locals meeting in Toronto in October 1920. The union also made efforts to attract French-Canadian workers (mainly women) through an active French local and a French department in Advance, the union magazine. A general organizer was sent to

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Montreal in 1922 to organize for a strike that year, and two FrenchCanadian women were hired to organize the shirtmakers in Montreal in 1920–2.23 In general, the ACWA put a great deal of effort into organizing the Montreal and Toronto shops. During the 1920s it sent staff to both centres and ran educational programs, and in 1926 the ACWA convention was held in Montreal. It was a hard battle, made more difficult by the factional fighting that touched both Toronto and Montreal during these years. But the ACWA’s main task during the 1920s was to bring the contract shops under its control. In December 1921 Montreal manufacturers introduced wage reductions, which precipitated a general strike in July 1922. Between 5,000 and 6,000 workers walked out.24 The workers won some concessions from a few of the larger manufacturers and signed collective agreements specifying that contract work would be sent to union contract shops only. But the victory was short-lived. By 1924 a dispute with the contract shops in Montreal again led the ACWA to call out its workers from the shops. Some 900 men and 600 women joined the general work stoppage. A collective agreement signed in late January 1924 with the manufacturers’ association stipulated that the companies had to use only unionized contract shops, which would force contract shops into the union if they wanted to be assured of work from association members. A subsequent agreement between the manufacturers and contractors stated that all contractors used by members of the manufacturers’ association had to be members of a separate United Clothing Contractors Association. By this method both union and manufacturers hoped to be able to control the conditions in the contract shops.25 But the number of contractors continued to grow, and the fight against them intensified.26 In August 1924 the ACWA pulled 1,700 workers out in a work stoppage in the independent contract shops. Again the victory was soon tempered, as a general depression in the clothing trade from 1924 to 1926 caused many manufacturers and contractors to ignore the agreements. A general strike of 6,000 workers in July 1926 established union shops in part of the industry, but the tough anti-union manufacturers still refused to sign. By late September some 200 workers were still on the streets.27 The strikes at two large shops, Society Brand and Hart Clothing, continued for several months until a settlement was reached. Anti-union sentiment ran strong in some of the older established shops such as Vineburg’s, Society Brand, and Samuel Hart, and these workplaces continued to fight unionization throughout the interwar period.

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By 1928 the contract shops were no longer adhering to union agreements. A lockout in the contract shops in June 1928 was followed by a temporary settlement in July, but it took another stoppage in August to bring those shops into an agreement. Ultimately, the never-ending struggles had cost the union. The ACWA in Montreal had conducted five general work stoppages in the trade by 1930, and membership had begun to fall. Montreal workers continued to struggle just to stay alive. Only the Toronto ACWA had been able to retain a collective agreement into the 1920s. It was easier for the union to gain ground in Toronto, because much of the skilled work located in the market there was present in several large, established shops producing madeto-measure men’s clothing. (In 1921, 40 per cent of Toronto firms specialized in made-to-measure, while Montreal had only 13 per cent of this market.)28 Co-operation between unions and manufacturers was easier to obtain in the men’s clothing sector, because the trade required skilled workers who could not so easily be replaced. These conditions led to a more co-operative company-union atmosphere in Toronto. In Montreal, where contract shops proliferated and women’s labour was cheap, co-operation was the last thing on the manufacturers’ minds. In the women’s clothing trades, organization had been confined to the cloak shops, where the issue of weekwork was a prime concern. While the 1919 strikes had introduced the principle of weekwork as opposed to piecework, with limited success, the economic decline of the cloak market relative to the dress market meant that the battle to re-establish weekwork was doomed. In both Toronto and Montreal union efforts to enforce weekwork standards were continually defeated. Initially the Montreal locals stood tough on the weekwork issue and struck to maintain it, while Toronto locals took a more conciliatory approach, leaving the issue to arbitration. Neither approach worked, because the manufacturers were unwilling to accept any concessions that would hinder their introduction of piecework. During the 1920s the ILGWU mounted only one concerted organizing campaign in Canada. In late 1924 and early 1925 it made efforts to establish a presence in the women’s cloak sector in both Montreal and Toronto. After facing an intransigent front of cloak manufacturers, the union turned on the membership of the locals instead. The battle for political control in the clothing unions had begun in earnest. A bitter international executive reported on the situation: ‘The local cloakmakers apparently, however, are falling short of the understanding of

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practical fighting unionism. They would have the fruits of organization fall down from above into their laps and they continually expect the International to fight their battles for them.’29 The situation was not quite that simple. In 1921, for instance, a campaign in Montreal was complicated by court injunctions, arrests, and jail sentences for some of the local activists.30 In the clothing trades, hostile manufacturers resorted to charges under the Criminal Code as a way of staving off unionization drives, forcing the unions into costly legal battles. The international executive had yet to come to terms with conditions in the Canadian cloak trade, and it was easy, once again, to place the blame on the presence of young FrenchCanadian women in the trade. ‘One of the most important factors that hamper the organization in Montreal is the fact that about 40 percent of the cloakmakers are French Canadian, who are a difficult element to organize’, the president of the ILGWU reported in 1924.31 Although the ILGWU sent two staff people to Canada and spent $40,000 on organizational work, the bulk of it in Montreal, in 1924 the ILGWU concluded, ‘Due to the terrible crisis in the cloak trade and the constant attacks of the organized cloak employers, labour standards have given way and conditions have changed very much for the worse.’32 The workers needed a strike to organize their ranks, and Toronto workers struck on 5 February 1925. Over 1,200 workers, 900 men and 300 women, walked out. By the time the strike ended in early March most manufacturers had agreed to their demands, producing the first contract in the trade since the collapse of the 1920 agreement.33 The settlement in Toronto established impartial machinery under Dr J.W. Macmillan, the Minimum Wage Board chairman, and set out a joint employer/union sanitary committee. While this impartial machinery moved the union into a settlement structure that took power away from the shop floor, it also had the advantage of creating a joint union/management responsibility for policing shops that broke from the agreement. In Montreal an ILGWU strike began on 3 February 1925, bringing out 800 men and 550 women from 115 shops. The ILGWU noted, ‘The most striking feature of the walkout was that most of the Frenchspeaking workers, upon whom the employers relied heavily to remain in the shops, walked out together with the rest of the trade.’34 But the union did not respond to this show of support from the French-speaking workers; the strike committee of 29 men and one woman included no French workers.35 The hierarchical structure of the union meant that vice-president Hochman and local ILGWU representative Joseph Schubert handled negotiations with the employers

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and co-ordinated strike activity. Within three days a settlement had been reached with 27 firms, covering 700 workers. Yet neither of the 1925 settlements enabled the ILGWU to sustain the gains made in the strikes. The strong resistance of employers in both cities could not be broken. The union membership of about a thousand workers in each of Montreal and Toronto quickly dissolved, and dissident elements in both centres challenged the handling of the negotiations and agreements. But the narrative of the battle between the left and right did not focus on these collective bargaining issues. Instead, the question became one of ridding the garment unions of their Communist activists. This time the executive blamed the situation on ‘the Communists’ destructive propaganda’.36 By 1929 the ILGWU lawyer, J.L. Cohen, was writing to ILGWU president David Dubinsky: ‘The local [Toronto] market is almost completely unorganized, the membership amounting at the most, to 300 out of an available membership of at least 1,800 or 2,000. Conditions of the trade are deplorable to say the least.’37 With organization in the women’s clothing trades limited to the cloakmakers, the narrow ILGWU vision failed to see the signs of economic decline. In 1922 cloaks and suits represented only 30 per cent of the total value of production in the Canadian women’s clothing industry, and by 1934 that proportion would be down to 24 per cent.38 By 1930, 44 per cent of the value of women’s clothing production would be in dressmaking, yet instead of organizing the growing numbers of men and women in the dress shops the ILGWU continued to focus its efforts on the dying cloak trade.39 Perhaps it was easier to stay with the known, to concentrate on the sectors in which men worked, rather than enter the more unfamiliar domain of sectors dominated by women.

Women, the ‘New Unionism’, and Arbitration Poor economic conditions along with the inability of unions and manufacturers alike to develop a consensus among their members placed heavy pressure on both unions and manufacturers to find other solutions to the poor wages and social conditions in the industry. Unionization efforts had made little headway in the first two decades of the century, and militant union activists, particularly those in the Trade Union Educational League, were making life unpleasant for the traditional craft-based unions such as the ILGWU. Although legislation had granted unions recognition as bargaining agents for workers in the trade, no enforcement mechanisms existed to push the parties in a

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trade union dispute towards a settlement. Several factors worked to create a climate of conciliation: lack of labour unity both at the international level and in Canada, costly legal battles against criminal charges levelled at union activists who walked the picket lines, and continued anti-union sentiment among the manufacturers in all sectors of the trade. The unions’ willingness to encourage the government to take on the responsibility for regulation and stabilization of the industry came out of a sense of desperation as much as out of any liberal thinking. In this there was a certain balance between an act of desperation by the manufacturers and international unions and the formation of a reasonable response to the unions’ attempts to gain legitimacy as organizations. Unions in the garment shops had to convince manufacturers that they offered a responsible approach to labour relations. On their own they had met with limited success during the period up to the late 1920s, and when the government began to make overtures to the labour movement in its efforts to regulate and stabilize the industry, the unions were more receptive to the idea than they had been before the war. In the United States, as Christopher Tomlins argues, the existence and continued development of a national union organizational structure rather than the older quasi-syndicalist organizations of trades offered the opportunity for the expansion of State relations with the unions. According to Tomlins, ‘Developments in the institutional structure and ideology of the labor movement, in labor relations theory and, finally, in the law thus combined in the years after 1900 to show how unions might be accommodated within the corporate political economy.’40 In both the ILGWU and the ACWA much of the process of expansion and increasing professionalization through centralization was articulated through the rhetoric of new unionism, which sought stability and security through trade agreements that offered manufacturers trade union peace in exchange for union recognition and wage concessions—a responsible partnership of two parties in a particular economic relationship. The Canadian opposition to this process of bureaucratization and centralization challenged the central offices of the international unions on two fronts. Left-wing unionists in the two unions fought against the bureaucratization, because it was moving labour away from a militant adversarial politics that rejected conciliation and favoured strike actions to achieve demands. Local union leadership felt that decision-making should remain the prerogative of the locals instead of being set by head offices located out of the country. They argued that US union officials did not understand the

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specific Canadian economic realities, and they were opposed to the centralization of activities in the New York offices. The union bureaucrats, then, were lined up against their own members as well as the manufacturers. The political battles over these issues had significant consequences. The growth of unions during the interwar years involved a struggle on the part of labour to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the State, but at the same time unions had to pay a price for that legitimation: they had to compromise. For the unions—which came to the bargaining table without much power to begin with—the fragile economic climate made the compromise more severe than might otherwise have been the case. They used every method they could muster to gain control in the garment shops, but with limited success. A divided house of labour brought to its knees by periodic unemployment and chronic low wages faced a group of manufacturers equally divided and under siege. Both looked to the government to bring about some stability to this situation. During the interwar years the traditional shop-floor unionism was gradually replaced by the new unionism model, exemplified in the needle trades by three issues: the enforcement of production standards, control of hiring practices, and the use of a piecework system. The resolution of these three issues became the foundation stones of the new unionism, part of a larger vision articulated most effectively by ACWA president Sidney Hillman, who was influential in restructuring labour union politics in the clothing trades in the period.41 To bring about this change, union officials first had to control their own members, which was not an easy task given militant elements in the locals and a seeming lack of interest in trade unionism on the part of women workers. But the introduction of arbitration machinery and third-party arbitration into collective agreements (in the ACWA in 1919) meant that the unions could diffuse conflict to a certain extent by moving it away from the shop floor and into outside hands.42 The introduction of a third party into collective bargaining not only altered the workers’ relationship to manufacturers, allowing manufacturers gradually to introduce labour process changes in their shops, but also reduced management’s prerogative to set wages, hire labour, and set production standards. Henceforth, decisions on wages, systems of work, and related conditions in the shops were to be made for the industry as a whole, rather than as a resolution of conflict between a single manufacturer and his workers. But the success of the new unionism required converts, both among the trade unionists and among the manufacturers, and the

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international unions’ bureaucracies spent the interwar period trying to convince manufacturers of their reasonableness. Gradually, large manufacturers (especially those in the more stable men’s clothing sectors) were bought off by the unions’ willingness to introduce production standards and accept piecework in their shops. The rank and file in both clothing unions felt strongly about this issue, and the fight against it was long and hard. In the end, both unions had to compromise, and it was up to Hillman to spell out just how the compromise would work.43 The new tripartite structure made women’s quest for a fair hearing even more difficult. While individual shop ‘chairladies’ were now empowered to collect dues and receive complaints, deputies—always men—appointed by the Arbitration Board handled all other union duties. The Arbitration Board now handled shop-floor concerns such as distribution of work and rates of pay. In his review of arbitration decisions in Montreal’s men’s clothing industries, Michael Brecher spelled out the board’s governing principles: ‘the emphasis on workers’ discipline, the union’s responsibility for the actions of its own members in violation of the agreement, the sanctity of the contract, the overriding importance of stability and uninterrupted production during the life of a contract, and the central role of collective bargaining in the maintenance of a mutually beneficial relationship between labour and management.’44 Within this structure, wage decisions no longer directly involved women in the shop. As a result, the resolution of shop conflicts changed from a social interaction to a bureaucratic process, making shop-floor resistance less effective. Rather than being questioned, traditional gender divisions in the shops were often officially confirmed by arbitration decisions, as illustrated in a 1921 ruling on a Montreal manufacturers’ application for a wage cut of 15 per cent for male employees and 20 per cent for females. The board was sympathetic to the manufacturers’ request, stating in its decision that it was ‘convinced that both from the point of view of skill and of production, the wages and the costs of the three main women’s operations, namely, armhole basting, finishing and button sewing, are comparatively high, and some adjustment ought to be made.’45 The board ordered an increase in production levels, to go up by 10 per cent on male operations and by 15 per cent on female operations. It warned: ‘If production has not come up to this average [in the next month], then beginning with the first pay roll week in February a wage cut of 10 per cent will go into effect.’46 When workers were unable to meet this demand, the board called for the wage reductions. As a result the union membership, unhappy with the settlement, began to drift away from the union.47

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Arbitration decisions often focused on contentious issues in the trade, with standards of production, hiring practices, and piecework key among them. Once this method of collective bargaining had been accepted by both employers and trade unions, it gave manufacturers the opportunity to introduce gradual changes in the labour process with the compliance, and in some cases the assistance, of the trade unions themselves. But because women were neither business agents in the union bureaucracy nor involved in the collective bargaining at strike time, their interests on the shop floor were seen as having little significance. Trade union control over the membership was extended further when the preferential union-shop clause was effectively extended to hiring practices in the 1920s. ‘Employers needing additional workers shall first make application to the Union specifying the number and kind of workers required.’48 This clause in the agreements gave the union greater control over its members and ensured a more compliant membership by giving union hierarchies the right to hire workers. Both the ILGWU and the ACWA saw the production standards issue as a bargaining chip in industry-wide negotiations. In an effort to stop full-scale use of piecework in the 1920s, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers introduced standards of production. In 1920 ACWA president Hillman had told the union convention: ‘I feel it is my duty to say we believe in production standards. . . . We have no quarrel with industry. We are for production. The greatest enemy of our organization would be opposition to production.’49 By 1925 the union was co-operating with the manufacturers in the introduction of section work ‘wherever such sectionalizing will prove advantageous in reducing costs’ and helping them install piecework systems in their shops.50 In August 1925 women pocketmakers at Toronto’s Regent Tailors resisted an Arbitration Board decision setting a production standard for each worker of 110 coats a day. The women gave notice to quit work immediately. The union tried to enforce the board decision, and the Toronto ACWA joint board sent new workers to the shop.51 But a committee of pocketmakers from other shops came to the joint board of the ACWA to declare that they were ‘in accord with the pocketmakers at Regent Tailors’. The committee stated, ‘The trouble at Regent is an attempt on the part of manufacturers to increase production and [we] have therefore decided if an attempt will be made in other shops to increase production of the pocketmakers, a stoppage will be declared.’52 Frank Rosenbloom, general office staff representative in Toronto after World War I, met with Regent Tailors and together they decided on a production level of 108 coats a day. Women were not included in these negotiations. By late September the issue had

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still not been resolved, and Regent pocketmakers reported to the union that their wages had been reduced by two dollars a week because they were not able to meet the Arbitration Board’s quota. While the women ‘claimed they were trying their best to do so’, the shop foreman continued to make their lives miserable. The pocketmakers threatened to give their notice again unless he was removed from the shop.53 The union promised to look into the matter, but the issue did not appear again before the ACWA joint board. Given the women’s dissatisfaction with the union’s handling of this problem, it is little wonder that their adherence to the union remained tenuous. The structure of the Arbitration Board and its mandate meant that decisions rarely took into account the employees’ specific working conditions. The board looked at the job, rather than the person who did the job. This arbitration system continued to divide workers along gender lines and further legitimized stratification of jobs on the basis of gender-ridden definitions of skill. When women in those jobs began to demand better wages or conditions of work, both employers and union representatives turned to the arbitration machinery for assistance, effectively blunting women’s resistance and perpetuating wage differentials.

Fighting the Piecework Issue After World War I, with third-party arbitration in place in some shops, the manufacturers again began to push for piecework. The international union officials, concluding that they could not effectively stop the trend, instead began to push for standardized piece-rates to prevent shops from setting different rates for the same job and creating excessive competition. At a meeting of the manufacturers and the Toronto ACWA in 1925, Hillman stated that ‘personally he was sympathetic to piecework, but it was not possible to get it on the market against the wishes of the people. The first step in this direction was the enforcement of standards of production, and this was the duty of the manufacturers.’54 In Toronto union staff representative Frank Rosenbloom told manufacturers that the ACWA ‘would not object to piecework, but even if some groups were willing to accept piecework, others would object. Prejudice was the chief reason for objection to piecework.’55 The two business cultures in the manufacturing world had different reasons for seeing piecework as a necessity. Small contract shops, beyond the fringe of unionism, had always used piecework. Largescale manufacturers saw its introduction as a method of improving

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efficiency and overcoming the variation in skills and capabilities of individual workers. The Toronto manufacturers of men’s clothing had pushed for the general introduction of piecework before the war, and it was finally firmly in place by 1931. In the Montreal men’s wear sector, the method of payment had been changed from weekwork to piecework by 1930.56 While male workers strongly opposed the practice of piecework in their shops, for women in the needle trades piecework was the norm. The issue preoccupied union officials, who had argued early on: Piecework tends to interfere with the concentration of the efforts of the organization on the really important issues—under a system of piecework the price settlements, with all the squabbles and disputes connected with them, tend to take all the attention of the workers and the organization. . . . Daily little struggles in connection with the price settlements, the energies and militancy of the workers of the trade are gradually spent, so that the organization meets with greater difficulties when there is a necessity to concentrate on the battle general.57 Yet, once again, the fight over piecework did not include much participation by women. The women workers were generally younger than the men and more likely to be short-term employees without strong attachments to the principles of trade unionism. Because of this, women tended to struggle against the intensity of work, but not against the cause of that intensity.

The Communist Challenge: The Trade Union Educational League In those days everything was different. We were so fanatic. It took a few years before I came into the socialist camp. Anyway once I went into the [Bolsheviks’] camp, so I remained all my life, a leftwinger. Even today there are many things in the Soviet Union that I would like to see different, but I can’t get it out of my heart.58 The battle for control of the membership in the international unions was further complicated by the presence of a vocal group of Communist Party of Canada (CPC) activists who did not share the same vision of corporate partnership in a capitalist economy. Trade union policy in the CPC was not consistent during the interwar years. Initially, in the early 1920s, the Party worked through the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) to influence the international unions, but by the

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late 1920s anti-Communist sentiments in the unions had pushed Communists to the margins. Then, when the international Communist movement changed political direction in the late 1920s, the CPC set up dual unions to battle for the rights of labour. Historian Joan Sangster notes: The Party’s initial trade union strategies . . . tended to exclude women. In the early 1920’s the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), a Comintern organization, urged its member parties to work within established trade unions. Women’s marginal status in the union movement meant that they were easily by-passed by these strategies, which concentrated on areas of established radical support, such as mining and lumbering.59 As part of an international socialist movement, the efforts of Canadian Communists were linked to programs and policies developed in the Soviet Union, and changes in political strategies and tactics in the labour movement were developed from within the body of trade unions associated with the policies of the Soviet Red International of Labor Unions. During the 1920s the RILU influenced the development of trade unionism in Canada. Lumber workers and the United Mine Workers Union in Cape Breton affiliated directly with the international body, while in other unions the Communists were able to have considerable influence. Initially the CPC made its main base in the TUEL, an affiliate of the Moscow-based RILU. The TUEL had been set up by the US Communist Party in 1920.60 It stressed the need for unity in the working-class movement and encouraged oppositional movements within the international unions (ACWA and ILGWU) to push for progressive action from within. After a branch of the TUEL was set up in Toronto in 1922, it spread out to several sectors of the working-class movement. The TUEL was a propaganda movement, not an organization, according to Tim Buck, future leader of the CPC and then head of the TUEL: ‘It had no constitution, no locals, no dues. Its most active supporters in every locality or enterprise, or local union, called informal meetings from time to time to discuss proposals for activity.’61 The program that united Canadian TUEL supporters included industrial unionism, united trade union political action, organization of the unorganized, and, after July 1923, national autonomy for the Canadian trade union movement. During the 1920s the TUEL was one of the main proponents of an industry-wide union based on a shop delegate plan.62 It was in the garment unions that much of the spirit of revolutionary unionism was focused.

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The revolution in Russia in 1917 energized the young left-wing activists in the immigrant communities of Toronto and Montreal. During the Great War and after it, socialist clubs, street meetings, and left-wing newspapers all championed the cause of the working classes. The impact of the 1919 General Strike in Winnipeg and the establishment of the Communist Party of Canada in 1921 seemed to suggest that the revolution was just around the corner. In the needle trades, both the ILGWU and the ACWA reflected the growth of socialist politics. Much of the Jewish leadership of these unions was drawn from the various sectors of the left-wing cultural and fraternal organizations that populated the immigrant worlds of the urban centres in Canada and the United States. When Bertha Blugerman arrived in Winnipeg after World War I she fell into a left-wing immigrant community almost as a matter of course. ‘My brothers were here since 1913, you know. So they gave me a head start because they took me places.’ By the time Bertha got her first job in the Winnipeg needle trades in 1924, she was already part of a growing social and cultural community that would shape her commitment to the left for the years to come. As Blugerman recalls: The Winnipeg General Strike played a very important role for us and also the question of what was going on in Europe was important. The immigrants that came at that time were a more idealistic type, more desirous of knowledge. We started building schools, we started building cultural organizations. After the strike in 1923, the ILGWU was practically defunct. The shops were all unorganized and it was like that all over Canada, not just here in Winnipeg, in Toronto, in Montreal, too. So most of the organized were under the left-wing leadership. We were ourselves, a sacrificing bunch. We worked for, went around ragged and organized the workers. We were the ones who were idealistic and you needed to be to do all that work. There isn’t the same idealism now, I’d say it’s labour business now, it’s all business.63 Beckie Lapides came to Canada from Russia in 1904 when she was six years old. By the time she arrived in Toronto her older sisters were already schooled in socialist ideas. I remember, when I was 13 or so, my sister had joined the Socialist Party. She took me along everywhere, and I wasn’t bored. They used to have people who were public speakers from their organization, they all spoke on how to inspire the people. . . . Then when

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I went to work in the factory, I met a girl there who was my age and we became friends. She belonged to what they called the Russian intelligentsia, they were mostly people who were active in Russia before 1905. She had a lot of friends coming in there, belonging to the Russian intelligentsia. They recommended to me what I should read, that’s how I became a socialist.64 Young activists like these women brought this idealism, energy, and youth into the TUEL and later the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers. In the formative years of the ILGWU, left-wing activists had been successful in establishing a Shop Delegates League, with its centre of activity in Local 25 in the New York dressmakers’ trades. As early as 1920 the general executive board had tried to isolate the dress local from further influence in the broader union movement. In a move to split the local into separate dress and waist locals, the executive tried to isolate the left, but the Shop Delegates Leagues grew and spread into other locals and other trades. The Shop Delegates Leagues of the ILGWU joined the TUEL in 1921, and by 1922 oppositional forces in the union were having an impact in the large centres of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Canadian needle trades locals experienced the same outburst of leftist activism, and oppositional groups in the ILGWU and ACWA in both Montreal and Toronto drew inspiration from the TUEL program. During the 1920s the international unions were still trying to consolidate their control of the industry, and their weakness gave the TUEL room to manoeuvre. The issues around introduction of production standards fed the fires of factionalism in the unions. The TUEL pointed out that the use of outside arbitration moved the union away from its earlier class politics, arguing that the Hillman administration in the ACWA had ‘transformed the union into the efficiency department of the factory-made men’s clothing industry’.65 Stressing the Communist influence, Buck argued: ‘We have active left wingers in every union except the United Garment Workers, with a committee embracing members of ACWA, ILGWU, Journeymen Tailors, Capmakers, and Furriers, coordinating their work on a national scale.’66 At the 1925 needle trades meeting of the TUEL in New York, the 90 delegates present included representatives from the ILGWU and ACWA in both Toronto and Montreal. The meeting demanded: ‘Union control of contractors through jobbers and manufacturers; a 36 hour week; 40 weeks guaranteed employment per year; abolishment of minimum standards of production and piecework throughout the industry; yearly earning power to a minimum of

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$2,000.00; an unemployment insurance plan paid for by the employers and administered by the unions.’67 By 1923 the left had considerable influence in the American ILGWU, in which left-wing members were strategically placed in leadership positions in several locals in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.68 In 1924 the executive board of the international and the TUEL members took their battle to the convention floor. With the issue of dual unionism as its central focus, the credentials committee of the convention, led by Joseph Breslaw and David Dubinsky, refused to seat elected delegates who were seen as members of the TUEL. That move did not succeed, but over the next several years the war against the TUEL resulted in locals being shut down, offices locked, elections declared invalid, and members suspended from the union. The needle trades unions were in a state of virtual civil war, with the trade union leadership pitted against large elements of its membership. The battles for political control grew in intensity throughout the 1920s. In both the ACWA and the ILGWU, the central union offices remained in the hands of the right-wing faction, whose members capitalized on what they called bad management by the left as a justification for purging the union of its left-wing activists under accusations of membership in dual unions. The political battle that ensued touched all sectors of the needle trades as it spread from New York locals to locals all over North America. In 1924, before the ILGWU began an organizing drive in the Canadian cloak market, ILGWU locals in Montreal and Toronto had been made up of a few ‘faithful members’.69 At that time the ILGWU ‘had a handful of C.P.C. nuclei in Toronto, while in Montreal, the entire Party fraction in all branches of the needle trades with a work force of 10,000, numbered 19 people.’70 By 1925 CPC leadership was in control of ILGWU Local 13 (operators) in Montreal. In Toronto the TUEL became active in the cloakmakers operators local of the ILGWU.71 The TUEL presence forced the union to discuss rank-and-file democracy, Canadian autonomy, and control, and to push for the return of weekwork in all the trades. After successful general strikes in 1925, the ILGWU membership was up to about a thousand in each city, but soon after, when the membership dwindled, the ILGWU blamed it on the Communists. By 1926 the Montreal operators local and the Joint Board were led by left-wing unionists who tried to establish the principle of local control over union affairs.72 Late that year, in a countrywide clean-up, the ILGWU pushed the leftists out of Montreal and closed the local office.

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In Canada by 1928 the New York executive had actively purged the left from the ILGWU. In Montreal and Toronto, cloakmakers disbanded the operators locals. The ILGWU blamed the loss of membership during the late 1920s on the CPC presence in the unions, their tactics in the shops, and on whatever other excuse they could find. The executive board withheld financial assistance and organizational staff from Montreal, saying, ‘When the time is ripe and there are signs of a genuine desire to initiate a self supporting trade union organization in Montreal, the International, needless to say will be glad to do all it can to revive the standards and the organization to what it had built so well in 1925.’73 Morris Sigman, who took over the presidency of the ILGWU in 1924, was, like Schlesinger before him, bitterly critical of the left in the union. The TUEL influence on the ACWA in Canada was the strongest in Montreal and weaker in Toronto, where the ACWA had more strength.74 In the Montreal ACWA the TUEL controlled two of the most important locals, the pressers’ local and the coatmakers’ local, and in 1927 two of the business agents on the Joint Board were TUEL members. Internal fighting in the union moved the focus away from the battle against non-union manufacturers and contractors, who were able to take advantage of the situation, reneging on collective agreements, lowering wages, and increasing the reliance on small non-union contractors. According to an ACWA stalwart named Blumberg, ‘These leaders had been so busy trying to bring into the Montreal organization speakers and agitators and advisors that were concerned about furthering the interests of the Workers’ Party than remembering that they were representing and working for the clothing workers of the city of Montreal.’75 By late 1928 the New York staff of the ACWA was in Montreal to ‘rescue the organization from the factionalists’ grip’.76 New elections for office that year saw the end of TUEL membership on the ACWA executive—with the ACWA sending a general organizer to Montreal to work with local right-wing unionists to ensure a victory for the central office. According to some accounts they were able to rally support from French and Italian workers’ locals, the cutters’ local, and some members of the pantmakers’ local. As usual, a subtext of ethnic animosity played a part in the struggle for control of the union. By the 1928 ACWA convention Blumberg was able to announce: ‘Montreal is beginning to re-establish conditions in the shops. Montreal is not talking politics today.’77 In Toronto the TUEL had control of the ACWA’s coatmakers Local 211 and encouraged ACWA affiliation with the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL), leading several individual shop strikes during the mid-1920s. But as in Montreal, TUEL

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influence in Toronto waned after the loss of the 1927 local elections.78 Still, the TUEL continued to influence the tone of union politics and was involved in a fight with the union bureaucrats at Stone Clothing in 1929.79 The two visions of trade unionism continued to clash. The report from the 1930 ACWA convention stated: To the local ‘lefts’ belongs the credit for forcing the issue, which eventually saved the union. They set in motion all sorts of insinuations. They repeatedly made the charge, with no basis in fact, that General Officers sought to impose upon the Montreal workers, and against their will, a system of piecework instead of the prevailing system of week work. They antagonized local activists who would not accept their dictation. They achieved an actual division of the organization in two opposing camps of ‘rights’ and ‘lefts.’80 The Communist trade unionists undoubtedly played an important role in the garment unions, proving to be among the most dedicated workers in the union movement. During the 1920s they took part in every major labour conflict, and they continued to play a major role in the needle trades in the 1930s despite the decline of trade union support during that period.81 At a point when the international unions were not yet firmly entrenched, the CPC brought to the unions a vision of rank-and-file industrial unionism that both challenged the traditional craft conceptions of unionism and the hierarchical organizational structures espoused by the ACWA and ILGWU leaderships. The Communist-led unionists wanted to establish local control over collective bargaining, while the bureaucrats in both major unions thought it more efficient to run things from their New York offices. The Canadian locals’ call for Canadian autonomy was strongly supported by the leftist forces in the unions. The CPC drew active left-wing women from all walks of life into trade union support work through the growth of Women’s Labour Leagues across Canada. During the early 1920s the Toronto branch of the WLL was active in supporting the organization of women workers in the garment industry and, with the support of the Toronto Trades and Labour Council, met with some success in this endeavour. While the CPC was no glowing example of support for anything like feminist principles, its emphasis on the need to organize working women did place it in the forefront of progressive forces in the union movement.82 The ardent attack against the left in both the ACWA and the ILGWU

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touched both men and women activists, but the approach to each gender was distinct. Union officials saw the leftist women activists as different from the male activists and were inherently suspicious of women’s actions. Alice Kessler-Harris suggests, ‘Labeling women leftists and communists was not so much an indication of their political position (although some were surely communists) as an acknowledgment of their potential power and a fear that oppositional politics of whatever kind would breed disloyalty in a fighting organization.’83 At the 1924 ILGWU meetings, after the executive had issued a ruling prohibiting its members from belonging to the TUEL, the credentials committee withheld approval for several women activists, stating that as members of the TUEL they were in a dual labour organization. The committee confronted the women: They say that they are organized for educational purposes. What do they discuss at their meetings? They are discussing the week work system, the piece work system, the 40 hour week. Are these political questions or economic questions? They are organized to get control of the labor movement and their first step is to get control of our International Union, because we have a few emotional girls who do not think with their heads but with their hearts, and who run away with their sentiment and call themselves ‘progressives.’84 Many of the women active in the TUEL and the progressive left had come to believe in the future of socialism through the social and cultural activities in the immigrant community. Jewish women, along with their brothers and fathers, led the needle trades workers into the fledgling trade union movement. Like Bertha Blugerman and Beckie Lapides, they were committed socialists who had given much thought to the path they now took. The union leadership seemed to find it hard to believe that these women actually had rational political views, and often accused women activists of acting irrationally when they went against the trade union bureaucracy.

Women and the Unions: The General Fallacy of Gender The ambiguity of male union activists towards women workers made their efforts to unionize them inconsistent, and it is therefore no surprise to discover that their efforts met with limited success when they moved beyond the confines of the progressive Jewish community. During the interwar period trade union attitudes to women workers changed, and the pre-war conception of their unique status gave way to a new view of their militancy. For instance, after a strike in

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Chicago in 1926 the ACWA’s general executive board commented: The strike revealed the general fallacy that the women’s membership in the labour movement cannot be depended upon for their loyalty and their readiness and fighting ability in protecting their organization. A majority of the members involved in the strike were women. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be in daily contact with the strike, both in New York and Chicago, could not help but admire the way the women members not only held their own with their brothers, but on many occasions were the driving power both in maintaining the morale and in the actual conduct of the fight on the picket line. . . . Let this be the answer to those who like to cover their own inefficiency in organizational work by blaming it on the women in the industry.85 These changes in attitude at the top of the ACWA had altered the union’s organizing techniques. The 1922 convention adopted a resolution affirming: ‘In the selection and appointment of organizers to unorganized territory preference be given to women from our rank and file who understand the psychology of the working women.’86 Despite this apparent change of heart, ACWA efforts continued to be inconsistent. In May 1923 the Toronto Joint Board decided to get a committee of girls from Local 233 to help organize the shirtmakers’ campaign, because most shirtmakers were female. They hired Sarah Gold at $125 a month to do the job.87 In September, after a strike at Beaver Shirt Company, Gold reported, ‘The workers are new to the organization, their financial situation was bad. They expect to be helped by the union.’ Yet by the end of September, after six or seven months on the job, Gold was off the payroll. The head office had decided that a new male organizer could add Gold’s work to his other responsiblities.88 Toronto locals agreed to pay her October salary, but by November Gold was dismissed. Organizing work among the shirtmakers continued sporadically after that, and shirtmakers’ locals continued to ask the Joint Board ‘to take a more active interest’ in their affairs.89 After Gold’s departure from Toronto, Brother Chikofsky and Sister Moore were assigned to supervise the campaign of the shirtmakers, and in January 1924 the shirtmakers’ local requested a general meeting of all women workers in the shirtmaking trade. But in response to the women’s request at this meeting that no more apprentices be allowed into the trade, the ACWA replied that it ‘couldn’t control the matter’ and the issue would have to be taken up with the manufacturers.90 The ACWA had begun to recognize that it needed not only to use

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women organizers but also to take up quite different approaches to unionization to attract young women: Because the majority of the shirtmakers were young women, the attitude of the parents had great influence on their decision to join or not to join, to strike or to scab. . . . Sometimes it was discovered that a girl active and enthusiastic about the union was told flatly at home to have nothing to do with it. In such a case, the organizer just had to unionize the family too.91 In Montreal the ACWA tried in the early 1920s to attract FrenchCanadian women, and to some extent the effort was successful. But by 1924, when women made up half the workers in the shops, only two of the 37 organizers in the Montreal locals were women.92 The unions called for women organizers to organize the women and French-Canadian organizers to organize the French-speaking workers, but while all unions recognized the need to use members of these communities who would be sensitive to local concerns, the union had neither the money nor the resources to do this job effectively. Instead, time and energy were going into the factional political battles. In 1930 the ACWA took on Hyde Park Clothing in Montreal over continual violation of the union agreement. The company was hiring young immigrants and paying them $5 – $10 for a 68-hour week.93 The general office sent Jule Lesniak to organize the Slav women, who made up a large percentage of Hyde Park’s workforce. Earlier, Lesniak had been sent to Hamilton to assist in a successful organizational drive there. Although the ACWA did engage some women organizers, it tended to wait until strikes were under way rather than sending the organizers in at the beginning of a campaign. This piecemeal technique could not have helped efforts to sustain the growth in women’s union membership. The ILGWU had similar experiences in the women’s garment industry. By 1920 the union, aware of the growing numbers of unorganized workers in the trade, began to ask the New York office for Canadian organizers. Because male organizers had been unable to sign up large numbers of women employed in the ladies’ garment industry in Toronto, the union decided that ‘only women can have access to this unorganized element in the ladies garment industry’ and instructed the general executive board to send an English-speaking woman organizer ‘to consolidate the ranks’.94 The motion was adopted, but apparently little or no action was taken. At the 1922 ILGWU convention Canadian locals again requested an organizer, and the executive

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replied: ‘There are thousands of dressmakers who must be organized as soon as industrial conditions improve and the opportunity is at hand.’95 Finally, in 1924, as a result of the AFL efforts to organize the women, the ILGWU began an organizing drive in the women’s clothing trade. However, for Canadian women it remained a campaign on paper only.96 In 1924 the Toronto Trades and Labour Council made an inquiry into the ladies’ cloak trades, which employed about 2,000 permanent workers: some 1,200 of them were Jewish; most of the rest were English-speaking women. About 700 of the Jewish workers were organized, and they tended to influence the others. The TTLC reported, ‘With the English-speaking workers, it is very different.’ These workers do not mix easily in an organization the membership of which is predominantly Jewish [workers] and on the other hand, fear that the employers will enlarge upon their recent tactic of utilizing racial prejudice and using inexperienced or partly trained Englishspeaking workers for strike breaking purposes, has a demoralizing tendency among the Jewish workers, rendering organizational work very difficult and putting strike action completely out of the question.97 The report recommended that the Women’s Labour League and the ILGWU co-operate to organize women and set up an English-speaking local. The Women’s Labour League had been set up, through the efforts of the Women’s Department of the CPC, to spearhead work among the women. One of the WLL’s main activists was a CPC central committee member, Florence Custance. The membership of the League went beyond the Party and was composed, according to the League’s report, of ‘women who are either the housewives or widows of trade unionists, most of whom are compelled to do their own housework and tend the needs of their families, and in many cases are compelled to work either full time or part time as wage earners. Their respective callings because of varied place put them out of the range of trade unions now in existence, but in order to feel they have some protection they belong to the League.’98 Until the Women’s Labour League joined the Workers’ Unity League, they were, according to Sangster, ‘a unique experiment in Canadian Communist history. Although generally controlled by the Party, they constituted an organization separate in name and identity from the Party.’99 Yet because of the WLL’s association with the Communist Party, the ILGWU refused to

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work with it, as recommended in the report at the TTLC in 1924. There were local women who were capable of organizing women workers in Canada. Toronto ILGWU locals hired a Hamilton social worker and trade union activist, Mary McNab, to help the union organize the 2,000 or so women dressmakers at Eaton’s in Toronto. Florence Custance had also been organizing the dressmakers for several years. Other members of the Toronto Women’s Labour League had also been active in strike support work and organizing efforts in Toronto garment factories since 1923. Despite these efforts, in 1925 the ILGWU sent Julius Hochman to Canada to begin an organizational drive in the Canadian women’s clothing trades. But his main interest was to combat the TUEL influence in the union. Economic and social conditions in the garment shops of Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg continued their decline into economic anarchy while the clothing unions fought among themselves. Defeats on the picket lines, lack of support from women workers, and poor shop settlements were all used to discredit the left wing. The ILGWU blamed the failure of the 1925 campaign and the general strike in the Toronto cloak trade on the ‘few petty Communist politicians, who as usual spent most of their time and the Union resources in playing their party’s game and in advancing their party’s aims, utterly neglecting to protect the interests of the cloakmakers in the shops’.100 Other evidence leads to a different conclusion. The strike of 1925, run again by the Jewish male activists in the presser and cutter locals, did little to draw in the growing numbers of young English-speaking women. Typically, Yiddish was spoken by all but two of the speakers at a union rally during the strike.101 By 1928 the ILGWU, realizing its limited success among the women, recommended the formation of women’s locals and encouraged special types of social and recreational activities that would appeal to women and a renewed co-operation with local women’s civic and welfare organizations.102 Women were still seen as incapable of directing their own unions, and women activists continued to be treated as unusual. When a Toronto delegate to the 1932 convention in Philadelphia praised the work of Sadie Reisch, he said, ‘It was a relevation to the workers in Toronto to find that within the ranks of the trade union movement women of such outstanding ability as Sadie Reisch have developed. . . . It is about time that the women asserted themselves and showed us men what to do in the trade union movement.’103 Despite this kind of high praise, male unionists continued to perceive active women trade unionists as the exception and to treat new women recruits to the union in much the same manner as

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they had before World War I. The struggle for control of the needle trades unions cost the unions dearly. Both the ACWA and the ILGWU faced the Depression years of the 1930s in financial uncertainty, their membership depleted and dispirited. The ILGWU membership went from nearly 3,000 in 1925–6 to less than 1,000 by 1927–8.104 Most of the garment workers remained unorganized and conditions in the trade continued to grow worse. The civil war had taken its toll. When the Depression hit with its full force in the 1930s, only the Toronto men’s clothing sector had been successfully unionized. Montreal manufacturers had effectively resisted unionization, contract shops had continued to proliferate, and union members in both the ILGWU and the ACWA were fighting among themselves. Neither union was able to enforce central control on the Canadian locals. Union militancy still had strong support in most locals, and the vision of shop-floor unionism was still considered worth fighting for. But the struggle against piecework and for implementation of production standards had required the unqualified support of the union centrals —which the workers did not give. The clothing unions would face the Depression in disarray.

6

‘A Real Man’s Fight’: Clothing Battles in the Depression Years I have worked three years at the Hillman and Sable Fur Company. Thirty girls are employed at this plant. The girls have been subject to frequent layoffs and part-time work. Last week on returning to work, the girls found they had been replaced by younger girls of 16 and 17 years. These girls were being paid $7.00 per week for a 49-hour week. The bosses fired the old girls because they had qualified for the minimum wage of the province. These new girls must work many months before they qualify. The Worker (Toronto), 21 January 1932 For most workers, and especially women, it had never been easy to make a living wage in the clothing industry, and the Depression years created even greater hardship. In each year from 1933 to 1936 about 12 per cent of the Canadian population were on relief. In the worst years, 1932–3, about two million Canadians—or one in five—were on public assistance. By 1933 one in four Montreal adults was on relief.1 While the forces of urbanization and the new industrial order had been remaking Canadian society, political and social institutions had not yet been created to cope with the massive upheaval of those changes or with the devastation wrought by the Great Depression. Welfare and social relief policies reminiscent of nineteenth-century rural society still influenced social policies on unemployment and relief. As economic and social conditions deteriorated and unemployment numbers continued to rise, conditions for Canada’s working class were bleak indeed. 142

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According to Frank Scott and Harry Cassidy, in their mid-1930s investigation of the men’s clothing industry in Ontario: ‘With the coming of the Depression the earnings and living standards of the clothing workers have been progressively reduced by a combintion of unemployment, short time and wage reductions, until most of them are now close to or below the border of abject poverty.’2 A report to the general executive board of the Toronto ilgwu in the mid-1930s described the effect of the Depression on that union: ‘Shops were bankrupt and closing their doors completely. The unemployment situation had reached a high water mark, threatening to overwhelm the organization.’3 In the trade as a whole, unemployent affected men and women differently: women had among the highest unemployment rates and experienced greater seasonal fluctuations in unemployment.4 The Toronto branch of the acwa was hard-pressed to support its members, reporting disbursements of $8,660 to 138 unemployed workers in 1931, $14,374 to 267 workers in 1932, and $7,242 to 146 workers by the end of September 1933.5 The Toronto ilgwu paid out $19,107 in strike relief in 1931. The Toronto Joint Board also made loans to members of the ilgwu of $2,406.45 in the same year.6 By 1929 the Toronto Joint Board owed the international over $4,000 and Montreal owed nearly $3,000. The Canadians were in no position to offer assistance to their own membership without continued help from New York, but this aid was not forthcoming.7 The head offices in New York, themselves hard hit by the economic malaise, were unable to provide staff or finances for union drives in their Canadian locals. Many dispirited union members, facing unemployment and defeat on the picket lines, once again drifted away from the unions. By the mid1930s the number of unionized Montreal cloakmakers had been cut in half from their 1929 numbers. Workers who did manage to keep their jobs—not an easy task in those years—lost ground quickly. In the men’s clothing industry between 1931 and 1932, wages fell by 24.1 per cent.8 In the women’s clothing sector from 1931 to 1935, wages fell by 17 per cent in ­Quebec and 15 per cent in Ontario. With the working seasons shortened to less than six months a year, the weekly wages, already low (reportedly below $7 a week for women and under $10 a week for men in Montreal’s men’s clothing shops), could no longer keep workers off the welfare rolls. In 1932, as two Toronto union shops reported to the Price Spreads Commission, ‘Out of 115 men . . . 57 earned for the year less than $800; 88 less than $1,000; and only 2 over $1,600.’9

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The Manufacturers’ Scramble To Stay Alive With Canadians everywhere spending less and less money on consumer goods, the clothing trades saw a major collapse of their market. Consumers not only had less money to spend, but their patterns of spending were also gradually shifting. By the late 1920s the impact of mass culture was beginning to be felt as more consumer dollars were going to leisure activities, including movies and buying new cars and radio sets. Mass consumption and instalment buying had altered ­consumer taste, and middle-class consumers had started to spend more money on larger items and less on clothes. Manufacturers tried to respond to this shift in demand by reducing their production costs and stressing cheaper lines of clothing, which meant trying to introduce more flexibility into the production process. These changes meant fewer jobs, shorter seasons with longer hours of work, and the proliferation of contract shops, where working conditions were undoubtedly the most exploitative. Irregular employment and fluctuating income became a normal situation for all employed in the needle trades. In the growing dress trade, the whole industry worked on piecework. With shops constantly facing new styles, the question of piecework rates returned to the bargaining table again and again. In small shops operators and finishers also faced constant changes in the wages paid for their work, which resulted in fluctuations in earnings from day to day. In good times, when labour was scarce and orders were plentiful, the piecework rates would be adequate, and dressmakers would work long hours and push themselves to the limit to meet production demands. In bad times competition both among the contract shops themselves and between contract shops and inside shops resulted in lower wages. Dressmakers would be left begging for work, and when working they rarely made a subsistence wage. As the Depression took hold the good times—or high season— shortened to a few weeks in the spring and a few weeks in the fall, and the bad times became the norm. In the dress trade, with the push to introduce cheaper dress lines, manufacturers lowered prices to the consumer—retail prices on dresses dropped to $3.75, $2.25, and $1.50—and cut production costs by pushing wages below a living wage.10 Women garment workers who could earn $25 to $28 a week in the late 1920s were earning only $12 a week by 1933.11 With none of the dress shops in Montreal or Toronto organized in 1929 when the Depression began, the ilgwu was at a loss to stop these practices. The Depression took a heavy toll among garment manufacturers

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This dress, from Rose Dress Manufacturing Company, Montreal, illustrates the complexity of garment construction during the 1930s. Dress operators’ skill required considerable knowledge and an ability to work quickly with fabrics that were frequently difficult to manipulate. (Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library)

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as pressure from both the textile and retail sectors squeezed them to the limit.12 With shops going bankrupt and closing down, the Toronto ilgwu’s executive report in 1935 noted: ‘Leading manufacturers, seizing upon the critical situation, bolted the Association and finally wrecked it, necessitating a guerilla war, whose outcome was a total dissolution of the Cloak Union.’13 Neither the unions nor the manufacturers’ associations could control the anarchy that ruled the needle trades in the Depression years. Scott and Cassidy estimated that only 53 per cent of firms active in the men’s clothing industry in 1926 were still in business by 1933. Among the small shops and contractors, the picture was even bleaker. Only 23.6 per cent of Ontario’s contractors survived beyond 1933. While 24.6 per cent of Quebec’s contractors survived past 1933, over 70 per cent of them had been listed for less than four years.14 The firms that survived the interwar years experienced considerable variation in levels of production. After a steady advance in value of production in both men’s and women’s wear sectors from 1924 to 1929, production declined in the years 1930–2. After that production levels started to climb again, with another slight recession in 1938. In women’s clothing, production levels dropped only slightly, despite the Depression. But in the men’s wear sector, which witnessed a sharp decline in prices, the value of production in 1939 was still 13 per cent below the peak year of 1929.15 The provincial variations in the industry’s economic vitality made Quebec’s low-wage conditions attractive to enterprising manufacturers, and whenever Ontario-based unions tried to get tough the manufacturers threatened to close up their Ontario shops and move to Quebec. By 1929 women’s clothing production in Quebec was valued at $30.6 million and Ontario’s production had begun to decline slightly, to $32.5 million, down about $400,000 from the year before. It was an indication of things to come. By 1932 Quebec had 7,102 workers making an average yearly wage of $852, giving the industry a gross value of production at just over $23 million. Ontario was down to 6,061 workers from a high of 9,026 in 1928. The average wage in 1932 was $894 a year, down from $1,046 in 1928, and the value of production had dropped to $17.2 million. During the 1920s the gross value of production in men’s factory clothing in Quebec had been nearly twice that of Ontario’s. When the Depression hit, both provinces suffered a decline. Ontario endured a loss of $7.8 million in its gross value of production from 1929 to 1932, and Quebec saw a decline in gross value of product of $15.1 million. In nonunionized Quebec factories the manufacturers adjusted to the

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e­ conomic downturn by firing workers, and by 1932 the industry had 41 per cent fewer employees than in 1928. In Ontario the job loss was less marked: a 17 per cent drop for the same period. While neither province had a healthy trade, Ontario’s unionized industry was able, to some degree at least, to cushion the crisis for its workforce. The industry’s strategy in the tough years of the 1930s was much the same as it had been in the relatively easy years of the 1920s: to cut back on costs wherever possible. Companies subdivided the labour process, changed the grades of garments they produced, and sought non-union labour wherever they could find it. Contract shops, once a convenience for the inside manufacturers making different grades of garments, now helped to drive down wages and prices. ‘Legitimate’ manufacturers were pushed to use contract shops as much as possible, especially as the pressures from mass buyers such as Eaton’s and Simpsons forced manufacturers to fill orders quickly and cheaply. They introduced more piecework rates in men’s clothing and women’s cloakmaking. And whenever they could they hired more women—the workers who came most cheaply. In their scramble to keep alive, the manufacturers relocated shops to areas that had cheap and non-unionized labour—especially Montreal and rural Quebec— and collective agreements disintegrated almost as soon as they were signed. Capital investment continued to fall after 1933 as small nonunion shops relying on poorly paid women workers became the norm. As the dress sector grew, the industry shifted to Quebec with its more readily available and cheaper, non-union labour. Montreal became the centre for the trade.16 Price-cutting resulted in continued wholesale price reductions in the early 1930s, particularly in the dress sector. The Royal Commission on Price Spreads pointed out: ‘Included in the wholesale price of a dress 10 years ago, a minimum unit of $8.00 would be left to cover the cost of overhead, labour and a reasonable profit for the producer. Today as low as fifty cents is left over to cover these items.’17 When prices for finished products went down, manufacturers had to find ways to cut their costs. Initially they had done this by farming out garments to homeworkers and small contractors. Later on ‘bedroom’ shops, low wages, low overhead, and long hours became the trademark of the dress industry. A typical example of a Depression-style enterprise was Balfour Dress, a small shop in Montreal that employed no inside labour at all; work was done entirely by contract. When it opened its doors in 1932, Balfour Dress made substantial sales to large buyers such as Eaton’s and Simpsons. In 1934 Balfour came under the scrutiny of

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the Price Spreads Commission, which found that Eaton’s had ­purchased dresses from the firm at $3.71 a dress, with the average cost of making each dress listed at around $3.00; but the contractor received only 52.5 cents per garment.18 Balfour Dress got the rest of the money for making up each garment—even though the company did not make it. The finished product just passed through the ­company’s hands. Conditions in the contract shop were of little concern to the Balfour Dress owners, who were only interested in the low price the contractor could provide. Dress manufacturing was not the only sector experiencing these excesses of price-cutting. In 1934 a Cornwall worker employed by Cornwall Pants Company wrote to the provincial Ministry of Labour: At present we are working from 85 to 90 hours per week for the small sum of $12.00 to $14.00 per week. There are also married men with families working for the small sum of $8.00 to $9.00 per week rather than be out of work. During the week the inspector was in town we had all got extra money which was not earned. But right now if he were to drop in he would find a vast difference as the wages have been cut all to pieces. If the inspector were to go through these two shops he would find that 70 per cent of them are being underpaid. At present, they have cut the pieceworkers again, so that it makes it almost impossible to live.19 These wage conditions contrasted sharply with the unionized wage rates paid to pant operators before the Depression. In 1922, for instance, Toronto union shops were paying male pant operators between $29 and $37 a week and female operators $18 to $27 a week.20 Sweatshop conditions were undoubtedly encouraged by the presence of so many small manufacturers with little capital and by the absence of union resistance to work conditions.21 R.P. Sparks, founder of the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, expressed his frustration with the small-shop owners in the 1930s: ‘The majority of these [manufacturers] are small shops which have been started by men who had some experience as ­operators, but who are almost totally lacking in business experience and without the slightest conception of the fact that they are simply one unit in an important economic group.’ Sparks complained that it required only ‘a little capital’ to start up one of these shops, with the result that ‘Even in the best of times, there is an excess in productive capacity.’22

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The Union Response and Communist Organizing The Depression years saw intense union activism, especially from the Communist-led unions—a development that did not go unnoticed by public officials and the press. The harsh conditions of the time and the manufacturers’ manoeuvring for survival made life extremely difficult for the unions. The array of small shops was hard to organize. They couldn’t fight against ‘runaway shops’, erosion of wages, and the implementation of piecework rates. Far too many of their ­members were either out of work or working too little and unable to pay union dues. In the ilgwu by 1931, 90 per cent of the union members were working only two days a week, and as a result union ­revenues had dropped to one-third of the amount collected in 1930.23 Most union activity in the clothing industry during the 1920s and early 1930s centred on the men’s clothing sector, where in 1920 men and women wage-earners were in about equal proportions. Unions were weaker in the women’s clothing sectors, where women workers dominated. In 1923, with over 7,000 workers in Ontario and another 3,000 in Quebec, there were only 1,245 union members in seven Canadian locals in women’s clothing. By 1932, when campaigns to organize the dressmakers were finally gaining support, Quebec’s ­garment workers had increased in numbers, but Ontario was still losing jobs in the women’s clothing sector. When the decade closed, the workforce of women’s garment production in Montreal had reached 13,357, and Toronto’s numbers had been reduced to 4,986. Yet by 1938 less than half of these workers were in the ilgwu. Women working for wages in 1940 outnumbered men three to one in Quebec’s clothing industry and five to one in Ontario’s industry.24 Women, as before, wanted to see unions address their day-to-day conditions. In the dress shops, for instance, the labour process was characterized by low wages, piecework, little sectioning of work, speed-up, arbitrary distribution of work, and long hours, all of which made for tension and short tempers. Dressmakers often made up several different styles a day, and price negotiations became a crucial aspect of labour-process control. Price committees gave workers some power to negotiate piecework rates, and the different unions offered different structural frameworks for resolving these rates. Both the ilgwu and the acwa made attempts to standardize the pricing system on garment production. In the acwa, Sidney Hillman had encouraged the introduction of scientific management principles in the 1920s and managed to get a standardized wage rate for each task in the production process. This idea of basic body pricing was

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harder to introduce in the dress sector, where style changes were more diverse, but by 1934 ilgwu president David Dubinsky was pushing for a standard pricing system in all the women’s clothing markets under ilgwu control. The introduction of these pricing ­systems brought scientific management into the labour process, and the international unions encouraged its continuance. The effect of these management changes formalized shop-floor relations and allowed manufacturers to continue to introduce production standards and piece-rates into their shops, although they were now able to do so with the assistance of the unions. In 1929 the Canadian Communist Party had moved to reorganize the Trade Union Educational League (tuel), and in 1930 it established its own unions under the newly formed umbrella of the Workers’ Unity League (wul).25 The first wul convention, held in 1931, had affiliates from the Lumber Workers Industrial Union, the Mine Workers, and the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers (iuntw).26 By 1933 the wul had locals of furniture and wood workers, food workers, rail workers, fishermen and canning workers, shoe and leather workers, and laundry workers. The Department of Labour reported its membership at 21,253 in 1933.27 In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Communist trade unionists focused their efforts on organizing the unorganized, and in the needle trades this led to union drives among the dressmakers. The Communist-led iuntw, formed in 1928, was the first union to successfully organize large numbers of women workers in the trade. Its success was linked to the lack of any such effort on the part of the other unions, as well as to the fact that the rank-and-file shop-focused structure of the Communist unions was more accessible to women than that of any other union.28 The iuntw continued the tuel vision of rank-and-file unionism, seeking to replace craft locals with a shop delegate system that made the individual shop the basis of trade union organization. In April 1929 J.B. Salsberg, national organizer for the needle trades, announced the provisional executive of the iuntw: Max Shur, Annie Buller, and Joshua Gershman of Toronto, and Max Dolgoy, a Winnipeg cloakmaker.29 By May 1929, when the iuntw held its first convention, various needle trades locals had been set up in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg.30 By 1930 the Toronto iuntw dressmakers local had two full-time organizers, Shur of the cloakmakers and Buller, who worked with the cpc paper, The Worker.31 While most of the organizational efforts of the iuntw were directed towards the women’s clothing trades, a small dissident group in the Montreal acwa set up the United Clothing Workers of

iuntw,

August 1929. (Communist Party of Canada Picture Collection,

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First annual picnic of the Winnipeg section of the National Archives of Canada, PA 134693)

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Canada.32 In 1928 the Canadian Cloak and Dressmakers Union of Montreal held a conference of dissident groups in the needle trades. Fed up with the continual battles for control within the ilgwu, they called for a Canadian union in the Montreal trade, and the iuntw began organizing there.33 Despite the defeatism of the ilgwu, the iuntw continued to struggle for improved work conditions. Given the exploitation of workers in the needle trades, its struggles were more necessary than ever. At a point when neither the ilgwu nor the acwa had been successful in gaining legitimacy in the needle trade, the iuntw had a crucial role to play. Because of the cautious role of the traditional unions, the ­Communist-led union’s militancy paid off. Its members were able to articulate the issues and to mobilize the workers in the dress sector. The labour struggles of the early 1930s left the unions in an even weaker condition than ever. Communist-led unions and the acwa and the ilgwu continued their war with one another, and the manufacturers were able to take advantage of their rivalry. By 1932 the acwa was so broke it could not afford a convention, and acwa locals in Mont­real were in complete disorder. Despite their problems, all three unions in the clothing trade conducted general strikes during the early years of the Depression. The acwa led market-wide strikes in Mont­real in 1932, 1933, and 1934. The ilgwu conducted general strikes in the cloak trades of Montreal and Toronto in 1930, 1932, 1933–4, and 1936. After the Toronto ilgwu had begun to organize the dressmakers in 1931, the iuntw conducted a general strike there, too.34 The iuntw also conducted a general strike of dressmakers in Montreal in 1934. The years 1934 and 1937 especially showed a high incidence of strike activity in the Canadian labour movement, with much of the 1934 activity concentrated in Ontario and Quebec. As Douglas Cruikshank and Gregory Kealey found, Ontario accounted for eight of the 14 violent strikes in 1934, while Quebec contributed three more that year. Manufacturing industries accounted for a fair share of those numbers, as the Communist-led Workers’ Unity League unions and the cio (Congress for Industrial Organizations) drive towards industrial unionism focused their battles in mass-production industries.35

Manufacturing Associations and the Large Retailers In 1934, when the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers surveyed some 83 clothing firms, it asked them to identify the ‘most outstanding evils in the trade’. The responses were: lack of control and lack of standardization of wages and hours of labour; disparity

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between the costs of production in union and non-union shops and between cities; price-cutting; and overproduction and dumping of goods on the market, which served to lower prices in the industry.36 The industry as a whole did not suffer from these maladies equally. Large manufacturers in men’s suits and women’s coats were able to standardize production by introducing scientific management techniques. These large, modern factories ran more effectively, with the most up-to-date equipment. They had more formal management relations with staff; they were ‘forward-thinking’ firms. Still, they were being undercut by small sweatshops, and the threat these contract shops posed to conditions in the trade and the economic viability of large manufacturers became acute. It seemed that respectable manufacturers who were willing to pay decent wages were being run out of the business. Each sector of the needle trades responded differently to the crisis atmosphere of the Depression years. The troubled times encouraged the unions and manufacturers to engage in co-operative management efforts, at the same time discouraging any workers’ push for direct control on the shop floor.37 For women an active shop union remained a prime concern. It was the only place they had a voice, a chance to counter the working conditions of the time. Certain sectors of the trade, such as dress production, were more prone to the problems of cutthroat competition. In the men’s wear sector, when contractors controlled much of the trade conditions were bad; but in the women’s wear sector, where jobbers controlled the trade and small shops prevailed, conditions were worse. Despite the continued expansion of the industry, these factors undermined industrial and commercial ­stability in the trade as a whole. Manufacturers, for their part, made further attempts to band together in associations, to satisfy a number of different interests that were often in variance. From 1918 to 1935 seven separate trade ­associations were established in Toronto alone, with memberships ranging from 10 to 100 members. The Associated Clothing Manu­ facturers, for example, never had more than 20 members. Yet these firms represented manufacturers from Toronto’s largest and most established firms, and by 1935 they were able to tell the Ontario Department of Labour that they represented 90 per cent of Toronto’s clothing manufacturers.38 Some of the associations came into existence for the sole purpose of negotiating with the unions; others appear to have had a broader mandate. The Association of Clothing Manufacturers in Toronto, established in August 1919, set as its objectives ‘the consideration,

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adoption and carrying out of such measures as may be calculated to further the interests of the clothing industry in Ontario for the consideration of all matters pertaining generally to the business in which the members are mutually interested and which may properly be brought about by the association.’39 Some manufacturers saw trade associations as a way of dealing with the more disreputable members of their own community, and in particular some anti-union manufacturers saw the associations as ­providing an institutional framework for mounting an attack on the organizing efforts of their employees. Others saw the associations as a bridge to rationalizing an otherwise unstable industry, or as a vehicle for introducing new management ideas that could help ‘respectable’ manufacturers improve production techniques. In both men’s and women’s clothing production some manufacturers were not necessarily anti-union; their main aim was simply to bring the industry into the modern age. Those manufacturers could find allies in the leadership of both the acwa and the ilgwu. In Toronto several of the larger manufacturers of men’s clothing played leadership roles in developing good trade relations with the acwa, going so far as sitting down with the union to work at restructuring production. The manufacturers wanted to reintroduce piecework in the Toronto trade, arguing that with Montreal men’s clothing largely working on piecework, the prices charged in Quebec for ­finished garments were lower than those charged in the unionized Toronto market. By the mid-1930s the acwa was willing to go along with the manufacturers’ push to reintroduce piecework and reduce overtime rates, but in return the union asked for a form of unemployment insurance to be introduced in the industry. In 1935 the acwa succeeded in striking a deal and, ahead of federal government initiatives in this area, set up an unemployment scheme in Toronto.40 The manufacturers saw distinct possibilities in these relationships. Hillman was instrumental in this process, as he encouraged co­operation with the progressive manufacturers in his effort to bring new unionism to the shops. In an extensive study of Hillman’s leadership in the acwa, Steven Fraser notes how Hillman and the acwa were able ‘to transmute the idiom of the shop floor and the pragmatic designs of socialism into the modern grammar of the managerial revolution’. Fraser describes the union president: ‘Hillman was a true industrial modern: A pioneer of worker’s participation as a vital component of managerial strategy, he was the architect of a new world order of work, one based neither on coercion nor on monetary incentives, but on those intangibles of the psyche and the social then being

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explored by industrial psychology and sociology.’41 Fraser argues that Hillman became committed to ‘a system of co-managed micro­ regulation’ in the men’s clothing industry after broader alliances with political and economic reform groups failed. The acwa encouraged its locals to develop alliances with like-minded manufacturers to pursue the vision of responsible, stable, and humane needle trades. One of the Toronto manufacturers who supported Hillman’s initiatives was Thomas Learie of W.R. Johnson and Company, an old, established firm that produced high-grade men’s and boys’ wear. For many years Learie was a leading member of the Toronto Men’s Clothing Association, and he had negotiated with the acwa since 1919. When he was invited to speak at the acwa convention of 1930, he outlined the association’s views: In the city of Toronto the clothing market has passed in easy stages from a disorganized and chaotic market into a relatively satisfactory and strong union market. I believe greater efficiency is coming into the Toronto market generally as a result of a definite understanding. While workers had to be educated to law and order, the same applied to manufacturers, and perhaps more so. Some manufacturers still require a measure of attention.42 In the manufacturers’ associations these forward-looking company officers argued against others of their kind who religiously fought union interference in the economic direction of the industry and steadfastly held to their autocratic power to hire and fire workers as they saw fit. Indeed, manufacturers in the clothing industry were never a cohesive group. For one thing, economic divisions in the production of clothing created differences in political and economic interests. Large manufacturers in men’s clothing had little in common with small shops producing dresses. As a Montreal garment manufacturer noted, ‘I profit on selling the garment, but the contractor makes his profit off the labour costs.’43 The two business cultures created different economic concerns among manufacturers, and trade associations that attempted to gloss over the differences soon failed. The anti-union manufacturers would contemplate no interference in management prerogatives. They held strongly to the principle of the open shop and saw trade associations as a means of protecting themselves against union interference in their businesses. As a result of the Depression conditions, clothing manufacturers in the 1930s were divided and in disarray when they faced the powerhouses in the retail and textile sectors. The manufacturers were at

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the mercy of the mass retailers, such as Eaton’s and Simpsons, which were adapting to the Depression by taking advantage of the weak and divided manufacturing sector through consignment buying and selling, and by using unfair returns policies and bankrupt selling to keep their own prices down. Retail sales had dropped, but the lower operating expenses of the large retail chains allowed them to survive much better than their counterparts in the independent retail sector.44 Through their practice of mass buying, the large retail department stores could set manufacturers’ terms for prices, styles, and delivery time. Mass buyers dictated sales for a large portion of the market and as a result were also able to control prices. They could increase the margin between their selling price and their buying price for clothes, thereby driving manufacturers’ prices even lower.45 Consignment buying served to increase the hold of the large retail outlets on a shrinking market, forcing competition to become still more feverish. For small shops, which were more dependent on mass buyers, these sales meant the difference between survival and bankruptcy. Mass buyers had their strongest hold on the women’s wear sector, with its concentrated women’s labour and short production seasons. By 1930, 41.5 per cent of all sales in women’s and children’s clothing were to department stores, with an additional 9.6 per cent of sales going to chain stores.46 With this degree of control over the market, mass buyers’ power was almost absolute. The large retailers adjusted their own losses in sales by putting pressure on the manufacturers to reduce their selling prices, often quoting the prices of Toronto firms known to be sweatshops and of firms in Quebec where wages were known to be even lower.47 One Toronto cloak manufacturer told the Price Spreads commissioners, ‘The department store buyers are always looking for “new fish” in the way of small sweatshops.’ He complained particularly about the buyers from one large store, Simpsons, whom he described as ‘two college boys, young and tough who had no feeling for the trade, and can say nothing but “you’re too dear,” if the manufacturer quotes a price of $2.00, they invariably say we can get the same for $1.00.’48 Lower labour costs in Montreal made competition between non-union ­Montreal shops and similar shops in Toronto intolerable to many Toronto firms, and they closed their doors and moved to Montreal. Max Enkin of Coppley, Noyes and Randall described the provincial differences in the experience of those years: ‘When a manufacturer went out of business here in Toronto, they left the industry or they left the province. When they went out of business in Montreal, then you would have two small manufacturers take their place. They

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didn’t even need to buy machinery, the contractor did that.’ Getting the manufacturers to close up ranks against their own was difficult, and only a few of the manufacturers were willing to push for more regulation and control of the needle trades. The large manufacturers as much as the trade unions wanted to find a more stable economic atmosphere in which they could operate, but it would take the presence of a strong trade union movement to force trade associations into line. ‘We didn’t need a trade association when we had no unions’, Enkin said. ‘Our association, Associated Clothing Manufacturers, was formed for labour negotiations. A number of firms would never have joined unless it was to deal with labour.’49 But because manufacturers’ associations were formed for a variety of reasons, and not just to work with labour, when associations tried to extend their jurisdiction over all members of a branch of the trade the conflicting interests of their members meant that they were frequently unsuccessful and quickly dissolved. Because it was difficult if not impossible to police their own members, the progressive manufacturers turned to the unions for help. When that also proved unsuccessful, they turned to the State to right the wrongs of an unstable industry. Later in the 1930s, the provincial Industrial Standards Acts would become the jurisdictional constituency for negotiations with the provincial governments. Negotiations with the State again forced manufacturers into trade associations as they moved from a loose network of manufacturers into a formal body seen as representative of the industry as a whole. In the end, it was not the unions or the manufacturers themselves that were instrumental in the development of stable trade associations in the clothing industry; the State legitimation of their presence proved to be the decisive factor.

Political Action and the Royal Commission on Price Spreads The social and economic consequences of the Depression for the ­needle trades would also bring greater public scrutiny to conditions in the clothing shops. Several factors influenced these events, not least the growing influence of Communist activists in the clothing industry. The federal and provincial governments began to come down hard on the Communists.50 In Toronto the police threatened organizations that rented space for Communist meetings, pushing the cpc to move its meetings into the streets, where members became more open targets. While the police continued to break up street meetings and arrest and beat onlookers, the public moved to condemn such arbitrary uses of

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power. The resulting ‘free speech’ movement focused more public attention on the left. In 1931 the federal government arrested nine leaders of the cpc under sedition charges and deported many foreignborn Communists under section 41 of the Immigration Act. The cpc was outlawed, and seven men each faced five years in prison. Their arrests began a political protest that drew both Communists and liberals into a campaign against what was seen as blatant political persecution under section 98 of the Criminal Code. Large rallies and continued public pressure under the direction of the Canadian Labour Defence League met with some success, and in July 1934, a month after the Liberal Party of Ontario came to power, five of the Commu nists were released; by the end of the year the other two were also back on the streets. This campaign against section 98 gave Communists a public profile that made them contenders in the fight for democratic rights during the Depression years. Communist trade union activists actively engaged in these protest movements, and many garment workers took part in the activities, which linked their union work and civil rights issues together. In 1931 the Toronto needle trades saw a virtual civil war break out between the left-wing and right-wing union factions in the streets of Toronto’s garment district. Strikes by both the ilgwu and the iuntw came to public notice as the unions fought each other in the shops and in the streets, scabbed on one another, and denounced one another in the newspapers as ‘labour fakers’.51 The public profile of the exploited garment workers was legitimized through newspaper coverage of working conditions, and the apparent unfeeling treatment that growing numbers of unemployed workers were experiencing at the hands of both federal and provincial governments and the lack of concern that governments were displaying for people’s civil rights moved liberals and social democrats to take on the fight to defend Canada’s growing poor. Canadian Forum, a magazine founded in 1920 by faculty members of the University of Toronto and a popular focus for liberal and social-reform intellectuals, took up the cause of social justice for Canada’s working poor. The magazine published social commentary by left-wing and reformminded people such as J.S. Woodsworth, Frank Underhill, Eugene Forsey, and Frank R. Scott, a Montreal lawyer and poet and co-author of the acwa’s Labours Condition in the Men’s Clothing Industry. In July 1931, Irene M. Biss, an economist from the University of Toronto and member of the League for Social Reconstruction, a group of left intellectuals who shaped the doctrine of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federtaion (ccf), wrote an article on the Toronto

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In 1931 the rivalry of the ilgwu and iuntw in the dressmaking industry brought garment workers out on strike. Here strikers gather on Spadina Avenue, the heart of the garment district in Toronto. By late February, when this picture was taken, over 1,500 workers were out on strike. (Globe and Mail Collection, City of Toronto Archives, SC 266–23263)

dressmakers’ strike, describing the conditions in the shops that had led to the strike. She concluded, ‘As the final inescapable problem in the background of the strike lies the depression and the whole system of industrial organization.’52 By the 1930s the Canadian Forum’s editorship had passed into the hands of the intellectual leaders of the League for Social Reconstruc tion. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which held its first convention in 1933, focused the political energies of the group. The ccf and the League provided an organizational framework for demands of social reform during the Depression years. To some extent the members of these bodies became the watchdogs for a nation in crisis as their wit and sense of social morality called on all Canadians to push for political reform with a human face. By 1933 one-quarter of the Canadian workforce was unemployed, but the federal government, now in the hands of R.B. Bennett’s Conservative Party, was still arguing that unemployment and relief

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An ambulance takes away injured strikers from the picket line of a ­Montreal strike of clothing workers, 1937. Picket line violence was often a part of strike activity. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University)

remained a provincial and municipal responsibility. Both Bennett and Mackenzie King, who came to power in 1935, perceived mass ­unemployment as a temporary phenomenon rather than a structural problem of modern capitalism, and as a result their administrations developed no comprehensive employment schemes to offset the high unemployment.53 The governments resorted to interim legislation offering relief to the unemployed, while the numbers of unemployed continued to grow. In 1934, as a response to the severe Depression conditions and the new public concerns, the federal government set up a Select Committee on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, headed by H.H. (Harry) Stevens, Minister of Trade and Commerce, to study trade practices in several industries (meat packing, shoes, biscuits, and clothing). His work on the commission would make Stevens the most popular Conservative politician in the country. His investigation focused attention

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on corrupt trade practices in manufacturing, and for the first time the abuses in the garment industry came under public scrutiny. The result was a public outcry. Both the ilgwu and the acwa took active roles in the investigation, which paid considerable attention to the exploitative conditions of non-union women workers.54 During the early years of the economic downturn, Bennett had introduced tariff protection that gave Canadian manufacturers an advantage, but the policy did little to promote economic recovery and served to make the question of tariff protection a sensitive issue. Stevens’s campaign spotlighted the evils of unregulated competitive capitalism. Since the late 1880s the growth of large department stores and retail chain stores had pitted their economic might against the small retail firms, and in so doing had generated a battle the small companies could not win. The newspapers sensationalized Stevens’s work and the investigation, initially a Select Committee, soon became a full-scale Royal Commission. Historian Donald Creighton notes that Stevens ‘enjoyed politics as never before.’ He subjected a long series of manufacturing and merchandising corporations to a persistent and pitiless cross-examination. He brought out the startling contrast between the healthy profits of Canada Packers Limited and the pitiful prices they paid for cattle; he revealed the glaring disparity between the generous salaries enjoyed by the executives of the T. Eaton Company and the mean wages earned by their clerks. Suddenly, through the efforts of Harry Stevens, the Conservative Party had become the friend and protector of the shop assistant, the industrial worker, the farmer, and the small, independent merchant.55 When the needle trades came under the commission’s microscope, the inquiry looked at conditions in the factories and contract shops, homeworkers, women’s working conditions, abuses of the minimumwage laws, the effect of mass buyers’ pricing policies, and collective bargaining in the industry. The garment unions were quick to see the possible advantages of such public exposure. They hoped that Stevens might be able to pressure the federal government to ­introduce legislation to control the trade and to offer political ­pressure to force manufacturers to begin to control their own ­ business. The acwa commissioned two members of the League for Social Reconstruction, Frank Scott and Harry M. Cassidy, a University of Toronto economics professor and sometimes arbitrator for the needle trades industry, to research conditions in men’s clothing and write a report on their findings that could then be submitted to the Stevens Commission.

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In 1934 when the dressmakers at Eaton’s came to the ilgwu asking for assistance, the publicity of the Stevens Commission had focused the public eye on labour conditions there. Despite wide public support the strike was lost and Eaton’s garment workers never joined the house of labour. This broadside illustrates the union response to the Eaton strike. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor­Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University)

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Scott also delivered a slightly different kind of report. In the pages of the Canadian Forum, he offered sharp poetical characterizations of the events of the day: Stevens’ Enquiry How shocked were all the business men When they found out how low were the wages They had been paying their employees for years.56 Shock aside, all members of the needle trades community hoped that Stevens could create a miracle, that he could bring order to the needle trades, and they did their best to facilitate that process. Warren K. Cook, a Toronto manufacturer and president of the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, encouraged and collaborated with the ilgwu in attempts to bring evidence against T. Eaton’s before the Stevens Commission. In a letter to ilgwu president Dubinsky dated 17 December 1934, Cook was optimistic about the impact of the commission: ‘I think we are going to get even further with legislation than you have thus far with the n.r.a. [National Recovery Act]’. He was convinced that the hearings would move public opinion to oppose the laissez-faire economic policies currently dictating government policy and to move towards support for a new economic order that, he hoped, was just around the corner.57 The garment unions actively supported the commission hearings. In 1934 the ilgwu, as part of a submission from the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, had Bernard Shane, then manager of the Montreal Joint Board of the ilgwu, prepare a statement on conditions in the women’s clothing industry for presentation to the Stevens Commission. After outlining the abuses he saw in the trade, Shane optimistically added, ‘we would like very much that an investigation be made into this industry, look into the books, investigate the payrolls of every factory, and only then could the true situation of the cloak industry be found out.’58 In Toronto, Sam Kraisman of the Toronto Joint Board, ilgwu, wrote to Dubinsky concerning the Stevens Commission: ‘There is at the moment an investigation conducted by the Canadian government, with a committee in session gathering evidence under oath as to conditions in the industry, with a view to inaugurate legislative measures to bring about codes similar to the n.r.a. in the USA.’ He continued, ‘This committee has brought out some startling evidence of the evils in the needle trades which shocked the entire country and has been the means of creating great dissatisfaction amongst the

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workers.’59 ­Kraisman was well aware of the opportunity such exposure gave the ilgwu, and he hoped that it would lead to a revitalization of their ranks. The industry got some unexpected help from the extensive press coverage of a ywca report on abuses of the minimum-wage law.60 Winnifred Hutchison, secretary of the National Council of the ywca and its adviser on industrial social and economic matters, investigated conditions of women needle trade workers in Toronto, providing extensive evidence of abuse in her report.61 After the 1931 dressmakers’ strike in Toronto the ywca and several women’s organizations in Toronto, with the assistance of the ilgwu and the manufacturers’ association, conducted research on women’s conditions of work in the trade. An expanded version of the study became part of the evidence submitted to the Stevens Commission.62 The study looked particularly at firms supplying department stores, and Hutchison interviewed employers and employees of about 50 firms.63 All of these events focused public attention on the urban poor at a time when social reform forces were beginning to have an influence in both federal and provincial domains.

Fighting the Contract Shops An issue that brought union activists and ‘respectable’ manufacturers together was the marked difference in wage rates between the contract shop workers and inside workers. In 1933 the average inside wage was $20 a week, while the highest-paid contract shop employee received $13 a week for a 44-hour week. A wage variation of around 40 per cent was common.64 While large manufacturers depended on the specialized contractors to ease some of the burden of production, they also resented the competition thus created. By passing labour costs on to the contract shops, the manufacturers were able to compete in the price-cutting war at the retail end of the business. But the small shops were also driving down wages by continually under­ cutting legitimate manufacturers. In 1930, just before initiating a ­general strike in the cloak shops, the ilgwu issued a press statement that described the effect of small contractors’ trade practices: Fair and decent manufacturers are unable to produce upon any certain or reasonable basis. The willingness of most undesirable types in the industry to take advantage of the weakened and underpaid workers gives these undesirable manufacturers an immediate advantage in the production of this merchandise. This

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at once introduces an element of uncertainty and instability into the industry with the result that other manufacturers feel themselves obliged to follow suit in cutting down the payments made to wage earners, and with the result that sometimes the original advantage of the manufacturer under paying his workers is more than overcome.65 Legitimate manufacturers were losing control of the marketplace. Sweatshops were now dictating wages and prices in the production process, and mass buyers and other large retail firms were pushing down selling prices at the other end of the production process. The relationship between contract shops and large manufacturers was further complicated by divisions based on the variety of products produced. Both the men’s and women’s clothing sectors had a number of different products, or subsectors, and in each case the organization of production depended on the type of product. Trade associations never crossed from one sector to the other. Given the distinct interests of large manufacturers and smaller contractors, united and co-ordinated activities even within a sector were impossible. These two distinct business cultures—large manufacturers and small contract shops—were very much in evidence in the Montreal market, where contract shops abounded.66 By 1932, 81 men’s clothing contractors operated in Montreal and only six in Toronto, and Montreal had come to rely more heavily on women workers, especially in the contract shops. In 1932, women made up 65 per cent of monthly wage-earners in contract shops (most of which were in Quebec), while they made up 53 per cent of wage-earners in all clothing factories in Quebec and only 45 per cent of all clothing factory workers in Ontario.67 In the women’s cloak trade the competition between the large and small manufacturers manifested itself in a competition between the two cities. Toronto cloak shops were larger than Montreal’s.68 By the 1930s the need to do something about the growing number of small shops and contractors was obvious to many of the larger manufacturers, and the antagonism between the two was obvious. Not surprisingly, the smaller operations had their own point of view on industry matters. In 1934, for instance, an unsigned letter to Louis Fine of the Ontario Department of Labour attacked high-profile members of the manufacturing community such as Thomas Learie and Warren Cook, accusing them of causing the sweatshop ­conditions. The anonymous writer compared the small shop to Cook’s factory:

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On the one hand, we have a small legitimate clothing firm capitalized say at $5,000. . . . Samples are cut, priced, numbered and ­classified, the traveller places them in his brief case and sets forth to do business with the retail trade. The same applies to that wonderful apostle of live and let live, Warren K. Cook, capitalized at some $25,000 or $30,000. The small man has quality, price, and workmanship equal to the chief whip of the Stevens party [H.H. Stevens had left the Conservative Party and formed a new political party, the Reconstruction Party, of which Cook was a member]. He [the small manufacturer] succeeds in placing his samples with the retailer . . . but along comes our friend Mr. Cook and other large manufacturers to these retailers. When the retailer acquaints Mr. Cook with the fact that he has already accepted samples, a few inquiring remarks as to concessions and so forth then he [Mr Cook] goes to work. Now did the small man give you 30 or 60 days credit? The retailers says—no—he can’t afford that. Did he give you thirty or forty suit ends on consignment? No, he can not afford that. Now, Mr. Cook noting all this and having the financial backing offers all these ­concessions, and the retailer seeing the advantages makes the switch. . . . He [the small manufacturer] must have something to offer the retailer. Probably he has some 30 or 40 workers and their families depending on him. So he desperately calls them together and explains the situation, knowing the solution to the whole problem is price, either he comes down below the large manufacturer or he ceases to do business. . . . I now ask you who therefore in the face of this evidence is responsible for driving the wages down? 69 The writer accuses Cook and the ‘fair and decent’ manufacturers of causing the poor conditions in the shops and suggests that Stapells, chair of the Minimum Wage Board, ignored these conditions because he ran a large warehouse that benefited economically from the present situation. The letter, despite its bias—it was most likely penned by a disgruntled small manufacturer—illustrates the political tensions existing among the manufacturers. Control of the contract shops in the men’s trade was finally brought about through the establishment of a trade association of contractors. The initiators of the trade association were large-scale manufacturers, who along with the union were able to push for regulation. Action to achieve control over the small shops in the women’s clothing sector was less successful. In the men’s clothing trades, where the union presence was most pronounced, labour and management did join forces to check the growth of contractors, and by the late 1930s their alliance began to pay off.

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A ‘Strange Alliance’: The Search for Stability The issue of control of the contract shops was also one of union ­versus non-union shops. A study for the ilgwu found that in Montreal the direct labour costs for the production of higher-priced garments ranged from 14 per cent of total production costs in non-union shops to about 22 per cent of total production costs in union shops. The study noted that unfavourable competition between Montreal and Toronto was not a result of unequal direct labour costs between unionized shops, but was instead due to labour-cost differences between union and non-union shops, which pitted unionized manufacturers against non-union manufacturers.70 This further emphasized the need for co-operation between unions and unionized manufacturers if the non-union factories were to be brought under control. The general trade union weakness strengthened the move towards collaboration with the larger manufacturers, as soon became apparent in the cloak strikes of 1930 in Toronto and Montreal. In Toronto the strike began on 28 January, drawing in 66 firms and 1,800 workers, 400 of them women. It ended on 6 February with a collective agreement between the 75 members of the Amalgamated Garment Manufacturers Council and the ilgwu, but the two-year agreement was compromised soon after it was signed.71 A lawyer for the manufacturers, L.M. Singer, noted in a letter to a Toronto manufacturer, ‘The only thing which can be said is that the union is willing to do informally and indirectly what it is unwilling to do formally, definitely and without the possibility of equivocation.’72 However, despite such compromise the manufacturers were not satisfied and by the spring of 1931 the manufacturers’ association, unable to hold its members in line, had dissolved.73 The ‘Big Six’, as the large manufacturers in the association were called, could not live with the union’s suggestion for a unified price system and would not accept union erosion of the manufacturers’ control over the labour process. Rather, they wanted control over the increased use of section work in their shops.74 In February 1932 several of the employers turned to the provincial Department of Labour for assistance. W. Morrison of Louvic Garment, the president of the trade association in women’s clothing, and several other manufacturers met with A.W. Crawford, deputy minister of labour in the Conservative-led provincial government, on 17 February 1932. They ‘expressed a desire to negotiate with the union, but feared they would be unable to secure the co-operation of a sufficient number of employers to make the negotiations worthwhile’, reported Crawford to J.D. Monteith, ­Minister of Public Works and Labour.75

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Provincial government officials kept a close eye on events in the garment district and tried informally to offer ministry officials as ­conciliators on more than one occasion. Officials of the ilgwu and a Mr Fester of the Minimum Wage Board had urged the labour minister to make a public statement to offer ministry officials’ services as intermediators in the dispute,76 but the minister had declined and the union was forced to strike again in 1932 and 1934. The union finally managed to get a concessionary agreement in place in 1934. The contract accepted piecework in the cloak shops and allowed manufacturers to create and/or maintain a body of underpaid operators in their shops.77 But even this concession did not keep the manufacturers satisfied, and in 1935 the cloakmakers were on strike again. In 1936, with assistance from the government, they finally got an agreement that stuck. The Depression conditions placed the unions in a compromised position, stimulated the extension of co-operation between the larger manufacturers and the traditional unions, and made Hillman’s vision of new unionism seem more acceptable to both parties. Economic insecurity, an inability to control competition in the trade, and a ­growing public awareness of conditions in the needle trades all made the move towards government intervention more acceptable to both ­parties. Legitimate manufacturers were up against a competitive ­situation over which they had little control, and the traditional unions had made little headway in their organizing drives. Instead, they were spending much of their time fighting the left within their ranks. With the third-party mechanism already in place, it was a logical extension to seek outside assistance in their fight to stabilize the trade, and by the mid-1930s the government was there to assist them. But at the same time this cautious behaviour on the part of the traditional unions also served to intensify interunion rivalry, with much of the battle ­taking place in the dress sector. By the late 1930s, manufacturers were still frustrated in their efforts to bring stability to the trade. In 1938, manufacturer Charles Foster wrote to Thomas Learie, secretary for the Associated Clothing Manufacturers, complaining: It’s high time that the Association and its membership get together with a determination to set things right. . . . There has been a lot of talking in the past by various Associations existing in the needle industry in Toronto, plenty more talking on the part of the Union officials of the various unions, but unless an organized effort will be made by all concerned, it is very apparent that it will only be a

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matter of time when the entire needle industry will disappear from the city of Toronto, and before such time comes, let us not throw up our hands in defeat but put up a real man’s fight.78 But manufacturers were never able to ‘trust one another to close up in the case of a fight’.79 No sooner were associations formed to deal with the unions, and collective agreements signed, than members began to jump ship. In some instances manufacturers would ­ contribute funds to encourage union busting by specific manufacturers. If they were successful, other members would follow suit and break the collective agreement, which, in the observance, would have helped to stabilize wages.80 Any limited success the associations did have was largely the result of having a common enemy, the unions. Manufacturers joined forces to fight trade union recognition, closed shops, and wage increases, but when associations signed collective agreements they were placing the responsibility of policing independent manufacturers at the union’s door. It was a strange alliance, and its success was limited because most trade unions did not have the strength to do the job. The growth of the dress subsector made conditions in the trade even more chaotic. The Depression brought both manufacturers and unions to their knees. An alliance between manufacturers and unions became an essential part of the stabilizing structure of the industry, but given the nature of the union structure, the alliance excluded women.

Organizing the Dressmakers Contract shops grew in number in the men’s and ladies’ coat and suit industry, but in the dress industry it was a different story, partly because there was nothing to contract out; a dress was itself a complete garment, and to break it into parts was not cost-efficient. Instead, the shops maintained their flexibility by remaining small and keeping their prices low. In 1936, R.P. Sparks, writing about the clothing industry for the Manual of the Textile Trades in Canada, ­estimated that the average wholesale price of a dress was $2.51 in 1934.81 In an industry dominated by the dictates of fashion and ­seasonal variations in the labour force, shops had to be able to ­produce some 2.7 million dresses a week in mid-May and then contract down to only 41,000 dresses a week by mid-June.82 At the mercy of seasons, style changes, and an economic depression, manufacturers in the dress trade had an uncertain future. Small firms grew in

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number as the twentieth century advanced. In Canada the average number of workers in a factory fell from 36.8 in 1928 to 30.9 in 1932, while the number of firms employing fewer than 20 workers grew from 243 to 264 during the same period.83 In 1934, of the 577 manufacturers of women’s wear in Canada, over half (308) had production levels of less than $50,000 a year.84 The growth of the dress sector accounted for much of the change in the industry during the interwar years. Yet until the 1930s the dress trade had been largely ignored by the unions. When organization of the dress sector finally began in earnest, two union visions vied for hegemony over the dressmakers, and two unions vied for control of the trade. It was among the dressmakers that the final battle was fought. The underpaid, overcrowded, and overwhelmingly patriarchal dress trade represented labour’s most intractable problem.85 The concerns of the other branches did not ­necessarily apply there. For example, the cloakmakers’ call to establish a weekwork system often fell on deaf ears among the dress­ makers, as New York cloakmakers had discovered in 1923 when the dressmakers’ union defeated a referendum on weekwork in favour of the continuation of piecework.86 The dress trades in Canada represented a complex organizational challenge, not just to organize women workers but to integrate young French-Canadian women into a union largely dominated by skilled Jewish workers. Language, craft alliances, gender, and ethnicity all posed challenges to the unions anxious to make inroads into Montreal’s dress shops. In the clothing industry, workers of French origin made up about 80 per cent of the workforce during the 1930s.87 As an ilgwu report put it: The Montreal dress trade is a considerable industry, but, at this moment it presents practically an unorganizable field as it is employing nearly exclusively French Canadian women. True enough, we have formed already in Montreal the basis for organizing activity among the French-speaking workers by having ­organized quite a lively branch of French-speaking men and women in the cloak trade. But from this to a concentrated movement to ­organize all French-speaking people in the dress trade is still a long distance. A movement of that size would require large means and long educational preparatory activity.88 Any organizational drive would require trade unionists to be fluent in French, and for the largely Jewish union bureaucracy the task seemed insuperable. Thus, despite appeals from Montreal locals, the job was put off until 1936.

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The ilgwu reluctance left the field open to the Communist-led Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers. The iuntw in turn relied on its Jewish women activists to assist them in this task. The iuntw had been active in Montreal for several years, mainly conducting individual shop strikes with limited success, and it was reported as having 1,550 members in 1932.89 Among those who were instrumental in the iuntw’s drive to build up its membership in the dress shops were Eva Shanoff and Rose Myerson, two young dressmakers working in Montreal during the early years of the iuntw. Shanoff became well-schooled in trade union struggles from her experiences at Rose Dress, a shop where the boss, fearful that the Jewish workers were going to organize a union, shut out all the Jewish workers. ‘When they fired us, we carried on a strike for about three months’, Shanoff recalled. ‘All the Jewish people were active in that strike, but after a couple of weeks, just Rose Myerson and myself were picketing for three months. Just us and the policemen. They arrested us several times for picketing. The union [iuntw] stepped in right away and that’s when I joined the union.’90 The bravery and perseverance of these two young women were typical of activists in the garment unions. ‘I belonged to the executive and I helped to organize the shops’, Shanoff said, ‘and when the general strike came [in 1934], I became really active. . . . I was in jail for two weeks during that strike.’ According to Shanoff, Rose Myerson, a Montreal-born Jewish woman fluent in French, ‘was a ball of fire, she was a big force in the union. She was amongst the French people, of course, she could speak to them, she could draw them out. She was quite an active union member. I was as active as her, but she was a bigger force.’ In response to the resistance of the dress manufacturers, the iuntw had developed the tactic of calling out key workers in shops where it had support, thus bringing the whole shop to a halt. ‘From the beginning we had operators, finishers, pressers and cutters, but not always from the same shop’, explained Joshua Gershman, who was an iuntw organizer in Toronto in those years. When we only had finishers and operators who had joined the union, then they would meet alone. We set up shop committees representing all the crafts. When shop trouble erupted the chairlady called the union agent and he decided to take action. If the question was complicated then we called a full shop meeting. . . . To organize we used personal contacts in the shops. We would send someone to visit them at home, someone who knew her. Then

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broadside used in the organizing drive among the Montreal dressmakers, late 1930s. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University) ilgwu

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we would sign her up and get her to come to a union meeting and bring other women with her. We used personal contacts in and out of the shops.91 To try to attract French-Canadian women the iuntw had set up ‘social clubs’ for women workers where they could learn about the union. French-Canadian women were paid a dollar less a week than Jewish women, which only increased the already large gap between the French and Jewish women.92 While the ilgwu still approached the difficult Montreal problem with great caution, in August 1934 the iuntw decided to take some 1,500 dressmakers into the streets.93 As usual, organization began with the men. Eva Shanoff recalled: ‘We didn’t have a hundred per cent. If they didn’t come out, they didn’t come out. I think the majority if they didn’t come out, the whole shop didn’t participate. Unless there were some Jewish pressers, or cutters, or some men . . . maybe some men, then sometimes they [the women] would follow.’94 The newspapers estimated strike strength at 3,000 to 4,000 workers, although the iuntw claimed a membership of only 1,600 workers, 60 per cent of them women.95 The iuntw demanded higher wages (a minimum-wage scale ranging from $12.50 a week for finishers to $30 a week for cutters), a 40-hour week, and union conditions in the dress shops. The dispute ended with a partial victory on 25 September, after 20,000 lost working days.96 But the union made a tactical error when it rejected the Quebec Minister of Labour’s proposal for arbitration early in the strike. This cost it public support. The industrial union had not taken its decision to the membership, choosing instead to settle with individual shops. The ilgwu capitalized on this, accusing the iuntw of being unrealistic and of not having the workers’ interests at heart. While resistance to the use of arbitration machinery in trade union disputes had been part of the iuntw program from the beginning, the ilgwu willingness to use arbitration made it a more expedient choice for dress manufacturers. Again the workers, mainly women, were caught in the middle of both disputes: between manufacturers and unions, and between left-wing and right-wing unionism.97 The issue of arbitration machinery was a political football in the battle between the left and the right in the garment unions. Although all the clothing unions had used some form of third-party arbitration at one point or another over the previous 20 years—extending its range through mechanisms frequently included in collective agreements—the strategy was not always well liked. The presence of

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e­ minent outside people who were placed as arbitrators on grievance boards was supposed to circumvent deadlocked bipartisan conciliation procedures, which were largely responsible for dispute settlement and regulation of collective agreements. The antagonism towards such outside interference was long-standing, however. In 1913 a faction of the ilgwu had charged the leadership of ‘putting the guidance of the cloakmakers’ union into the hands of doctors, professors, scientists and intellectuals who had never in their lives been inside of a workshop’. The questions were political ones. Who made decisions about what went on in the shops? Where was political power to be located? In the hands of those on the shop floor? At the trade union’s central office? Or in the hands of some third party ­outside of the industry entirely? The Communists were of two minds on this question, partly because international Communist policy was contradictory. Lenin and the Russian Communist Party had come to appreciate the ­rationality of scientific management and saw its potential for transforming capitalism into a form of scientific socialism. The Communist move towards technocratic socialism met with resistance both in Russia and in other centres where ideas of workers’ control placed shop-floor unionism at the centre of their politics. Communist workplace political strategies were thus complicated by these two tendencies, shop-floor unionism and ‘democratic Taylorism’. 98 In the iuntw, where a political strategy that espoused shop-floor unionism held dominance, third-party arbitration was viewed as class collaboration. At the same time Communist garment workers were asked to follow the discipline of democratic centralism, which did not itself originate from the shop floor. When the executive of the iuntw made the decision to refuse arbitration, it followed Party policy, not the mandate of a shop-floor unionism that would have required consultation with the membership. The iuntw had cause to be wary of the arbitration machinery, because the ilgwu had a strong influence on the process and its fight against the Communists still held priority over allegiance to the garment workers themselves. In a letter to Dubinsky in August 1934, Bernard Shane outlined the ilgwu meddling in the affair. ‘It is bad for me to write in this manner on a strike that is so wholly justified, only that it fell into such hands.’99 It was likely that arbitration would have gone against the Communist-led union, but its visible antagonism to the process of arbitration was used against the membership. The iuntw was no match for staunch anti-union manufacturers and the ilgwu combined.

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The situation was irretrievable, and the iuntw never recovered. Its defeat in the Montreal general strike in 1934 meant that, as Shane reported to Dubinsky, ‘some 250 cutters lost their jobs, and 300 ­Jewish pressers were out of work soon after the strike, their places filled by French Canadian women, and over 1,000 Jewish girls have been completely excluded from the trade and the chances are that they shall never be able to come back since the employers blame them for all their troubles.’100 Manufacturers, wary of the ‘Communists’ in their shops, had noted that a large number of Jewish women were active in the union and acted accordingly. Of 12 arrests reported on 29 August 1934, 11 were of women.101 Eva Shanoff was one of those, spending two weeks in jail during the strike, and she was among those blacklisted afterwards. She said later, ‘I could not get a job and that is why I came here [to Toronto], because Gershman told me to come here, and I got a job.’ Many of the blacklisted Jewish women wore crosses around their necks when they went back into the shops to look for work.102 After the defeat of the strike, the ilgwu pulled the more conservative elements among the male cutters into the union.103 Then, as Shane recalled, ‘With the cutters organized, we now had an “in” to the dress industry. The skeptics, however, said we had reached the end of the line. “You’ve organized the cutters,” they said, “but you’ll never organize girls—especially girls in the Province of Quebec” (and 90 per cent of the workers in the industry were girls).’104 But as Leah Roback, an ilgwu organizer, reported, the job was made easier for the ilgwu: The ilgwu came in, it took over from the Workers’ Unity League [iuntw], and although the wul didn’t win the strike, as one considers it, but they did win something. The workers had developed a militancy that they didn’t know existed. For the first time there was this militancy of the French girls. In spite of the fact the clergy had gone all out with speeches and the Church! I mean they had ­Sunday meetings in the Church to convince the girls not to join the union.105 Against opposition from the patriarchal authority figures in their lives, the young French-Canadian women moved into a union movement led by older Jewish men. The step seemed like a giant one, astonishing many observers, but women had developed a sense of community for themselves in the two strikes in the 1930s. Jewish radical women like Myerson and Shanoff had earlier helped to organize their more naïve sisters. Their success was based partially on their

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past experience of trade union organizational strategies and partly on their understanding of labour radicalism within the broader Jewish cultural community to which they belonged. French-Canadian young women did not often have such cultural resources from which to draw emotional and political support. Yet as they moved into trade union activism, they were attracted into a broader social community of the iuntw political culture. When the iuntw decided to rejoin the ilgwu, the workers faced an undefined situation. Now they waited to see what the ilgwu would offer them.

The IUNTW ‘Walkover’ to the International, 1935–6 In 1935, a call by the Communist Party of Canada for full organizational unity of the Canadian trade union movement led to the merger of industrial unions under the Workers’ Unity League and the international unions.106 The original decision, an international one rather than one coming from the rank and file, was a result of international changes in Communist policy aimed at amalgamating the separate ‘red’ unions (iuntw) with the international unions (ilgwu). In the needle trades the implementation of the ‘walkover’ epended on the strength of the local iuntw relative to the international union, and each city dealt with the decision differently. The iuntw had been successful in organizing the Toronto dress trade, and when the Workers’ Unity League made the decision to disband the iuntw, the ilgwu had to negotiate a settlement with the iuntw.107 But in Montreal things were different. Shane and the ilgwu had the ­Montreal iuntw in the palms of their hands.108 Eventually the members of the Dressmakers’ Union (iuntw) were forced to join the ilgwu on an individual basis. According to Gershman, ‘Every member of the iuntw who went back into the ilgwu couldn’t find work because the bosses knew they were Communists. This was particularly true for the Jewish girls who were all in the iuntw.’109 The experiment in separate unions had helped workers experience a different kind of union activism. Many who compared their experience in the ilgwu and the iuntw found the ilgwu less democratic. Even when the walkover occurred in Toronto locals, the democratic spirit, and the political battles between the left and the right, carried on for several years. As Max Dolgoy recalled, ‘We used to have a mass meeting to elect a delegate to a convention. A mass meeting of the entire industry, of all the shops, to elect a delegate. Today you have no local meetings, it’s, ah, it’s the elected upper strata, they carry on.’110

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For the women, who by now identified strongly with the Industrial Union, the top-down decision of the Workers’ Unity League to disband the ‘red’ unions was not clearly understood. Even for the men and women activists at the centre of iuntw negotiations with the ilgwu, the decision was hard to swallow. Shanoff recalled the walkover: ‘It was still the Industrial Union when I came here [from Montreal], and shortly after, we joined the International. And believe me, that was a black day for me, for . . . most of us.’111 Another women activist said, ‘It was like losing a dream.’112

Women and the IUNTW When the industrial unions (iuntw, Mine Workers’ Union of Canada, and the Lumber Workers Industrial Union) formed under the Workers’ Unity League (wul), the Communist program for organizing women had altered. After the immersion of the Women’s Labour Leagues into the wul in the late 1920s, most of the work among women workers was temporarily placed on hold. The wul had seen the importance of organizing women workers and in April 1931 had set up a Women’s Department ‘to give central leadership among women workers and wives.’113 The wul pushed to ‘elect women workers to District Councils, to place a comrade in charge of women’s work, to do research work to develop specific demands for a program of women workers, to work among unemployed women workers and to establish a women’s section in the newspaper Unemployed Worker, put out by the Unemployed Workers Association.’114 The wul called for a ‘concentrated campaign to organize such industries as the textile, food, etc., where women are in predominant numbers’.115 As ambitious as the task was, the cpc was in no position to carry out much of this work, and most of the organizing of women was centred in the needle trades, where the wul already had a base. Women appear to have played a more active role in the iuntw. ‘In Montreal when I first joined the union’, Eva Shanoff recalled, ‘we had meetings, we had parties, we had all kinds of things. . . . I feel it was a very interesting time for me. I really enjoyed myself.’116 The iuntw was much smaller than the other unions, and most of the members knew one another in other contexts within the Jewish community. Other social networks in the immigrant community reinforced the appeal of the union and frequently other family members endorsed membership in the garment unions. In the small world of Jewish Communists these tendencies were even more pronounced. Bertha Blugerman recalled, ‘It was very easy for those who wanted to

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take an interest, you had the opportunity to do it. Because I belonged to the labour movement generally, you know, I belonged to the Young Communist League. So you want to build a better world to live in, so you are drawn in.’117 The social aspect of union activities was appealing to young single people in the shops. If women were more active in the iuntw it was perhaps because the union offered women workers a union structure that was much more responsive to their concerns. At the heart of the iuntw was the shop committee, a revival of the shop delegate system originally espoused by the Trade Union Educational League. In July 1930 The Worker reported: The iuntw has completely liquidated the old structure that to a large extent retarded the growth and development of our union. The old structure of locals and Joint Boards do not make the shop the bosses for our union activity. The shop delegate system will initiate activity in the shop, will develop a leadership, will organize shop committees in every shop and the shop delegates council will be the powerful organism of the union and will administrate the affairs of the union. The shop delegate system will be the rank and file leaders of the union.118 Still, as Sangster pointed out, ‘The Party’s initial trade union strategies . . . also tended to exclude women.’119 In the early phase of organizing in the 1920s the Red International of Labour Unions had encouraged international Communists to work within the established trade unions, but because of the low numbers of unionized women and their marginal status in the labour movement, that work often passed by women. When the international Communist policy called to ‘organize mass delegate meetings from the factory nuclei’ of activists, the cpc policy again assumed a strong radical women’s presence in the shops, which was not really there. Finally, the cpc effort to organize women factory workers was itself weak, as the funds and staff to do the job were not available.120 Only in the needle trades, where a decade of organizing in the wul had paid off, was women’s presence strong. Women made up nearly half of the delegates at the second convention of the iuntw and served as shop chairladies under the iuntw banner. In Toronto, reported Leo Uhra, ‘Women served on the executive boards, on all committees of the Joint Board, but here in Toronto, there were no paid women officials of the Industrial Union.’121 Several Communist women activists worked full-time with the Workers’ Unity League.

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Like their counterparts in the traditional unions, Communist leaders saw organizing women workers as problematic. ‘When I came to Montreal in 1929 as an iuntw organizer’, Gershman recalled, ‘we didn’t have one unified craft union. The operators, finishers, drapers, and pressers were women and we didn’t insist that they merge with the cutters, the men. We concentrated our efforts on the women ­particularly. There were a number of women on the executive and they helped to organize.’ As a result, the union was able to involve a large number of women in union activity. Gershman gave his view on why this had happened: The shop committee was the basis of our organization. This was the medium through which we reached out to the women. We gave them the initiative in forming the union. When everyone in the shop had joined our union we called a shop meeting. We had a shop committee elected, then our executive of the union were ­representatives from the shops. The shops elected shop chairladies and grievances were reported to her, then she reported it to the union. If it was necessary we called a shop meeting to see what to do. Generally speaking, one could say that the very structure of the Workers’ Unity League, of which the iuntw was an important part, was class struggle, and we paid attention to the lower paid ­ workers. Of course, here women were the majority.122 In Montreal an iuntw executive member, Fred Labelle, a presser, helped to organize the French women. ‘We succeeded in spite of the Church, the manufacturers, and the police. We solidified women into a militant front’, Gershman recalled. But again, the fight for the hearts and minds of the French-Canadian dressmakers was not an easy one: The very same women who were militants in the shop were under the influence of the Church and the priest at home. In one shop strike, where we won an increase for the finishers, drapers, and operators, we got a raise of $2.50 a week. Then on Monday, the women came back to the office to tell us they were going to give the money back to the manufacturers because the priest had told them at Sunday mass that the money was sinful money. This is the kind of thing we had to fight against.123 The acwa and the ilgwu had been seen as ‘Jewish unions’ because the heads of both unions were Jewish, and now the iuntw was showing the same ethnic structure.124 However, by the time of the strike in 1934, French-Canadian women were included in the iuntw. ‘Ruth’, a Jewish activist in the Montreal clothing trades, described the situation:

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It has always been like this, one nationality against another. People should understand that the enemy is never another worker, it’s the factory, the boss. . . . At first, the French-Canadian women didn’t support me because I was a Jew and the boss was also a Jew. Me, I was saying, ‘Look at me, I barely earn more than you do, I am a worker like you, I am closer to you than to the boss. Him, he’s another kind of Jew.’ (I was earning more because it was not piecework. I had a lot of experience, and I was changing jobs often, asking for more. That’s how I had a little bit more than the others.) . . . Sometimes I preferred the French-Canadian women to the Jewish ones, because they [Jewish women] were talking too much to the boss. Sometimes, after the workers’ meetings, the next day, the boss knew everything. Someone would go and tell him everything—it was not necessarily the Jews, it could be someone of any nationality.125 Both Jewish bosses and French-Canadian workers were suspicious of the active Jewish women, yet gender alliances between French and Jewish workers did develop. Shanoff said, ‘As a matter of fact, during the strike [in 1934], one French girl who participated in the strike, we both got arrested and both stayed in jail together. After the strike, we continued our friendship.’126 The first union experience of many women was with the Communist-led iuntw, and it remained a formative influence on their later union activism. The iuntw did not treat women workers as having a special status or as being different from men: the union’s socialist program built in an expectation that all workers would find common cause in class struggle, and women were subsumed under the general category of ‘worker’—unlike earlier organizing efforts in the needle trades, in which trade union participation was conditioned by gender. Despite this change, men still took the lead in the Communist-led union, and it was men who spoke for the class. In the end the women’s presence, while felt more than in the international unions, was still as a minority group. Union activism had drawn women into the left, and after the iuntw disbanded in 1936 many of the women remained active for only a brief period of time. The excitement of organizing, of almost nightly meetings that accompanied participation in the industrial union, was less extensive in the traditional international unions. After the needle trade workers joined the ilgwu, the ilgwu continued to have price committees in the shops, but most of the union bargaining moved out of the shops and into the managers’ hands.

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Women and the Piecework Issue The testimony of women garment workers before the Price Spreads Commission in 1933–4, the union campaigns and battles, and the mounting activism among the dressmakers themselves all pointed to a need for change in work conditions. As interest in unionism grew among the young women dressmakers, the question of the type of union and their relationship to it became more important. If the garment unions were to include women as equal partners in the house of labour, what kind of union would best serve their needs? How would women be situated within the trade union bureaucracy? In retrospect we can look back and ask these questions of the historical events that increasingly involved women garment workers in their broad sweep, but at the time, when organizational efforts to unionize the dressmakers were just beginning to show signs of success, the question of women’s place in the house of labour was not seen as being of much importance. Yet it is little wonder that women in the union movement focused mainly on the day-to-day concerns that arose in the shops; their position in the labour process determined it. In her report for the Price Spreads Commission, Winnifred Hutchison of the ywca stated: The power of piece-rates over the wage, happiness and health of the workers was a recurring note in our investigations. . . . The setting of piece rates is an important matter, especially for garments which are not standardized. . . . From many employees, especially operators, we heard of the unfair way in which these rates were set. The method adopted is to time some girl, usually the fastest, sometimes more than one girl, making them do it competitively. Sometimes the sample maker is timed, and employees claim that she is a picked worker and very fast. The time she takes to make up a garment will be less than the average girl will take, and the resulting piece rate is thus too low.127 The strain and speed required when rates were set too low led to frustration and exhaustion, and wages often failed to reach even the minimum required by the law. ‘We were very much struck by the signs of strain and fatigue in the faces and attitudes of the factory workers with whom we came in contact’, Hutchison stated. ‘It was an exception to find a factory where this was not the first impression. This is particularly sad considering the youth of most of the girls.’128 In non-union shops management set the rate, and if workers ­complained they were threatened with dismissal. Setting of piecerates was particularly important for women’s garments, which were

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not standardized, while they were of less importance in men’s ­garments, which were more or less standardized. In her study Hutchison noticed that some factories used a stopwatch to set the rate— ‘Sometimes without the knowledge of the fastest operator who was being timed, who might otherwise approximate her speed to that of an average worker.’ Larger factories often employed the precepts of scientific management to assist in setting piece-rates. Hutchison found that when one department store factory used a stopwatch, ‘only the bare operation was clocked and . . . the timing did not begin until the girl collected her bundle, consulted the sample, found the matching thread, sorted the pieces and made ready the machine which involved changing the foot and threading the needle.’129 In the larger businesses that tended to draw in young women workers—like the Eaton’s department store factories or large massproduction dress factories such as Ideal Dress in Montreal—the actual physical work environment could be quite pleasant. But the speed-up generated in a more formal work atmosphere still caused considerable stress, and women who complained were frequently fired. Unionization efforts often proved unsuccessful. In effect, the more vulnerable and less politically conscious women workers gravitated to the large shops, where they ultimately had less protection from arbitrary setting of piece-rates and speed-up. It was essential for women workers to have some say in these rates, for low piece-rates not only brought down their wages but also determined every aspect of their workdays. Besides being used as a whip for speed-up, piece-rates meant that the amount workers earned depended on the kind of work they got to do or on the style of the dress. Some dresses were easier to make up than others, some ­bundles larger than others. If management determined how work was ­distributed to the employees, workers had little control over their wage rates. Changing from one operation to another—i.e., working by machine on the main body of a garment, from hemming to operating, for example—slowed work down, which in turn reduced the possible wages. In addition, because workers were not paid for waiting time, slack periods cost the worker. ‘When there was a little bit [of work], let’s say the boss wanted you to come in for one dress, you had to come in.’130 In a brief article for Canadian Forum in 1931, Irene Biss described the plight of dressmakers: So far as wages are concerned, the pieceworkers are the chief ­sufferers. Styles change constantly, and only a few frocks of the same type can be absorbed by one limited market. Therefore prices

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for new jobs are constantly being fixed and it is naturally usually the employer who has the deciding voice. Arbitrary wage reductions were another sore point. In some cases the workers, according to their report at least, did not know what rates they were making until they got their pay envelope at the end of the week. . . . The majority of workers did not know until evening whether or not they would have to work overtime, and the compulsion to stay, with the possible loss of a job in view, was quite effective, if not explicit. Sometimes work was very irregular, and the finishers and pressers especially might sit around all day waiting for work, and then have to stay late to complete a consignment for mailing the same evening.131 For women in the dress trade, control over these conditions was desperately needed. Still, the piecework question was not simply a women’s issue, for it was complex and varied in its impact. The political issue of piecework and its introduction in the garment shops was different for different sectors of the industry. As Steven Fraser points out, the issue of piecework versus weekwork was a ‘moral and existential’ issue more than a technical one. He notes that piecework’s challenge to weekwork generated outrage from many of the skilled male workers, who dreaded a return to the conditions prevailing in the ‘task shops’ of the nineteenth century. Manufacturers, for their part, were often only willing to consider weekwork rates if payment was tied to regulation of production standards. Fraser argues that the companies ‘outraged an artisan sense of autonomy and fuelled anxieties generated by the homogenizing and levelling tendencies represented by the new technologies, by the expanding mass market for cheaper clothing, and by the rationalizing practices of the “new unionism.” ’132 At union conventions, where objections to the introduction of piecework were frequently raised, protests against piecework were as frequently tied to this vanishing artisan sentiment as to radical shopfloor politics. Given that most young women workers were not closely tied to the artisan traditions of the needle trades and that many of them were part of the new technological restructuring of the factories, because the deskilling of operating tasks allowed their entrance into the industry in the first place, they had little experience of a shop floor that was not dictated by piecework rates. This is especially true for the young Gentile and French-Canadian women workers who, unlike their Jewish immigrant sisters, were not as likely to have arrived at the factory door as already skilled tailoresses or dressmakers.

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These differences between the men and women workers may account for women’s lack of interest in the piecework issue, but, again, this highly complex issue was not simply one of gender—and, indeed, it had a political dimension as well. The adoption of piecework in the needle trades was tied to the broader question of deskilling and the loss of artisanal control on the shop floor. The latter issue tied skilled workers, irrespective of gender, together and further enhanced the gulf between immigrant workers, who were often considered to be somewhat skilled, and the young French-Canadian women in Montreal and their Gentile counterparts in Toronto. In sectors such as men’s suits, overcoats, and other heavy garments or clothes of complex construction, such as women’s coats and suits, skilled tailors did much of the operating. The work still had much of the artisanal flavour that was not part of the labour process in dressmaking. In the trades in which heavy garments were produced, piecework rates were challenged because they threatened the male artisans’ view of their craft. Also, the introduction of piecework rates was often tied to the deskilling of the work, which was tied to the ­sectioning of garment-making into smaller units that did not then require such skill. Abe Magerman of the Toronto cloakmakers ­suggested that the reason for the introduction of section work in the trade was that the older skilled tailors who had made the full garment had begun to retire, creating a shortage of skilled workers. The manufacturers had then decided to divide the work into sections, and more women moved into the jobs. With the new women workers and the introduction of production standards and hourly rates, the bosses were able to speed up the work and reduce labour costs.133 In the production of men’s and women’s coats and suits, by tradition the tailors who made the full garment were men, but with no apprenticeships in the trade the skills were not passed on to younger workers. When the older men retired, the younger men often did not have the knowledge and training necessary to make up the garments. The manufacturers used this situation to their advantage by breaking the tasks down into smaller units—creating section work—and using less skilled workers to do the jobs. As this happened, women began to move in, and as a result both men and women were holding jobs as section workers. Manufacturers who hired women in these jobs paid them women’s wages—that is, lower wages. The presence of women doing these jobs threatened male workers’ jobs, because men were traditionally paid more. Men, then, were not just fighting piecework—piecework was the tip of the iceberg, part of a larger package involving the deskilling and restructuring of the labour process. In the larger factories in

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men’s clothing and women’s cloaks and suits, the piecework issue’s political significance was much different from what it was in the dress shops. As a result, when the issue of stopping the introduction of piecework came before the union conventions, the discussion was usually initiated by those sectors of the trade that were more heavily unionized and whose members were more active in the union movement. And the issue of piecework was not easily resolved. In 1932 the New York cloakmakers demanded that the union take a stand and ‘go on record absolutely in favour of week work’, but ilgwu vice-president Hochman responded that such a stand ‘would not be practical’. Hochman stated, ‘Our position is a practical one, that the General Executive Board enforce week work wherever possible, and we refer the matter to them.’ Union members at the convention continued to challenge the executive, saying it had ‘sanctioned the establishment of piecework in any market’. The matter continued to plague the executive in the following years.134 At the 1934 acwa convention, during a major debate on piecework, only one woman spoke to the question, and she was not opposed to piecework. She said, ‘If others feel they can best control their conditions through the piecework system, it isn’t fair to impose a different system.’135 The 1934 convention put an end to the controversy once and for all. After a long debate on the convention floor the president, Hillman, proffered his position: ‘Let me ask those who propose the resolution for week work—what is it that they are asking the convention to do?’ Hillman warned that such a resolution ‘would mean a general strike in the clothing industry’. Unless you really mean that, then you are simply engaging in beautiful phrase making. In a very innocent resolution you are asking the convention to declare a general strike in our industry for the week work system, because no one here is childish enough, I hope, to think that a resolution at this convention will put the industry on week work. . . . I will tell you what will happen. What will happen is that the contracting shops will work piecework, that the markets where we have not got complete control will work piecework and you will sacrifice every organization maintaining standards.136 Hillman, a realist, drove home his point with the following illustration: Montreal also submits the resolution; Montreal, where the whole market was destroyed, practically every house out of business— Gardner’s, Keller’s, Levenson’s [all large factories producing men’s clothing], where we enforced conditions. Through that

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c­ ondition we have ruined hundreds of families of our best ­members. . . . We have made of the whole Montreal market a ­rotten contracting ­market. I found that where wages years ago in shops in those ­contract markets were $5 to $6 a week, there was a week work ­system. As a result of it, demagogues took hold of our organization in Montreal and ruined whatever was left. It took an extraordinary effort to rebuild it and we have not repaired the ­damage as yet.137 Hillman and the union therefore proposed a compromise similar to the one adopted by the ilgwu. The acwa convention supported the proposal ‘to leave the question of piecework and weekwork to the individual markets’, which would in turn leave the way open for ­individual manufacturers to introduce piecework without hindrance from union officials.138 Toronto and Montreal locals stubbornly ­continued to request that the international union reintroduce weekwork into their markets, but their request met with a cool reception.139 Piecework seemed to have won the day. It is not hard to understand why. Much of this struggle for piecework vs weekwork was not a burning concern for women workers. The women who worked under a weekwork system could hardly be said to have been earning a living wage. Their wages were set either by the bosses or negotiated with the male union bureaucrats who always ensured that women would be paid less than men. At least under the piecework system, the gender of the worker was irrelevant to the bargaining process; the only things that really mattered were skill and speed. These factors may go some way in explaining why so many young women preferred to work in the large dress shops rather than in the small contractors’ shops. Of course, the attraction worked both ways: the large manufacturers were most interested in having the services of young women, because semi-skilled women workers were cheap to employ. For women, the shop was the union. They were not likely to be involved in union politics beyond the shop committees, so for them it mattered very little that the union had the appearance of being divided into ‘many smaller organizations’, as Hillman had complained. Since they were already employed on piecework rates, they preferred to see those rates set in the shops, rather than behind closed doors between union officials and manufacturers. In the shops the women could directly bargain for their wages through the shop committees. ‘I don’t like to work time-work. I like to be my own boss’, explained Eva Shanoff. ‘Each dress is a different style and you settle accordingly. You have to go through every style, you have to go through every stitch, what this dress has, what that dress has. You have to bargain, sometimes fight, never mind bargain.’140 In the dress

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shops, with often over a hundred style changes a season, the price committee would meet to set amounts for each change, so that women had a fair degree of control over their work and the prices they received. Once the prices were set, ‘Every one worked for themselves. There was little unity’, reported a Montreal dressmaker, Margo Durocher.141 The system encouraged individualism. It was used as a whip for speeding up work, placing the burden of slack time on the shoulders of the individual worker. It increased the tension over allegations of unfair work distribution and favouritism among the operators. As well, because many women had little work history of collective action they were not much bothered by the effect of piecework on their sense of trade unionism. For women, class power was expressed in the bargaining process itself. It was here that they came up against the boss and sometimes won. Clothing factory worker Sophie Mandel described how a committee operated in the cloak shops: The operators had a committee. They would decide how much they wanted. The finishers would decide how much we wanted. Then we would go into the boss to talk with him about the prices. You know when you go into settle the price, you don’t expect to get exactly what you asked for. If I knew I was going to get a cent, or two cents extra for a coat, I used to ask him four cents. I should be able to bargain down. If I used to go in to settle on the winter coats, I used to ask him for a raise, for a couple of cents a coat. He asks, ‘Why do you want a raise?’ I say, ‘Because it’s so hot—in the summer when it’s hot you work on winter coats—and when I sit and hold the heavy coat on me I deserve two cents extra.’ Women were both slaves to the speed-up required of pieceworkers and their own mistresses—or at least they felt like they were their own bosses. According to Mandel: We used to sit at tables and work and we were talking. One day the boss comes up, he says, ‘Let’s have less talking and more work!’ I says, ‘Mr. Price, I talk on my own time. If I wouldn’t talk I wouldn’t work.’ He says, ‘I can’t win with you’, and he used to go away. I used to love to sit and talk with the girls, I am my own boss, I do what I want. I can get up a few times and go next door, there was a little cafeteria, to pick up a coffee and bring it in. He has no business to stop me, because I work on my time. If you work timework, that’s a different story. Time-work you have to work, comes lunch hour then you go for coffee, you can’t go in the middle of the work, because it’s his time. But when you work piecework, you are the boss.142

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For women, then, the issue of piecework vs weekwork was a complicated one involving the degree of control over their work. Price committees gave women at least a modicum of direct control over the wages they made. Through their strength on the price committee they fought to get good piece-rates, and afterwards they could make a fair day’s wage simply by working as hard as possible. The real issue was not piecework or weekwork, but who made the decisions about wage rates. The trade union fights of the 1930s were for trade union ­recognition, and as part of that battle unions wanted some say in the setting of piecework prices and the distribution of work. In the nonunion shops these ‘rights’ belonged to the manufacturers, who ­arbitrarily set wage rates, distributed work as they saw fit, and generally organized and reorganized the labour process independent of trade union influence. Union leaders such as Hillman and Dubinsky argued under the rubric of new unionism that manufacturers were inefficient in the way they organized the labour process, that trade union input into setting wage rates, organizing production standards, and distributing work would further contribute to the efficiency of the operations in the shops. While many manufacturers wanted to avoid what they saw as union interference, how could they when they themselves were under siege from their own community and from the mass buyers in an ­economic climate that was bringing such disaster—a climate in which many of the companies were fighting just to hold on to their factories? The economic experience of the Depression years, the interunion fights, and the lack of cohesion among the manufacturers themselves seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion: the resolution of the questions that threatened the stability of the Canadian garment industry would not come from within the needle trades community itself. In the end the real fight was a battle between male trade union bureaucrats and the manufacturers, and it was about who made the decisions—and where they got made. This struggle seemed to require the services of an outside arbitrator—and the men in the provincial departments of labour came forward to fulfil that role. That piecework became the central issue for union political ­divisions in the interwar period attests to the overwhelming male domination of union activity and to the lack of women’s participation in trade union affairs. With this issue, as with others, the struggle between left-wing and right-wing forces in the union—as well as the struggle between workers and management—was carried on over the heads of the majority of workers in the industry.

7

When the Boys Get Together: Orchestrating Consent

The Boys are having a conference with the employers tonight, preparatory to the conference which opens on Monday. I have just gone over the schedule paragraph by paragraph with the boys and changes will be proposed in the rates for specific crafts. J.L. Cohen, lawyer for the union, to Bernard Shane, Montreal, ILGWU, 26 November 1936 When the clothing unions turned to the State to settle the disputes over wage rates and unfair trade practices in the needle trades, the men in charge had little difficulty convincing the government officials that saner minds must prevail. Thanks largely to the in-depth ruminations of the Stevens Commission, the sense of crisis in the needle trades—the troublesome economic and social conditions, the plight of workers at all levels—was now public knowledge. The ravages of the Depression years now caused concern in the social circles that mattered. Still, it would take some time to get the government to act. A history of non-interference in the affairs of the marketplace shaped the political morality of State officialdom. Garment unions had been pushing for third-party intervention—a goal that would ostensibly offer a new mechanism for dispute settlement or for settling grievances or violations of the collective agreements. Third-party mediation meant that both unions and management would begin to accept outsider influence in the affairs of the industry. Could it be much of a leap of faith to extend that 190

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influence to State assistance in creating and shaping a regulatory model for collective bargaining relations in the clothing industry? But the recruitment of State officialdom into active negotiations over the regulation of the labour process would move trade union activism further from the shop floor, the place where women gathered in the greatest number and had at least a minimal political voice. For the proponents of collective bargaining, the 1930s were mean years. Despite their established rights to organize and to collective bargaining, despite strike after strike, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America continued to face off against a firm employers’ resistance to collective bargaining and trade union recognition.1 Unions were learning the hard way that on their own they were too weak to bring employers into line. ‘It seems idle to declare that workers are entitled to certain “rights” of association or of collective bargaining’, J.L. Cohen, the lawyer for the clothing unions, remarked at the time, ‘without at the same time recognizing that recalcitrant and anti-social employers constantly prevent the exercise of these rights.’ Cohen concluded, ‘Society has an interest and a duty to use its legislative power to enable these rights to exist in fact and not only in theory.’ By the 1930s both the trade unions and the manufacturers were actively seeking State intervention in the industry. Cohen accused the Canadian government of avoiding its responsibility: ‘It will prefer to appear to be filling the role of umpire to conceal the fact that, as Government, it has failed to discharge its primary duty to the rules. Umpiring without rules is a make-shift process, and that, in great measure, marks the whole attitude of Government in Canada today on the question of labour relations and collective bargaining.’2 For many critics and many members of clothing unions as well, turning to the State for assistance was like forming a pact with the devil. Unions wanted to have collective bargaining rules in place and have them legitimized by the State; but at the same time members were aware that State legitimation would make their organizations hostage to a public body over which they would most likely have little control. Unions worried about what they might have to give up to get the assistance and legitimation of the State in collective bargaining. Would they be handing over their collective power to the State? When trade union recognition was no longer based on the collective power of the workers to face off against the bosses—and instead was based on legislated rights given to unions by the State— what would be the long-term consequence for future trade union actions? Trade unions could not always expect to have friendly

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governments in power. Would the legislative rights written into the laws of the State protect them no matter what party was in office, no matter what political winds were blowing? The development of provincial collective bargaining legislation in the 1930s would have a decided impact on the clothing industries of Montreal and Toronto. The push to provide Canadian workers with a ‘New Deal’ resulted in provincial government legislation that regulated hours and wages in the clothing industry in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Ontario’s Industrial Standards Act and Quebec’s Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act became law at a time when the Industrial Recovery Act in the United States was reshaping collective bargaining south of the border. More particularly, in the context of the needle trades, the legislation and the political process of the negotiations surrounding it would take on a heavily gendered nature that could only have a negative impact on the women who formed the majority of the workers and unionists in the trade. And those negotiations ultimately would set the hours and wages for clothing workers. With the government convinced of the need to introduce detailed labour regulations, the task of the union leadership then became one of orchestrating membership consent. But the negotiations of both the ILGWU and the ACWA with the provincial governments went on over the heads of the rank-and-file union members. In particular, women workers knew little or nothing of the deal until it was completed. The trade union men spoke as the voice of all the membership—which meant that they continued to speak for the women, as they had been doing for decades past.

The Context of State Intervention Trade unions have their own built-in contradictions. While they serve to organize workers to obtain bargaining power over wages and work conditions, for instance, they can also function politically to contain dissent among their members and to solidify workers’ acceptance of their subordinate position as a class.3 As part of this process, trade union leaders must appear to be responsible spokespersons for the working classes. If unions were to survive within the capitalist system, the government and the capitalist class would have to be convinced that labour was using its class power in a ‘responsible’ manner—that is, in a way that contained discontent rather than exploited it. This was no easy task in a movement experiencing sharp internal factional disputes. During these years both the ILGWU and the ACWA

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leaderships were engaged in a battle against the left within their own unions and more particularly against the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers, which was unwilling to abandon its class-based unionism for the more conciliatory model of new unionism proposed by the ILGWU and the ACWA. Left-wing trade union activists—especially anyone connected with the Communist-led Workers’ Unity League—continued to see the employers as the main enemies of labour; yet their political position was so weakened that they could do very little to make their views heard in the shops. In the wider world of national politics the fight against communism continued to heat up, adding to the weakness of the left in the clothing unions and limiting the resistance to government intervention. If ‘industrial peace’ was to be brought to the needle trades, a strong, persuasive leadership would be needed—a challenge readily accepted by ACWA president Sidney Hillman, among others. By the time the clothing unions turned to the State to settle disputes over wage rates and unfair trade practices, the unions in charge had little difficulty convincing government officials that saner minds must prevail. Thanks largely to the in-depth ruminations of the federal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying (the Stevens Commission) in 1934, the sense of crisis in the needle trades—the troublesome economic and social conditions, the plight of workers at all levels—had become public knowledge. The ravages of the Depression years now caused concern in the social circles that mattered. Still, it would take some time to get the government to act. A history of non-interference in the affairs of the marketplace shaped the political morality of State officialdom.

Government Acts: In the United States The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as US President in 1932 brought hope for a New Deal in America. Left-wing and progressive forces and trade union leaders such as Hillman saw the advantage of working with Roosevelt as his government took office in March 1933 and quickly began changing the face of US politics.4 The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in June 1933 had established a kind of precedent. According to Jesse Carpenter, the legislation ‘embodied objectives that had long dominated collective bargaining in the needle trades’.5 The Act set out ‘to provide for the general welfare by promoting the organization of industry for the purpose of cooperative action among trade groups; to induce and maintain united action of labor and management under adequate

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This newspaper clipping found in the papers of J.L. Cohen captures the patriarchal sentiments that enveloped the negotiation process for the industrial standards legislation in Ontario and Quebec. (National Archives of Canada, J.L. Cohen Papers, MG30, A94, file 2181C—neg. C144073)

government sanctions and supervision; to eliminate unfair competitive practices; to improve standards of labor; and otherwise rehabilitate industry.’6 The National Recovery Administration (NRA)—the official agency responsible for setting up and administering the new legislation— established 18 codes covering all aspects of the needle trades and providing set wages and hours of work for each sector of the trade. Each code established different wage rates and different classifications of skilled and unskilled work. According to Carpenter, the legislation ‘might well have been taken from any one of scores of collective agreements between employers’ associations and labor unions in the needle trades.’ He noted, ‘The declared objectives of the

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codes, stated in such phrases as “improving standards of labor and eliminating unfair trade practices with the aim of rehabilitating” the industry—could have served equally well for the preamble to collective agreements.’7 Some of the clothing codes clearly set out wage rates by gender, with job classifications establishing a certain wage rate if a man did the job and a lower rate if a woman did the job, just as they had done in collective agreements before that time.8 Hours of work ranged from 35 a week in men’s clothing to 37.5 a week in some sectors of women’s clothing. As Carpenter observed, ‘Except for new titles, most of the provisions in the first code of fair competition approved for the women’s coat and suit industry could not be distinguished from the terms of a collective agreement.’9 As the New York Times pointed out on 12 August 1934, ‘The code fitted this particular trade like one of its own cloaks.’10 The strength of the resemblance between the codes and collective agreements in the trade attests to the power that needle trade union officials had in shaping the regulations. The ACWA’s Hillman not only took part in ‘the political manoeuvring’ that led to the creation of the NRA, but also quickly became a member of its Labor Advisory Board and later of the National Industrial Recovery Board itself. According to Steven Fraser, Hillman ‘did so despite the fact that the final draft of the NIRA was regarded as a triumph, if not a total one, for corporatism.’11 From Hillman’s point of view, the National Industrial Recovery Act was ‘the most constructive legislation enacted by Congress. . . . We have told our membership time and time again that it was about time for the government to step in. . . . We propounded that idea very early in 1930.’12 Hillman was not alone. David Dubinsky, president of the ILGWU, was also an ally of the new order, although more cautious in his support. In July 1933 Dubinsky said, ‘It is safe to assert that there is no industry in the United States that stands as much in need of the remedies and relief afforded by the National Industry Recovery Act as does the cloak and suit industry.’ Dubinsky moved into full support of negotiations to set codes in the needle trades, but he cautioned, ‘Without strong unions in every essential industry to back it up, the Recovery Act may not be of great or permanent good to the American wage earners.’13 Efforts to organize the as yet unorganized sectors of the US garment industry took up much of his union’s time during the fall of 1933. The ‘golden opportunity for organizing the workers’ meant that all hands were busy with ‘the opportunity that comes once in a lifetime’. Canadian locals’ appeal for assistance during these times met with an angry response. Dubinsky told the

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The ‘boys’, including ILGWU leaders and manufacturers—and one woman, Dora Lovitch of the Toronto ILGWU joint board—at a reception for David Dubinsky, international president of ILGWU, Royal York Hotel, Toronto, 1937. Dubinsky is second from right at head table. To his left is ILGWU lawyer J.L. Cohen. (Archives of Ontario, Multicultural History Collection, Jewish History, MSR 1506)

Canadians to ‘maintain their positions in the best way possible until the next season’.14 Although enforcement of the codes proved to be a problem and the US government struck down the NRA in 1935, claiming that it contravened the constitution, the ACWA was still convinced that the legislation had been helpful to the trade. The experience of the NRA codes encouraged the growth of trade associations and extended the influence of trade unions. Within a year the ILGWU was able to claim contractual relations with 68 different employers’ associations in Canada and the United States. Trade union membership rose, and Hillman of the ACWA could claim that 85 per cent of the men’s clothing industry was organized. ILGWU membership soared from 23,876 in 1932 to 198,141 in 1934. The establishment of the codes also moved the unions away from their emphasis on parochial, narrow interests to industry-wide considerations. During the few years of its operation government officials had gathered trade data, which now became part of a new rational, scientific analysis of industry practices. In the following years much of this information helped form a new code for the trade, using much of the same approaches outlined by the NRA.15

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Yet the NRA also brought to the fore problems and political divisions that had plagued the industry prior to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Regulation and control of non-union shops, the continued pressure for the downward slide of wages and hours (a direct result of unregulated garment production through jobbers and contractors), and geographical disparities in wages and hours, which further drove down conditions in the larger garment manufacturing centres, all reappeared under the administration of the codes. The unions’ hope that the New Deal codes would force unethical manufacturers to obey the laws—a compliance they themselves had been unable to bring about through strikes and enforcement of collective agreements—was short-lived. As Fraser concludes, ‘The NRA was born in contradiction and would never escape that fate.’16 As proponents of the new unionism, Hillman and Dubinsky wanted to be part of a political process that would ‘abolish industrial despotism’ and usher in a new age for labour. The enthusiasm was bound to spread across the border into Canada, with members of the international unions frequently reporting on the progress of the new developments to their Canadian counterparts in Toronto and Montreal. The two international unions were keen on bringing to Canada the kind of reforms they had seen implemented in the United States.17 In Canada the 1935 federal election of the Liberal Party under the leadership of Mackenzie King and the rise of the Liberals to power in Ontario in 1934 pointed towards a promise of better days for Canada’s working class. In Quebec the Liberal government of LouisAlexandre Taschereau was in its last days, and public pressure for government to bring labour policy under State regulation continued to mount. In 1934 the ACWA reported, ‘The existence of the Clothing Code Authority in the United States has brought much attention to the feasibility of some sort of control over hours, wages and other trade practices being introduced into the Canadian industry.’18 Clothing unions, attempting to take advantage of the climate of reform, did their best to ensure public scrutiny of the industry. Their efforts to bring conditions in the trade to the attention of the Stevens Commission resulted in rising pressure to develop legal mechanisms for regulation and control of the trade. As the Canadians moved towards their own ‘little NRA’, they were not unaware of the limitations of the US model. Still, the ammunition provided by Professors Frank Scott and Harry M. Cassidy in their Royal Commission on Price Spreads study provided the ACWA with the evidence it needed to convince the government of the necessity of introducing an NRA in Canada.19

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Government Acts: In Canada From 1933 on the net effect of the Depression years was to speed up the collaboration of unions and manufacturers. Thanks to the Roosevelt era in the United States and its echoes in Canada, the Canadian government’s new role as industrial arbitrator would soon make possible the institutionalization of relations in the needle trades. In 1934 Quebec passed the Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act, and Ontario followed suit in 1935 with the introduction of the Ontario Industrial Standards Act. Alberta (1935), Nova Scotia (1936), Saskatchewan (1937), and New Brunswick (1939) passed similar Acts. As Bernard Woods and Sylvia Ostry point out, this legislation not only served to declare provincial rights over labour relations but also ‘laid the framework for a system of industrial relations which combined collective bargaining with state regulation.’20 The New Deal had come to Canada, with major consequences for the needle trades. Until the 1930s both federal and provincial governments generally adhered to a principle of voluntarism in their dealings with the union movement. Neither level of government had done much to regulate wages and hours of work beyond a minimal level of decency. Workplace legislation was complicated by a two-tiered governmental system based on the ability of both federal and provincial powers to enact labour laws. The division of power, stemming from section 91 of the British North America Act, is not without its complications. The federal government had little legislative jurisdiction over labour relations.21 The federal model for labour relations remained its 1907 Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, which had itself come under dispute by 1925, partly because it infringed on provincial rights. Issues of collective bargaining could fall under either provincial or federal jurisdiction, with labour matters in general tending to be placed under provincial jurisdiction over property and civil rights and trade union activity affected by criminal law falling under the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada. In addition, the federal government had jurisdiction over its own employees, Crown corporations, and enterprises linking one province to another. Historically, the provincial intervention regulating conditions of labour occurred in three phases. In 1884 and 1885 Ontario and Quebec introduced provincial factory legislation that attempted limited control of the workplace. During the second phase (1919–34), the State acted as a protector of women and children working in the manufacturing sector. It legislated a minimum wage for women workers and later limited the number of hours they could labour. Yet

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once the legislation was on the books, there was little attempt to enforce it. The third phase, the setting up of provincial industrial standards legislation, extended provincial control of industrial conditions over a whole industry, whether the workplaces were unionized or not. The Factory Acts of 1884 in Ontario and 1885 in Quebec set up general safety provisions for all workers, but for hours of labour, meal breaks, and special safety precautions the legislation was framed with the intention of protecting women and children (considered as equivalents) within specific branches of the industry that employed them.22 These early Acts prohibited factory employment of girls under 14 and boys under 12 and limited hours of labour for all boys under 14, all girls under 18, and all women to 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Since the laws acknowledged the specific vulnerability of women and children, the special ‘problems’ affecting those workers were classified as issues of civil rights and as such fell within provincial rather than federal jurisdiction. There was no attempt at that time to set a minimum wage for work or to regulate the hours and conditions of men’s labour.23 The presence of women and children in the manufacturing sector during the nineteenth century had caused concern among trade union associations and others who wished to promote the welfare of those groups. Unionists in particular were concerned that the presence of cheaper labour would undercut their own position in the labour market. Thus, laws touching on the role of women workers in Canada had a dual rationale: to protect women and children workers from overwork and harmful conditions in the shops and factories; and to control and limit their workplace activity. Alice Kessler-Harris emphasizes the contradictory nature of the protective legislation in the United States, and Boris observes the ambiguous effect of protective legislation on women workers, especially on homeworkers: ‘mothers belonged at home, but not laboring for wages.’ Indeed, US law proclaimed women as being different. As Boris puts it, ‘The discourse of restriction often highlighted the inappropriateness of women being out of the home (at night) or even working (in foundries).’24 The workers, lacking the protection of a trade union, became dependent on legislative protection. In fact, their jobs became constituted in a way that relied on State protection: ‘Labour, having done its best to turn women into children, now pleaded that they needed the fatherly care of government intervention on their behalf.’25 These comments apply equally well to the Canadian situation. By 1907 labour legislation had established the minimum age of entrance into the workplace at 14 years and limited the hours of

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labour for women and children to 60 hours a week, with some exceptions. For example, Ontario deemed it permissible to employ young boys under 14 and girls under 18 in the food-processing and canning industries during the months of July to October. Quebec introduced an amendment in 1907 restricting the use of young boys and girls who were unable to read and write, forcing employers to send such workers to night school until they could pass a literacy test.26 Provincial Factory Acts were frequently revised to extend their jurisdiction over other workplaces or to limit the hours of work for underage workers as well as adult male workers. Variations from province to province and from trade to trade resulted in a lack of uniformity in legal standards, which gave enterprising manufacturers the opportunity to play one province off against the other (a common practice in the needle trades, with their interprovincial competition). Almost all provinces also established specific legislation for women and girls, but in several industries minimum wages for women were fixed and maximum hours of labour defined in a way that encouraged abuse. In the clothing industry, minimum wages and hours for women and girls depended on the location in which work was carried out; there were lower wage scales and longer hours for women employed in the countryside. In addition, the wage rates for Ontario and Quebec were not the same; as a rule rates in Quebec were lower than those set in Ontario.

The Minimum Wage: Protecting Women and Girls? Some objection might be taken to legislation of this kind if it applied to adult male employees, but as regards women and girls the State is thoroughly justified in interfering not only for the protection of those unable to protect themselves to the same extent as men, but for the preservation of social order and better standards of decent living.27 Manitoba established the first minimum-wage Act in Canada, in 1918, followed by British Columbia in the same year, Quebec and Saskatchewan (1919), and Nova Scotia and Ontario (1920). The Acts followed a similar pattern. They each set up boards of appeal to regulate wages for women, and in some provinces the boards also had the power to regulate hours and work conditions.28 The Ontario minimum-wage legislation required employers to pay wages of $12 a week to experienced women 18 years of age and $10 a week to inexperienced women of the same age. The law required employers in

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factories, shops, restaurants, and places of amusement to keep records of their employees. It also provided the employers with some leeway: 25 per cent of the workforce employed in any one shop or factory could be paid below the minimum. The law remained the same throughout the 1920s and 1930s, although the wage rates and percentages of inexperienced workers varied from industry to industry, and wage rates and the geographical zones to which they applied varied between provinces. Minimumwage laws did not fix flat rates for wages. Each statute provided for an administrative body that would examine specific industrial conditions and set rates based on those industrial conditions and on the cost of living necessary to keep a single girl. Each province set the rules for establishing its provincial board somewhat differently. In Ontario and Quebec the rate was set by a board of representatives from industry and the community and depended on the cost of living of a single girl. In Ontario and Quebec the law originally referred only to wages, but later came to cover hours of work as well.29 In the Ontario clothing industry a minimum wage set in 1922 at $12.50 a week prevailed into the Depression years. When manufacturers approached the Minimum Wage Board in September 1932 for a reduction in that rate, their appeal was unsuccessful, although it may have prompted a re-examination of the cost of living for women in 1933. The Ontario Minimum Wage Board decided that a single woman living in Toronto in 1933 could be expected to support herself on $650.05 a year (in 1929 in the urban United States $800 a year was considered to be a minimumwage level necessary ‘for health and efficiency’ of a single worker).30 The assessment allowed for a yearly expenditure of $364 ($7 a week) for board and lodging, $115.05 ($2.21 a week) for clothing expenses, $23 for recreation and amusement, $6 for reading matter, and $10 for church and charity. The minimum budget also included a detailed breakdown of all allowable clothing per year and allowed for the cost of incidentals such as toothpaste, thread, needles, and shoelaces.31 One of the drawbacks of such detailed accounting was the assumption of full employment throughout the year: very few single women, particularly in the needle trades, ever worked a full year. With their negligible presence in unions, women workers had little protection other than that provided by the State.32 This fact became the basis for the legislative advances such as the minimum wage laws of 1919 and 1920 in Quebec and Ontario. The argument that women were deserving of special protection went beyond their lack of collective bargaining power; it was linked with traditional conceptions of the nature and proper role of women. Women were supposed to bear

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and rear children, and industrial work that hampered this true function of women was to be curtailed at all costs. Although labour legislation was, to some extent, in place, its enforcement was never extensive. Indeed, the issue of who was responsible for dealing with violations was not at all clear. In all provinces factory inspectors were responsible for seeking out abuses and enforcing labour legislation under the provincial Factory Acts, but the State provided only limited resources for this purpose. In many provinces the minimum-wage statute also expected individual women to come forward and report abuses to the boards, after which fines would be imposed and workers’ back pay would be collected. Workers who took this course of action would often lose their jobs and then have to wait for months before receiving their settlements. In Quebec in 1930, with 7,410 industrial establishments listed, only 2,195 inspections were made. ‘At this rate each establishment would be visited about once every three years’, Scott and Cassidy observed. There had always been too few inspectors—in 1910, for instance, only seven men, a medical inspector, and three women worked as inspectors in Quebec, and eight in Ontario. They were expected to deal with all the factories in the provinces.33 By 1938, 26 men and 7 women worked as factory inspectors in Ontario. The success of these inspectors, not surprisingly, was minimal. For example, 4,851 orders for improvement, 11 prosecutions, and 8 convictions were issued under the Ontario Factory Act in 1934–5. Under the Ontario minimum-wage legislation in 1934–5, 1,000 employees received wage adjustments and 64 employers were prosecuted for violations of wages or hours of work. Only 24 of them were convicted.34 In 1934 the Price Spreads Commission learned that only $238,000 had been allocated for factory and minimum-wage inspection in the whole of Canada.35 Quebec’s Minimum Wage Board, chaired by Gustav Francq’, had four members, assisted by seven fulltime inspectors. Although the minimum-wage law was passed in 1919, it was not in operation until 1925. Despite their numbers, Francq reported in a meeting with their Ontario counterparts on 4 October 1932 that he was having great difficulty enforcing the Act.36 Employers were creative in inventing ways to evade the regulations.37 The Depression years saw an increase in violations of the law in the clothing industry in both Ontario and Quebec. Winnifred Hutchison’s report to the Stevens Commission outlined the various methods used by garment manufacturers to avoid the law. They told employees not to punch the time clock and to avoid revealing the total hours

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worked. Manufacturers worked overtime without required permits and sent work with women who had not been able to make the minimum wage on piecework during their workdays. They recorded work as part-time when a full workweek had been put in, and they put experienced women workers on the factory books as inexperienced workers to justify paying them a lower rate. A boss might put two workers’ pay in one envelope, making it appear that one woman had received the whole amount. Companies sometimes paid wages below the minimum to more than the 20 per cent of the pieceworkers allowed by the Act. Sometimes they withheld partial wages for insurance funds, or replaced women with young men, whom they could pay less than the minimum wage because there was no regulation for male wages. Finally, they discharged women who made complaints to the Minimum Wage Board.38 Eaton’s garment factory had an innovative manner of avoiding the minimum-wage rates. One Eaton employee, a Miss Wells, reported to the Stevens Commission that her supervisor kept a list of girls who failed to make the minimum wage each week. The company gave the girls ‘special money’ to bring them up to the minimum required by law, but if they made above the minimum the following week the extra money was deducted off that week’s pay.39 After an extensive examination of conditions in the Ontario garment industry, Hutchison concluded: ‘As the minimum wage legislation stands now, it seems purely remedial rather than protective, that is, the board seems to function as a complaint bureau, rather than as a law enforcement department of the government.’ The Ontario Minimum Wage Board’s ability to enforce standards during the 1930s was obviously taxed to the limit. For instance, when Hutchison carried out her research on needle workers in Toronto she found that 17 girls had gone to the Minimum Wage Board to complain of receiving wages of $2.50 to $3.50 per week. The board told them nothing could be done about it.40 Another woman, I.M. Lunn, researched minimum-wage violations in men’s clothing for Scott and Cassidy’s report to the Stevens Commission and reported: ‘There are about 70 shops in Toronto, and of these only 10 were paying decent wages. . . . Cases of minimum wage violations were present in both contracting shops and inside shops, and the inside shops were only a little better than the others.’ Wages in the men’s clothing factories were frequently below the minimum, particularly for finishers. Not one of the 20 finishers Lunn interviewed was earning an average of more than $12 for a 60-hour week during the season.41 Similarly, Scott and Cassidy reported that in the Quebec garment trades, ‘The

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minimum wage act is being violated on a fairly extensive scale.’ Of the 31 shops they visited, 24 were employing women below the minimum rates. In 11 of the shops, over 90 per cent of the women were receiving wages below the minimum.42 Political resistance to the ineffectiveness of Ontario’s Minimum Wage Board came from several quarters. Mary McNab openly criticized the board at the annual meeting of the Trades and Labour Congress, but as Minimum Wage Board officers reported in their monthly statement to the deputy minister, the attack was ‘unwarranted’. Officers of the board in Ontario did not take kindly to the accusations against them. Cassidy’s research on its functioning led manufacturer R.A. Stapells to write to Dr J.M. Robb, Ontario’s labour minister, saying, ‘I don’t know whether you will feel inclined to continue this controversy with Dr. Cassidy or not. My feeling is however that there is nothing to be gained by arguing with this theoretical college professor whose views very evidently are dominated by his political leanings, apart from the further fact that I consider him to be an unscrupulous, dangerous individual.’43 On 14 May 1934 the board prepared a public statement against the allegations made by Lunn and Cassidy. The Conservative Party government continued to hold to the view that ‘the great majority of employers in Ontario are co-operating with the board. . . . The Act is being enforced as vigorously as possible.’ The government added, ‘It had not been the policy of the Board to prosecute employers who perhaps unwittingly had violated the Minimum Wage Act.’44 During the early 1930s the Minimum Wage Board in Ontario attempted to use its limited powers ‘to stamp out these practices by small manufacturers which are intensifying the trading down process and making the lot of young women employed in their factories extremely difficult when their standard of living is already low enough.’45 But the fines levied by the board were small, and manufacturers largely ignored the board’s recommendations. The legislation did lead to some gains, particularly in setting wage standards for work. As well, the existence of legislation specifically for women workers reflected an acceptance of their place, however temporary, in the labour force.46 Despite the best intentions, though, the general status of women workers remained poor. By requiring employers to treat women and children better than men, labour legislation both protected women from some of the harsh effects of industrial life and ensured their separateness in the workplace, reaffirming the distinctive nature of women’s and men’s jobs. It also had another effect. As Scott and Cassidy reported, ‘For some time the Commis-

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sion has had to face a fresh difficulty which tends to spread: the replacement of apprenticeship men and women by young boys leaving school whose age varies from fourteen to eighteen, to do work requiring little experience. As the Minimum Wage Act applies only to females, these young boys are hired at ridiculous prices.’47 Hutchison’s research found the same pattern of replacement of women workers with boys and men. She told the commission about one factory’s response to a visit by the minimum-wage officer in September 1933. The manager informed us that he was now going to dismiss all the girls and replace them with men and boys, whom they could easily get at 21 cents an hour (unskilled work). In fact they had a line-up of men outside the factory every morning, many of them offering to work at 50 cents a day. He said they had been dismissing girls and replacing them with men for a long time. They used to employ 50 girls, now only 12.48 In 1937 Ontario and Quebec changed minimum-wage legislation to cover male workers.49 Setting regulations for only a part of the labour force obviously did not work, except perhaps in a rather perverse way, noted by Kessler-Harris: ‘As they affected both the workplace and the home, protective statutes provided a continuing device for dividing workers along gender lines and stratifying the work force at a time when the number of skilled jobs was declining and the resulting homogenization of the work force threatened to lead to developing class consciousness and thence to class conflict.’50

Government Intervention in the Needle Trades In a 1943 issue of Public Affairs, Bora Laskin, then a University of Toronto law professor, commented on the state of pre-war labour relations: It is hardly open to dispute that we entered this war with a system of labour relations that showed little, if any, advance over that in vogue in 1914. About 20 per cent of workers in industry were organized in trade unions, most of them craft unions of skilled workers. . . . The thousands of unskilled workers in our manufacturing and primary industries were largely untouched by any form of legitimate employee association or compelling collective bargaining. There were no effective laws guaranteeing freedom of association or compelling collective bargaining. The open shop was a flourishing principle of labour relations policy, and discrimi-

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nation on account of union activity through discharge or demotion was, prior to 1939 at any rate, neither unlawful or unusual. At the same time existing legislation and court decisions relative to strikes and picketing made it fairly clear that any union activity that was likely to be effective, would be declared illegal and would subject the participants to both criminal and civil penalties.51 The social and economic devastation of the 1930s stood as testament to laissez-faire capitalism’s failure to organize social security for Canadians, and social reformers were generating considerable support for state intervention in the field of social policy. The social consequences of the Depression years and the weakness of the union movement made it easier for social reform advocates to put forward the case for a new age of labour relations policies. Calls for minimum-wage laws for men and for unemployment insurance plans came from diverse sectors of Canadian society: labour unions, the recently formed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, government officials such as H.H. Stevens, churches, women’s organizations, and even some sectors of the business community. Despite its weak enforcement, the Minimum Wage Board legislation did alter the perspective that market conditions should remain free of state restrictions. The gradual shift in attitude away from unhampered trade conditions in the needle trades towards judicial regulation of wages and hours of work opened the door to further judicial regulation in the industry. By 1933 the Minimum Wage Board in Ontario had ‘made more adjustments [of wages], instituted more prosecutions, and collected more arrears than in any previous year since the Act was passed’, but this activity was not enough to solve the industry’s problems.52 The publicity from the price spreads investigation of the trade’s abuses of the minimum-wage law placed more pressure on the government to act, and a convergence of economic and political forces made increased government regulatory action acceptable. The restructuring of the garment industry in response to the economic collapse of 1929, along with the increased pressures of mass buying and higher textile prices, gave an advantage to sectors with low labour costs. Those factories producing women’s clothing moved to capitalize on the availability of cheaper labour in Quebec, and many Toronto factories closed their doors and moved there. These actions prompted some unionized manufacturing firms to support tougher government legislation that would equalize wages between the two provinces. In 1935, for instance, William Johnston of the Associated Clothing Manufacturers Association in Ontario protested to the provincial

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labour department about conditions in the men’s clothing trade, especially the ‘unscrupulous and unethical trade practices on the part of certain manufacturers’, and complained about the lack of legislation covering hours and minimum wages. Like many other members of the needle trade community, Johnston optimistically hoped for legislation that would alter economic conditions in his province and in Quebec.53 Manufacturers, now at the mercy of both mass buyers and ‘fly-by-night’ shops, felt besieged, their survival uncertain. At the ACWA convention in 1936, Joseph Schubert reported, ‘The exodus or migration of the clothing industry to rural districts, particularly since the crisis, has led to the formation of new clothing centers. This has resulted in the manufacturing of clothing in twelve different rural districts in the Province of Quebec besides Montreal.’54 The growth in the numbers of small contract shops and outof-town shops, combined with the intense individualism of many manufacturers, made internal trade regulation extremely difficult. As a result of the Stevens investigation, labour leaders and social reformers also began to demand a more interventionist policy on the part of the State. Union bureaucracy was also receptive to government intervention. The process of centralization and bureaucratization in both the ILGWU and the ACWA throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the gradual extension of State assistance in the needles trades, gave credence to the judicial rights of these unions as key players in the negotiations for Canada’s version of the American NRA. The collective bargaining structure had already been set up to accommodate a move beyond face-to-face negotiations. While trade union struggles, particularly in the ILGWU, demonstrated a growing tension between class-based collective bargaining and the new unionism approach that used ‘outside’ arbitration, the trend towards containment of class-based bargaining had already been firmly established. Based on interviews he conducted with men’s clothing manufacturers, Michael Brecher observed that ‘The Impartial Chairman System is seen as an integral part of the Amalgamated philosophy of industrial relations and must be considered largely its contribution to the machinery of industrial dispute settlement.’55 The government intervention in the clothing market was also partially a result of the lack of power of both manufacturers and trade unions either to control their own members or to assert a measure of control over the industry itself. Although manufacturers’ associations, generally a product of the early 1930s, never did manage to encompass all the manufacturers, their existence at least gave trade unions and the provincial departments of labour a party to negotiate with,

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and this in itself was new.

Collective Bargaining: Official Acts and Decrees By the time the Quebec and Ontario governments began to put forth their labour legislation in the mid-1930s, several key issues dominated discussion: (1) the legal recognition of employee representation through trade unions (the right of employees to join a trade union of their choice and the question of legal recognition of trade union jurisdiction over specific industries or sections of workers within an industry); (2) the mechanism for enforcement of wages and hours set by the legislation, a concern of both employers and employees (who would punish the firms that broke the law, and what procedural mechanisms would enforce wages and hours set out in the law); (3) the geographical jurisdiction of the law and, within this broader issue, which elements of industry would be covered by the law; and (4) the right to picket and strike (although neither Ontario nor Quebec wanted to touch this issue in its legislation). In the political discussions that predated the enactment of the laws, the character of the political debate in Quebec and Ontario shared some similarities. Both provincial governments were reacting to similar economic climates, but they did so in dramatically different political climates. In Quebec the Catholic union movement initially conceived of labour law by juridical extension, that is, regulations applied to one industrial sector would apply to the entire industry.56 The Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC), established in 1921, had 25,000 members throughout Quebec by 1931, and its leaders, Abbé Aimé Boileau and M. Gérard Tremblay, a chaplain and a secretary-general respectively for the Catholic unions in Montreal, both strongly supported the idea of juridical extension of collective agreements. Indeed, Catholic unions had been supportive of the idea of third-party arbitration through a joint committee of employers and employees for many years, finding their inspirations on this point in Church doctrine.57 The idea of joint committees in which workers and employers would have equal influence stemmed from social doctrine set out in the 1891 encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII, and was in part inspired by European, primarily Belgian, collective bargaining law, which favoured collaboration between employers and employees.58 But by 1933 there was little leadership in the Catholic workers’ movement to push for juridical extension. Instead, the CTCC embraced the idea of corporatism outlined by Alfred Charpentier, a

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founding member of the union and its president from 1934 to 1946. Charpentier expressed his views on the pages of La vie syndicale: ‘Where is the remedy? It is in legalized industrial corporation. What do we mean by that?’ He went on to explain, ‘Under a simple formula it consists of organizing each industry corps with the help of the State, without the union having any claim to it, leaving the membership freedom of adhesion.’59 Under Charpentier the CTCC was more interested in pushing for minimum-wage laws to cover male workers than it was in ideas of extension, although he did agree with the previous leadership that public powers should be used to regulate conditions in the workplace. Without Tremblay and Abbé Boileau’s influence, the congress of the CTCC moved resolutions to push for a minimum-wage law. M. Léonce Girard, as secretary-general of the CTCC in Montreal by 1932, took up the cause of jurisdictional extension, and the idea received unanimous support on the congress floor in 1933.60 By that time, former CTCC leader M. Gérard Tremblay—who had become undersecretary in the Quebec Ministry of Labour in 1931—and Joseph Arcand, Quebec’s Minister of Labour, were already drafting the law, wary of what might happen if prompt action was not taken to ameliorate severe economic and social conditions. Arcand stated: I do not hide that I personally judge excellent the principle of leaving responsibility to fix a profession’s working condition to the employers’ and workers’ organizations, and I find equitable the compulsory extension of mutually adopted disposition to nonunionist. . . . We will study this question with care, and we invite the workers’ and employers’ organizations to prepare public opinion for a measure that it would not readily be disposed to accept.61 The Quebec government was keen to develop a law with some teeth in it for judicial enforcement, and had tried to regulate the needle trades using the provincial Minimum Wage Board, under the able chairmanship of Gustav Francq. As chair of the Minimum Wage Board and the most knowledgeable expert in the government on European labour law, Francq likely had some influence on the development of the decrees and other aspects of Quebec labour legislation.62 In the spring of 1934 the board intensified its ‘drive against exploitation of girls and women in the needle trade’.63 While the 150-member strong National Associated Women’s Wear Bureau protested the ‘unduly harsh treatment’ of government officials, Francq reported, ‘The orders are going to be observed even if I have to break every offender.’64 The

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Minimum Wage Board’s prosecution of six garment manufacturers for wage abuses in March 1934 set the stage for Arcand. Tremblay and Arcand apparently did not expect the proposed bill to gain wide public support. As Arcand indicated, not all unions were behind the push for labour laws.65 The international unions were fearful that such legislation would undercut their role in setting wages and hours through collective agreements. The ILGWU and the ACWA, as well as the IUNTW, worried that the government’s legislated minimum wages and maximum hours would become the standard for the whole of industry and that collective agreements establishing wage rates over the minimum would be ineffectual. In an industry in which several unions competed for the allegiance of the workers, the issue of trade union jurisdictional rights was of major concern. With the IUNTW and the Catholic unions both competing with the international unions for the right to represent needle trades workers, who would decide which union legally represented the workers? Labour activists suggested that legal recognition would only come to those unions that would incorporate under regulations outlined in the 1924 Loi des syndicats professionnels, and that any unions unable to do this would be outside of the jurisdiction of the provincial law and could not bring to court employers who disobeyed the wage and hours set out in the law. The international unions were convinced that in Quebec’s political climate the decision would favour the French Catholic unions. Their prediction was accurate, for Leonard Marsh observed this same fact in his 1936 assessment of the Arcand Act. He found that ‘The philosophy of the Catholic Unions is to say the least conciliatory rather than militant, and it is these unions which have grown most since the passage of the Arcand Law. At the end of 1933 their membership stood at 26,900, but the annual Convention at the end of 1935 was able to announce thirty-four new affiliations and a total membership of 38,000.’66 The CTCC was a strong promoter of the proposed legislation, and eight months before its adoption the organization ran an extensive publicity campaign to gain support for its passage.67 The provincial government paved the way for support, with M. Gérard Tremblay reminding his audience at the CTCC congress in 1933 of ‘tous les dangers que court notre pays’ if the bill was not passed.68 In Quebec political culture, ‘les dangers’ came from the right and the left, as both political influences vied for public attention during the 1930s. The Liberal Party, in power for nearly 40 years, now found that its accommodation of business and Church interests was wearing thin. It was

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time to court the working class, and Tremblay promised that after passage of the law, ‘Notre province sera le paradis de l’ouvrier.’69 With the passing, in April 1934, of the Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act—the Arcand Act as it was popularly known— unions turned from confrontational campaigns to co-operative, industry-wide negotiations. It was the first labour law of its kind in Canada to set standards for wages, hours, conditions of apprenticeships, and the proportion of skilled and unskilled workers in the trade.70 Using this Act, Labour Minister Arcand would oversee the passage of Orders in Council in which labour provisions, agreed to by the workers and manufacturers party to a specific collective agreement, would be imposed on all provincial industrial establishments in that trade sector. The Arcand Act promised changes in the needle trade, and Arcand declared that under the new law, ‘Sweatshops will soon be a thing of the past in the Province of Quebec.’71 The new Act declared: ‘A collective labour agreement, made between, on the one part, one or more associations of employees and, on the other part, employers or one or more associations of employers, shall also bind all employees and employers in the same trade or industry; provided that such employees and employers carry on their activities within the territorial jurisdiction determined in said agreement.’72 Such extension of the collective agreement only referred to hours and wage rates; other aspects of the agreement were not to be extended. It was up to the various parties in each industry to make a request to the Minister of Labour to have their collective agreement accepted, at which point the government would issue an Order in Council that made the agreement binding within 30 days of its publication in the Quebec Official Gazette. Although the Act contained no provisions relating to union recognition, it gave union negotiations a new legitimacy. But it also crytallized divisions between workers on the basis of gender, length of experience, skill, and geographical location.73 The Arcand Act introduced another layer of bureaucracy into trade negotiations, moving the decisions about wage rates for specific job categories one step further from the shop floor. Government regulation began first in Quebec’s men’s clothing industry. Political economist Michael Brecher called the Quebec labour legislation of 1934 ‘the great divide’ in labour-management relations. In Montreal, where an ad hoc Arbitration Board consisting of representatives from labour, management, and government had been set up, the industry was ‘confronted with the stark facts of economic depression, cut-throat competition, reduced profits and wages,

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and considerable unemployment’. According to Brecher, the prevailing conditions led all three members of the Arbitration Board to agree ‘on the need for some form of governmental intervention in the clothing industry and the establishment of formal machinery to bring order out of the prevalent chaos’.74 Under a joint negotiation team made up of union, government, and manufacturing representatives and their corresponding legal representatives, the province was divided into zones, measured from Montreal, with wages and hours set for each zone. The country shops, which were mostly not unionized, were allotted lower wages.75 In the clothing industry, under the direction of the Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act, an Order in Council, the Decree Relating to the Men’s and Boys’ Clothing Industry, was formally introduced on 27 February 1935.76 The agreement covered 75 per cent of the industry’s employers and 70 per cent of its workforce. The firms included in the agreement had 85 per cent of the capital production in the industry and employed about 7,000 workers.77 Significantly, the progress of government regulation would follow the path of the established trade union organization, starting with the area—men’s and boys’ clothing—most dominated by men.

‘The First Bright Ray of Sunshine’ In September 1934, Ontario Attorney-General A.W. Roebuck paid a visit to Quebec to see how the Arcand Act was working. He reported that there should be such a law in Ontario, too, because since the beginning of July there had been 21 strikes in various Ontario industries. ‘I look for hundred per cent co-operation from employers in Ontario, and I think that labour will be glad to co-operate.’78 Earlier, in 1933, Prime Minister Bennett had expressed concern to provincial officials about the growing unrest in Toronto’s women’s cloak and suit industry. His action caused local government officials to extend their inquiry in the trade. The forces on the left were gaining strength, and on 6 October 1933, deputy labour minister A.W. Crawford warned Public Works Minister J.D. Monteith, ‘The situation is assuming an unhealthy political aspect, particularly in view of the increasing activity of the Workers’ Unity League. . . . The workers are becoming desperate; the employers can see no way out except through government intervention; the governments are already supporting large numbers of garment workers through direct relief and the situation grows steadily worse.’ Crawford called for the government to establish an industrial code, but neither the

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provincial government nor the federal government was quite ready to act.79 In the garment industry the idea of industrial codes gained steam. Clothing manufacturer Warren K. Cook lobbied the federal government to establish NRA measures in Canada, but he remained a minority voice among manufacturers.80 The ILGWU ‘kept aloof from the entire matter’ of organizing the manufacturers to lobby for industrial codes, but Cook continued his efforts to bring political pressure on the government through the Stevens Commission, as a letter from Sam Kraisman to Dubinsky in early November 1933 indicates.81 In 1934, with a new Liberal government in power in Ontario and the decrees in place in Quebec, the province began to develop its own ‘little NRA’, hoping to learn from the experiences of both Quebec and the United States. Certainly labour representatives were wary of the possibility of any Ontario legislation that would duplicate the Quebec decrees, because they believed that in some of the decrees the Quebec government was not respecting TLCC unions as employees’ representatives. Government discussions prior to the passage of Ontario’s Industrial Standards Act made frequent references to the Quebec Act, but Attorney-General Roebuck later insisted that Ontario’s Act had been drawn up independently of the Quebec decrees—an unlikely proposition because Roebuck had met with Quebec’s Arcand well before the presentation of the ISA in the Ontario legislature. Roebuck, emphasizing interprovincial co-operation, met with government officials from Manitoba, Alberta, and Quebec, but in the end it was the collaboration between Arcand and Roebuck that mattered to the needle trades. Louis Fine, Ontario’s industrial standards commissioner, expressed that hope in a meeting with clothing manufacturers on 20 December 1934: I know many of the men sitting around here will be happy not to worry about the other fellow’s cost and I say, Mr. Roebuck, when we are able to accomplish this, the majority of the gentlemen represented here will agree with me that it is the first bright ray of sunshine that the needle trades will see for some time, and if there is a possibility of in some way making uniformity of prices or wages between the Provinces of Quebec and Ontario it would be a God-send to those in this Province.82 The Toronto Associated Clothing Manufacturers were quick to respond to the government initiative, requesting a meeting with labour department officials to discuss the new wage legislation.83 This began a process of ‘information meetings’ with trade unions and employers’ associations in all aspects of industry, which carried

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Attorney-General and Minister of Labour A.W. Roebuck in his office at the Ontario legislature, 1935. (Globe and Mail Collection, City of Toronto Archives, SC266-36009)

on over a period of months, spanning the fall of 1934 and the winter of 1934–5. At each of these meetings Roebuck outlined the government draft of the bill, which had already been through cabinet and caucus, passing unanimously each time, but had not yet had its first reading in the provincial parliament. The government intended to

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submit the wording of the bill to the public after first reading in the legislature. At an information meeting on 19 December Roebuck outlined the procedures the government intended to follow: ‘I propose that either side, employers or employees, may requisition a meeting from the government, that is to say they may come up to the Department and say we desire a meeting, if they are employees with the employers, for the purpose of negotiating a collective agreement. In that case the department will call that meeting, an official from the department will take the chair . . . so as to ensure skilled chairmanship.’ The government, Roebuck said, would try to intervene before a strike occurred. Now if a meeting of the kind with a proper and sufficient representation from both sides,—note my words—reduces an agreement to writing in which there is a schedule of hours or of days of labour and of wages, not necessarily just a minimum wage like the present Women’s Minimum Wage Act, but any schedule that may operate through the industry . . . If an agreement of that kind is actually signed and laid before the Department of Labour and approved by the minister in charge, it may by Order-in-Council be declared law within that portion of the province which the meeting decides and which the Minister approves and becomes law, so that the will of the majority within the industry may be enforced on those who do not attend the meeting, or who after attending do not carry out the agreement. There will be sufficient teeth in the Act.84 The question of ‘proper and sufficient representation’ became a central concern to both employers’ and workers’ representatives. Trade union officials wanted assurance that unions would be the only legal representatives for employees—to ensure, as Tom Moore of the TLCC aptly put it at a meeting of the TLCC and the Ontario Department of Labour on 19 December 1934, ‘that our position is protected from the chiselling organization, just as the trade is protected from the chiselling employer’. They wanted assurance that representation from company unions would not be considered as ‘competent to negotiate these agreements, unless they were organized freely and entirely separately from any connection with the employers’.85 Despite protests from all labour leaders who spoke to him, Roebuck remained convinced that the broad wording in the Act was all that was required, and this wording remained. Another concern for labour leaders arose out of interunion rivalry. The TLCC wanted the provincial government to recognize only collective agreements signed by its member unions. The All-Canadian

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Congress of Labour wanted to know what the government would do when ‘two legitimate organizations’ had collective agreements in the same industry. ‘What provisions does the Department make to determine who actually represents the workers? Our Union or the other union?’ But Roebuck, Louis Fine, and F.R. Marsh (the deputy minister of labour) disagreed with the labour federation’s views. Fine pointed out that in the dressmaking and shoemaking industries the Workers’ Unity League represented ‘possibly 85 per cent of the employees. Is the Minister to refuse to deal with them . . . to tell them that he cannot come to terms with them because they work on the theory of political disruption?’ When the TLCC’s Moore continued to object to the inclusion of the WUL, Roebuck remarked, ‘What you mean Tom, is that no-one should be recognized unless he is affiliated with the international.’ Moore, with a smile, replied, ‘Certainly.’86 The issue was not that simple, and both parties knew it. So despite TLCC objections that they did not want to ‘be party to any legislation that lets them [the WUL] take advantage of our efforts’, the final wording of the Act did nothing more than state that employee associations were ‘a group of employees organized for the purpose of advancing their economic conditions and which is free from undue influence, domination, or interference by employers or associations of employers’.87 In a meeting with the IUNTW on 23 January 1935, the provincial government assured J.B. Salsberg and other WUL leaders that they did not want ‘to do the work of Labour unions, but rather to assist and put a weapon in their hands and join in with interested parties in stabilizing rates throughout the industry.’88 Conversely, they were unwilling to do the manufacturers’ bidding, to deal with the problems of dissent among their own ranks. The Liberal government saw the legislation as a way of facilitating discussion between all elements of the labour and business communities. It was not about to establish a trade union law that would have limited application to bona fide trade unions and manufacturers’ associations. Given the close connections of men like Roebuck and Fine to the needle trades, conditions in that industry were clearly on the minds of government officials as they drafted the Industrial Standards Act. Marsh had come from the building trades union into the Ontario government, but Roebuck had acted as a lawyer for the ILGWU in negotiations between the cloak manufacturers’ association and the ILGWU in 1934. He had watched that agreement fall apart when non-association shops refused to abide by the agreement, and in the end, as Roebuck explained, ‘The chisellers bedeviled the whole situation.’ He

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was not about to see it happen again. The administration of the Act would fall on the shoulders of Louis Fine, the government’s choice as industrial standards officer, a man who had spent most of his life working in the needle trades. Like many skilled craftsmen in the trade, Fine had at different times been both a manufacturer and a trade union representative. Throughout the conferences held in the fall and early winter of 1934–5 the garment industry was frequently used as an illustration of how the law could benefit industrial life in Ontario. In a meeting with members of the needle trades on 20 December 1934, Roebuck said: ‘When the Bill is drawn up and enacted and signed by the LieutenantGovernor I hope that the groups engaged in the needle trades, because I have this particular industry closely in my mind from the very inception, that immediately the needle trades will assemble and say what they can make of it.’89 Even in these all-male meetings, the spectre of gender was never absent. The role of the language used in the talks, even in discussions with members of the needle trades, defined not only how male workers saw their sisters in the garment shops, but also how they saw themselves. When Roebuck and the other representatives referred to wage rates, they were talking about the rates for men. In an industry in which over half of the workers were women, the male voice was the norm, dominating discussion just as it did at most union meetings, maintaining a mode of discourse that gave privilege of position to all male workers. Men’s concerns were taken for granted, and women’s labour and women’s place in the industry were left by the wayside. In Quebec these negotiations were further removed from the shop floor. The French-speaking membership did not even understand the language of those who assumed to represent them. This made it difficult for workers to know when and how to exert their collective strength.90 The language of the new labour legislation defined gender relations in the industry at the same time as it reflected the imbalances in power relations between the sexes. The men who negotiated for the industry saw women workers as a special category of workers and assumed that their own positions in the trade would define all work in the industry. While the gendered assumptions about work in the garment industry would continue, they were no longer articulated directly; by the late 1930s gender-neutral classifications of jobs would hide inequality from public scrutiny. The set of legal practices put in place with the legalization of industrial standards in the needle trades reorganized managerial and trade union relations and set new boundaries around the limits of exploitation in the industry, but the negotiations

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continued to naturalize gender relations in the trade. Although the new legislation would bind together unions, government, and employers in a new relationship, its apparent benefits would not be shared by all members of the needle trades community. In the government’s meeting with garment manufacturers, the question of ‘girl labour’ was addressed as part of a larger discussion on minimum-wage levels. When Roebuck referred to the administrative process outlined in the new Act (‘the Department calls the meeting, invites both sides, the representatives of the men and the employers’), it was clear that once again men were to speak on behalf of the women in industry. Relations of ruling demanded it.

8

After the Acts: Setting the Standards, Putting on the Pressure When the union began organizing, I can’t say I was overly enthusiastic. Like most girls in the shops, I was suspicious, confused. After all, which of us knew the meaning of a union? To sign up with the union meant to be a pioneer and most people aren’t interested in pioneering—particularly if it might cost them their bread and butter. Yvette Charpentier, ‘Our Debt to the Union’, in ilgwu, Local 262, ­Souvenir Album (1953) With the passing of the Industrial Standards Act in Ontario and the Arcand Act in Quebec, the clothing industry in both provinces was anxious to get collective agreements legally sanctioned by Order in Council. Indeed, the political process involved in the registration of these collective agreements illustrates the importance of interprovincial markets in the clothing industry and at the same time suggests how a male workforce was privileged through the outcome of these negotiation processes. According to the Ontario legislation, after all the parties involved had settled on minimum wages and job classifications, the agreement was to be registered with the government and the schedule thus established would become law for all factories and their employees who lived and worked in the particular zone, whether they were members of trade unions covered under collective agreements or not. The industry would then establish a tribunal, composed of two members from the unions, two members from the manufacturers, and a 219

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jointly agreed upon chair, which would administer the schedule for the trade. In Quebec, employers and employees had to meet and establish an agreement before the government could act. The provincial ministry was not involved in these negotiations as it was in Ontario. In addition, the administrative machinery that enforced the agreed wages and hours in Quebec and in Ontario differed considerably. As Leonard Marsh described, ‘the joint committees of the Arcand Law are, in essentials, only private bodies: their inspectors are perhaps quasi government officials, but their status is more nearly equivalent to that of trade union officials.’ Marsh concluded that ‘the Ontario Act provides for a combination of public and private administration: the Arcand plan, however, leans more heavily on the non-governmental committee and as its sponsors have stated “a sense of responsibility among workers and employers.” ’1 Despite these differences, clothing manufacturers in the two provinces were pushed to co-operate with one another. In July 1935 Montreal cloak manufacturers and the ilgwu had signed a memorandum of agreement. In August the parties applied to the Arcand Act to have an Order in Council passed to extend the agreement to the industry as a whole. But they were concerned that Ontario cloak manufacturers set similar rates, so both ilgwu officials and manufacturers’ associations in Montreal put pressure on Ontario to make a deal. When the meetings began in Ontario’s clothing industry in June 1935, all of the representatives in attendance were anxious to see an agreement that would establish the schedule of wages and hours of labour under the Industrial Standards Act. Initially, when the Ontario Minister of Labour convened the consultation meeting, Toronto manufacturers were unwilling to agree to ­legislation that was different from that in Montreal. As a result, Toronto union officials were continually in contact with their Montreal counterparts to work out contract language that would assist the registration of Toronto collective agreements. The success of this depended on the goodwill of both sides—labour and management—if it was to function properly. In Toronto, representatives of the trade associations and the unions, along with their respective lawyers, sat down with government officials to draft the specific clauses of a Schedule of Wages and Hours for the Cloak and Suit Industry.2 Certain issues discussed illustrate both the patriarchal subtext of the agreement and the areas of conflict that existed between labour and management. Firstly, manufacturers were concerned about defining the geographical limits of jurisdiction of the legislation. In Quebec, the

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A broadside calling Toronto cloakmakers to a union meeting. Much of the literature put out by the Toronto clothing unions appeared in English and Yiddish. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell ­University)

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­ ollective Labour Agreements Extension Act had established stanC dards for certain hours and wages to be applied in certain zones. In Ontario, to control the competition from out-of-town shops, manufacturers wanted to follow the same pattern of differential wage rates. Secondly, the manufacturers also wanted to define jurisdiction over the type of product to be covered by the law. Given the fragmentation of production (in both grade of garment and type of manufacturer), this question would help determine the future economic advantages and disadvantages for each type of manufacturer. As the minutes of an Industrial Standards Conference indicated, in the men’s clothing trade there were disputes over the type of garment manufacturer to be included: custom tailor shops, jobbers, and contractors all presented problems for the negotiators.3 While the Ontario law initially applied to the firms that produced women’s coats and suits, it was later extended to men’s and boys’ clothing and then finally to all women’s clothing. In the men’s clothing sector, disputes over the inclusion of pant and vest shops in the agreement caused considerable problems, because clothing manufacturers used small pant contractors to keep their production costs low. Thirdly, both manufacturers and trade union officials hotly contested the question of skill required to do specific jobs. Both parties drafting the schedule wanted to solidify the differentiation of men and women in the trade. The continued breakdown of job classifications offered certain manufacturers an opportunity to deskill work and gave them a competitive advantage in the market. As with the nra in the United States, the new Ontario legislation was more a ratification of existing practices than a sweeping innovation in labour standards or trade regulations.4 In other words, the legislation did not challenge the discrimination in wage rates between men and women but merely clarified it. Gender issues were an integral part of all three concerns at the bargaining table, although this gendered subtext was absent from the actual negotiations. Out-of-town shops were able to produce garments more cheaply because they relied on cheaper women’s labour, and manufacturers wanted to protect their access to this labour pool from any government regulations that might raise wages. The country shops—which mainly operated as contract shops and relied heavily on women workers—paid lower rents, operated under lower minimum wage schedules, and were more difficult for government inspectors to supervise. Their workers spent more hours on the job for less pay.5 The dispute over the type of garment covered by the law also involved gendered wages. The desire to keep certain products outside

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the new regulation was based on the manufacturers’ interest in maintaining the production of goods that relied most heavily on cheaper, non-unionized labour—which was, again, mainly the labour of women—and manufacturers wanted to pay women less for certain types of jobs within the factories themselves. The manufacturers in these sectors wanted to remain outside of the provincial law. But the most obvious area of contention between men’s and women’s work in the trade was the question of skill and job classification.

Defining Skill, Legislating Inequality At one of the conferences held before the passage of the isa, in December 1934, labour lawyer J.L. Cohen illustrated the intricacy of job classification and skill in an industry that had no uniformity in styles or grades of products. ‘In a complex trade like the needle trade one could get together a dictionary of what various terms mean and what they mean on various occasions and various seasons’, he said. ‘I’m afraid the other industries will have very little attention because the needle trade will take all their time. . . . It is an industry that brings points up every hour of the day.’6 Indeed, the schedules do read like dictionaries, with pages of job classifications attached to each agreement, as Table 1, which lists the job descriptions for the women’s cloak and suit trade, indicates. Table 1 Job Descriptions in the Women’s Cloak and Suit Trade, Ontario, October 1935 full skilled cutters

Those able to grade sizes on materials, make markers, lay up, shear cut, and machine cut, in a workmanlike manner, all raw materials used in the manufacturer of garments. semi-skilled cutters

Those able to do some but not all work of full skilled cutters and who do not make markers or grade sizes on materials. trimmers

Those able to grade sizes on, lay up, make markers, cut in a workman­like manner all materials used for the lining and trimming of garments. skilled fur tailors

Those able to pin and sew on fur trimmings in a workmanlike manner.

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Table 1  (continued) assistant fur tailors

Those able to do some of the above operations of the skilled fur tailor but do not pin on fur. button sewers

Those able to sew on buttons, hooks and eyes, clasps and ornaments. general hands and examiners

Those able to examine and clean garments after they are finished and pin on belts. section operators

Where any more than 2 workers do any portion of the work in the operating of any single garment, all the operators working thereon are hereinafter referred to as section operators. skilled operators

Those able, by sewing machine, to do any of the following operations in a workmanlike manner, to wit; join cloth body, sew in sleeves, ­facings and collars, as well as those, being section operators, by sewing machine do any one or more of the following operations, namely, stitching collars, making sleeves, sewing facings, joining seams of body, joining seams of lining and the like, as well as those operators able to do in a workmanlike manner all the sewing machine operations necessary to complete garments of all kinds. semi-skilled operators

Those operators, not being section operators, who are unable to do in a workmanlike manner all the sewing machine operations necessary to complete garments of all kinds. top pressers

Those able to press and complete the pressing of a garment after it is lined by the finishers. machine pressers

Those able to press by means of a Hoffman or other steam machine. under pressers

Those able to press all seams, sleeves and linings and to complete the pressing of the garment so that it is ready for the finisher.

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Table 1  (continued) piece pressers

Those able to do all incidental and piece pressing necessary so as to make the garment ready for the skilled operator. lining makers

Those able to make by machine and/or sew the linings for the ­garment. finishers

Those able by hand to sew in whole linings on garments and/or tack neck pieces and linings and/or fell buttonholes, bottoms and sleeves. skirt makers

Those able to do all sewing machine operations necessary to complete skirts. machine basters

Those able to do basting by machine. hand basters

Those able to do basting by hand. special machine operators

Those able to work any special machine used in the manufacture of garments for felling, basting, buttonhole making and serging. source:  Agreement made 1 October 1935, pursuant to the Industrial ­ tandards Act, 1935 between the employees employed in the province of S Ontario cloak and suit industry and the employers carrying on business in the Province of Ontario. nac, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181B, J.L. Cohen Papers.

For negotiators, trying to define skilled work was like walking through a minefield. Union representatives on the Ontario negotiating committee wanted to protect the jobs of their members while appearing to be ‘reasonable’. In these deliberations the question of gender and skill eventually became the pivotal issue, but first all sides had to accept the legitimacy of the subdivisions of work performed in the shops. Through the subdivision of labour, manufacturers had been able to institute an ‘infinite variety of labour costs’.7 To justify these divisions the committee placed workers in separate categories and attempted to classify them on the basis of skill, which proved

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from the beginning to be a thorny task. At an acwa convention in 1934, H. Wernik articulated the political nature of the problem: It seems that our officials are looking too much to the standpoint of the industry and they are overlooking, to some extent, our standpoint. . . . Owing to the fact that our industry has so many sections, we can not say whether this or that is skilled or unskilled. I am positive, if we were to differentiate between skilled and unskilled, that most of the workers would be in the unskilled class. It does not really take much time to learn operations in the pants and vest branches of the industry.8 The trade unions were placed in a no-win situation. Because they wanted to defend the skill requirements in the job classifications—as a basis for justifying specific wage rates for their members—they had to engage in the discussion of job classifications in developing the industrial standards schedules for the needle trades. They were now taking part in this discussion in an environment in which they were not in a position to define the classification of jobs through collective strength as gained by use of the strike weapon. Instead, they sat across the table from the manufacturers, their lawyers, and the government officials and tried to make their case in a language that would be acceptable to all sides. The lawyers took over. Away from the picket lines, away from the rank and file, collective bargaining in the hands of the lawyers took on a new identity, and the limitations in these negotiations would alter the character of labour negotiations for all unions from this point forward. The unionists had to show themselves to be responsible members of the needle trades community, willing to compromise and place the needs of the community before their own collective interests. To do this, they hired Cohen, an experienced lawyer with a sharp mind, a background in left-wing politics, and close familiarity with the needle trades. During the free speech movement in Toronto in the late 1920s Cohen had successfully defended Communists arrested during the street protests. As a personal friend of Communist leader Tim Buck, Cohen continued to act as the Party’s counsel throughout the 1930s.9 As well, he had built up a good law practice working for labour unions in Toronto. He was counsel for the ttlc and had an intimate knowledge of labour law. Cohen was a dealmaker, comfortable with backroom trade union political manoeuvring. His expertise proved to be invaluable. The growth in the numbers of section-work shops created discrepancies in labour costs, because manufacturers who employed only

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J.L. Cohen photo by Yousuf Karsh, 4 June 1943. Cohen acted as the dealmaker in many of the trade negotiations in the needle trades. His ­influence and legal advice on labour matters placed him in the backrooms of many labour negotiations during the formative years of the cio in Canada and the formation of the clc in the postwar years. (Yousuf Karsh Collection, National Archives of Canada, PA–197434)

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two operators, usually men, to sew together the various parts of a garment—one man to make the whole body and the other to make the whole lining—were at a competitive disadvantage with manufacturers who divided the work into ‘simple’ sections, each done by a different worker, supposedly ‘unskilled’ compared to the operators, and usually a woman. As L.M. Singer, a lawyer for the Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association, put it to Cohen in a letter of 27 June 1935, ‘There has developed in the industry a mass production or “section” system of manufacturing cloaks and suits by unskilled employees whose services are confined to the constant performance of one simple operation.’10 By Singer’s estimate, from 25 per cent to 30 per cent of all garments manufactured in Ontario were being produced in that way by the mid-1930s. The growth of section work was considered a threat to organized labour, partly because of its impact on the so-called ‘skilled’ workers, who found a ‘constantly diminishing market for their skill, experience and ability’, and partly because standard manufacturers employing these ‘skilled workmen’ had to pay (according to Singer) ‘considerably more (and sometimes nearly twice as much)’ as the section manufacturers to produce the same garment.11 When some shops worked section work and others did not, those on section work had a competitive advantage as the speed of production was greater and the cost per unit was lower than could be found in the non-section shops.12 Not surprisingly, then, manufacturers wanted to see some regulation of section work in order to level the playing field, as correspondence regarding the collective agreements for cloakmakers makes clear.13 The Toronto cloakmakers’ collective agreements had tried to abolish section-work shops, but the agreements were never enforced. The continued presence of section shops and their devastating effect on the needle trades attested to union ineffectiveness in controlling the cloak trade. The ilgwu did not have the strength to fight the erosion of the conventional cloak shops, and while some of these manufacturers appealed to the union to do just that, they both knew it was a losing battle. In 1935 the ilgwu entered negotiations in the hope, as Cohen put it in a letter to Bernard Shane, that it could protect the skilled male operators and ‘define section workers as mechanics in the same category as complete operators thus making it possible to establish one formula of wage payment applicable to section as well as to non-section shops’.14 In this manner wage rates would be high enough to convince manufacturers that doing business as section shops was going to cost them as well. In the heat of the discussion,

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the union had to display a willingness to compromise or it would not be able to legitimize its presence at the table. The discussion around the establishing of the schedules indicates that in the interests of defending their skilled male workers the unions were generally ­willing to concede to lower rates for women workers. The manufacturers in both the men’s and women’s sectors of the trade also wanted to get rid of workers who could not perform well under the speed-up system produced by section work. By 1935 over 53 per cent of all workers in Montreal’s men’s clothing industry were working on piecework rates, and production levels had greatly increased. As Joseph Schubert, the lawyer for the trade association, pointed out, ‘Every manufacturer conducting a union shop is therefore saddled with a proportion (in some cases a substantial proportion) of employees whose services, by reason of their age or inaptitude or some disability, are neither desired or required.’15 The presence of these ‘sub-average’ workers put union shops at a disadvantage, and unionized manufacturers wanted to ensure that if they had to put up with these workers, then so, too, would the non-union shops. In the end the unions pushed to have the question of ­ competency decided by a joint committee of manufacturers and union representatives. During the negotiations for an agreement in the women’s cloak trade in Ontario the section-work issue split the manufacturers. Large cloak manufacturers such as Durable Cloak and Superior Cloak, both section-work shops, refused to join the manufacturers’ association.16 Manufacturers tried to place the responsibility for controlling the ­section-work shops on the union’s shoulders by threatening to resist registration of the agreement under the Industrial Standards Act.17 When the Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association lawyer Singer wrote to M. Heller, association president, on 25 May 1935, he encouraged the manufacturers to take part in the negotiations. Singer suggested: ‘It would be expedient to enter into such an agreement for Ontario, on the express condition and provided only that wages and hours and days of labour could and would, similarly and to the same extent, be regulated and standardized in Quebec.’18 He hoped that negotiations under the isa could lead to a uniform wage rate system that could standardize operations on the ‘body system’. By this he meant a method of wage settlement that divided garment production into its basic component parts—operations on the main body of the jacket, the sleeves, the collar, the pockets, and so on—with each assigned individual rates of prices and wage rates. Singer recognized that uniform wage rates both between the two provinces and among

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the various manufacturers were not possible until all shops were regulated and standardized. The ilgwu, recognizing the fragility of the alliance with the ­manufacturers and that the companies could bolt at any moment,19 decided that one way to keep wage rates high was to call section workers skilled workers. The ilgwu staff were realists. David Dubinsky knew the union was not strong enough to strike over the issue of section-work shops. A compromise had to be struck. In a letter to Sam Kraisman of the Joint Board of Cloakmakers and Dressmakers, Dubinsky admitted the futility of strike action over the issue, ‘whether now or ever for that purpose’, stating that ‘the only way’ the matter could be solved was ‘to settle prices per garment and apportion it for various sections, or eliminate a number of people from ­section work, thereby reducing it to some degree.’20 Dubinsky warned the Toronto ilgwu, ‘Do not permit yourselves to be trapped in an unsolvable situation, because you can never demonstrate that you are able to eliminate sections.’ The best the union could hope for was a guaranteed minimum rate for all section workers. When negotiations began in the women’s cloakmaking trade manufacturers stated a key position: ‘There should be a differential with regard to the rates paid to men and women help. There should be a 20 per cent difference in the rate.’ But they cautioned, ‘That should be a minimum wage rate and would not affect the piece work.’21 It was ­significant that they wanted to exclude pieceworkers, for piecework was a great leveller. ‘When you work piecework, the faster you work the more money you make’, Sophie Mandel, a Toronto finisher in a cloak shop, explained in an interview. ‘In the union where we had, the Local 94, the men and women used to get the same price. If you were faster you made more, if you wasn’t so fast you made a little less. But the same price was for each of us.’22 The question of skill was pivotal in the discussions, because it would have an influence on the numbers of lower-paid women in the shops. The introduction of section work in both the men’s clothing trades and women’s coats had necessitated defining skill again at the bargaining table. The union had to argue that section jobs were actually skilled work and should be financially compensated as such, which became its first goal in negotiations. The Montreal agreement of February 1935 created three different classifications for skilled workers, including section workers among them. Skilled operators were defined both as ‘section operators who do any one or more of the following operations, such as sewing on collars, making sleeves, sewing facings, joining seams of body, joining seams of lining, making collars, making pockets, attaching

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l­inings’, and as non-section operators who ‘do any one or more of the following operations in a workmanlike manner—join cloth body, sew in sleeves, facings and collars’. In addition, they were ‘able to do in a workmanlike manner all the sewing machine operations necessary to complete garments’.23 While these definitions were intended to ‘place the section operator in a position similar as to the earning rates and capacities as that of any skilled operator’, they would, as the Toronto ilgwu lawyer Cohen pointed out to the Toronto Joint Board of the Cloakmakers, ‘involve serious organizational problems relating particularly to the “right to the job.” ’24 As a result the Toronto ilgwu draft proposal for the Industrial Standards Act’s definition of section workers was convoluted in the extreme: ‘Those able to operate by sewing machine but not able to make complete garments; but those engaged in operations as aforesaid under what is known in the industry as the section system shall not be included in this category but shall be considered skilled operators.’25 To further substantiate the workers’ claim to skilled status, the union proposed giving equal pay to section and non-section workers. But in his letter to Bernard Shane of 7 June 1935, Cohen noted, ‘Some means would have to be established of applying the general wage formula in a flexible manner.’26 This kind of problem could easily be resolved in Quebec, where the joint committee of unions and manufacturers created under the provincial decrees allowed for wage assessments to be made. The question was more complex in Ontario, where the Industrial Standards Act was to have no such clause. (Unlike the Quebec Act, under the isa the proposed board to administer the schedule was not invested with any power or provided with finances for administration. Instead, the government appointed an industrial standards officer to investigate violations of the schedules.) The underlying issue was the increased number of cheaper women workers, so the question of skill differences between men and women had to be addressed. According to Cynthia Cockburn, ‘The political definition of skill, like class and gender, is always dynamic and relative. For every person or job that is defined as skilled, another must be defined as less skilled.’27 Years of established practices had defined jobs in the trade by gender. As Israel Shanoff said, ‘The cloak operators are mostly men. There were women on ladies’ coats, too, but the majority were men. At that time you had to be a good mechanic to be [an] operator. Women only made the linings. To be an operator, to operate, was a man’s job. . . . Most came from the old country, tailors, ladies’ tailors, and they became cloak operators and designers in the trade.’28

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All members of the committee drafting the Ontario legislation were willing to formalize the subordination of specific sectors of workers in the shops. The issue here was which group of workers should receive this designation. The question was certainly a political one. Women, traditionally a minority among cloak operators, were beginning to move into the operating jobs customarily held by men. Because women were seen as unskilled workers, when they moved into the cloak operator jobs they carried with them the stigma of unskilled workers. If male workers were to resist deskilling, they needed to do so through assertions of men’s superiority as skilled cloak operators. Men would have to argue that women working at the same section-operator jobs as men were skilled workers as well. If they failed to win this argument, manufacturers could claim that section-work jobs were unskilled, and the men and women would both receive a lower wage rate. Men could ensure their superior status in the production process if certain jobs were defined as skilled and women’s access to them was limited, but with the erosion of operators’ jobs through the introduction of the section-work system, men had a hard time arguing that their work was skilled while women’s section work was not. Manufacturers wanted to keep labour costs down and equalize production costs throughout the trade. They simply wanted to ensure access to a sector of cheaper labour; they cared little whether it was male or female. Indeed, the trade union men who negotiated the rates in the Act were all ‘skilled’ workers themselves.

For the Good of the Industry: The Victory of Wage Discrimination When the first Ontario clothing industry schedule under the Industrial Standards Act was signed on 1 October 1935, it did not contain a clause specifying wage differentials between men and women in the cloak and suit industry29—a clause included in the Quebec Act. The agreement recognized under Quebec’s Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act included both section and non-section workers and specified a 20 per cent wage differential between skilled men and women and a 10 per cent wage differential between semi-skilled men and women. The Montreal ilgwu was forced into a position from which it had to sell the agreement to its Toronto counterparts because the Quebec agreement contained a provision stating, ‘The date on which the Collective Contract will become effective, will be Monday, November 18, 1935, provided that the contract in the province of

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Ontario, containing similar provisions as to definitions of crafts, hours and wages, becomes effective the same day.’30 Bernard Shane, general manager of the ilgwu’s Montreal Joint Board, was the agreement’s salesman, the man who had to convince the Toronto union of the decree’s merits. Shane, a strong supporter of the move to new unionism and a virulent anti-Communist, had been sent from New York to Montreal to ‘clean up’ the disorganized union locals and begin an organizing drive in the dress shops. Before that appointment he had been in Toronto, where his aggressive and strident manner had not made him many friends in the Toronto Joint Board. When he came back to Toronto to make the case for the agreement he met with some opposition, especially around the clause establishing a wage differential. Hyman Langer, a cloakmaker on the Joint Board in Toronto, did give his support, and Shane reported to Dubinsky, ‘The presence of Brother Langer at these meetings was a great help to me. He could see the point in a clear cut way, and he also realized that there are very few girls, either in Toronto or Montreal, that can compare to the minimum of a skilled male operator.’31 But Cohen realized that the clause would allow manufacturers a free hand to replace men’s labour with cheaper women’s labour unless they excluded section workers from the differential clause. The officials of the industry did not really need to push for a clause on gendered wage differentials. The gender divisions in the trade were so deeply embedded in the organization of the industry that there was little need to set up a separate women’s clause. Every time the negotiators settled on wage and hour differentials based on ­geographical locality, or product type, they were in essence writing gender into the subtext. Thus, while the special clause dealt with women’s labour as a special category in specific jobs, it was only a small part of the overall process that formalized inequalities in the relations between manufacturers in the country shops and those in the cities, between union and non-union shops, and between men’s and women’s jobs in all the shops. On 19 October 1935, in a letter to Louis Fine, Cohen argued, ‘It would be injurious to provide for a lower minimum for female ­section operators because it was felt that as regards section operators the method of operation too adds to the relative skill or rate of production, that a female section operator should receive the regular minimum.’32 Toronto union representatives and Cohen argued: ‘A female section operator becomes as productive as an individual male operator and although the lower minimum for individual female

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o­ perators may be justifiable, such a provision should not apply to female ­section operators.’33 The Toronto position, then, was that since men and women were in direct competition as section operators, it was important to ensure wage parity for all section work irrespective of gender. At the same time, Toronto officials were willing to differentiate by gender those working in other occupational categories. They linked gender to the low productivity of non-section operators and argued that a woman’s productivity in non-section work jobs was lower than a man’s. Therefore, they decided, the wage differential clause could apply exclusively to this category of worker and thereby avoid male/female wage competition in the section-work jobs. The Montreal manufacturers’ association pressured its Toronto counterparts on this issue, advising them to accept the original clause establishing a differential ‘wholeheartedly for the good of the industry’, as Shane put it to Dubinsky on 21 October 1935, ‘also for the reason that the clause is justifiable, since the female operators in Canada are far below in their skill, especially in production, in comparison with the men operators.’34 Both the manufacturers and Shane threatened that the Toronto schedule would not obtain a registered agreement unless the clause was inserted as it had been in the Mont­ real agreement. Toronto union officials held out for their split version of the clause. ‘The boys’ from the Toronto ilgwu soon had a conference with Shane, who was ‘quite put out at first over the difficulty’ the Toronto unionists were creating around the issue of the differential. Aside from Langer, none of the other Toronto ilgwu officials were in favour of the differential clause as put forward by Shane.35 Finally, a meeting held in Montreal on 28 October 1935, in Labour Minister Arcand’s office, registered the two agreements, with the Ontario agreement falling in line with its Quebec counterpart on the wage differential issue. The schedule of the agreement was then registered with the Ontario Department of Labour on 18 November 1935.36 On 7 November 1935 an Order in Council in the Quebec provincial assembly made obligatory the collective agreement between the ilgwu and the Association of Manufacturers of Cloaks, Suits and Ladies Garments (the manufacturers’ council). The agreement included the revised version of the wage differential clause.37 It did, none the less, set limits on the wage differentials between contract shops and inside manufacturers and between rural and urban shops. In a departure from other labour legislation in the past, enforcement of the decree was to be administered through a joint committee of

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manufacturers and trade unions, not directly by the government itself. The progress in government regulation had not only mirrored trade union organization—starting with the areas in which men numerically dominated and moving from the men’s clothing sector to women’s cloaks and suits, and later to dressmaking—but also ­ mirrored the exploitative character of the trade, reaffirming the sexual division of labour and the lower wage levels of the rural shops. In an attempt to protect male jobs, the union bought into the further ­fragmentation of the labour force and agreed to a system of negotiations that gradually refined those divisions. In the end the union accepted a hierarchy of labour with women at the bottom; but to keep women at the bottom they had to argue that women were less skilled at operating sewing machines. Male trade unionists were sensitive to the degradation of their work and the use of women as replacement workers, but at the ­bargaining table they had not been successful in attempts to block this process. Now negotiations with the government presence gave them a window of opportunity they could not afford to miss. In the end, the Canadian unions had put their stamp on wage discrimination. As if to punctuate this discrimination, a Montreal newspaper carried a picture of the signatories to the agreement, with the caption ‘Fathering a Cloak ‘nra’ for Canada.’38 The ‘boys’ had completed their task.

Women Unionists:  Left Out The results of the four months of negotiation for the schedule under the Industrial Standards Act appear not to have made their way back through the union to the locals for discussion, although the Joint Council of the ilgwu might have had some say in the process. In November 1935 Kraisman reported, ‘It took a great deal of effort to convince our members of the benefits that would be derived from the registration of the agreement.’ Before the negotiations began, Kraisman said, the Toronto ilgwu had called meetings of shop chairmen, joint boards, executive boards, and members in general to explain ‘every detail so that a thorough job could be made of it.’39 In July 1935 a general meeting of the cloakmakers had authorized the union staff to handle negotiations for the Industrial Standards Act, and there was no further discussion with the membership. Because the schedules under the isa were intended as a base for wages and hours in each job category and not collective agreements per se, the contents of the schedules were not meant to include all the provisions ­

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normally found in a collective agreement. The Ontario cloak schedule of 1935 explicitly stated that the agreement was for minimum-wage standards and ‘shall in no way abrogate, prejudice or supersede any collective bargaining or any other agreement or arrangement between employees and employers in the cloak and suit industry other than to the full extent to which any such collective agreement purports to provide lower wages or more or different hours of labour than as hereinbefore set out.’40 Despite the riders in the agreements, manufacturers in all sectors hoped that the rates and hours would become the collective agreements for the trade. When contract negotiations resumed in 1937 in Montreal and in the cloak and dress sectors in Toronto, none of the women unionists were aware of the differential clause imposed under the isa and the Arcand Act. A Toronto activist in the cloakmakers, finisher Sophie Mandel, sat on the Joint Board during this time. Later on she recalled: I know in Quebec the wages was much lower than in Toronto. And Shane tried to get some things there that wasn’t according to our policy in our union. That’s why Kraisman was sent there, to straighten him out. . . . When an agreement is signed in the union it goes to the Joint Board, it comes to each local, they read the minutes and each local has the right to discuss if the agreement was right, and if you were against something you had to stand up at your local meeting and talk against it. So it [the differential clause] should be in the local minutes. But I never had it! I never recalled that we should ever have anything like this reported at a local meeting.41 Possibly, because the clause was added after the collective agreement was already agreed upon, the revision never made it back to the local level. In any case, it was not even discussed at the meetings of the Joint Board even after it was in effect. The garment unions now had two very different types of agreements, and the collective agreements with unionized employers were more democratically managed than the negotiations for agreements under the provincial legislation. Whereas collective agreements had to come back to the membership for discussion and ratification, no such procedure was in place for the agreements struck in the schedules. There were also no constitutional procedures and policies in place to direct the negotiating process for those schedules. The union bureaucracy seems to have had a free arm to negotiate a deal. Under these procedures, gender issues could never become political issues, and there is nothing in the historical record—either oral or documentary,

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such as minutes of union meetings—to indicate that union memberships had any input in the negotiation or its outcome. How could gender be used as a basis of discrimination in a trade union movement in which women were in the majority? For one thing, trade union activity in the needle trades in the 1920s and early 1930s for the most part stayed away from the women’s dress sector, where women formed the largest section of the workforce. For another, gender inequality was simply the ‘normal’ state of affairs— so taken for granted that it was hidden away from the consciousness of the day, so normal that it was virtually unspeakable: the people of the day tended to lack the language to express it as a way of being. Neither the new unionism nor the struggle against piecework spoke directly to the concerns of women workers, and the wage schedule of the isa did not address women’s day-to-day concerns. The interunion struggles of the early 1930s served as a catalyst for organizing women workers in the dress sector in 1937, but most of the political manoeuvring went on in a domain exclusive of women. Although the traditional unions (ilgwu and acwa) made some efforts to organize women, the presence of women in the union bureaucracy was limited. The resulting shift away from shop-floor unionism towards industry-wide collective bargaining ensured that women at best had a peripheral position in union decision-making. Because the Communist-led unions, such as the Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers, which favoured returning control of the labour process and decision-making to the shop floor, were more likely to attract women workers (as they had shown in the early 1930s), the defeat of communism in the union movement was more than a simple defeat of a political faction. It marked the end of a form of unionism that had drawn women into trade union activism.42 In the acwa and the ilgwu, even as the use of women organizers improved during the interwar period, their representation on the general executive boards did not. By 1934 Dorothy Bellanca was the lone woman on the 15-member acwa executive.43 By 1936 the Montreal and Toronto delegates to the acwa convention were still all men. The lack of organization among the shirtmakers continued to be a concern, and at the acwa convention of 1936 the Hamilton local brought forward a motion to organize the shirtmakers in the Canadian market. The acwa had begun to organize all women workers in the United States—where some 30,000 shirtmakers were in the union by 1936—but Canadian efforts were sporadic.44 At the 1936 convention, delegate Josephine Branagan, a representative of the US shirtmakers’ local in Elizabeth, New Jersey, expressed her hope that the shirt­makers

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‘in the next two years, would be led by 60% women.’45 Yet the formal speaker at that convention was the business manager for the New York shirtmakers’ local, Alex Cohen, who had been invited back into the Amalgamated after being expelled for corruption several years earlier.46 In his speech Cohen heaped praise on the young women shirtmakers for their spirit and the inspiration they provided for the membership as a whole. But although women may have been perceived as the spirit and inspiration for the unions, this was still at best a moral position not far removed from the role they held within the family as the ‘angels in the home’.

After the Acts In 1935 J.L. Cohen argued that the Industrial Standards Act ‘marks a new era in the activity of the Union, and recognizes, in a sense, that the Union is now “of age” with rights and responsibilities.’ As Cohen pointed out, ‘Any failure [on the part of the union] to completely ­fulfil these new responsibilities will result in exposing the workers to the dangers involved in the application of a legalized agreement which provides for lower schedules than the prevailing union rates and includes provisions which, without Union supervision may prove of serious danger to the workers.’47 Government officials in both Ontario and Quebec had high hopes for the success of the new Acts. Gérard Tremblay, Quebec’s deputy minister of labour, reported in May 1935 that 100,000 people were covered by the Quebec Act, which was giving wage increases totalling up to $4 million in the first year. In each industry in Quebec covered in the decrees a levy of between 0.5 and 1 per cent of payroll went to administration of the regulations through the Board of ­Arbitration, which had full power to regulate and enforce the decrees.48 Ontario picked up this procedure later. Ontario government officials were impressed with Quebec’s initial success, but for garment workers these increases in wages, already well below the unionized standards in Ontario shops, were not likely to have the immediate effect of equalizing wage differentials between the two provinces. Still, the manufacturers were impressed, if we can take Thomas Learie’s comments to the provincial labour minister as typical of their sentiments. Learie said that the Ontario Act had ‘done more to stabilize competitive prices and equalize competition than any other piece of labour legislation.’ He also pointed out that the isa had its share of ‘enemies, both among manufacturers (urban and rural) and employees, particularly urban’. He regretted, however, that

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the Act ‘was victim of a too definite tendency on the part of unions to regard it as an instrument for recruiting union members’.49 Indeed, the unions did hope that the new legislation would assist them in expanding their numbers, and, like the US experience of the New Deal legislation, Canadian membership in the clothing unions increased substantially in the 1930s—although many factors undoubtedly contributed to this growth.50 But the main purpose of the legislation—to bring about industrial peace—was not immediately met. To show manufacturers they meant business the unions still found it necessary to use the strike weapon. The acwa conducted several large shop strikes in the late 1930s, and the ilgwu finally got around to organizing the dressmakers in Montreal. The enforcement of the decrees in Quebec and the schedules in Ontario meant that the union officials had to ‘convince the membership that the [provincial] registration of a scale of wages lower than the scale prevailing under the collective agreements will in no way affect their rates under the collective agreement.’51 Over the following years the line between regulations under the schedules (or ‘decrees’ in Quebec) and the regulations specified under a collective agreement became increasingly vague. Manufacturers wanted nothing more than to see the regulations become the basis upon which all wages and regulations were enacted. The ilgwu had to try to draw a clear distinction between the board established under the Act and any joint board of arbitration operating under the collective agreement. The membership, suspicious of the deal, wanted assurances that the wage rates set out in the law would not simply become the standard rates, and it accused the leadership of ‘union organizing by registration’.52 By 1935 Montreal women’s cloakmakers had given up much of the ilgwu’s right to control wages through the collective bargaining process. The Joint Committee procedure (a committee of union and manufacturers’ representatives) set up by the decrees in the clothing industry meant that, as Shane told Cohen in a letter of 7 August 1935, ‘We cannot have the Price Committee responsible to the Union. May I call your attention that we are living in the Province of Quebec.’ In the end the issue was whether the union staff were ‘going to turn the Union over to the Law as was done by other Unions’ or whether the staff would retain the union and use the law to its advantage.53 For the left-wing forces in the union, the choice that the union made on this matter was clear: the leadership had turned the union over to the law. In both Ontario and Quebec the legislation was amended several times during the late 1930s, but registration of the clothing trade agreements continued. Registration for the men’s clothing industry

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under Quebec’s Labour Agreements Extension Act began in late 1935 and was completed in 1936.54 The acwa in Quebec registered its agreement with the provincial government in February 1935.55 In the women’s clothing sector, the cloakmakers’ agreements were first registered in both Ontario and Quebec in 1935. Quebec dresscutters first registered their agreement in April 1936, and in 1937 the rest of Quebec’s dress trade started the process of registering their agreements. These agreements had the same lifespan as a collective agreement, and each union was regularly back at the bargaining table renegotiating the conditions of the schedules. No longer was it possible for Ontario unions to establish higher wage rates than their Quebec counterparts simply because the union in Ontario was stronger. But the implementation of the isa seemed to make little difference in the competition between Quebec and Ontario, because by the late 1930s Ontario men’s and women’s clothing manufacturers were being squeezed out of the trade. One Toronto manufacturer of men’s clothing noted cynically, ‘The chief difference between the Quebec law and the Ontario law was that in Ontario one had to live up to the law, whereas in Quebec anything in the codes could be changed for a price of $50.00 through any French Canadian minister.’56 The Toronto market, according to Charles Foster of the Associated Clothing Manufacturers, ‘continued to bear a differentiation of labour costs of anywhere from 50% to 100% over the Mont­ real and Quebec centres.’57 While the Ontario government was convinced of the need to make labour costs more uniform from province to province, manufacturers in Quebec, well aware of their competitive advantage, resisted such a change. While organizationally the two provinces remained distinct, there was greater need for co-ordination between the two provincial union centres.58 But the political climate in Quebec was changing. The Liberal government of Taschereau began to fall apart in the provincial elections of 1935. A liberal reform group under Action Libérale Nationale gained strength, and by June 1936, with Maurice Duplessis now its leader, broke with the aln and forced an election. In August 1936 the newly created Union Nationale won a majority. Duplessis was not a friend to labour, and the Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act came under attack. In 1937 the law was abrogated and replaced by the Act Respecting Workmen’s Wages. The original Act interpreted employees’ associations to mean trade unions, but now the status of employee groups was widened to include the possible recognition of company unions. The Act recognized associations as they were defined in the 1924 Loi des syndicats professionnels,

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which stated, ‘The admission of foreigners to a syndicate, in excess of one-third of its members shall involve the dissolution of such syndicate.’59 The extension of collective agreements was no longer the key question. The Department of Labour was given more power to establish zones and determine wage differentials. The impact of these changes on the status of international unions such as the acwa and the ilgwu would have serious consequences for the dressmakers’ union drive. Duplessis tightened his grip on the union movement further through a campaign against Communist activities in the province. In 1937 the Act Concerning Communist Propaganda, popularly known as the ‘Padlock Law’, allowed police to lock up any building used by Communists. The Act was used loosely against both unions and political groups, and the ilgwu was not spared from the attacks.60 The strength of the Catholic Church in Quebec continued to influence trade union activity, but now, under Duplessis’s influence, the anti-Communist propaganda emerging from the church pulpit was reinforced in the practice of trade union law. In addition, anti-Semitism and the rise of support for a growing Fascist movement in Europe added to tensions in a garment industry heavily reliant on Jewish and other immigrant labour. Still, the Arcand Act and its revisions played an important role in trade union development during the second half of the 1930s. It established minimum levels for wages and a legal means of forcing all employers and workers to observe those levels—although unions were left trying to negotiate collective agreements that went above the minimum.61 The union bureaucrats in the acwa and the ilgwu, satisfied with that achievement, concentrated on expanding their memberships to workers who remained outside the union fold. Immediately after negotiations on the cloak trade were successfully completed in Montreal, the ilgwu was beginning to organize the dresscutters and the campaign for the dressmakers began in earnest.

‘The New Children of a Great Family’— The Dressmakers’ Campaign of 1937 By 1936, with the new codes in place for men’s and women’s coats and suits, all that remained was to extend their jurisdiction over the women’s cotton dress shops. In the spring of 1935 the ilgwu was optimistic about its prospects in Montreal. The Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers, defeated on the picket line in 1934, had ­disbanded, and the ilgwu was successfully courting the cutters back into the fold.62 Montreal locals appealed to the general executive

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board to support a dress campaign there. Frank Breslow, the interim manager of the new dresscutters’ ilgwu local, stated: The dress manufacturers are very much afraid of another strike in the industry, as many of them are on the verge of bankruptcy and are relying on the coming season to carry them through. This places us in a very favorable position. If we are able to get the majority of the cutters back into the organization, primarily from the largest shops, we will be in the position to gain union recognition and the conditions we demanded last fall without a struggle.63 The ilgwu capitalized on the iuntw setback, aiming its sights at the disillusioned members of a local of independent cutters that, although not part of the iuntw, had come under cpc influence, with many of its members feeling a close connection to the industrial union.64 The decision to organize the cutters probably came out of several informal meetings the ilgwu had with Labour Zionists who were opposed to the cpc influence in the independent cutters’ local. After an informal meeting with cloakmakers’ manager Albert Eaton, held at the local Young Men’s Hebrew Association, the dissidents picked several Jewish cutters to meet with Dubinsky to discuss setting up a dresscutters’ local under the ilgwu. For the Jewish men in the ilgwu, who were themselves supporters of the Jewish social democratic left, it was an easy fit. Certainly, Shane was not willing to work with the Communists in the dress shops, who by the fall of 1935 were appealing to him for entry into the ilgwu. When Jennie Brenner, secretary of the 110-member operators’ and finishers’ local of the iuntw, appealed to the ilgwu for charters and ‘the immediate possibilities to start a campaign to organize the dressmakers’, Shane and the head office in New York simply spouted executive board policy to ignore her overtures.65 It was easier to start with the dresscutters. Despite the internal machinations of office politics, the cutting rooms of the downtown district of the Montreal dress industry slowly moved towards establishing Local 205. Breslow, once a supporter of the industrial union, became the organizer for the cutters and was able to deliver a small cadre of cutters into the ilgwu. Then, shop by shop, the union chipped away at the dress trade. By the end of 1935 Local 205 had 253 members, and the ilgwu had been able to obtain price increases in several shops. Without the iuntw’s initial groundwork, the ilgwu success would have been limited, as Breslow acknowledged: ‘In approximately 50% of our shops real union conditions already existed, established through the efforts of the independent dress cutters union and maintained and safeguarded by local 205.’66 Breslow

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ended up serving a short jail sentence for ‘conspiracy to intimidate workers’, and the ilgwu sent in another organizer to replace him. Local 205 was in effect the thin wedge in a larger campaign. In July 1936, having gained a tentative agreement with the manufacturers in April, the union approached the Department of Labour for registration. Shane, somewhat triumphantly, described the meeting: Last Tuesday morning we had a final conference before the Department of Labour pertaining to the legalization of the dress cutters contract. There was quite a group of manufacturers objecting to this legislation. The group was composed of Cotton Dress Houses who are operating on a large scale, some of them employing as many as 300 to 500 workers. They were positive that when they get to the Minister they will be able to parade as big shots and as such will be excluded from the agreement. I wish to tell you that by the time we were through with them they looked so small that we needed field glasses to see them. The agreement was approved in its entirety for all cutters in the dress trade.67 The field was well prepared for a major campaign in the dress trade of Montreal, but these efforts needed some co-ordination with the Toronto ilgwu, where by that time the Communist faction of the iuntw had already joined the ilgwu dressmakers’ local. In Toronto, Local 72 had a working agreement between the left and right by 1936. Both factions held positions on the Joint Council and there were two business agents, one representing each faction. The first Joint Council consisted of five women and nine men. The chairman of the operators’ branch was Max Dolgoy, a member of the cpc and ex-president of the iuntw. The first meeting of the newly formed dressmakers’ operators, finishers, and drapers local was held on 4 May 1936.68 That same year the ilgwu reported that 57 shops were registered, 30 of them union shops, with 700 union members (although 100 of them were unemployed). Each shop retained its committee, which represented all crafts in the shop.69 In January 1937 the Toronto dressmakers’ Local 72 signed its first agreement with the manufacturers, and the age of new unionism in the dress trade had begun. Eva Shanoff recalled those days in the ilgwu: I think there was one strike in 1932, 1933, that’s all and since then we didn’t have no strikes. The International [ilgwu] doesn’t allow strikes. That’s all, no. There wasn’t much to do. Except maybe to speak to somebody near the building to join the Union or follow somebody to a house and talk to them. And then there were the meetings to discuss the problems of the Union, that’s all.70

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The days of active union struggle were on the wane in Toronto, a result, possibly, of a combination of two factors: the demise of the cpc-led union movement, and the changes in the legislative climate brought about by the Industrial Standards Act. Given that dress operators in Montreal were not similarly organized, competition from the Montreal dress shops was killing Toronto workers’ jobs. The minimum wage was the same in Montreal and Toronto for experienced workers in certain sectors, but Montreal manufacturers were able to hire inexperienced young women for two years before the minimum weekly wage of $12.50 had to be paid. In Toronto the learning period was limited to one year. According to the calculations of the Price Spreads Commission, Toronto was losing out on cotton and silk dresses, in the production of which ‘Montreal saves $3.00 on a weekly wage of every inexperienced over eighteen on the Toronto costs.’71 For several years Toronto manufacturers of women’s clothing had been losing work to Montreal businesses. By 1936 twice as many women were working in Montreal’s women’s clothing shops as in Toronto’s, and Quebec’s gross value of production was more than double that of Ontario.72 Montreal manufacturers specialized in the production of simple dresses, with over half of their production concentrated in that area. The dress sector employed nearly 7,000 workers in Montreal, and only about 1,000 workers in Toronto.73 The union knew it had to close the gap by organizing the Montreal shops. In March 1937, after Hyman Langer had been to Montreal to assess the situation for the union, he wrote to Dubinsky, ‘I have spent three days in Montreal, last week, and came away feeling a deep sense of futility.’74 Earlier, in June 1936, several ilgwu staffers and Dubinsky had met in Winnipeg and mapped out a campaign strategy for Montreal.75 But the plan disintegrated as Shane tried instead to delay the organization of dressmakers for a few years. He had hoped that the dresscutters’ contract would hold and thereby present a good base for organizing the other workers in the shops. In March 1937 Langer reported, ‘The very employers comprising the Manufacturers Guild, so to speak the friends of the Union, upon whom Shane has rested his cause, are the very people who have taken him in camp, and are today busy drawing up an agreement with the Catholic Syndicate, creating a condition where one has to cram in 8 or 10 months activity into a mere three or four weeks.’76 For Langer, a strike was ‘unthinkable’, but the union was forced to act. The Toronto ilgwu was concerned. If the strike was settled and the resulting wage rates set in a collective agreement were low, ‘rates

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established in Montreal, which would become a public property, must once again affect conditions in Toronto.’77 This was one of the sideeffects of the Collective Labour Agreements Act. Quebec manufacturers were hoping to use the new legislation to make the low wage levels in the Montreal shops legitimate. They hoped that the Catholic unions would offer them a better deal than the one proposed by Shane and the ilgwu. Toronto, ‘growing panicky’, was afraid to take on any further organization for fear of a greater exodus of shops to Quebec. The need to co-ordinate efforts between the two markets took on a new urgency, but still nothing was done. Soon the situation was complicated by new contenders in the union field. Two Catholic unions—the Ligue catholique des ouvrières des industries de l’aiguile and the Fédération nationale du vêtement—were beginning to organize dress shops outside of Montreal and had some influence within the city. ‘They have influence over the French-Canadian workers’, reported dresscutters’ organizer Breslow. ‘The danger is, therefore, particularly great in the dress industry as the vast majority of workers employed in this industry in Montreal are French Canadians.’78 Researcher Alexandra Szacka notes that the manufacturers and the syndicates were able to use ethnic prejudice, particularly anti-Semitism, to suit their ends. ‘The creation of Catholic unions helped to reinforce the French-Canadian workers’ hostility towards non-French-Canadian employers, particularly Jewish ones (who formed an important part of the employers in sectors they were concentrated in). It has also helped to isolate the FrenchCanadian workers from the other workers, mostly Jewish.’79 The ilgwu now had to make a serious effort to attract the dressmakers to their union or lose them to the Catholic unions. With Duplessis in power and a revision of the Arcand Act favouring the Catholic unions, the pressure to be the first one to the government’s door to register an agreement was intense. Like Yvette Charpentier, who admitted that she was not ‘overly enthusiastic’ but rather ‘suspicious and confused’ when she was approached to join the fledgling union, the young French-Canadian women were, as always, hesitant.80 Charpentier’s sentiments were common among young FrenchCanadian women in the shops. To offset this resistance, the ilgwu appointed R.A. Desrochers and Anne Galarneau, two women organizers from within the cloakmakers’ union. They were soon joined by Louise Racine-Delise, a shop-floor sewing-machine operator with no prior union experience. As ilgwu organizer Leah Roback described Racine-Delise, ‘She was a beautiful woman, tall and slender . . . her heart was in the right place and she was interested, she

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was sincere and she really did her best.’81 Finally Rose Pesotta, a vice-president of the international, came to assist the Montreal campaign, because ‘the dressmakers needed a woman’s approach.’82 The union used home visits and leaflets at the shops, but in addition to these traditional methods it also ran bilingual radio broadcasts. 83 Still, it needed more help. ‘At the same time when Rose Pesotta came, you needed a French front’, Roback said. ‘We had at that time a Mr Schubert, he was with the Liberal Party machine I think. So Shane asked him to find us a good young man who would be able to work in helping to organize. Mr Schubert found Claude Jodoin. Claude was a young Liberal.’84 Over the next six months the Montreal union offices of the ilgwu were transformed. The Jewish-led union had to reconstruct itself into a place in which the French-Canadian workers would feel comfortable. Pesotta described this transformation: We proceeded to arrange the union headquarters in a manner to meet the aesthetic requirements of our future members. After the place was all dolled up with library shelves, an improved stage, a pantry well equipped for tea parties, a radio, a phonograph, and a piano, we ventured to arrange an ‘open house’ and invite the dressmakers to come and see us. We picked an evening to coincide with the local holiday for ‘old maids’ known as St. Catherine’s Day, and served molasses and soft drinks, interspersed with union speeches. Well, the affair was a huge success. The headquarters was jammed to capacity and everyone had a swell time.85 Although the ilgwu had taken an unduly long time to put the effort into organizing the women, the union obviously knew how to do the job properly. Over the next several months the ilgwu enlisted support from various sectors of organized labour from both within their own union and outside of it. The Millinery Workers sent people to work on the campaign, and the Montreal Trades and Labour Council leader, Raoul Trépanier, came on board as chairman of the strike committee. The ilgwu enlisted support from Idola Saint-Jean, a leader in the French-Canadian suffrage movement, just as it had looked to the suffragists years before in the first campaign to organize the Montreal garment workers. Pesotta encouraged the wives of the cloakmakers to form a women’s auxiliary to assist the dressmakers’ campaign. The new dresscutters’ Local 205 executive, mainly composed of Jewish men, saw its way to adding two French-Canadian members to its body as trustees. The ilgwu established special headquarters for the campaign and set up a special bilingual newspaper and an education

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department to attract the young French-Canadian women.86 Finally, the New York office offered financial support for the new round of activities, something it had long been reluctant to do. Dressmakers’ Local 262 got its charter at a large meeting in a Montreal hall in January 1937. Pictures of the charter members were taken and later published in a local paper, L’Illustration Nouvelle. But within days the seven women who had appeared in the photo were fired from their jobs.87 Pickets were set up outside the shop of Queen City Dress, one of the manufacturers that had fired its unionized workers, and the fight began in earnest. In Pesotta’s account of this strike, she noted that the women who joined the ilgwu from Queen City Dress were the same women who had been part of the iuntw during the 1934 strike. Now they were back in the dress shop, ­wearing Catholic crosses in an attempt to keep their jobs. When the ilgwu called them out on strike to defend the seven women who had become the charter members of Local 262, the response in the shop was 100 per cent. The ilgwu wanted the Queen City strike to send a message to Montreal dressmakers. Pesotta had what she called ‘a special job’. Throughout the day she helped look after the strikers’ needs in a union headquarters ­commissary, ‘to keep the strikers contented, and feed and educate them, while Bernard Shane negotiated with their employer.’ The care with which I arranged for feeding the strikers had a definite purpose behind it. I wanted it known that the ilgwu provided well for members involved in a dispute. In the morning we had fruit, eggs in any style, sweet rolls, and coffee, and during the day hot drinks were ready whenever the pickets came in for a respite from the bitter cold. And I went out of my way to get delicacies for lunch, starting with shrimp cocktail and ending with chocolate layer cake and ice cream.88 Although victory came quickly in this case, the union did not press Queen City Dress for a union contract. Instead, it asked for the reinstatement of the seven discharged workers, and no discrimination for joining the union. The message that went out to both manufacturers and workers was clearly a soft sell. The women’s strike experience was a far cry from their experiences in the 1934 iuntw strike. With backing from the international office, life on the picket line was much easier, and the ilgwu wanted to reassure the manufacturers that, unlike the Communists, they were reasonable people. The ilgwu campaign culminated in a general strike of 5,000 to 8,000 dressmakers in April 1937. According to Roback, the union

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planned a surprise strike, calling it at midnight on the 14th of April so that it began the next morning in earnest, with ‘nobody at the ­factories—nobody. It was really a beautiful job, a beautiful job.’89 Before the ilgwu was able to meet with the Dressmakers Guild (the manufacturers’ association), the large dress manufacturer Charles Sommer called in the national Catholic unions. Under the leadership of ­Sommer, who was as stridently anti-union as ever, the Guild was uncompromising. According to Shane, Sommer offered the Catholic unions ‘a backdoor contract’ that ‘merely recognized them as ­bargaining agent for Montreal’s dressmakers’. But there was no real bargaining; the employer’s sole promise was to enforce the minimum wage code of the Province of Quebec with its 44 to 48 hour week. Minimum wages ranged from $7.00 to $12.50 a week, there was no change. . . . The Guild sold them [Catholic unions] a bill of goods that it would ‘deliver’ the workers to their union. They accepted Sommer’s promise and signed the contract.90 After signing a contract with the two Catholic unions, the Dressmakers Guild said, ‘These unions are distinguished from some other labour organizations in that they are 100% Canadian. Their leaders are Canadian citizens with an interest in the welfare of Canadian labour. They are not foreign agitators giving the workers promises of large wage increases that are impractical.’91 The content of the ­‘contract’ between the Ligue catholique des ouvrieres des industries de l’aiguile and the Dressmakers Guild, as published in the Quebec Official Gazette on 10 April 1937, proved an asset to the ilgwu organizers. The conditions clearly offered workers very little. The Dressmakers Guild continued to stir up resentment against ‘foreign agitators’. In the churches, Catholic workers were being told to stay out of the ilgwu. Reverend Jean Bertrand of the Catholic syndicate argued, ‘If the Catholic League suffers defeat Catholic workers will be forced on pain of unemployment, to adhere to a movement of Communist tendencies.’ He added, ‘Has not the government of ­Quebec just engaged itself to combat communism in the Province?’92 The Catholic unions and Catholic priests from the pulpit called for the deportation of Shane and Pesotta, as well as the arrest of every picketer not from Montreal.93 The ilgwu fought these efforts through radio broadcasts and leaflets to the workers. The situation was exacerbated by the existence of the Arcand Act (now amended and renamed the Act Respecting Workmen’s Wages). The catch was that if no objections were raised within 30 days of the

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notice, as published in the Quebec Official Gazette, the collective agreement signed between the Dressmakers Guild and the Catholic unions would be given government approval. But La Ligue Catholique’s anti-Semitism was causing concern among some Jewish garment manufacturers, who did not feel all that comfortable having signed an agreement with ‘a Jew-baiting Catholic syndicate’.94 As a result, the jurisdictional picture was clouded when, on 23 April 1937, a breakaway group of manufacturers, owners of about 40 smaller factories, signed with the ilgwu. This newly formed Dress Manufacturers Organization offered closed-shop conditions, a 10 per cent wage hike, and a 44-hour week to about 2,000 of the striking dressmakers.95 Some of the signatories to this collective agreement with the ilgwu had also signed the original agreement with the Catholic unions. The Quebec government was thus in a quandary: the Act Respecting Workmen’s Wages made extension of the agreement to the whole trade mandatory, but which collective agreement should now stand? On Saturday morning of that same week the Department of Labour called a meeting of the ilgwu, the new trade association, the Catholic unions, and the Dressmakers Guild. Attempting to resolve the situation, the department suggested a ‘three man arbitration board under provincial Department of Labour auspices to settle the entire dispute leading to the strike’. Decisions of the board ‘should be binding on all factions concerned and all strikers should return to work pending the mediation deliberations’.96 The ilgwu was willing to go for arbitration, but first it wanted assurances of union recognition, and Shane wanted to take the conciliation offer to his membership before agreeing to the government request. In the meantime, more and more manufacturers wanting to get their machines running again were deserting the Dressmakers Guild, although about 3,000 workers remained on strike. The government continued to pressure the ilgwu to give up its closed-shop demand and accept arbitration to ‘prove that it is really sincere in the defense of the workers’ interests’.97 Instead, the ilgwu increased its strike pay and reinforced its picket lines. According to Shane, by that point the international office had spent over $250,000 and was willing to spend more.98 The Dressmakers Guild persisted with its ‘foreign agitators’ propaganda, telling the dressmakers, ‘We who have given you your jobs and paid your wages are your best friends.’ The Guild agreed to ‘meet and discuss wages and work conditions with any Canadian workers through their own Canadian organizations’.99 The government considered intervening. In early May 1937 the Attorney­General’s office issued warrants for the arrest of Shane and Trépanier,

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The key players in the dressmakers’ organizing drive, Montreal, 1937. Left to right: unidentified; Rose Pesotta, vice-president, ilgwu; Bernard Shane, general organizer and manager of the cloakmakers’ union of Montreal; and Claude Jodoin, French organizer. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University)

strike committee chairman and president of the Montreal Trades and Labour Council.100 In the end the Duplessis government reconsidered the action, and the warrants were never served. Issachar Greenberg, a Montreal manufacturer and former executive of their trade association who was at that time representing the Broad Silk Manufacturers’ Credit Bureau in Montreal, was able to bring the Dressmakers Guild and the ilgwu together in a meeting. After strenuous negotiations, an agreement was signed on 6 May 1937 providing for a union (ilgwu) shop, a 44-hour week, grievance machinery, and the right to settle piecework rates.101 The minimumwage rates were left to be set by an impartial chairman. The ilgwu had not anticipated that the dressmakers would be so easily unionized. ‘We are receiving new pleasant surprises’, Shane wrote to Kraisman in Toronto in May 1937. ‘Not only were the girls good strikers, but they are also good union members after they entered the shops. We are having from ten to fifteen shop meetings a

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day and in all instances we find great enthusiasm. A most encouraging feature is that the chairladies are collecting their dues religiously and the members are paying them even more religiously.’102 The union had made itself attractive to women workers by putting in place an educational department and social clubs; it had also created an active shop-floor base. As Rose Pesotta put it at the time: Over night, ordinary operators, pressers, finishers and cutters, practically none of whom had any experience, assumed leadership of large shops on strike. And through the halls and along the picket lines swept a wave of new songs in French on popular French themes enriching the traditions of the ilgwu. Any movement with its base in the hearts and minds of thousands of workers creates its own music—and that strike was such a movement.103 Despite the enthusiasm on the part of ‘the girls’, the legalization of the agreement was again left largely to ‘the boys’. Under Shane’s leadership, Trépanier, Pesotta, and John Ulene of the dresscutters met with the manufacturers. On 2 June 1937 they placed their case for ensuring minimum wages for the dressmakers before the impartial chairman who, under the amended Arcand Act, had the powers of decision. Again the decision-making process was out of the hands of the rank and file. The difference in political climate and shop conditions between Toronto and Montreal meant that decisions by the Montreal impartial chairman would most likely reflect the complex gender relations of the Quebec needle trades. In Montreal, dress manufacturers had been moving women into positions as pressers, a traditionally male job. In the agreement signed in Montreal, pressers’ wages included a wage differential, with women pressers to be paid less than men. In Toronto the dress agreement signed by the recently formed Local 72 had no such clause. Toronto’s ilgwu still had to contend with leftwing activists in the dress local, while Montreal did not. The wage differential clause for pressers remained in the agreement when it was registered.104 In an optimistic mood the Montreal dressmakers moved to organize the cotton dress shops, but the union victory was short-lived. The ilgwu had started its organizing drive in the ‘downtown shops’, which produced expensive garments, but now abruptly shifted its organizing efforts to the ‘uptown shops’, which produced cheaper garments and included one of Montreal’s largest dress shops, Ideal Dress, with over 400 women employees. Sam Kraisman was brought in from Toronto to head up the campaign in Ideal Dress. As Issy

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Glouberman, a cutter at Ideal Dress, pointed out, the new focus proved to be a strategic mistake. ‘At Ideal Dress, in a week’s time you could be an operator. They started with the bottom grade and you can’t organize the people at the bottom, they can be replaced too easily.’105 The ilgwu signed up the majority of the workers, but the manufacturer refused to meet with the union. ‘It was the beginning of a six-month siege that cost the International another $250,000.00’, Shane reported.106 Other manufacturers helped out Ideal Dress in its fight, the shop was lost, and for the next two years the manufacturers as a whole did their best to avoid the 1937 agreement. It would take another strike in April 1940 to bring the Dressmakers Guild members into line. In the cloak and suit sector as well as the dress sector the position of women was the same. Their larger numbers in the dress sector had little effect on the decision-making structure of negotiations. The government, the employers, and the union representatives were all men. Among the dressmakers, the union effort from the beginning had been under the control of the cutters. As Maurice Mandel of the cutters’ union said, ‘What cream is to coffee, the cutters are to the Dress­ makers’ union. And it has been that way since 1937. We helped build Local 262, we fought for and along side the Dressmakers and we made them union conscious.’107 Some women, notably Rose Pesotta, had been involved in the organizing drive, but mostly the presence of women had been limited to the picket lines and serving on social ­committees, with ‘the boys’ alone carrying on the negotiations.108 In June 1937 David Dubinsky welcomed the Montreal dressmakers into ‘the great army of organized labour’. The language of his welcoming address was revealing. ‘You are the new children of a great family which is ready to receive you and help you’, he declared, firmly setting out once again the place of women in the house of labour.109 As Canada prepared to enter World War II, women were as little involved in the clothing industry’s union leadership as they had been in the earliest strikes before World War I.

Achieving Stability The strike of 1937 is often seen as a major victory for the union. ‘The grève des midinettes of 1937 is famed in song and story’, writes Terry Copp. ‘It was a famous victory except that, like previous attempts to organize the less-skilled workers, the agreement didn’t last the year. . . . It was not until April of 1940 that the ilgwu was again ready to take on the manufacturers in a mass strike.’110

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The year 1940 was also the beginning of the cio union drive in Canada, and a time when several other large strikes were fought. Trade unions were just beginning to get back on their feet after the Depression. Not surprisingly, then, social scientists and historians have come to see the 1937 strike as a pivotal point in garment union history. Indeed, the strike represented a notable attempt by the ilgwu to secure its control over the Canadian garment industry, to establish ‘collective relations and arbitration machinery’, and to achieve ‘stability and entrenchment’.111 ‘Stability’ had been achieved in Toronto when the Toronto dressmakers signed a collective agreement in 1937. The power of the shop committee was already reduced. Shop chairmen and ‘chairladies’ were given most of the responsibility for settling prices with the manufacturer, ‘subject to the approval of the Union’. Cutters gained a minimum of $30 a week, operators a minimum of 65 cents an hour, and finishers a minimum of $14.50 a week for a 40-hour week.112 The union reported, ‘It has not been an easy task to convince the membership of the benefits inherent in collective relations,—a membership who has been trained for years under the so-called “Left Wing ­Industrial Union” to despise collective relations as something ­synonymous with “class collaboration.” ’ The disorganization of the Depression years had led to government regulation of the industry and reaffirmed the manufacturers’ control over the labour process. These factors also gave trade union officials the responsibility for regulation of the workers and ratified, yet again, women’s secondary status in the workforce. Left-wing union activists—both men and women—were uncomfortable with the centralized bureaucratic procedures that put decision-making into the hands of paid union staff and took it away from shop committees. But the male trade unionists who opposed these changes had a political base within the locals from which they could resist. Women had a weaker position. They held few paid or elected positions, and the ­further removed the committee was from the shop floor, the more unlikely it was that women would be directly represented on issues that concerned them. This framework of bargaining shaped women’s trade union position in the interwar years. As a report produced by the Toronto Joint Board of the dressmakers put it, ‘The manufacturers, having obtained assurance that strikes and stoppages are no longer in vogue, dared to plan ahead, to risk greater investment and venture into new enterprise.’113 After 1940 there would be no major strikes in the dress trade until the late 1970s. ‘The boys’ had kept their word.

9

Conclusion: ‘This Group of Girls and Men …’

At the 1937 ILGWU convention in Atlantic City, a party of 20 people from the Montreal dressmakers’ campaign received an enthusiastic welcome. According to Rose Pesotta, ‘The party included Raoul and Mme. Trépanier, Bernard and Mrs. Shane, John and Mrs. Ulene, chairwomen from five large shops, and several newspapermen.’ Dubinsky welcomed them on the stage, saying, ‘On this platform you see many gifts. But the finest gift of all to our convention is this group of girls and men from Montreal.’1 The language of the social and political world of the needle trades unions, the language of everyday life during the organizing drives, the language of all of the collective agreements, and the language of negotiations: they all reflected the relations of power. There were male names, there was continual mention of ‘man’s’ rights and needs and skills, and then there were the ‘girls’. But ‘women’ were absent from the language—a most remarkable absence given their numerical domination of the workplace. The contrasting language used to refer to women union activists and men trade unionists reflects, to some degree, women’s position as political subjects within the labour movement. These representations of men and women in everyday language reaffirmed patriarchal relationships between the men and women workers at the same time that the very ‘naturalness’ of it all made those power relationships unseen and unrecognized by both sexes. Researchers have commented on the ‘seamlessness’ of women’s lives as they move back and forth between caretaking in the home and caretaking in the workplace, but men also move ‘seamlessly’ from protecting and providing in the home into similar roles within 254

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the world of work.2 It is as if an analytical wall has been placed between the public and private spheres, and only when we break down that wall can we clearly see the gendered connections between family and work. The relations of ruling legitimized men’s role as spokesmen for the working class. Male control of the public sphere allowed for male control over women’s labour and inhibited any efforts by women workers to take on leadership positions that would put them in control of men’s labour. The social prescriptions for masculine and feminine behaviour further ensured that men and women would continue to play out their destinies—men as protectors for the class and women as its caretakers. Rose Pesotta’s position during the 1937 Montreal dress campaign is a good example of this. At the time of the strike, Pesotta was a member of the general executive board of the international, and as a senior organizer she had many years of experience in the organization. Yet the division of labour between Pesotta and Bernard Shane placed Pesotta in the ‘special role’ of caterer and support worker, while Shane was clearly called on to do the hard bargaining.3 The relegation of women to the social sphere created a specific political context for women’s trade union activism. At times their historical dislocation from male trade union activism had served women workers well. In the pre-war strikes the establishment of separate women’s locals not only allowed women workers to voice specific concerns based on their sex, but also allowed for cross-class alliances (however tenuous they may have been) and gave women the space to speak as women rather than as genderless members of the working class. Early feminist cross-class alliances were able to make reference to this understanding of woman’s difference—as potential mother and wife—situating all women within the discourse of domesticity. With this separation and difference reaffirmed in the feminist discourse of the pre-World War I trade union movement, needle trades women and their middle-class sisters were able to speak politically of their rights to equal pay for equal work. This community of women politicized both middle-class and working-class women, but at the same time maintained gender differences. The political legitimacy of women’s position in the workplace was voiced through an appeal to women as domestic creatures, as ‘angels in the home’, and the exploitation of women in the workplace was construed as a threat to the moral fibre of the family. Women garment workers’ dislocation from the collective bargaining process began in these early years, and it signified a specific relationship women had to the public sphere of waged work. While this

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Bernard Shane (centre) brings his ‘girls’ to greet David Dubinsky (hat in hands), international president of ILGWU, as he arrives at the Montreal railway station, 1940. (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Cornell University)

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relationship may have altered over the next several decades, women’s political disenfranchisement continued. The workplace culture continued to be masculine, which meant that women’s work was measured against the work of their male co-workers, and that women would always come up short, be considered less skilled, and appear less committed to the workforce and less militant as trade unionists. Men, after all, were doing the measuring. When skill became a focus in the legal discourse of needle trades regulation in the mid-1930s, it did not seen illogical to turn again to the language of difference to give legitimacy to the privileging of male workers in the legal texts of the Industrial Standards Act and the Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act. Could a woman do a man’s job? The answer to this question had ramifications beyond the narrow confines of those meetings in Toronto and Montreal. Men’s right to a fair wage was seen as a reasonable request, while women’s wages were discussed only in relation to men’s superior performance. Representation of gender in legal documents continued to reflect the patriarchal structures of ruling relations. Protective legislation such as for the minimum wage, as well as the political behaviour of trade union men and their political allies in the middle classes, reflected a continued masculine dominance. Fathers and brothers were personified in the State legislation, in union structures, and in women’s relations to their male bosses. Each of these locations in the social structure of the period became a site of gender and ethnic relations, not only privileging men over women, but also privileging Jews over French Canadians. The representation of gender and ethnicity within the needle trades community was a complex mix that altered over the decades between 1890 and 1940. Needle trades workers did make political gains through establishing union shops in much of the industry. To some extent wages and conditions of work gradually improved. But social relationships continued to reflect a political process that privileged Jewish men over French-Canadian women. These gender and ethnic relations provided a remarkable stability in the face of a continuing, major economic restructuring of the industry. The issue of sex labelling of jobs became more intense as industrial restructuring progressed. But the strategic positions of male workers within the bargaining process ensured the men, to some degree at least, a kind of protection as skilled workers. Skill became a ‘contested terrain’ as the battle in the workplace was fought through the prism of gender relations. Even though all sectors of the trade recognized the need to stabilize the industry and clarify the tasks

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involved in production, the solutions to the problem had their costs. The price for industrial peace and job protection was the continuation of discriminatory practices against women workers. An acknowledgement by trade union men that women workers constituted a low-paid sector would have altered the nature of trade negotiations for the industrial standards legislation. To acknowledge that low-wage sector and its institutionalization in the trade, men would have had to challenge the hierarchical wage rates set in place by management. They would have had to disrupt the existing bargaining structures, to bargain for equal pay for women workers—in an industry historically built on wage discrimination. They would have had to challenge the whole house of industry in a completely new way. And none of the parties involved in the negotiations wanted to set into question the foundations of work relations in the industry. In the end the gender-neutral language of economics and legal discourse kept them safe from this acknowledgement of the traditional structures of economic power. Throughout the years of trade union organization women workers were construed as representing a social problem to the broader goals of trade unionism. The temporality of the ‘woman problem’ shifted as women’s participation in the industry grew and changed over time. The association of problematic womanhood encompassed FrenchCanadian and non-Jewish women alike. Their participation in the union movement was seen as a deviant matter, and their forms of activism were delegitimized in the political and social climate of a male-defined mainstream unionism. Male union activism, from its craft origins to the industrial unionism of the 1930s, was naturalized. Women workers, young and old alike, entered the unions and the workplace as a special category of ‘womanhood’. The gradual integration of women into the trade union movement in the 1930s as the trade unionists’ ‘little sisters’ continued the process of dislocating ‘women’ from the political and economic discourse of the union movement. Men were proud to be the protectors of their ‘little sisters’ in needle trades unionism, and protect them they did. Minimum-wage laws were written to do just that, ensuring that women would be lowpaid workers in an already exploitative industry. The legislation’s restrictive protection of women and girls resulted in limitations on job choices and hours of labour and reaffirmed capital’s use of female labour as semi-skilled, part-time employees in a seasonal industry. Women were protected from the opportunity to stand as equals in a working-class movement. The good jobs were preserved for men and

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the bad jobs for women. Authority and power in the workplace remained in men’s hands. When women did seek a legitimate place in the unions as partners and sisters, they soon found that it was not to be an easy struggle. The gendered relationships in the public world of the workplace were intimately linked to gendered relations learned at home; patriarchal relationships extended beyond the homes of workers—they permeated every aspect of life. Traditional forms of authority derived from patriarchal power served to personalize the dependency of women, children, and younger men in the workplace, in the home, and within their social communities. As both familial and work relationships changed and were reconstructed through the trade union struggles that brought men and women workers together, these new relationships in turn altered how unions conceived of the issues of skill and work. The effects of both family life and factory life on men and women meant that for working-class women the harsh exploitation in the workplace was only one aspect of their subordination. As a result women learned to adjust their work lives to family responsibilities, which left them dependent on homework, seasonal work, and less skilled trade jobs. In the clothing industry the ISA and the Arcand Act set in place a formal set of rules that again reflected relations of ruling that privileged men’s workplace rights over those of the women workers. In all of these discussions, gender formed an invisible force. Gender-neutral job classifications made it difficult for unionists to reveal the concrete relations on the shop floor. The job descriptions located positions within the labour process, outlined wage rates, and placed positions in the hierarchical structures shaped by management. In an industry dominated by women workers, their sex was not a matter of record. For the next several decades women would remain under the patriarchal control of their trade union brothers—their voices silenced by that fact. As far back as 1910 women garment workers had demanded wage equity. At a 1910 union rally in Montreal an anonymous, dark-haired young woman climbed onto a makeshift stage and read out a poem to the assembled audience: Do we live for those who love us For the work they make us do? For the middleman above us? For the employer, landlord too? Do we live to rise each morning

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Work and slave till eventide? Oh yes, we live for others In the saddest sense of the phrase We live that they may exploit us In a thousand various ways.4 In 1910 that poem—a clear call not just for economic justice but for recognition of ruthlessly skewed relationships—created a sensation, as did the sight of women on strike, marching in the streets. But by 1940 women’s voices calling for equality in the workplace had grown faint indeed—and it would not be until the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the push of the second wave of feminism and a renewed labour movement, that those voices would be heard so strongly and sharply once again.

Notes

Chapter 1 1. Montreal Star, 24 Feb. 1910. 2. Interview with a French-Canadian garment worker, Montreal, 1990. 3. Feminist writers have tried to explain the relationship by reference to a dual-systems theory of patriarchy and capitalism, in which the two systems are seen as being relatively autonomous. But this vision treats patriarchy as analytically distinct from capitalism and often implies that women live in the realm of patriarchy and men in the realm of capitalism. Capitalism, however, is not gender-neutral, and the dualsystems theory is not adequate for a complete examination of the historical development of a specific industry. Recent feminist historiography offers new insights, which have allowed us to develop a more subtle understanding of gender practices that give meaning to work and class experiences. For a review of this problem, see J. Acker, ‘Class, Gender and the Relations of Distribution’, Signs 13 (Spring 1988); E. Faue, ‘Gender and the Reconstruction of Labor History: An Introduction’, and articles by A. Kessler-Harris and L. Fink in Labor History 34, 2–3 (Spring-Summer 1993): 169–204; and Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY, 1991), especially Baron’s introductory essay. 4. The theoretical work of Joan Scott and Denise Riley is crucial to this discussion and has shaped recent historiography. See Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis, 1988). Also see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988); Baron, Work

261

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5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

NOTES

Engendered; and J. Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley, Calif., 1990). See, for example, Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988). Sonya Rose, ‘Gender and Labor History: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy’, International Review of Social History 38 (1993): 153. For a discussion of the development of middle-class concepts of separate spheres, see Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York, 1992). Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Treating the Male as “Other”: Redefining the Parameters of Labor History’, Labor History 34, 2–3 (Spring-Summer 1994): 198. Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns (Toronto, 1990), 9. Kessler-Harris, ‘Treating the Male as “Other” ’, 195. Rose, ‘Gender and Labor History’, 159. Christine Stansell’s account of the outside system in the US provides an excellent analysis of this process. Stansell, ‘The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City’, in Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz, eds, Working Class America (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 78–103. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1973. Canada, Dept of Labour, Women at Work in Canada (Ottawa, 1964), 28. See also Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, vol. 6, Occupations of the People (Ottawa, 1915), table 1, 3–7. In 1891, 26 per cent of all industrial workers were employed in clothing manufacture, and the industry employed the largest proportion of industrial workers in Toronto at that time. Greg Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–1892 (Toronto, 1980), 307. See also Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada and Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada (Ottawa, 1939). See G.W. Bertram, ‘Economic Growth in Canadian Industry, 1870–1915: The Staple Model and the Take-off Hypothesis’, Canadian Journal of Economics 29 (1963): 159-84. The significance of clothing production to the industrial structure of Quebec is even more pronounced than the figures for Canada as a whole. Based on a comparison of the gross value of production of all industrial output in Quebec, the clothing industry ranked third out of 17 industries in 1929 and second

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18.

19.

20.

21.

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in 1945. P. Linteau, R. Durocher, J. Robert, and F. Ricard, Histoire du Québec contemporain: Le Québec depuis 1930 (Montreal, 1989), 30. Canadian Textile Journal, 8 June 1920, 309. Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada (Ottawa, 1928), 4. Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada (Ottawa, 1928), 2. Geoff Eley, ‘Playing It Safe or: How Is Social History Represented? The New Cambridge Social History of Britain’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993): 213. There are several histories on the development of the US garment industry. See, for example, Louis Levine, The Women Garment Workers and the History of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (New York, 1924); Joel Seidman, The Needle Trades (New York, 1942). Several books also deal with trade union development, such as James M. Budish and George Soule, The New Unionism and the Clothing Trade (New York, 1920); Jack Hardy, The Clothing Workers: A Study of the Conditions and Struggles in the Needle Trades (New York, 1935). No such complete study has yet been done in Canada, although Charlene Gannagé’s study of modern factory conditions in Toronto offers insights into gender relations in the garment factory. See C. Gannagé, Double Day, Double Bind: Women Garment Workers (Toronto, 1986). Two excellent studies of Jewish workers in the needle trades examine ethnic issues in the workplace. The authors weave together gender, class, and ethnic consciousness in a subtle analysis of how these ideologies and practices shape work in the industry. See Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900–1939 (Toronto, 1992); Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, NY, 1990). A recent comprehensive study of homework in the United States is Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York, 1994). Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, 1984.

Chapter 2 1. See, for instance, Bettina Bradbury, ‘Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: NonWage Forms of Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861–91’, Labour/Le Travail 14 (Fall 1984): 46; also, Margaret Conrad, ‘ “Sundays Always Make Me Think of Home”: Time and Place in Canadian

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2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

NOTES

Women’s History’, in Veronica Strong-Boag and Anita Clair Fellman, eds, Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History, 2nd edn. (Mississauga, Ont., 1991). Canada, Women at Work, 1; Pat Connelly, Last Hired, First Fired (Toronto, 1978), 88. Susan Trofimenkoff, ‘One Hundred and Two Muffled Voices: Canada’s Industrial Women in the 1880’s’, in Michael Cross and Gregory Kealey, eds, Canada’s Age of Industry, 1849–1896 (Toronto, 1982), 216, 227. Although this observation has been made by many writers, these same traditional dictates seem to have shaped most forms of working-class women’s work up to World War II. See, for example, Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978); Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, ‘Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975): 39; Susan Cross, ‘The Neglected Majority: The Changing Role of Women in Nineteenth Century Montreal’, Histoire Sociale/Social History 6 (1973); Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘The Girl of the New Day: Canadian Working Women in the 1920’s’, Labour/Le Travailleur 4 (1979): 131–64; and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff and Alison Prentice, eds, The Neglected Majority: Essays in Canadian Women’s History (Toronto, 1977). For more recent critiques of this view, see Baron, Work Engendered, 12–13. This is not simply to suggest a unitary causal explanation for gender divisions in the workplace, which would merely reflect workers’ relationship to the family economy, for this is a highly complex relationship that is only now beginning to be understood. Kessler-Harris argues that by using the concept of ‘household’ as part of our understanding of the positioning of working-class men and women in both the economy and the home, we radicalize our understanding of labour history. As Elizabeth Faue observes, ‘A household centered labor history further integrates in a meaningful way race specific understandings and experience of class.’ See Faue, ‘Gender and the Reconstruction of Labor History’, 17. See also Baron, Work Engendered, 1–46. As labour history moves into a new era, understanding and documenting working people’s history through exploration of identity construction and experience have served to flesh out our understanding. The Globe (Toronto), 19 Nov. 1898. Sonya Rose, ‘Gender at Work: Sex, Class, and Industrial Capitalism’, History Workshop 21 (Spring 1986): 115. Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s’, in Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History (Boston, 1985), 119.

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9. The classic work on the subject is Barbara Welters, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’, American Quarterly 18, 2 (1966): 151–74; see also Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London, 1983); Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington, Ind., 1973). 10. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 72–3. No corresponding evidence is available for Toronto and Montreal during this period; however, similar patterns of ethnic concentration were evident by 1931. 11. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family; for Canadian evidence, see Bettina Bradbury, ‘The Family Economy and Work in an Industrializing City, Montreal, 1871’, Historical Papers 1979: 71–96. 12. For an excellent critique of historical accounts of Victorian morality, see Steven Seidman, ‘The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered’, Journal of Social History 24 (Fall 1990): 47-67. 13. Mary Melendy, Maiden, Wife and Mother: How to Attain HealthBeauty-Happiness (Chicago, 1903), 52. 14. Frager raises this point in her discussion of Jewish women’s responses to the ‘cult of domesticity’ popularized among the middle class during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 150–3. 15. See William L. Marr and Donald G. Paterson, Canada: An Economic History (Toronto, 1980), 201; Michael Piva, The Conditions of the Working Class in Toronto, 1900–1920 (Ottawa, 1979), 29. 16. Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary from Two Thousand Social Workers (New York, 1913), 46. This position is also seen in the work of Tilly and Scott, who observe: ‘Old values co-exist with and are used by people to adapt to extensive structural change.’ Tilly and Scott, ‘Women’s Work and the Family’, 42. 17. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, Toronto, May 1973. 18. See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 149–54; Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 50–89. 19. See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 153. Frager’s evidence on Jewish women’s attitudes to unionism suggests that they were less constrained by the cult of true womanhood. 20. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the USA, 1900–1930 (New York, 1979), 25; see also Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses, 116–17. 21. Helen Gregory MacGill, ‘The Jobless Woman’, Chatelaine (Sept. 1930). MacGill was a judge in the Juvenile Court in British Columbia and a member of the BC Minimum Wage Board in the 1930s.

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22. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, Toronto, May 1973. 23. See Gail Cuthbert Brandt, ‘Weaving It All Together: Life Cycle and Industrial Experience of Female Cotton Workers in Quebec, 1910–1950’, Labour/Le Travailleur (Spring 1981): 113–26. Several studies have documented the relationship between work and geographical location. See Theodore Hershberg et al., ‘The “Journey-to-Work”: An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880’, in Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family and Group Experience in the 19th Century (New York, 1981), 128–73; Piva, Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 125–38. 24. Minimum-wage boards established a regulation that limited the percentage of inexperienced women in any factory, and this allowed manufacturers legally to pay less than minimum wage. According to the ruling, ‘The number of inexperienced adults and young girls together must not exceed one half of the total female working force, temporary employees whose term of employment is less than one month, not being excluded.’ The regulation also specified that 80 per cent of women working as pieceworkers had to be governed by these rules. No such regulation applied to men in the shops. ‘Orders of Ontario Board Governing Needle Trades, nos. 17 to 20’, Labour Gazette, Sept. 1922, 990–1. A report of the Association of Clothing Manufacturers (Toronto) in 1919 addressed the question of ‘learners’. The report outlined a wage scale for the local industry, stating that ‘girls’ learning the trade start with $12 to $14, and men learning the trade start at $17 to $18 as a minimum. Association of Manufacturers (Toronto), Minutes, 25 Nov. 1919, unpublished records, Associated Clothing Manufacturers of Toronto. 25. Stansell, ‘Origins of the Sweatshop’, 93. 26. Interview with Aline Champagne, Montreal, 1972. 27. Interview with Rose Hoffman (Kamarofsky), Winnipeg, 12 Mar. 1983. 28. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, May 1984. 29. Mary Aikman, ‘The Nature of Women’s Employment, with Special Reference to Montreal’, MA thesis (McGill University, 1938), 308. 30. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1973. 31. M.C. Urqhuart and K.A. Buckley, Historical Statistics of Canada (Toronto, 1965), ser. C36–46, 60. 32. Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, vol. 6. (Ottawa, 1915), table 5, 100–4. 33. See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 222. 34. Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, vol. 4 (Ottawa, 1927), table 5, 444–5. 35. Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, vol. 7 (Ottawa, 1937), table 41, 194–5. 36. Ibid., table 70, 998–1001.

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37. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 222. 38. See Canada, Women at Work, 21; Connelly, Last Hired, First Fired, 84. 39. Peter Goheen, ‘Currents of Change in Toronto: 1850–1900’, in R. Douglas Francis and Donald B. Smith, eds, Readings in Canadian History (Toronto, 1982), 231. 40. L.C. Marsh, Employment Research (Toronto, 1935), 314. 41. Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, vol. 4, table 6, 718, 741. 42. Evidence from US sources reflects a similar pattern of ethnic dispersion in the occupational structure. See John Bodnar, ‘Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in Industrial America’, Journal of Social History 14 (Fall 1980): 49; Barbara Klaczynska, ‘Why Women Work: A Comparison of Various Groups—Philadelphia, 1910–1930’, Labor History 17 (1976): 73–87; Corrine Azen Krause, ‘Urbanization Without Breakdown: Italian, Jewish, and Slavic Immigrant Women in Pittsburgh, 1900 to 1945’, Journal of Urban History 4 (May 1978): 291–306. 43. This point is also made in US studies. See, for example, Klaczynska, ‘Why Women Work’, 73–87; Bodnar, ‘Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-class Realism’, 49; Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women in the Trades: Pittsburgh 1905–1908 (New York, 1909), 130. 44. The Jewish population in Canada grew from 6,414 in 1891 to 74,564 in 1911 and 155,614 by 1931. See Judith Seidal, ‘The Development and Social Adjustment of the Jewish Community in Montreal’, MA thesis (McGill University, 1939), 6. 45. The Jewish Eagle, 20 June 1909, as cited in David Rome, ed., ‘Epilogue’, On Our Forerunners at Work (Montreal, 1978), 130–1. 46. M. Siematicki, ‘Communism in One Constituency’, as cited in Rome, ed., On Our Forerunners at Work, 20. See also John Laslett, ‘Jewish Socialism and the Ladies Garment Workers of New York’, in Laslett, ed., Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924 (New York, 1970), 98–143. 47. Vera Shlakman, ‘Unemployment in the Men’s Clothing Industry’, MA thesis (McGill University, 1931), 14. 48. Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, vol. 4, table 6, 718. The calculations here are by the author. 49. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 221. 50. Eighth Census of Canada, 1941, vol. 3, table 26, 948. 51. Seventh Census of Canada, 1931, vol. 7, table 36, 68. 52. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 100. 53. See Tony Manwaring and Stephen Wood, ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Tacit Skill in the Labour Process’, Socialist Review 74 (Mar.-Apr. 1984): 77. 54. Rose, ‘Gender at Work’, 121–2.

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55. Women’s acceptance of male authority in the workplace and at the bargaining table was based on a specific gendered nature of subjectivity shaped in that historical period. The notion of subjectivity is a useful addition to a consideration of skill and the labour process. In his discussion of labour process theory Scott Davies notes how ‘permeable the internal-external boundaries are for the labour process. Since the same proposed hegemonic conditions do not exist for women consent should be conceptualized by implicating the “other” type of domination women experience, within a complex constellation of factors both internal and external to the workplace.’ Scott Davies, ‘Inserting Gender into Buroway’s Theory of the Labour Process’, Work, Employment and Society 4, 3 (1990): 391–406. 56. In the survey of 40 custom tailors: 2 tailors had inside shops; 17 also had homeworkers; 34 sent cut work out to others who had seat room in another’s shop; 38 had homeworkers making up coats, pants, and vests. National Archives of Canada (hereafter NAC), RG7, ser. II, box 1, ‘Information re Tailoring Trade in Small District in Toronto’, undated, in Deputy Minister of Labour files, general subject file, 1916–20. 57. Royal Commission on the Relations between Labour and Capital, Quebec Evidence (Ottawa, 1889), 15. 58. Lionel Rubin, ‘A Look Back into the Past’, Menswear of Canada 58, 7 (July 1967): 20. The earliest manufacturer of men’s ready-made clothing was the Toronto firm of Livingstone and Johnson (est. 1868)— the first apparel company that did all the cutting and sewing on the premises. It later became a subsidiary of Tip Top Tailors. See R.P. Sparks, ‘The Garment and Clothing Industries’, in Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 2nd edn (Gardenvale, Que., 1930), 109. 59. Harry A. Cobrin, The Men’s Clothing Industry (New York, 1970), 152. In Toronto, firms such as Tip Top Tailors and Stone Clothing operated large made-to-measure businesses by the 1920s. 60. ‘Man-tailored suits of heavy material were associated with male tailors. Since dressmakers weren’t familiar with the tailoring techniques involved in stitching, padding, and pressing in men’s suits, a mantailored suit did, in fact, have to be made by a male tailor’, explained Kidwell and Christman in their history of the women’s sector in the United States. Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, 1974), 143. 61. Ontario, Dept of Agriculture, Report of the Inspector of Factories (Toronto, 1907), 60, in Provincial Archives of Ontario (hereafter PAO). These reports were published annually after 1888, with the inspectors reporting to the Department of Agriculture until 1900, thereafter to the

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62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

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Department of Public Works, and later (beginning in 1920) to the Department of Labour. ‘Wearing Apparel’, Industrial Canada, June 1905, 758. Helen Sumner states that the manufacture of cloaks and mantles in the United States began between 1848 and 1858 and developed further about the time of the Civil War. Women’s suit manufacturing began in the 1880s, and underwear was not manufactured in large quantities until after 1890. H. Sumner, History of Women in Industry in the U.S.A., United States Dept of Labour, Report on the Conditions of Women and Child Wage Earners in the U.S.A., vol. 9 (Washington, 1910; reprint, New York, 1974), 142. Kidwell and Christman, Suiting Everyone, 137, estimate that by 1910 every article of women’s clothing could be purchased ready-made. Gerald J.J. Tulchinsky, The River Barons: Montreal Businessmen and the Growth of Industry and Transportation, 1837–1853 (Montreal and Kingston, 1977), 220; Tom Atcheson, ‘The Social Origins of Canadian Industrialism: A Study in the Structure of Entrepreneurship’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Toronto, 1971), 124; Canadian Textile Directory (Toronto, 1885), 193–4. Ibid. (1885), 193–4. ‘Wearing Apparel’, 758. ‘A 20th Century Expansion: The Growth of Clothing Manufacture in Canada’, in Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 8th edn (Gardenvale, Que., 1936), 96. R.P. Sparks, ‘Women’s Factory Clothing Industry’, Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 2nd edn, 1930, 118–21. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London, 1887; reprint, New York, 1967), 763. Raphael Samuel observed this same tendency in manufacturing in midVictorian Britain: ‘Consumer demand also tended to favour limited production runs, alternating between periods of heavy pressure, when there was a helter-skelter rush of work (as in the “bull” weeks immediately preceding Christmas) and others when trade was dead. In conditions like these it was easier, when faced with rush orders, to take on extra hands, or to sub-contract the work, than to install expensive machinery and plant: less risky in the long run, and in the short run at least a great deal more profitable.’ Samuel, ‘Workshops of the World’, History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977): 55. Even in 1935 H.H. Stevens still characterized the industry as one displaying ‘economic instability, excessive competition, with contract shops and homeworkers alongside the usual type of manufacturer’. Canada, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying,

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72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

NOTES

Report (Ottawa, 1937), 109. See also Industrial Canada, Dec. 1938, 29–30. Canada, Parliament, ‘Report Upon the Sweating System in Canada’, prepared by A. Wright, Sessional Papers, vol. 29, no. 61 (Ottawa, 1896), 6. Boris, Home to Work, 51, 53. See, for example, Royal Commission on the Relations between Labour and Capital, Quebec Evidence, 285, 294–5; Montreal in 1856, The Commerce of Montreal (1880), 50, 103, as cited in Gregory Teal, ‘The Organization of Production and the Heterogeneity of the Working Class: Occupation, Gender, and Ethnicity Among Clothing Workers in Quebec’, Ph.D. thesis (McGill University, 1985), 168. The Globe, 19 Nov. 1889. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report to the Honorable Postmaster General on the Methods Adopted in Canada in the Carrying Out of Government Clothing Contracts, prepared by W.L. Mackenzie King (Ottawa, 1898), 6. Rome, On Our Forerunners at Work, 49. PAO, Dept of Labour, Minimum Wage Board, Minutes, 3 Apr. 1922, Labour Standards Branch, Manpower Division. Michael Davidson, ‘Montreal’s Dominance in the Men’s Clothing Industry’, MA thesis (University of Western Ontario, 1969), 30. Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 214–15. See Butler, Women in the Trades, 139. Shlackman, ‘Unemployment in the Men’s Clothing Industry in Montreal’, 12. William Lyon Mackenzie King, ‘Sweating System in Montreal’, The Herald (Montreal), 16 Apr. 1898. See also The Globe, 19 Nov. 1898. As quoted in Rome, On Our Forerunners at Work, 49. This term was used by Quebec labour historian F. Harvey, quoted in Rome, On Our Forerunners at Work, 60. Quoted in Sherna C. Berson, ‘The Immigrant Experience: Jews in the Clothing Trade, 1900–1930’, MA thesis (University of British Columbia, 1979), 163. King, ‘Sweating System’. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 133–4. Seidman, Needle Trades, 13, estimates that in the United States, ‘The average life of a men’s clothing firm was seven years, while in the New York dress industry a fifth of the jobbers and inside manufacturers and a third of the contractors discontinued business in some years.’ Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 221. L. Johnson and R. Johnson, The Seam Allowance: Industrial Home Sewing in Canada (Toronto, 1982), 48–9.

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92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107.

108.

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Canada, Parliament, ‘Report Upon the Sweating System in Canada’, 13. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 130. Marie Leblanc, ILGWU, interview, 17 Sept. 1981. E.W. Weaver, Profitable Vocations for Girls (New York, 1916), 60, quoted in Eisenstein, Give Us Bread But Give Us Roses, 102–3. Interview with ILGWU pensioners, Montreal, 1979. Canada, Dept of Labour, The Garment Worker, July 1929. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 6, file 2569, J.L. Cohen Papers, A. Weingarten, Industrial Standards Board, to Cohen, 25 Mar. 1937. Tamara Hareven, ‘Family Time and Industrial Time, Family and Work in a Planned Town, 1900–1924’, Journal of Urban History 1, 3 (May 1975): 365–89; Tilly and Scott, ‘Women’s Work and the Family’, 36–64; Scott and Tilly, Women, Work and Family; A. Amsden, ed., The Economics of Women and Work (Harmondsworth, England, 1980), 91–124. More recent theoretical work on the relations between the domestic economy and the mode of production includes Baron, Work Engendered, 1–46; Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, Theorizing Women’s Work (Toronto, 1990); Eileen Boris and Cynthia Daniels, eds, Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Chicago, 1989). Judy Lown, ‘Not So Much a Factory, More a Form of Patriarchy: Gender and Class during Industrialisation’, in Eva Gamarnikow, D.H.J. Morgan, J. Purvis, and D.E. Taylorson, eds, Class, Gender and Work (London, 1983), 28–45. Armstrong and Armstrong, Theorizing Women’s Work, 75–6. Boris, Home to Work, 95. Aikman, ‘Nature of Women’s Employment’, 308. Bettina Bradbury, ‘Women’s History and Working-Class History’, Labour/Le Travail 19 (Spring 1987): 41. Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Canada, ‘Report of Liaison Committee on the Responsibility of Women Wage Earners for Dependents’, unpublished paper, National Council, Toronto, 1935, University of Toronto Archives (UTA). Tamara Hareven and John Modell, ‘Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 35, 3 (1973): 467–79; Johnson and Johnson, Seam Allowance, 38–45; Butler, Women in the Trades, 135–40. See the discussion of this in Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, Ky, 1990), and in Kessler-Harris, ‘Treating the Male as Other’, 190–204. Ontario, Commission on Unemployment, Interim Report, 20 July 1915 (Toronto, 1916), 170.

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109. Martha Mays, ‘Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage’, in Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest, 3–4. 110. The defence of the family wage also served to reinforce the patriarchal family roles and in effect define the working class as male. 111. For an excellent characterization of male culture, see Peter N. Stearns, Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York, 1979), 77. See also H. Brod, ed., The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (Boston, 1987); P. Willis, ‘Shop Floor Culture, Masculinity and the Wage Form’, in J. Clarke et al., eds, Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London, 1979). 112. This argument is also developed by Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 67–70. 113. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 117. 114. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry (1918); Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry (1918). 115. See the interview with Albert Abromovitz as cited in Berson, ‘Immigrant Experience’, 172. 116. PAO, Ontario, Deputy Minister of Labor, General Correspondence, Report of the Inspector of Factories, 1910 (Toronto, 1911), 53. 117. ‘Wearing Apparel’, 758. 118. Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada, 1920 (Ottawa, 1922). 119. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry (1930); Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry (1930). 120. This study concentrates on the main branches of the trade: men’s and women’s ready-made clothing. For a detailed breakdown of all products of the needle trades, see Hardy, Clothing Workers, 150; NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 1, J.L. Cohen Papers, ILGWU memo to Ontario Minimum Wage Board, undated. 121. Levine, Women Garment Workers, 219–20. 122. Jessica Davies, Ready-Made Miracle: The American Story of Fashion for the Millions (New York, 1967), 28–39. 123. For a brief overview of these competing processes, see Baron, ‘If I Had a Sewing Machine’, in Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson, eds, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike: Women Needleworkers in America (Philadelphia, 1984), 38–42. 124. Labour Gazette, Sept. 1900, 4. 125. ‘Wearing Apparel’, 759. See also ‘A 20th Century Expansion’, Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 96. 126. Frank Scott and H.M. Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry: A Report (Toronto, 1935), 3.

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127. Interview with Marie Leblanc, ILGWU, Montreal, 1981. 128. See the evidence on the tailoring trades presented to the Royal Commission on Relations between Labour and Capital. A typical case was that of Israel Solomon, a Montreal tailor who manufactured men’s overcoats, employing himself, his father, and two girls. Both the girls did handwork, while Solomon and his father operated the machines. Royal Commission on Relations between Labour and Capital in Canada, Quebec Evidence, part 1 (Ottawa, 1889), 560. 129. For an excellent discussion of this process, see Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 282–365. 130. Irving Abella and David Millar, eds, The Canadian Worker in the Twentieth Century (Toronto, 1978), 176. 131. Joan Scott, ‘Mechanization of Women’s Work’, Scientific American 247, 3 (1982), 176. 132. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, Toronto, May 1973. 133. Interview with Rose Hoffman (Kamarofsky), Winnipeg, 1983. 134. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, May 1984. 135. Abella and Millar, Canadian Worker, 173. 136. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1983. 137. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, May 1984. 138. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974), 170. 139. Interview with David Solomon, quoted in Rome, On Our Forerunners at Work, 32. 140. Ben Birnbaum, ‘Women’s Skill and Automation; A Study of Women’s Employment in the Clothing Industry, 1946–1972’, unpublished paper, London, England, 1972, 10. 141. For example, see Ruth Brandon, A Capitalist Romance: Singer and the Sewing Machine (Philadelphia, 1977); interview with M. Reid, Singer Sewing Machine Manufacture Ltd, Montreal, 1979. 142. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 113. 143. For a good review of the literature on this topic, see C. Littler, The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies (London, 1982), 7–14. 144. D. Lee, ‘Skill, Craft and Class: A Theoretical Critique and a Critical Case’, Sociology 15, 1 (Feb. 1981): 59. 145. Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London, 1983), 116. The same theme is taken up by Barbara Taylor and Anne Phillips, ‘Sex and Skill: Notes Towards a Feminist Economics’, Feminist Review 6 (1980): 85. ‘This pattern of development of the sexualization of skill labels following the actual de-skilling of work processes is one which has been repeated throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’

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146.

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PAO,

Ontario, Deputy Minister of Labour, General Correspondence, Reports of the Inspector of Factories, no. 24 (Toronto, 1912), 58. See also Nelleke Bakker and Jaap Talsma, ‘Women and Work between the Wars: The Amsterdam Seamstresses’, in Paul Thompson, ed., Our Common History: The Transformation of Europe (London, 1982), 171–85; Jensen and Davidson, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike. 147. Sonya Rose concludes that ‘the solution to gender conflict in this instance was to “gender machines” in effect creating a gender segregated workforce based on which machine was considered “a man’s machine” and which was considered a “woman’s machine.”’ Rose, ‘Gender at Work’, 119. 148. Cockburn, Brothers, 113.

Chapter 3 1. Quoted in Berson, ‘Immigrant Experience’, 160. 2. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 132; see also 133–66. 3. Moses Rischin, The Promised City (Cambridge, 1978), 183, quoted in Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 135. 4. For a discussion of the relations between Jewish factory owners and Jewish workers, see Frager, Sweatshop Strife. 5. Quoted ibid., 60. 6. Interview with Morty Cryer, Montreal, 1996. 7. Boris, Home to Work, 56. 8. See Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991, 2nd edn (Toronto, 1992), 171–4. 9. TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 31st Annual Convention, Vancouver, 20–5 Sept. 1915. See also Ruth Frager, ‘No Proper Deal: Women Workers and the Canadian Labour Movement, 1870–1940’, in Linda Briskin and Lynda Yanz, eds, Union Sisters: Women in the Labour Movement (Toronto, 1983), 44–64. 10. NAC, Toronto Trades and Labour Council (TTLC), Minutes, 1916, microfilm, no.C–4588. 11. TLCC, Report and Proceedings of the 34th Annual Convention, Quebec City, 16–20 Sept. 1918, 151. 12. Quoted in Jesse Thomas Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 1910–1967 (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 8. 13. Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 115–16. KesslerHarris’s examination of coalition-building in the US union movement prior to World War I outlines the social and economic consequences for the development of separate union locals for women.

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14. See ibid., 114–21; Roger Waldinger, ‘Another Look at the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union: Women, Industry Structure and Collective Action’, in Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest, 98–100. 15. Because trade union records are documents created by the small, largely Jewish male membership it is difficult to build an assuredly complete picture of women workers’ trade union attitudes in Canada before World War I. As a result the historical record may provide an account of male perceptions of women workers but tell us little of women’s perceptions of trade unionism. 16. NAC, microfilm, TTLC ‘Report of the Needle Trades Organizational Committee’, Minutes, 3 Jan. 1924. 17. See Robert Babcock, Gompers in Canada: A Study of American Continentalism before the First World War (Toronto, 1974), for a discussion of the AFL in Canada; and Gregory Kealey and Bryan Palmer, Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (Toronto, 1987), for a discussion of the Knights of Labor. 18. Estimate given in Robert Craig Brown and Ramsey Cook, Canada, 1896–1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto, 1974), 112. Accurate statistics on trade union membership in Canada were not available until 1911. 19. Palmer, Working-Class Experience, 169. 20. Marr and Paterson, Canada: An Economic History, 213. 21. They had 38 locals in Canada by the 1890s, with 28 of them in Ontario. See Eugene Forsey, Trade Unionism in Canada, 1812–1902 (Toronto, 1982), 260–5. See also Harold Logan, Trade Unions in Canada (Toronto, 1948). 22. PAO, Ontario, Legislative Assembly, Dept of Public Works, Bureau of Labour, 4th Annual Report, 1903. 23. PAO, Ontario, Dept of Labour, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, 1915. In subsequent years the TLCC continued to recommend that while elimination of homework was in principle desirable, it was ‘not advisable at the present time’. 24. TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 1915. Daniels notes that the US unionlabel campaign focused on the unsanitary nature of work in the home because the unions saw this strategy as an effective way to capitalize on middle-class consumers’ fears of tuberculosis. See Cynthia R. Daniels, ‘Between Home and Factory: Homeworkers and the State’, in Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds, Homework; Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 19–20; Boris, Home to Work, esp. chs 2, 3. 25. Toronto City Archives (TCA), box 167, Reports of the Medical Health Officer, 1910–14, Dept of Public Health. There were 631 cases of acute

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26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

NOTES

contagious disease in Jan. 1913, up from 323 at the same time the year before. The figures gradually declined after that year. A 1913 report on slum conditions in central Toronto commented on homework: ‘In several places 2 or 3 sewing machines were being used in the manufacture of men’s clothing. Some of these were unsanitary places. In one house, as many as 8 of those sewing machines were concealed.’ TCA, RG1, F22, box 167, Dept of Public Health, ‘Recent Investigation of Slum Conditions in Toronto, Embodying Recommendations for the Amelioration of the Same’, Report of the Medical Health Officer. An influx of immigrants into central Toronto placed housing at a premium, and health conditions deteriorated. Charles E. Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America: A Study in Progressive Trade Unionism (New York, 1934), 65. The shift to ready-made clothing resulted in a new class of workers, and by 1921 a third of clothing production was being done in factories. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 81–3. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Annual Convention, Boston, June 1904, 12; Report and Proceedings of the 5th Annual Convention, 1905, 14. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada (Ottawa, 1911–13). See J.M. Budish and G. Soule, New Unionism and the Clothing Trade (New York, 1920), 74–6. When the Toronto local of the ILGWU made its first request for an organizer in Canada, it was ‘to receive the moral support of the ILGWU and to be empowered to agitate for the label’, not to try and extend membership into the women’s ghetto. See ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Annual Convention, 12. Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New York, 1979), 99–119. See Budish and Soule, New Unionism, 164. For a discussion of the tensions between craft and new unionism, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘The “New Unionism” in Perspective’, in Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labour (New York, 1984), 152–75. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 110–12. In his review of unionization to 1902 Forsey reported, ‘By 1902, Toronto had six locals, of which three survived; Montreal seven, of which five survived; Hamilton four (all gone); London two (consolidated by the end of 1902); Stratford two (one still there by the end of 1902); and Winnipeg, Victoria and Dundas one each (all still there by the end of 1902).’ Forsey, Trade Unionism in Canada, 267. See Joan M. Jensen, ‘The Great Uprising in Rochester’, in Jensen and Davidson, eds, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike; United Garment Workers

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47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

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of America (UGWA), Report and Proceedings of the 1914 Convention, 328. Piva, Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 158–9; Logan, Trade Unions in Canada, 150. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 81–6. H.D. Rosenbloom to J. Potofsky, 16 Sept. 1920, ACWA correspondence, box 55, file 17, quoted in Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 84. Waldinger, ‘Another Look’, 97. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Convention, 1902–3, 27. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 5th Annual Convention, 22. Waldinger, ‘Another Look’, 97. Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 115–16. Forsey, Trade Unions in Canada, 267. For an overview of US developments, see Seidman, Needle Trades, 87–90. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 111. For an examination of AFL policy and practices during the early twentieth century, see also Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Where Are the Organized Women Workers?’, Feminist Studies 3, 1–2 (1975). For an analysis of the New York ILGWU policies towards women, see Waldinger, ‘Another Look’, 86–109. Women represented 45 per cent of needle trades workers in 1901. Fourth Census of Canada, 1901, vol. 3 (Ottawa, 1905), table 1, 4–5. Charles Zaretz recorded the steady decline in membership in the UGWA after 1914. Zaretz, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 79–102. See also Budish and Soule, New Unionism, 85–8, for a more detailed account of the dispute. Laslett, ‘Jewish Socialism and the Ladies Garment Workers of New York’, 98–143. Speisman makes this point concerning Toronto cloakmakers. Stephen Speisman, The Jews of Toronto (Toronto, 1979), 192. Editors from Jewish newspapers were called on to address union conventions and instil an ethic of social justice in their audiences; Montreal’s Volkszeitung editor spoke at the 1912 ILGWU convention in Toronto. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Convention, Toronto, June 1912, 95. The Poalei Zion, the Workman’s Circle, and the Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, fraternal organizations active in the Jewish community, provided political and often financial support to union efforts in the needle trades, while labour papers in the Yiddish language offered inspiration to their cause. See A.D. Hart, ‘The Jewish Labour Movement in Canada’, in Hart, The Jews in Canada: A Complete Record of Canadian Jewery from the Days of the French Regime

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

NOTES

to Present Times (Toronto/Montreal, 1926). Both Jewish men and women in the needle trades were influenced by this political and cultural community. See Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Organizing the Unorganizable: Three Jewish Women and Their Union’, Labor History 17 (Winter 1976): 5–20; Sylvia Kopald and Ben Selekman, ‘The Epic of the Needle Trades’, The Menorah Journal (Oct.-Dec. 1928). For Montreal locals, see ILGWU, Report and Proceedings, 1906, 26; see also Seidman, Needle Trades, 100. Toronto cloak locals received a charter in 1904. In 1907–8 another Toronto local of cloakmakers was formed; the 1910 convention listed the local as dissolved, but an independent Cloakmakers Union was operating in the city at that time. See ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 10th Convention, June 1910, 16, 44. Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), Report and Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Convention, Chicago, 8–13 May 1922 (New York, 1922), 402. For Scott, see Jean Thomson Scott, ‘The Conditions of Women’s Labour in Ontario’, University of Toronto Studies in Political Science, 1st ser., no. 3 (Toronto, 1892), 27. Many of the women organizers complained about the problems of organizing women. See, for example, Nellie Andrews, ‘Organizing Women’, American Federationist 36, 8 (1926): 976; Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York, 1915), 146–7, 149. See also the comments of Lenore Barry, organizer for the Knights of Labor in the late nineteenth century, in Carolyn D. McCreesh, ‘On the Picket Line: Militant Women Campaigning to Organize the Garment Workers, 1880–1917’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Maryland, 1975), 40, 43; Budish and Soule, New Unionism, 41. Women activists ‘insisted that the Amalgamated undertake a campaign to recruit women, and, once they were enrolled, to sustain their interest. At the 1916 biennial Convention, the demands began to pay off. This time, when the Baltimore delegation requested a woman organizer, the convention concurred.’ Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement, 383. Ibid., 255. In a strike at Hart Manufacturers in Montreal, Oct. 1909, Hart assured the press that ‘not one of our native born employees was affected [by the strike].’ Canada, Dept of Labour, Economics and Research Branch, Strikes and Lockouts in Canada (Ottawa, 1956), strike no. 3199. ACWA, Report of the 3rd Biennial Convention, Baltimore, May 1918, 88. Interview with a French-Canadian garment worker, Montreal, 1990.

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61. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Annual Convention, 12. 62. At the same time a number of Church-led unions had not fared much better in the needle trades. The province was 80 per cent French Catholic, with an additional 5 per cent Irish Catholic. (The Catholic unions recruited from among both these groups, but were largely unsuccessful among the Irish Catholic workers.) Church intervention into trade union activities in Quebec began at the turn of the century, when Archbishop Bégin declared that while the right to establish trade unions was legitimate, ‘In order that they may have the right to exist, may exercise good, it is necessary that they have an honest and just purpose, and that in attaining this purpose, they make use of means in conformity with morals, honesty, and justice.’ To do this they must recognize the teachings of the Catholic Church, something the internationals did not do. See Allan B. Latham, The Catholic and National Labour Unions of Canada (Toronto, 1930). 63. Labour Gazette, July 1913–June 1914, 1157. La Fédération nationale Saint Jean Baptiste was founded in 1907 by Marie Gérin-Lajoie and Caroline Dessaules-Béique. The organization espoused a Christian feminism that saw women’s role in the family as central. For the 20 years following its inception the organization, led by upper-class and middle-class French-Canadian women, worked to educate and promote women’s rights in Quebec. The association established three broad areas of work: charity, education, and working women. At its height it had 22 affiliates and a membership of several thousand women. Archbishop Bruchési defined feminism as ‘the zealous pursuit by women of all noble causes in the sphere that Providence has assigned to her.’ See P. Linteau et al., Quebec: A History, 1867–1929 (Toronto, 1983), 446–7; Micheline Dumont et al., L’Histoire des Femmes au Québec (Montreal, 1982). 64. Katherine B. Legge, ‘Labour Legislation in Canada’, MA thesis (McGill University, 1930). See also Allan B. Latham, ‘The Catholic and National Labour Unions of Canada’, MA thesis (McGill University, 1927); Dumont et al., L’Histoire des Femmes au Québec, 329–33. 65. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, Officers’ Report, June 1914, 11. 66. See, for instance, Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 106. 67. Joan Scott, ‘On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History’, International Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987): 10. 68. The strike was originally declared in about 10 shops but spread to a thousand workers after clothing contractors locked out their workers to put pressure on inside manufacturers to raise the prices paid to the contractors, so that they in turn could pass some of their gain on to the

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69.

70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

NOTES

workers. The strike brought women workers in the men’s clothing industry into the UGWA for the first time. Newspaper accounts of the strike referred to male strikers as men and female strikers as girls, connoting a lesser status to the women strikers. Grievances at each firm were slightly different, and as the strike spread more workers left their machines. The main issues were linked to the inside manufacturers’ use of subcontractors, a system that meant long hours (up to 60 hours a week) and the introduction of piecework rates. The union demanded changes in wage rates, shorter hours, union recognition, and an end to piecework. Although a settlement was reached between the UGWA and some of the manufacturers, the manufacturers quickly moved away from the agreement’s terms. NAC, RG27, vol. 295, Strikes and Lockouts, strike no. 2979–81. The years 1912 and 1913 saw 242 and 234 strikes respectively. See Charles Lipton, The Trade Union Movement in Canada, 1827–1959 (Montreal, 1968). Ibid., 110. Gregory Kealey, ‘1919: Canadian Labour Revolt’, Labour/Le Travail 13 (Spring 1984): 16. See James Thwaites, ‘La Grève au Québec: Une Analyse Quantitative Exploratoire Portant sur la Periode 1896–1915’, Labour/Le Travail 14 (Fall 1984): 190. Craig Heron and Bryan Palmer’s study of industrial conflict in south-central Ontario also suggests that strikes were more commonly waged in times of prosperity. See Heron and Palmer, ‘Through the Prism of a Strike: Industrial Conflict in Southern Ontario, 1901–14’, Canadian Historical Review 30 (1977). See also Kealey, ‘1919: Canadian Labour Revolt’, 15–16; Kealey, ‘The Structure of Canadian Working Class History’, in G. Kealey and W. Cherwinski, eds, Lectures in Canadian Labour and Working Class History (Toronto, 1985), 23–36; David Bercuson, Confrontation at Winnipeg: Labour Industrial Relations and the General Strike (Montreal and Kingston, 1974). UGWA, Report and Proceedings of the 9th Convention, June 1908, 12. In 1910 the women’s garment industry was still relatively small; the number of workers on wages in Montreal women’s factory clothing was estimated to be 1,141. Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, vol. 6 (Ottawa, 1915), table 9, 308–9. In this same volume, table 6, 252, suggests that the Canadian industry employed only 500 workers, over twothirds of them women. Census figures for these years are contradictory. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Annual Convention, 12. Montreal Herald, 23 Feb. 1910. Labour Gazette, Apr. 1910, 118.

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78. Montreal Star, 23 Feb. 1910. 79. Clothing industry strikes in Montreal prior to this one had been mainly in individual shops. The largest strike, in Aug. 1907, had involved some 400 workers from three shops. Few union efforts had any success, and for the most part manufacturers continued to have the upper hand. See Labour Gazette, 1901, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909. 80. Montreal Daily Herald, 26 Feb. 1910. 81. Montreal Star, 24 Feb. 1910. 82. For a critique of the middle-class reformers’ view of working-class women, see Wayne Roberts and Alice Klein, ‘Besieged Innocence: The “Problem” and the Problems of Working Women—Toronto, 1896–1914’, in Janice Acton, ed., Women at Work (Toronto, 1973), 211–52. 83. Montreal Star, 25 Feb. 1910, 4. 84. Boris, Home to Work, ch. 2. 85. For a discussion of this theme, see Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 110–38. 86. See Daniels, ‘Between Home and Factory’, 21. 87. The Montreal Suffrage Society, according to Cleverdon, was a ‘shortlived and ineffectual suffrage group, under the leadership of Mrs. Bullock, of Montreal from 1909 to 1911’. C. Cleverdon, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Canada (Toronto, 1950), 220. Cleverdon notes that an effective association was not formally established until 1913. 88. Carol Lee Bacchi, Liberation Deferred? The Ideas of the English Canadian Suffragists, 1877 to 1918 (Toronto, 1983), 118–23. Although Rose Henderson, a member of the Montreal Suffrage Society, a Montreal probation officer, and a leader of the Canadian Labour Party, spent much of her energy on a campaign for mothers’ pensions, the cause of working women was certainly not a focus for the society. Henderson’s links to the CLP are reported in Joan Sangster, ‘The Communist Party and the Woman Question, 1922–1929’, Labour/Le Travail 15 (Spring 1985): 31. 89. See Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds, Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 1–17, for a general discussion of this issue. 90. It is not clear from the newspaper reports whether the call for equal pay came from the women of the Montreal Suffrage Society or from the women workers themselves. Most women were working at piecework rates but were probably paid lower rates than their male counterparts if the call for equal pay had any validity. 91. Montreal Star, 21 Feb. 1910. 92. Montreal Herald, 26 Feb. 1910.

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93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107.

108.

NOTES

Ibid., 24 Feb. 1910. Montreal Star, 24 Feb. 1910. Ibid. Labour Gazette, Mar. 1910, 1064. See Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 126; Waldinger, ‘Another Look’, 98. Montreal Star, 24 Feb. 1910. On the question of women accepting the male voice as their own, E.J. Hobsbawm makes a similar point with regard to the development of working-class consciousness and the early stages of labour organization. His observation may well help explain women’s apparent decision to go against their own economic interests (as defined by their gendered position). He observes: ‘The organization thus becomes an extension of the individual worker’s personality, which it supplements and completes. . . . It expresses not some abdication of their private judgement before some superior authority’s, but the assumption that the union’s words are their words.’ From ‘Notes on Class Consciousness’, in Hobsbawm, Workers, 27. Montreal Herald, 28 Feb. 1910. The strike moved beyond simple economic and workplace issues. It presented a larger social vision of workplace justice, and as such appeals to moral leaders for support were quite appropriate. An appeal to public officials for justice was not unlike earlier appeals of the Journeymen Tailors for justice against sweatshops. Montreal Herald, 24 Feb. 1910. Montreal Star, 25 Feb. 1910. Assistance from within the Jewish community was common; see Rome, Our Forerunners at Work, 133. Labour Gazette, May 1910, 1326. Montreal Herald, 26 Feb. 1910. ILGWU convention proceedings of 1914 make mention of a small local of shirtmakers and dressmakers, Local 112, which was probably formed out of the 1910 strike, but union records place its charter around 1914. See ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 11. After the strike charters were issued in May 1910 to Local 13, a cloak and skirtmakers’ local, and to Local 61, a pressers’ local. A local of cutters received its charter in Jan. 1911. However, it is likely that all these locals were the result of the strike itself. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Convention, 13. By 1918 Montreal cloak and suit shops claimed a union membership of about 75 per cent of the 900 or so workers in the shops. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 14th Convention, 15, 254. Labour Gazette, 1914–15, 932–3.

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109. The Globe, 10 June 1912. 110. Discontent with the UGWA orchestration of the strike resulted in a call for a Canadian union (Canadian Garment Workers of Montreal). The UGWA charged that the new union was composed of ‘contractors, subcontractors and sweaters, none of the real workers would have anything to do with the new union’. Montreal Star, 26 June 1912. 111. Globe, 10 June 1912. 112. The Gazette (Montreal), 12 July 1912. 113. Ibid., 10 July 1912. 114. Ibid., 26, 27, 29 July 1912. 115. Montreal Star, 24 June 1912. 116. Ibid., 8 July 1912. 117. La Gazette du Travail, Aug. 1912, 200. 118. Montreal Star, 29 July 1912. See also UGWA, Report and Proceedings of the 1914 Convention, 65. 119. Seidman, Needle Trades, 121–7. 120. The Globe, 16 Apr. 1913. 121. Hamilton Spectator, 15 Apr. 1913. 122. Ibid., 17 Apr. 1913. 123. Ibid., 26, 28 Apr. 1913. 124. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Convention, 13. Four delegates from each of Toronto and Montreal were present at this convention. 125. PAO, promotional brochure, Eaton’s Ltd, Eaton’s Archives, Toronto, 1923. 126. R.P. Crawford, ‘Why Eaton’s is One of the World’s Greatest Establishments’, Forbes, 1 Apr. 1925. 127. PAO, ‘Canada’s Greatest Store’, Eaton’s public relations document, Toronto, 1899, Eaton’s Archives. 128. PAO, ‘The Home Comers’, public relations brochure, Toronto, 1903, Eaton’s Archives. 129. PAO, public relations brochure, Toronto, 1908, Eaton’s Archives. 130. Interview with Joseph Salsberg, quoted in Ruth Frager, ‘Sewing Solidarity: The Eaton’s Strike of 1912’, Canadian Women’s Studies/cahiers de la femmes 7,1 (Fall 1986): 96. See also Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 127–30, 138–40, and (on ethnic prejudice) 90–1. 131. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Convention, 2–3. See also Toronto District Labour Council, Minutes, 15 Feb. 1912, 7 Mar. 1912. 132. Interview with Salsberg, quoted in Frager, ‘Sewing Solidarity’, 97. The local Toronto paper Jack Canuck, 24 Feb. 1912, comments on the ethnicity of the strikers and notes that 65 of the men were Jews who had gone on strike for Gentile women workers.

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133. Frager, ‘Sewing Solidarity’, 96. 134. The World (Toronto), 22 Mar. 1912. 135. The Ladies Garment Worker, Apr. 1912, quoted in Frager, ‘Sewing Solidarity’, 96. 136. Labour Gazette, Mar. 1912, 993, 1108; June 1912, 1174. 137. See Toronto Star, 30 Mar. 1912. 138. The Telegram (Toronto), 7 May 1912. 139. The Globe, 25 Mar. 1912. 140. Toronto Star, 25 Mar. 1912. 141. The Telegram, 25 Mar. 1912. 142. PAO, ‘Newsclipping Scrapbook, 1900–1920’, Eaton’s Archives. A fundraising flyer, ‘Displaced Working Girls’, requested that funds be sent to Miss Alice Chown. Carol Lee Bacchi makes mention of Chown’s connections to Toronto’s labour movement: ‘Alice Chown, who was one of Canada’s few radical suffragists, tried to elicit support among her fellow Toronto suffragists for the New York garment workers strike. She failed.’ Bacchi gives the date for this event as 1912, obviously confusing the Eaton’s strike run from New York with a strike in New York. There was no strike in New York that year. See Bacchi, Liberation Deferred, 120. Chown provided an account of her difficulties in persuading Toronto’s women’s clubs and suffragists to support the women strikers. See Alice Chown, The Stairway (Boston, 1921), 151–3. Also on Chown, see Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 138–9. 143. Chown, The Stairway, 151–2, quoted in Ruth Frager, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the Eaton Strikes of 1912 and 1934’, in Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde, eds, Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women’s History (Toronto, 1992), 199–200. 144. For an account of the use of consumer boycotts, see Ruth Frager, ‘Uncloaking Vested Interests: Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the Jewish Labour Movement in Toronto, 1900–1939’, Ph.D. thesis (York University 1986). 145. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 139. See also Frager, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender in the Eaton Strikes’, 189–204. 146. The Globe, 15 Feb. 1912. 147. Toronto Star, 21 Mar. 1912. 148. The Telegram, 28 Mar. 1912. 149. Few historians have bothered to document the strike, although the Jewish historians Stephen Speisman and Erna Paris as well as Ruth Frager and her recent work are exceptions to this. 150. Interview with Beckie Lapedes (Fagel Dordick), Toronto, Dec. 1983. 151. The Ladies Garment Worker, Apr. 1912, quoted in Frager, ‘Sewing Solidarity’, 97. For a more detailed discussion of anti-Semitism

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among Toronto garment workers, see Frager, ‘Uncloaking Vested Interests’. 152. Quoted in Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 124. See also ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 14th Convention, 190. 153. Fannia M. Cohen, ‘Can Women Lead?’, Justice, 15 Feb. 1936.

Chapter 4 1. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Convention, 89. 2. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 11. 3. Ibid. 4. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 13th Convention, 47. 5. Belva Herron, ‘The Progress of Labor Organization among Women, Together with Some Considerations concerning Their Place in Industry’, University of Illnois, Studies in the Social Sciences 1, 10 (1905): 479. 6. McCreesh, ‘On the Picket Line’, 106. 7. Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions (New York, 1926), 122. 8. Ibid., 163. 9. See Maxine Schwartz Seller, ‘The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand: Sex, Class, and Ethnicity in the Shirtmaker’s Strike of 1909’, in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Struggle a Hard Battle: Essays on Working-class Immigrants (De Kalb, Ill., 1986), esp. 268–9. Canadian immigrant patterns in the needle trades do not show such a large number of Italian women, and the density of immigrant women in the garment industry is found slightly later than in the United States; however, the ILGWU treatment of women workers is similar to that found in the Canadian locals. 10. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 95. A similar point is made by Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, esp. ch. 5. 11. Catherine Denmark, ‘Our Women Workers’, Ladies’ Garment Worker, Aug. 1914, 24, quoted in Waldinger, ‘Another Look’, 99. 12. McCreesh, ‘On the Picket Line’, 70. 13. Herron, ‘Progress of Labor Organization among Women’, 473. 14. Wolfson, Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, 121. 15. This account is documented in Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 135. 16. PAO, Minimum Wage Board, Minutes, 25 Mar. 1922, 7. 17. Wolfson, Woman Worker and the Trade Unions, 175–81, 185–6. 18. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. 19. When president Abe Rosenberg arrived in the city in May 1913, he judged the situation: ‘Every shop calls strikes at will, without applying for sanction to any authority. Then the employees come to the organiza-

286

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

NOTES

tion remnant still in existence for moral and other support, and this remnant throws itself into struggles from which it has not the slightest hope to emerge victorious.’ He concluded that the local unions were ‘suffering from the disorder, lack of discipline and inordinate love of militancy prevailing in the ranks’. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 11. Ibid., 35; Seidman, The Needle Trades, 107–9. By 1914 the ILGWU had 4,100 Canadian members in six Quebec and four Ontario locals. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada (Ottawa, 1915). In 1913 national membership in the US was 90,000; 80 per cent were under the Protocol. See Hardy, Clothing Workers, 35. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 11. See Seidman, Needle Trades, 98–100. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 153–4. UGWA, Report and Proceedings of the 1910 Convention, 17. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 13th Convention, 47. Ibid. Labour Gazette, Feb. 1917, 133. Urqhuart and Buckley, Historical Statistics, 105. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 14th Convention, 14. Ibid., 39. May Danish and Leon Stein, I.L.G.W.U. News History, 1900–1950 (New York, 1950). Jewish Eagle, 20th Anniversary Issue, 30 Jan. 1938. For accounts of these strikes, see NAC, RG27, vol. 314, microfilm, T–2695, Dept of Labour, Strikes and Lockouts files, strike nos. 65, 132, 135; Toronto World, 4, 11 July 1919; Montreal Star, 2, 4, 5 July 1919; The Globe, 2, 3 July 1919. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 15th Convention, Boston, May 1920, 22–3. La Gazette Travail, May 1919, 601. Logan, Trade Unions in Canada, 149. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Convention, Montreal, May 1926, 187. ACWA had conducted shop strikes at several of Montreal’s largest men’s clothing firms. Semi-Ready Ltd went out in Dec. 1916, Fashion Craft in Nov. 1916, and John Peck and Company in June 1916. All of these actions won concessions for the workers. The manufacturers saw the disputes at Fashion Craft and Semi-Ready as the place to draw the line. See Labour Gazette, Aug. 1916, 1468; Dec. 1916, 1842. Ibid., Feb. 1917, 108. Ibid., Apr. 1917, 278.

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41. Michael Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation in the Men’s Garment Industry of Quebec, 1914–1954’, in H.D. Woods, ed., Patterns of Industrial Disputes: Settlements in Five Canadian Cities (Montreal, 1958), 100. 42. Montreal Star, 25 Jan. 1917, 14. 43. The Gazette, 16 Jan. 1917, 4. 44. Ibid., 15 Jan. 1917. 45. Ibid., 16 Jan. 1917. 46. For an overview of this drive and the Toronto 1917 drive, see Zaretz, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 149–53. 47. Ibid., 153–4; ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 3rd Biennial Convention, Baltimore, May 1918, 122. 48. Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Minutes, Toronto, 1919; Logan, Trade Unions in Canada, 150. 49. The use of this mechanism, established in the needle trades by a settlement at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx Co. of Chicago some years before, became the backbone of Hillman’s labour policy for the ACWA. The impartial chairman used in US disputes since 1912 was given broad authority to make decisions. A board of arbitration and a chair were part of the agreements made in 1917 in Montreal and 1919 in Toronto. Initially the board was fairly large, with four representatives from each side, plus the chair. This group was a bit unwieldy and gradually the industry came to rely simply on the decisions of an impartial chairman, appointed by agreement of both parties for the length of the collective agreement. For discussions of this system, see Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’; Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 40–3, 139–72. 50. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Biennial Convention, 1920, General Executive Report. 51. Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 174. 52. TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 31st Annual Convention, Vancouver, 20–5 Sept. 1915. For information on Gutteridge, see Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950 (Toronto, 1989), 118–19. 53. TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 33rd Annual Convention, Quebec City, 1917, 165–6; TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 34th Annual Convention, Quebec City, 16–20 Sept. 1918, 151. 54. In Canada, cross-class women’s alliances were more limited than those in the US. Linda Kealey suggests that Helena Gutteridge and another activist, May Darwin, were exceptions in the Canadian feminist movement because they linked socialism and feminism to a labour movement commitment. Linda Kealey, ‘Canadian Socialism and the

288

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

NOTES

Woman Question, 1900–1914’, Labour/Le Travail 13 (Spring 1984). See also Sangster, Dreams of Equality, chs 1, 2. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 176–7. See also Frager’s discussion of the role of Toronto suffragists during the Eaton’s strike of 1912. Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 137–42. Frager notes that ‘in this period women’s organizations were often immersed in the social purity movement and hence especially concerned about sexual exploitation and sexual impropriety. . . . Club women thus responded to the portrayal of female workers as sexual victims, but they were far less interested in other hazards faced by women workers.’ Frager, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Gender’, 200. TLCC, Minutes, 1918, 135. TLCC, Report and Proceedings, 34th Annual Convention. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 14th Convention, 16. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 66. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 15th Convention, 52. Mme Blanche Rompre and Mme Anita Passon-Baldock were hired briefly to organize the shirtworkers. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 4th Biennial Convention, 172. American Federation of Labor (AFL), Report and Proceedings, 41st Convention, 13–25 June 1921, cited in Labour Gazette, July 1921, 924. Labour Gazette, June 1922, 599. Ruth Milkman’s examination of the AFL in the United States stressed the significance of the AFL leadership. She suggests, ‘No organization had as great an impact on the sexual division of labor as the AFL. In the early years of the Federation’s existence, official AFL statements consistently encouraged the trade unions affiliated with it to organize women workers, and in 1890 a committee on women’s work was appointed to facilitate this process.’ Milkman, ‘Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor, Historical Perspectives on Women’s Work and the American Labor Movement’, Socialist Revolution 49 (Jan.-Feb. 1980): 115. For more detailed accounts of the AFL position, see Kessler-Harris, ‘Where Are All the Organized Women Workers?’, 97–9; Ann Schofield, ‘Rebel Girls and Union Maids; The Woman Question in the Journals of the AFL and IWW, 1905–1920’, Feminist Studies 2 (1983): 335–58. Milkman, ‘Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor’, 118–19. Of the 134,348 trade unionists affiliated with international unions by 1914, only 6 per cent (800) of them were reported to be women. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada, 4th annual (Ottawa, 1915), 15. Trade union membership grew from 133,132 in 1911 to 175,799 in 1913, then fell during the years 1914 to 1916, after which it climbed to a high of 375,000 in 1919. Ibid., 12th annual (Ottawa, 1924).

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68. Canadian government estimates for women’s union membership illustrate this fluctuation: 1922: 8,893; 1923: 7,302; 1924: 5,966. Ibid. (Ottawa, 1922, 1923, 1924). 69. Ibid., 14th annual (Ottawa, 1925), 214. However, Urqhuart and Buckley’s figures for the same periods differ slightly, as they estimated 140,500 trade unionists were members of international unions out of a total union membership of 166,200 in 1914; and 202,000 out of a total of 260,600 union members in 1924. Urqhuart and Buckley, Historical Statistics of Canada, table ser. D412–13, 105. Kessler-Harris estimates that 6.6 per cent of wage-earning women in the US were in unions by 1920. Kessler-Harris, ‘Where Are All the Organized Women?’, 92. 70. Woman Worker, Dec. 1926, 4. 71. Reported at ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 227. Fannia Cohen placed a resolution on the floor of the convention ‘to formulate a plan for the organization of working women’ in the ILGWU. It asked the convention to firm up its organizing effort among women garment workers, but the convention simply referred the resolution, saying the AFL resolution had dealt with the matter. 72. ACWA, Documentary History of the ACWA, 1916–1918: Proceedings of the 3rd Biennial Convention of the ACWA, 88. 73. Interview with Sophie Mandel, Toronto, 1984. 74. ILGWU, Montreal Joint Board, Dressmakers Union, Les Midinettes, 1937–1962 (Montreal, 1962), 93. 75. The question of why workers chose the paradigm of gender in which to express their work relationships deserves further study. While male workers used the work they did as a measure of self-worth, the historical transformation of this identity poses interesting questions for research. Why did male workers choose the paradigm of gender as a means to challenge their bosses? Male workers’ appeals to manliness appear to take a specific form during the transformation of craft work into mass production; appeals to respectability and manliness, used from the 1890s to the 1920s, do not seem prevalent in the 1930s. Had the meaning and function of masculinity on the job been transformed during the transition from craft to mass production? For further discussion, see Steven Maynard, ‘Rough Work and Rugged Men’, Labour/Le Travail 23 (Spring 1989): 159–69. 76. David Dubinsky with H.H. Raskin, David Dubinsky: Life with Labor (New York, 1977), 101. 77. Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, ‘Arbitration Decisions— Montreal’, 11 Feb. 1921, unpublished papers, Toronto. 78. UGWA, Report and Proceedings of the 1912 Convention, 9. 79. As the quotation opening this chapter indicates, Zillah Eisenstein notes that this tendency is a characteristic of patriarchy; quoted in Bonnie

290

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

NOTES

Fox, ‘Conceptualizing Patriarchy’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25, 2 (May 1988): 175. Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 120. Labour Gazette, Feb. 1912, 817. See ACWA, Documentary History of the ACWA, 1914–1916, 75. Early constitutions of the ILGWU expressed similar sentiments. In Canada the contemporary left political parties were arguing among themselves over the role of trade unions in the class struggle; the Canadian Socialist League and the Socialist Labour Party, both formed in the 1890s, and later joined by the Independent Labour Party, all argued over the trade union’s role. See Linda Kealey, ‘Women in the Canadian Socialist Movement, 1904–1914’, and Janice Newton, ‘From Wage Slave to White Slave: The Prostitution Controversy and the Early Canadian Left’, in Linda Kealey and Joan Sangster, eds, Beyond the Vote: Canadian Women and Politics (Toronto, 1989), 171–95, 217–38. See also Martin Robin, Radical Politics and Canadian Labour, 1880–1930 (Kingston, Ont., 1968). Quoted in Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 61. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Convention, 59, quoted in Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 61. For a discussion of the implications of these tensions in the international labour movement, see Hobsbawm, ‘The “New Unionism” in Perspective’, 165–75. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 40. See Mercedes Steedman, ‘The Promise: Communist Organizing in the Needle Trades, the Dressmakers’ Campaign 1928–1937’, Labour/Le Travail 34 (Fall 1994): 42–52. In 1926, 4,770 women belonged to unions in Canada, but about 400,000 women were officially employed; The Woman Worker, Dec. 1926, 4. In 1937 Toronto had over 2,000 workers in 60 dress shops when unionization brought them into Local 72, ILGWU. In Montreal the 4,000 dressmakers were organized into Local 262 in 1937. Danish and Stein, ILGWU News History, 1900–1950. For a discussion of the problems of organizing women during this period, see Alice Henry, The Trade Union Woman (New York, 1915); Nellie Andrews, ‘Organizing Women’, American Federationalist 8 (1929): 36; Wayne Roberts, ‘Honest Womanhood’, in Acton, ed., Women at Work, 211–59; Catherine McLeod, ‘Women in Production: The Toronto Dressmakers Strike of 1931’, in Acton, ed., Women at

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Work, 309–29; Rose Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters (New York, 1945); Tentler, Wage Earning Women; Schofield, ‘Rebel Girls and Union Maids’, 335–58; Louise Tilly, ‘Paths of Proletarianization, Organization of Production, Sexual Division of Labour and Women’s Collective Action’, Signs 7, 2 (Winter 1981): 416–17; Wolfson, Woman Worker and the Trade Union; J.J. Kenneally, ‘Women and Trade Unions 1870–1920: The Quandary of the Reformer’, Labor History 14 (1973): 42–55; Kessler-Harris, ‘Where Are the Organized Women Workers?’, 92–109; Jensen and Davidson, A Needle, a Bobbin, a Strike, 81–183; Frager, ‘No Proper Deal’, 44–64; Angela V. John, ed., Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800–1918 (London, 1986).

Chapter 5 1. W.A. Mackintosh, The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations (Toronto, 1967), 71–2. 2. For wage and cost of living indexes, see ibid., 78. 3. For a discussion of the legal aspect of this issue, see Jacob Finkelman, ‘The Law of Picketing in Canada’, University of Toronto Law Journal 2 (1937–8): 67–102, 344–60. 4. Bob Russell, Back to Work: Labour, State, and Industrial Relations in Canada (Toronto, 1990), 82. 5. H.D. Woods and S. Ostry, Labour Policy and Labour Economics in Canada (Toronto, 1962), 18–19. 6. Similar action was taking place in the United States. See Christopher Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (New York, 1985); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (Ithaca, NY, 1991). See also H.A. Logan, State Intervention and Assistance in Collective Bargaining: The Canadian Experience, 1943–1954 (Toronto, 1956); J.C. Cameron and F.J.L. Young, The Status of Trade Unions in Canada (Kingston, Ont., 1960). 7. Labour Gazette, Apr. 1932, 413–15; ibid., Sept. 1922, 990–1. In Ontario the Minimum Wage Board’s five members were: H.H. Stapells, a dress manufacturer; Margaret Stephens, Garment Workers Union; Mrs Horace Parsons, National Council of Women; M. Fester, a cigarmaker and secretary of the Hamilton Trades and Labour Council; and the chairman of the committee, Prof. J.W. Macmillan of the University of Toronto. 8. Ibid., Apr. 1932, 413. The Quebec minimum-wage law had little real effect because the commission was not given appropriate powers. For a general discussion of the preliminary years of minimum-wage law, see

292

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

NOTES

Kathleen Derry and Paul Douglas, ‘The Minimum Wage in Canada’, Journal of Political Economy 30, 2 (Apr. 1922): 155–88. NAC, TTLC, Minutes, 7 Sept. 1922, 5 Oct. 1922, microfilm, C–4588. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, May 1973, Toronto. Interview with ILGWU pensioners, Montreal, 1983. NAC, Royal Commission on Prices Spreads and Mass Buying, ‘Report on the Manufacturing of Ladies Ready Wear’, in Exhibits, no. 437, 27. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, Thos Learie to Ministry of Labour, Ontario, 7 Feb. 1938. The smaller groups included the Association of Clothing Manufacturers, established Aug. 1919, with 17 members in Toronto; the Clothing Manufacturers Association of Montreal, in 1908, with 23 members; and the Montreal Cloak and Suit Manufacturers Association, with 16 members, established 1917. NAC, RG33/18, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, vol. 57, Exhibits, no. 33. The larger Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers was established in 1918 to, among other things, ‘establish and promote a foundation for honest and intelligent business methods and principles among its members’ and ‘to foster and protect the business of its members from the evils of misrepresentation’. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Organization in Industry, Commerce and the Professions (Ottawa, 1919). The association had only 70 members, while at this time Fraser’s Industrial Directory listed some 294 manufacturers in Toronto and 367 in Montreal. It was obvious that the association’s influence did not spread far. Interview with Lewis Manley, Manley Coats and Suits Ltd, Toronto, 1983. Interview with Joseph Said, Mabelle Dress, Montreal, 1979. Ibid. Interview with Lewis Manley, Toronto, 1983. NAC, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, vol. 155, Exhibits, no. 437. Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada (Ottawa, 1926), 2. Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada, 1920, 4; Labour Gazette, Sept. 1921, 1158–9. In 1939 there were 615 establishments in women’s clothing and 387 in men’s clothing. See Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry and Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1939. Canada, Dept of Trade and Commerce, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry (Ottawa, 1920); Labour

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

293

Gazette, July 1924, 570. In 1920 there were 5,058 male wage-earners and 5,942 female wage-earners in the factory clothing sector of the trade. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Convention, 209, 210; ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Convention, 130. The Gazette, 25 July 1922. NAC, RG27, vol. 332, Dept of Labour, ‘Strike no. 3,’ Strike files. The government did not begin collecting statistics on contract shops until 1932, when it gathered statistics from 95 contract shops producing both men’s and women’s clothing, 81 of them in Montreal. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada, section 2, Clothing Contractors, 1932, 22. Labour Gazette, Sept. 1926, 862. Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 65. ILGWU, Executive Report, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 67. Montreal Star, 9, 16 Nov. 1921. ILGWU, Executive Report, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 67. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 19th Convention, Boston, May 1928, 227; ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 66. By 1924 both Toronto and Montreal locals were completely demoralized. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 18th Convention, Philadelphia, May 1925, 101. PAO, Dept of Labour, ‘Clipping Files’, 1925. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 18th Convention, 104. The 1925 report on the Montreal ILGWU, however, mentioned that a small French-speaking workers’ local was organized as a result of the strike. See ibid., 106. ILGWU, Executive Report, Report and Proceedings of the 19th Biennial Convention, 228–9. J.L. Cohen to Dubinsky, Toronto, 25 Oct. 1929, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Quebec’s share of the cloak trade increased in the 1920s, from 26 per cent in 1922 to 34 per cent in 1930. Provincial figures were not kept for the 1930s. See Canada, Report of the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1922, 1930, 1934. See ibid., 1930. Tomlins, State and the Unions, 91. See Steve Fraser, ‘Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal: Shop-Floor Insurgents, Political Elites, and Industrial Democracy in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’, in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds,

294

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

NOTES

Working-Class America: Essays on Labour, Community and American Society (Urbana, Ill., 1983), 212–55, for a discussion of ‘new unionism’ and its evolution in the needle trades. On Hillman, see George Soule, Sidney Hillman: Labor Statesman (New York, 1939); Fraser, Labor Will Rule. Arbitration machinery had been introduced into the needle trades after the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx agreement in 1910 when Hillman was representative for the UGWA. Third-party arbitration came in several years later with the introduction of an impartial chairman who had the right to cast a final decision in all cases brought before arbitration. For a full discussion of this in the Canadian men’s clothing industry, see Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’. By 1919 the ACWA had already introduced outside arbitration in its collective agreement in Toronto. This agreement set up a tripartite board composed of a representative from the union, a representative from the manufacturers’ association, and an impartial chairman selected by both parties. The board was to have ‘full and final jurisdiction over all matters arising under the agreement’. See ‘Memorandum of Agreement’, 16 June 1921, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 135. Arbitration File, ‘Decision of the Board of Arbitration’, Dec. 1921, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. Ibid. General Meeting of the Association of Clothing Manufacturers and ACWA, Minutes, 3 Mar. 1922, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. The same wage reduction was introduced in Toronto shops—$5 for men and $3 for women—but it required the intervention of officials from Montreal, Toronto, and finally ACWA staff representative Frank Rosenbloom from Chicago before the membership would accept it. See ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Convention, 213–14. According to the minutes of one meeting, union officials had ‘attempted to get the people to agree to the reduction and [were] hooted out of the meetings’. Minutes, 3 Mar. 1922, 21 June 1921, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto; ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Convention; General Meeting of the Association of Clothing Manufacturers and ACWA, Minutes, 3 Mar. 1922, Toronto. ACWA, Clothing Manufacturers Association of Montreal, Memorandum of Agreement, 16 June 1921. By 1925 a union-run employment exchange had opened in Montreal, and also in Rochester, NY. Chicago had established one in 1922. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 7th

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Biennial Convention, 28. 49. Quoted in Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 99. 50. ACWA, Toronto Joint Board, Minutes, 20 Aug. 1925. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 27 Aug. 1925. 53. Ibid., 24 Sept. 1925. 54. Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Association and the ACWA, 17 Nov. 1925, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. 55. Minutes of a Special Meeting of ACWA and Association of Clothing Manufacturers, 7 July 1921, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. 56. Minutes, 23 Apr. 1931, private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto; Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 13. 57. Budish and Soule, New Unionism, App., 339. 58. Interview with Beckie Lapides (Fagel Dordick), Toronto, Dec. 1983. 59. Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 33. 60. Quoted in Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks (Montreal, 1981), 114. 61. NAC, MG32, G3, vol. 4, Tim Buck, ‘The Workers Party’, draft copy, Tim Buck Papers, 1965–70. 62. Hardy, The Clothing Workers, 41. 63. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, May 1973. 64. Interview with Beckie Lapides, Dec. 1983. 65. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Convention, 15. 66. NAG, MG32, G3, vol. 4, TUEL, ‘Report to the Canadian Section’, 1924, Tim Buck Papers. John Manley contradicts the suggestion that CPC strength in the garment unions was significant. He states, ‘Throughout the 1920’s there was never the slightest possibility of a left wing take over of a single international garment union.’ Manley, ‘Communism and the Canadian Working Class during the Great Depression: The Worker Unity League, 1930–36’, Ph.D. thesis (Dalhousie University, 1984), 522. 67. Left Wing (Toronto), Oct. 1925, 3. 68. In New York, Charles Zimmerman took over the leadership of the dress and waist locals. As a Communist and one of the few male dress operators he was quickly moved into a leadership position. For discussions of US union activities during this period, see M. Epstein, Jewish Labor in USA, 1914–1952, 2 vols (New York, 1953), I, 134–6, 166–8; Seidman, Needle Trades, 153–85; S. Nadel, ‘Reds versus Pinks: A Civil War in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’, New York History, Jan. 1985, 49–72.

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NOTES

69. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 18th Convention, 227. 70. Manley, ‘Communism and the Canadian Working Class’, 472. The ILGWU membership in Montreal in 1924 was about 350, mainly cutters and operators. Manley’s assertion most likely underestimates TUEL support. 71. Max Shur, a Communist Party activist, was president of the local until 1928. 72. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 19th Convention, 227, 229, 230. 73. Ibid., 19. 74. Manley, ‘Communism and the Canadian Working Class’, 491, makes the point about the TUEL influence being the strongest in Montreal. In terms of electing business agents and executive members of the ACWA, TUEL strength waned after a defeat by the right in local union elections in 1927. Yet in June of 1928, when the TUEL called a demonstration of needle trades workers in Montreal’s Mount Royal Arena, it drew an audience of some 5,000 workers. See Louise Watson, She Never Was Afraid: The Biography of Annie Buller (Toronto, 1976), 25. 75. Blumberg addressing the AWCA Convention, in ACWA, Proceedings of the 8th Biennial Convention, Cincinnati, 14–19 May 1928, 252. 76. Ibid., 73. 77. Ibid., 252. See also Communist Party of Canada, Canada’s Party of Socialism: History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1921–1976 (Toronto, 1982), 39. 78. According to Hardy, Toronto’s ACWA managed to remove the TUEL from office in 1926 through a phoney election. See Hardy, Clothing Workers, 104. See also Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 185–90. 79. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 9th Biennial Convention, Toronto, 12–17 May 1930, 82. 80. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 8th Biennial Convention, 73. 81. Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks, 134. 82. Sangster, ‘CPC and the Women Question’, 25–56. 83. Kessler-Harris, ‘Problems of Coalition-building’, 129. 84. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 42. 85. ACWA, Executive Board Report, Report and Proceedings of the 7th Biennial Convention, 87. 86. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Convention, 375. 87. ACWA, Toronto Joint Board, Minutes, 17 May 1923. 88. Ibid., 4 Oct. 1923. For a discussion of the Sarah Gold affair, see Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 135. 89. ACWA, Toronto Joint Board, Minutes, 8 Nov. 1923. 90. Ibid., 3 Apr. 1924. 91. ACWA, Bread and Roses: The Story of the Rise of the Shirtmakers, 1933–34 (New York, 1936), 45; see also ACWA, Report and Proceedings

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97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

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of the 11th Biennial Convention, May 1936, 322. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 6th Biennial Convention, May 1924, 136. ACWA, General Executive Board Report, Report and Proceedings of the 9th Biennial Convention, 82. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 15th Convention, 90. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 16th Convention, Cleveland, 1–13 May 1922, 49. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 17th Convention, 166–7. The 1924 convention saw the introduction of a resolution by the Toronto delegates to organize the dressmakers. NAC, MG28, 144, TTLC, Minutes, 3 Jan. 1924, Records of the Toronto Trades and Labour Council. The organizational committee was: Tim Buck, Florence Custance, William Varley, John Munroe, George Lewis, Mrs Garraugh, and Sam Kraisman. NAC, MG28, I 44, reel M–2292, ‘Report of the Objectives, Policies, and Work of the Federation of Women’s Labour Leagues of Canada’, undated, Records of the Toronto Trades and Labour Council. See Sangster, ‘Communist Party and the Woman Question’, 47. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 20th Convention, May 1929, 98. Toronto Star, 5 Feb. 1925. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 19th Convention, 72–3. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 21st Convention, Philadelphia, 2–6 May 1932. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada, 18th annual report (Ottawa, 1929), 213.

Chapter 6 1. For a discussion of these conditions in Canada, see the introduction in L.M. Grayson and Michael Bliss, eds, The Wretched of Canada: Letters to R.B. Bennett, 1930–1935 (Toronto, 1971). 2. Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 7. The report, commissioned by the ACWA, was submitted to the Royal Commission on Price Spreads in 1934. 3. ILGWU, ‘Report to the General Executive Board’, undated, Toronto, misc. files, ILGWU Archives, Kheel Centre for Labor Management, Cornell University. 4. NAC, RG33/18, vol. 155, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Principal Statistics, 1923–32; Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Final Report (Ottawa, 1937), 110; Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 97–9. Toronto wage rates in 1931: cutters, $25 and $35 a week;

298

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

NOTES

operators and pressers, $20 to $30 a week; and finishers, $12 to $18 a week. PAO, ILGWU, Jewish Collection, William Villano Papers, ser. 085–055, ‘Statement of the Cloakmakers Union of Toronto’, 1931, Multicultural Historical Society of Ontario (MHSO). See Grayson and Bliss, Wretched of Canada; Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Unemployment in Canada, Census Monograph no. 11 (Ottawa, 1938), 253. Government calculations of the 50 occupations with the highest percentages of women showed unemployment rates varied from a low of 1.8 per cent among proofreaders to 12.02 per cent for dressmakers, 12.4 per cent for seamstresses and sewers in small shops, 15.9 per cent for factory sewing-machine operators, and 24.9 per cent for hat and cap makers. The highest unemployment rate for occupations listed was 36.8 per cent for women employed in fish canneries. Canada, Unemployment in Canada, 253. Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 23. Paul Mancini Papers, MHSO, Jewish Collection, MSR no. 7055, PAO, Toronto Joint Board, ‘Financial Statements’. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 21st Convention, 97. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1932. Royal Commission on Price Spreads, Final Report, 110. The ILGWU tried to bring the principles of scientific management into its New York dress shops by introducing a unit system of price settlement. In New York, where it had unionized the industry, the union negotiated such a settlement in the late 1930s. Julius Hochman, ‘The Unit System of Dress Price Settlement’, Justice, Sept. 1934, 14–15. PAO, RG7–12–0–326, box 6, Ontario Dept of Labour, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, evidence given by Winnifred Hutchison before the Price Spreads Commission, 23–24 Jan. 1933. For a discussion of the textile and retail sectors’ relationship to clothing manufacturers in the 1930s, see Teal, ‘Organization of Production’. ILGWU, ‘Report to the General Executive Board’, Toronto, undated, misc. files, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 67–8. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1939. There is a wealth of information on the industry during this period as a result of the 1934 Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying. See Shlakman, ‘Unemployment in the Men’s Clothing Industry in Montreal’; Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’; Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry. Little

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

299

has been written on the women’s dress trade, but see Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades; Fraser, Labor Will Rule. Canada, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Report (Ottawa, 1937), 4333. Canada, Royal Commission on Price Spreads, ‘Report on Manufacturing of Ladies Ready Wear’, in Exhibits, no. 437 (Ottawa, 1934). PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, Fred Casperel, Cornwall, Ont., to Minister of Public Health, Ontario, Jan. 1934. ‘Wage Scale’, Toronto, Mar. 1922, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto, private files. See Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 70. They state: ‘The necessity of getting orders at any price leads some firms to quoting prices insufficient to cover their costs. The newer and smaller firms are usually the worst offenders in this respect.’ R.P. Sparks, ‘Clothing Canadians’, Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 8th edn (Gardenvale, Que., 1936), 97. Supervisor, Toronto ILGWU, to David Dubinsky, 14 Aug. 1931, David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1931–2, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Canada, Report of the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1940. CPC, Canada’s Party of Socialism, 85; The Worker, June 1930. See also NAC, MG32, G3, CPC, Tim Buck Papers, vol. 4, ‘Resolutions of the Enlarged Plenum of the CPC’, Feb. 1931. According to Tim Buck, by then leader of the CPC, the WUL had 40,000 members within its first four years of existence and led 181 of the 233 strikes that took place between 1933 and 1936. Buck, ‘Workers Party’, 87. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada (Ottawa, 1934). Steedman, ‘The Promise’. Watson, She Was Not Afraid, 26; The Worker, 18 Apr. 1929. NAC, CPC files, MG28, IV4, vol. 51, file 30, ‘First Annual Convention of the IUNTW’, 10–12 May 1929. For a brief history of this period and a biography of Annie Buller, see Watson, She Never Was Afraid, 26. By 1930 the new Canadian union (UCW) in the men’s sector in Montreal had not been able to gain strength against the ACWA. The UCW led a strike in the contract pant shops in 1930, but it ceased to exist soon after that. Canadian Labour Monthly, Aug.-Sept. 1928, 37. For accounts of this strike, see McLeod, ‘Women in Production’; Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 195–200. As Frager points out (p. 193), ‘In

300

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

NOTES

the Third Period, the polarization between the two sides was so intense that each side had a vested interest in discrediting the other side’s leadership no matter what that leadership had actually done.’ She concludes that this factional fighting in the Toronto needle trades and in the Jewish working-class community was destructive and seriously damaged the community at a time when it needed to organize women needle workers. Douglas Cruikshank and Gregory S. Kealey, ‘Canadian Strike Statistics, 1891–1950’, Labour/Le Travail 20 (Fall 1987): 115. NAC, RG33/18, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, vol. 57, Exhibits, no. 33. For a discussion of this process in the ACWA, see Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 209–15. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, William Johnson, Associated Clothing Manufacturers, to Mitchell Hepburn, 20 Mar. 1935. Canada, Dept of Labour, Report on Organization in Industry, Commerce and the Professions, select years. Interview with Max Enkin, Toronto; Men’s Clothing Association, Minutes, Toronto, 3 July 1935. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 171. The Globe, 16 May 1930. Interview with Joseph Said, Montreal, June 1980. Department store operating expenses in 1930 amounted to 25.8 per cent of the value of sales, while independent men’s wear retailers’ operating expenses were 32.85 per cent of total value of sales, and women’s wear retailers’ operating expenses amounted to 28.78 per cent of total sales. As cited in Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 250. The highest percentage mark-up between purchasing price and department store selling price was in women’s dresses, where the percentage of mark-up to cost of sales was 271.07 per cent. Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Report (Ottawa, 1935), 223, as cited in Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 262. H. Marshall and A.C. Steedman, ‘Textile Distribution: Where the Canadian Public Buys Dry Goods and Apparel’, Manual of the Textile Industry of Canada, 9th edn (Gardenvale, Que., 1937), 98. Only 27.5 per cent of sales in men’s and boy’s clothing went to department stores and 10.1 per cent to chain stores. The 1934 figures presented to the Price Spreads Commission showed a similar pattern. NAC, RG33/18, vol. 93, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Exhibits, no. 412, 2–22.

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301

48. Ibid., no. 412, 11, vol. 93. 49. Interview with Max Enkin, Toronto, 1986. See also Association of Men’s Clothing Manufacturers, ‘Objectives for the Cloak Manufacturers Protective Association in Toronto’, private files, Toronto. 50. For a more detailed discussion of the consequences of the Communist struggles in Quebec, see Andrée Lévesque, Virage à Gauche Interdit: les communistes, les socialistes et leur ennemis au Québec, 1929–1950 (Montreal, 1984); Marcel Fournier, Communisme et Anticommunisme au Québec, 1920–1950 (Montreal, 1979); CPC, Canada’s Party of Socialism: History of the Communist Party of Canada, 1921–1976. (Toronto, 1982), 72–81. 51. For a discussion of the interunion rivalry in Toronto, see Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 180–210. 52. I.M. Biss, ‘The Dressmakers’ Strike’, Canadian Forum, July 1931, 367–9. 53. For a review of the State role during the Depression, see James Struthers, No Fault of Their Own: Unemployment and the Canadian Welfare State 1914–1941 (Toronto, 1983). 54. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Convention, Atlantic City, 9–17 May 1938, 220. 55. Donald Creighton, Canada’s First Century 1867–1967 (Toronto, 1970), 216. 56. Canadian Forum, Mar. 1935, as excerpted in J.L. Granatstein and Peter Stevens, eds, Forum: Canadian Life and Letters, 1920–70, selections from The Canadian Forum (Toronto, 1972). 57. Warren K. Cook to Dubinsky, 17 Dec. 1934, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. 58. Bernard Shane to Tom Moore, president, Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, 10 Mar. 1934, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1933–4, ILGWU Archives. 59. Sam Kraisman to Dubinsky, 12 Mar., in David Dubinsky Correspondence, Toronto Joint Board, ILGWU Archives. 60. See, for example, Evening Telegram (Toronto), 25, 26 Jan. 1935. 61. Hutchison was also a member of the administrative committee for government relief to single women in Toronto. She was responsible for a study on the administration of relief in Canada and chaired a conference in Ottawa on government relief in 1933. Evidence given by W. Hutchison, Price Spreads Commission, 23–4 Jan. 1933. See W. Hutchison, YWCA, ‘Report on Labour Conditions in Industries in Toronto Employing Women Needle Workers’, Royal Commission on Price Spreads, Exhibits, no. 412 (Ottawa, 1935).

302

NOTES

62. See note in Biss, ‘Dressmakers’ Strike’, 367. 63. Hutchison, ‘Report on Labour Conditions’. 64. NAC, RG33/18, Royal Commission on Price Spreads, vol. 155, Exhibits, no. 437, 27. 65. NAC, NG30, A94, J.L. Cohen Papers, vol. 1, ‘Memorandum of Conditions of Workers in the Cloak Maker’s Union in the City of Toronto, and on the Preparation of a General Strike’, Jan. 1930. 66. Fraser, ‘Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal’, 215. 67. Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1932. 68. By 1929 half of the Canadian factory clothing manufacturers employed 20 or fewer workers and only a very few had a capital investment of over $500,000. See Canada, Report on the Men’s Factory Clothing Industry and Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1929. 69. PAO, Louis Fine, Correspondence Files, Deputy Minister of Labour, ‘Warren K. Cook, Chief Party Organizer, Reconstruction Party, His Objective, Political and Personal Ambition’, unsigned, undated, c. 1935. 70. ‘Report by Thomas Cohen on the Canadian Cloak Market’, 14, David Dubinsky Correspondence, Joint Board, Toronto Cloakmakers, 1935–9, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. 71. Time lost in the strike was equal to 12,000 working days; see Labour Gazette, Feb. 1930, 118. The agreement allowed for the election of shop chairmen and price committees to settle prices for work with the employer and also set up a Joint Conference Board composed of three representatives from the union and three from the manufacturers’ association ‘to deal expeditiously and settle all complaints, disputes and grievances’. If no decision was rendered, the matter was to be dealt with through arbitration. Labour Gazette, Apr. 1930, 449. This strike in the Toronto cloak shops was complicated by the political rivalry between the Communists and the ‘right’ unionists in the ILGWU. Frager gives a detailed account of the effect of the political factional fighting on the strike’s outcome. See Frager, Sweatshop Strife, 191–5. 72. NAC, MG30, A94, J.L. Cohen Papers, vol. 1, L.M. Singer to H.J. Macdonald, 11 Aug. 1930. 73. Supervisor, Toronto, ILGWU, to Benjamin Schlesinger, 24 June 1931, David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1931–2, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. 74. ‘Highlights and Activities of the Toronto ILGWU since 1937’, David Dubinsky Correspondence, Toronto Joint Board, 1935–9, ILGWU Archives. 75. PAO, Dept of Labour, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, 1931–3, A.W. Crawford, Deputy Minister of Labour, ‘Memoran-

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303

dum’, 18 Feb. 1932. 76. Ibid., A.W. Crawford, ‘Memorandum for Dr. J.D. Monteith, Minister of Public Works and Labour’, 16 Feb. 1932. 77. NAC, MG30, A94, J.L. Cohen Papers, vol. 2, file 2095, ‘Memorandum of Agreement’, 29 Jan. 1934, Toronto Cloak and Suit Joint Board, ILGWU and Industrial Council of Cloak and Suit Manufacturers, Toronto. 78. Chas Foster to Thomas Learie, 15 Dec. 1938, in Correspondence, private files, Association of Men’s Clothing Manufacturers, Toronto. 79. ‘Minutes of a Special Meeting’, 17 Dec. 1920, private files, in Association of Men’s Clothing Manufacturers, Toronto. 80. In Toronto, Superior Cloak attempted to break the union in its shop by moving the operation out of Toronto in 1935. Interview with Louis Posluns, Toronto, 1972. When the union won, the other manufacturers set up the Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association and signed an agreement with the union, while only weeks before they had assisted Posluns of Superior Cloak financially in his fight against the union. Interview with Lewis Manley, Toronto, 1983. 81. Sparks, ‘Clothing Canadians’, 99. 82. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 26. 83. Calculations from Canada, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry, 1929–32. 84. Sparks, ‘Clothing Canadians’, 98. 85. While the size of Canadian dress manufacturing shops was generally smaller than those in the United States, Glenn’s observation about the differences in social dynamics between small and large shops in the United States is pertinent here. She notes, ‘Young people had their own special reasons for disdaining the landsleit shops and preferring to work in the larger factories.’ Glenn suggests, ‘Inside factories such as those in New York’s shirtwaist and dress industries and Chicago’s modern tailoring establishments tended to provide women with a greater range of jobs and more potential for occupational and wage mobility than the contractors could.’ The large shops also symbolized cultural mobility for Jewish immigrant women as ‘they were moving out of the ghetto and into a more Americanized environment.’ Glenn argues that the small contract shops, heavily populated with immigrant Jews and members of their own community and run by Jewish men, retarded assimilation. See Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 137–8. The same ethnic character of many of the small contract shops in Montreal and Toronto may have influenced the choices of women there—more particularly for young French-Canadian women in Montreal who had a choice

304

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

NOTES

between working in a Jewish-run small shop or working in a large dress factory such as Ideal Dress, which employed 225 workers, nearly all females. At Ideal Dress, all the women workers were employed on a piecework basis and in 1934 the average weekly wage was between $10.88 and $11.57, or about 18 to 25 cents an hour. These wages were generally higher than many of the other shops in Montreal. For example, Little Daisy Dresses, a small firm owned by Hyman and Max Cohen, paid female pieceworkers 17.7 cents to 23 cents an hour. Canada, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, ‘Report on Manufacturing of Ladies Ready Wear, 1935’, Exhibits, no. 437. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 21st Convention, 119. Eighth Census of Canada, 1941, vol. 7 (Ottawa, 1944), table 26, 956–7. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 21st Biennial Convention, 47. Montreal Joint Board to Sam Kraisman, 21 Sept. 1932, Correspondence, Montreal Joint Board, 1931–4, ILGWU Archives. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. As told by Joshua (Joe) Gershman, Toronto, 1986. Anne Bobb, ‘Working among French Canadians Is Our Central Task’, Young Worker, 21 May 1934, as cited in Manley, ‘Communism and the Canadian Working Class’. The ILGWU hoped to take advantage of the Price Spreads Commission publicity. See Montreal Star, 29 Aug. 1934; Bernard Shane to Dubinsky, 14 Mar. 1934, David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1933–4, ILGWU Archives. See also Evelyn Dumas, The Bitter Thirties in Quebec (Montreal, 1975) for a discussion of the 1934 general strike of the IUNTW; Lévesque, Virage à gauche interdit, for a discussion of Communist activities in Montreal. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. Interview with Joshua Gershman, Toronto, 1986. Labour Gazette, Oct. 1934, 905. Manley, ‘Communism and the Canadian Working Class’, 496–501. For an excellent discussion of Lenin’s views on this matter, see Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 185–9. Shane continued: ‘I was in touch with Mr. Greenberg who acted as impartial chairman at our conferences. He was advisor to the dress employers in their conferences with the cutters. Mr. Greenberg is now the manager of the Silk Mills Credit Association and he has a great influence over the manufacturers of cloaks and dresses. It was on my advice given to Greenberg that the dress manufacturers offered the cutters an increase of 20% for all cutters receiving $20.00 and less, 10% up to $30.00 and 5% above that, a union shop for the cutters and

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100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

305

all that goes with it.’ Shane to Dubinsky, 28 Aug. 1934, David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Shane to Dubinsky, 5, 17 Sept. 1934, David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Montreal Star, 29 Aug. 1934. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. At the 1934 ILGWU convention, informal talks were held between Dubinsky and conservative cutters and pressers from Montreal to plan a strategy to take over the dressmakers. The instigators drew their support from the Jewish social democrats in the Bund and the Workman’s Circle. Interview with Issy Glouberman, Montreal, 1985. ILGWU, Local 262, Souvenir Album, 1937–1952 (Montreal, n.d.). Interview with Leah Roback, 15 Dec. 1972, Montreal. See CPC, Canada’s Party of Socialism, 100. For a discussion of the policy, see NAC, Tim Buck Papers, MG32/G3, vol. 4, ‘A Democratic Front for Canada’, 1938. Interview with Max Dolgoy, Toronto, 1983. Dolgoy was hired as a business agent in Toronto, and later another left-winger, Leo Uhra, was hired. Interview with Joshua Gershman, Toronto, 1986. See also Frager Sweatshop Strife, 199–201, for a more detailed account of the walkover in Toronto. Joshua Gershman to Bernard Shane, Montreal Joint Council, ILGWU, 17 Oct. 1935, David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1934–9, ILGWU Archives. See also Jenny Brenner and Mike Kussin to Dubinsky, 29 Nov. 1935; Dubinsky to Bernard Shane, Montreal Joint Council, 22 Oct. 1935. Interview with Joshua Gershman, Toronto, 1986. Interview with Max Dolgoy, Toronto, September 1983. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. The quotation is from a story told by Joshua Gershman, interview, Toronto, 1986. PAO, Attorney-General’s Office, CPC files, ‘Memo to District Councils’, from WUL, National Women’s Department, J. Collins, 22 Apr. 1931. Ibid. NAC, MG28, G3, vol. 4, CPC, Tim Buck Papers, ‘Resolution of the Enlarged Plenum’, Feb. 1931. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. Interview with Bertha (Dolgoy) Blugerman, Toronto, May 1973. The Worker, 26 July 1930. Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 33. Sangster, ‘Communist Party and the Woman Question’, 35. Interview with Leo Uhra, Toronto, 1973.

306

NOTES

122. Interview with Joshua Gershman, Toronto, 1986. 123. Ibid. 124. For a discussion of the role of ethnicity in Quebec unions, see Alexandra Szacka, ‘Fragmentation du Mouvement Ouvrier: La Situation des Immigrant Juifs au Québec, 1920–1940’, MA thesis (Laval University, 1981). 125. Quoted ibid., 125. 126. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. 127. NAC, RG33/18, vol. 93, Royal Commission on Price Spreads, ‘Report on Labour Conditions in Industries in Toronto Employing Women Needle Workers’, 1935, in Exhibits, no. 412. 128. Ibid., no. 412, 51. 129. Evidence given by W. Hutchison before the Price Spreads Commission, 23–4 Jan. 1933, 10. 130. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. 131. Biss, ‘Dressmakers Strike’, 386. 132. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 174–5. 133. Interview with Abe Magerman, ILGWU, Toronto, 1973. 134. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 21st Biennial Convention, 232. 135. ACWA, Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, Rochester, 14–19 May 1934, 359. 136. ACWA, Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, 370. 137. Ibid., 372. 138. Ibid., 355. 139. See motions placed before the 1937 convention. ILGWU, Report and Proceedings of the 23rd Convention, Atlantic City, NJ, May 1937. 140. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. 141. Interview with Margo Durocher, ILGWU, Montreal, 1972. 142. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, 1984.

Chapter 7 1. J.L. Cohen, Collective Bargaining in Canada: An Examination of the Legislative Record and Policy of the Dominion of Canada (Toronto, 1941), 11–12. 2. Ibid., 15. 3. This analysis of trade unions’ role in relation to the State is outlined in Rianne Mahon, ‘Canadian Public Policy: The Unequal Structure of Representation’, in Leo Panich, ed., The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power (Toronto, 1977), 182–6. 4. For a general discussion of the political context, see Fraser on the presidential campaign to support Senator La Follette and the subse-

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

307

quent activities in Labor Will Rule, chs 7, 10, 11; Tomlins, State and the Unions, 99–148. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 591. Quoted ibid. Ibid., 591, 592. The code in the cloak and suit industry approved and signed by Roosevelt on 5 Aug. 1933 gave male pieceworkers 10 cents more than women workers doing the same work. See reprint of code in Justice, 15 Aug. 1933. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 592. Quoted ibid., 597. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 284. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, 146. David Dubinsky, ‘In Defense of the Union’s Code in the Cloak and Suit Industry’, Justice, 1 Aug. 1933. PAO, Multicultural Society of Ontario, Jewish Files, William Villano Papers, Ser. 085–0055, D. Dubinsky to Kraisman and Langer, Toronto Joint Board, 8 Sept. 1933. See Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 650–2; Tomlins, State and the Unions, ch. 4; Fraser, Labor Will Rule, chs 11, 12. Fraser, Labor Will Rule, 293. For a detailed study of the NRA, see Robert H. Connery, ‘The Administration of an NRA Code: A Case Study of the Men’s Clothing Industry’, Committee on Public Administration, Social Science Research Council, Studies in Administration 4 (Chicago, 1938); Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 591–654. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, 83. Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry. Woods and Ostry, Labour Policy and Labour Economics in Canada, 22–3. Cameron and Young, Status of Trade Unions in Canada, 21–2. In Mar. 1908 (p. 1100) the Labour Gazette, a publication of the federal Department of Labour, stated: ‘In nearly all, the clauses relating to child and female labour are very similar, and the two classes may be fitly taken up together.’ For a review of factory legislation, see Linda S. Bohnen, ‘Women Workers in Ontario: A Socio-Legal History’, University of Toronto Law Review 31 (1973): 45–74; Edith Lorentsen and Evelyn Woolner, ‘Fifty Years of Labour Legislation in Canada’, in A.E.

308

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

NOTES

Kovacs, ed., Readings in Canadian Labour Economics (Toronto, 1961), 92–136; Esdras Minville, Labour Legislation and Social Services in the Province of Quebec, prepared for the Royal Commission on DominionProvincial Relations (Ottawa, 1939), 11–37; A.E. Grauer, Labour Legislation: A Study Prepared for the Royal Commission on DominionProvincial Relations (Ottawa, 1939). By the 1930s the provincial departments of labour administered a variety of Acts pertaining to conditions of labour: The Factory, Shop and Office Building Act, The Steam Boiler Act, Operating Engineers Act, Apprenticeship Acts, Building Trades Protection Acts, Employment Agencies Act, and the Minimum Wage Acts. Boris, Home to Work, 119. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 209. Labour Gazette, June 1907, 1384. Allan M. Dymond, KC, The Laws of Ontario Relating to Women and Children (Toronto, 1923), 124. Lorentsen and Woolner, ‘Fifty Years of Labour Legislation’, 103. Ibid. Grauer, Labour Legislation, table 6, 45. Ibid., 251. There were a few scattered locals of women prior to 1900, but little is known of their existence. Jean Thomson Scott stated that some women belonged to cigar-makers’ and typographical unions by 1890, but their impact was negligible. See Scott, ‘Conditions of Women’s Labour in Ontario’, 23. Lorentsen and Woolner, ‘Fifty Years of Labour Legislation’, 100. Grauer, Labour Legislation, 99. Hon. Mr Stevens in Evidence given by Winnifred Hutchison before the Price Spreads Commission on Violations and Evasions of Minimum Wage and Factory Acts, Jan. 1934. PAO, Dept of Labour, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Minimum Wage Board, Report, Oct. 1932. The T. Eaton Company developed a practice of working out a minimum wage on a two-week basis, so ‘girls’ who were not able to make the $12.50 minimum on piecework one week had several days during the next week to make it up. Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Exhibits, 4508. An anonymous letter to the Department of Labour from a bookkeeper and auditor concurs with Hutchison’s findings. PAO, Correspondence, 27 July 1934, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Low Wages and the Industrial Standards Act. Royal Commission on Price Spreads, Evidence, Miss W. Wells testi-

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40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

309

mony. Similar evidence was presented by Winnifred Hutchison and I.M. Lunn in their investigations during the Price Spreads hearings. NAC, RG33/18, W. Hutchison to Royal Commission on Price Spreads, Hearings, 24–5 Jan. 1933. PAO, Dept of Labour, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, I.M. Lunn, ‘Report on Minimum Wage Law Violations’, University of Toronto, Feb. 1934, 5–6. Lunn’s evidence was based on interviews conducted with trade union officials, social workers, and workers in the cloakmaking trades. Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 53. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence, R.A. Stapells, chairman, Minimum Wage Board, to Dr J.M. Robb, Minister of Health and Labour, 1 May 1934. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, ‘Record of the Conservative Government, Department of Labour’, 5 Apr. 1934. Officials appointed by Ontario’s Conservative Premier Henry assured Dr J.D. Monteith, Minister of Labour, 12 Sept. 1933, ‘Everything possible is being done by the Department of Labour under existing legislation and financial limitations to enforce minimum wage rates for females.’ It was further stated that ‘Working conditions in the factories and shops of Ontario are not excelled by any other province or state on the American continent.’ PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Correspondence 1931–3. ‘Wage Conditions in the Needle Trades’, Canadian Congress Journal 12, 9 (Sept. 1933): 22. For a general view of the legislation’s effect on Canadian women in the 1920s, see Veronica Strong-Boag, ‘The Girl of the New Day’, in M. Cross and G. Kealey, eds, The Consolidation of Capitalism, 1896–1929 (Toronto, 1983), 195–200. Further evidence on the replacement of girls by lower-wage boys can be found in evidence given by Winnifred Hutchison before the Price Spreads Commission on Violations and Evasions of Minimum Wage and Factory Acts, PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files. W. Hutchison, Report to Price Spreads Commission, 1934, ‘Some Effects of the Minimum Wage Legislation’, 95. British Columbia had enacted such legislation in 1925, Alberta in 1936, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan in 1934. See Lorentsen and Woolner, ‘Fifty Years of Labour Legislation’, 118–19. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 213. Bora Laskin, ‘Industrial Relations and Social Security’, Public Affairs 8 (1943–5): 48. In 1933, 2,500 adjustments were made to wages in 1,000 firms, with $9,497.77 wage arrears collected. Labour Gazette, Oct. 1934, 916.

310

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

NOTES

PAO,

Deputy Minister of Labour Files, ‘Needle trades’, W. Johnston to Minister of Labour, 20 Mar. 1935. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Convention, 220. Schubert, considered to be the ‘Father of the Decree’, sat as Montreal’s ACWA representative on the Joint Board, which supervised and ensured the carrying out of the decree. Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 129. The provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario used this method of regulation, whereby obligatory hours of labour and wage regulations set in one sector of an industry were legally binding on the industry as a whole, and extended certain clauses from collective agreements between one or several unions and employer associations to make rulings that were legally binding on the whole of an industry in the province. The individual industry-wide regulations took the form of government decrees. Several sources discuss the development of provincial legislation in Quebec. Gérard Hébert traced the conception of the Extensions Act to the 1924 Loi des syndicats professionnels, which stated, ‘La convention collective de travail donne ouverture à tous les droits et recours établis par la loi pour la sanction des obligations.’ This law constitutes the first time a provincial legislature raised the issue of ‘la convention collective’. Gérard Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives dans l’industrie de la construction dans la province de Québec, 1934–1962’, Ph.D thesis (McGill University, 1963), 165. See also Marie-Louis Beaulieu, Les Conflits de Droit dans les Rapports Collectifs du Travail (Quebec, 1955), 136–9; Beaulieu, ‘Contenu effets juridiques, application et exécution de la convention collective dans la législation du Québec’, Revue du Barreau 18, 2 (fév. 1958): 53–66; Jean-Charles Bonenfant, ‘Nature juridique de la convention collective de travail’, Revue du Barreau 1 (1941): 250–8. More recent studies of the Act are Jean Bernier, L’extension juridique des conventions collectives au Québec, La Commission consultive sur travail (Quebec, 1986), 8–25; G. Tremblay, ‘Collective Agreements and Judicial Extensions’, Relations Industrielles 7 (1951–2): 72–80. See Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives’, 205–6. Bernier, L’extension juridique des conventions collectives, 8. La vie syndicale 11, 6 (juillet 1932): 19, quoted in Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives’, 175. Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives’, 178–9. Quoted in Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives’,

N OT E S

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

311

180. I am grateful to Madeleine Parent for this observation. Montreal Star, 7, 10 Mar. 1934. Ibid., 10 Mar. 1934. See the discussion in Hébert, ‘L’extention juridique des conventions collectives’, 186–8. Leonard Marsh, ‘The Arcand Act: A New Form of Labour Legislation?’, Canadian Journal of Economic and Political Science 2, 3 (Aug. 1936): 415. See, for example, A. Boileau, ‘La loi françoise sur les conventions collectives’, La vie syndicale (Jan. 1934): 1. Le Devoir, 20 Nov. 1933, 4. Ibid. Quebec, Orders in Council Having Force of Law in the Province of Quebec (Quebec, 1934); Labour Gazette, May 1934, 417. Montreal Star, 12 Mar. 1934. Quebec, An Act Respecting the Extension of Collective Labour Agreements, 20 Apr. 1934. Teal makes this point with regard to the minimum-wage laws. See Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 360–5. Leonard Marsh’s article on the Arcand Act in 1936, which examines the differences between the Ontario and Quebec legislation, makes similar observations: ‘The Arcand Act’, 404–23. Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 102. In most industries union shops were located mainly in Montreal, and wages in the other zones continued to be low, which allowed manufacturers to exploit the fragmentation of labour between rural and urban shops and between union and non-union shops. In the clothing industry in 1938, when a contract was again signed in the men’s clothing sector, no more than 29 per cent of all employees in the industry were receiving the minimum rates and over. See NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 7, file 2603, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Study of the Men’s and Boys’ Clothing Industry of the Province of Quebec’, 1938. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Convention, 216. Labour Gazette, Jan. 1935, 3. Montreal Star, 5 Sept. 1934. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence Files, 1930–3, Crawford to Monteith, 6 Oct. 1933. Cook and Stevens were close political allies; both later became active in the Reconstruction Party. PAO, MHSO Jewish Collection, MFW158, reel 8, William Villano Papers.

312

82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

NOTES

S. Kraisman to D. Dubinsky, 7 Nov. 1933, ILGWU Toronto Joint Board Correspondence. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Industrial Standards Act, Louis Fine, statement in meeting of Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers and Dept of Labour, 20 Dec. 1934. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour’s Office, Wm Johnston to Hon. A.W. Roebuck, 22 Aug. 1934; F.R. Marsh to Wm Johnston, 31 Aug. 1934, ‘Low Wages and the Industrial Standards Act’. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Industrial Standards Act, Meeting of Trades and Labour Congress of Canada and representatives of various industries with Hon. A.W. Roebuck, Attorney-General and Minister of Labour, J.F. Marsh, Deputy Minister of Labour, Louis Fine, Industrial Standards Commissioner, and A.W. Crawford, chairman, Minimum Wage Board, 19 Dec. 1934. Similar meetings were held with the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, All-Canadian Congress of Labour, and Workers’ Unity League. Ibid., meeting of TLCC and Dept of Labour, 19 Dec. 1934. Ibid. ‘An Act Respecting Industrial Standards’, 18 Apr. 1935, in Statutes of the Province of Ontario passed in 25th year of King George V, first session of the 19th legislature of Ontario (Toronto, 1935). PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, delegation from the Workers’ Unity League received by A.W. Roebuck, J.F. Marsh, L. Fine, and A.W. Crawford, 23 Jan. 1935, 2. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, Industrial Standards Act, meeting of members of Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers with Hon. A.W. Roebuck, Attorney-General and Minister of Labour, J.F. Marsh, Deputy Minister of Labour, Louis Fine, Industrial Standards Commissioner, and A.W. Crawford, chairman, Minimum Wage Board, 20 Dec. 1934. Observations made by Madeleine Parent, interview, 1997.

Chapter 8 1. See Marsh, ‘The Arcand Act’, 408–10, for a more detailed discussion of the differences between the two Acts. 2. The Associated Clothing Manufacturers, the Toronto men’s clothing trade association, represented 90 per cent of Toronto manufacturers; the Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association represented women’s clothing trades in Toronto; in Montreal the Association of Manufacturers of Cloaks, Suits, and Ladies Garments represented the women’s ready-made trades; the Associated Clothing Manufacturers represented the men’s clothing trades in Montreal. The ILGWU and the ACWA

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3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

313

were the main unions involved, but the small UGWA also took part in later negotiations. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 4, file 2396a, J.L. Cohen Papers, Minutes of the Industrial Standards Conference, undated. Carpenter makes this point in regard to the US material. See Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 598. See Scott and Cassidy, Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 23–6. PAO, Deputy Minister of Labour Files, J.L. Cohen, statement at the Meeting of Members of the Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers and the Ontario Department of Labour, 20 Dec. 1934, 10. Teal, ‘Organization of Production’, 387. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, 302–3. As the CIO unions moved into Canadian industries, Cohen became their lawyer and was intimately involved in negotiations during the 1937 Oshawa auto strike. By the early 1940s the CCF was courting him as a potential candidate in the federal election, as a man who could appeal to both the CCF and Communist factions in the labour movement. See Gad Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics (Toronto, 1968), 109; William Beeching and Phyllis Clarke, eds, Yours in Struggle: Reminiscences of Tim Buck (Toronto, 1977), 166–7, 309–10, 316; Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Little Band: The Clashes between Communists and the Canadian Establishment (Ottawa, n.d.), 69–85. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181A, J.L. Cohen Papers, Singer to Cohen, 27 June 1935. Ibid. Ibid., file 2181b, Toronto Cloakmakers Union, L.M. Singer to M. Heller, 25 May 1935. See ibid., file 2181a, Correspondence re Collective Agreements, Cloakmakers, undated. J.L. Cohen to B. Shane, 7 June 1935, in David Dubinsky Papers, Toronto Joint Board Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, J. Schubert to Cohen, 24 July 1935; Singer to Heller, 25 May 1935. ‘Report by Thomas Cohen on Canadian Cloak Markets’, 20 Jan. 1939, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Correspondence, re Collective Agreements, Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association to Toronto Joint Board, Cloakmakers, 20 Aug. 1935. Under both Quebec’s Labour Agreements Extension Act and Ontario’s Industrial Standards Act each industry covered had to agree to a standard of

314

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

NOTES

wages. These agreements, called decrees in Quebec and schedules in Ontario, were registered with the provincial labour department, which then used them as the basis for arbitration of disputes over wages and hours in the trade. The legislation outlined a procedure for establishing arbitration committees (joint committees of manufacturers and trade union representatives, chaired by a mutually agreed-upon chair) in each sector of the industry covered by the decrees/schedules. For a detailed discussion of the difference between Ontario and Quebec legislation, see Marsh, ‘The Arcand Act’, 404–23. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181b, Toronto Cloakmakers Union, J.L. Cohen Papers, L.M. Singer to M. Heller, 25 May 1935, Correspondence re Industrial Standards Act. S. Kraisman to B. Shane, 3 June 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, Toronto Joint Board, ILGWU Archives. Dubinsky to Sam Kraisman, 7 Sept. 1935, ibid. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 4, file 2369a, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Minutes of the Conference on Industrial Standards Act’, Toronto, 1935, 15. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto, 1984. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181d, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Collective Labour Agreement for the Cloak and Suit Industry as Agreed Upon by the Contracting Parties after Conferences with Those Opposing the Agreement as Published on 10 August 1935’. Under the Quebec Labour Agreements Extension Act, the Decree 564, 27 Feb. 1935, covered those working in the men’s and boys’ clothing trades; Decree 3184, 6 Nov. 1935, covered women’s cloaks and suits; and the final Decree 2440, 9 Sept. 1936, covered work in the manufacture of women’s dresses. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, Cohen to Toronto Joint Board, Cloakmakers, 8 Oct. 1935. Industrial Standards Act, draft, undated, ibid., file 2181c. J.L. Cohen to Bernard Shane, 7 June 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, Toronto Joint Board, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Cockburn, Brothers, 132. Interview with Israel Shanoff, Toronto, 1973. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181b, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Agreement Pursuant to the Industrial Standards Act’, 1 Oct. 1935. Ibid., file 2181d, ‘Collective Labour Agreement’, 10 Aug. 1935. Bernard Shane to Dubinsky, 21 Oct. 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, Cohen to Louis Fine, Industrial Commissioner, Dept of Labour, 19 Oct. 1935. Ibid., Cohen to Sam Kraisman, 29 Oct. 1935. B. Shane to Dubinsky, 21 Oct. 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University.

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315

35. The clause stated: ‘The minimum wage requirements for female operators shall be as hereunder provided: Skilled female operators shall be 20% below skilled male operators’ minimum. Female semi-skilled operators shall be 10% below the semi-skilled male operators’ minimum. Provided however, —That the wages or remuneration of any female operator of equal productivity or performing the same operations on piecework basis as a male operator, shall be equal to that payable to the male operator. That in any event the minimum scale for female section operators shall be the same as that of male section operators.’ See ‘Schedule of Wages and Hours for Cloak and Suit Industry’, Ontario Gazette, 9 Nov. 1935. 36. The parties present included: Louis Fine from the Ontario Department of Labour; Abe Magerman and Hyman Langer from the ILGWU Toronto office; J.L. Cohen, ILGWU lawyer; Candide Rochefort, organizer for the Montreal cloakmakers; Bernard Shane; Albert Eaton, general manager of the cloakmakers for the Montreal ILGWU; Joseph Schubert. A Montreal alderman from 1924 to 1940, Schubert had been involved in trade negotiations for both the cloak and men’s clothing sectors for several years prior to his involvement in negotiations for the decrees. See Brecher, ‘Patterns of Accommodation’, 95, 119–23. 37. Labour Gazette, Dec. 1935, 1156. 38. The source of the clipping is not identified. Located in NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181c, J.L. Cohen Papers. 39. S. Kraisman, ‘All Canada Markets at Last Fully Union’, Justice, 1 Nov. 1935, 11. 40. ‘Schedule of Wages and Hours for Cloak and Suit Industry’, 19 Nov. 1935 to 18 Nov. 1936, Ontario Gazette, 9 Nov. 1935. The Quebec agreement wording was not so strong: ‘This agreement shall supersede all individual agreements that may exist between employers and employees, except the collective agreements which now exist between the several parties hereto, save and except that under no circumstances shall wages be paid under the minimums fixed by the present agreement nor shall the hours of labour be over the maximum fixed by the present agreement.’ Quebec, ‘Order-in-Council no. 3184’, 6 Nov. 1935, Quebec Official Gazette, 9 Nov. 1935. 41. Interview with Soshke (Sophie) Mandel, Toronto cloakmaker, 1984. 42. Steedman, ‘The Promise’, 37–73. 43. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Convention, 12. 44. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 12th Biennial Convention, 206. 45. ACWA, Report and Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Convention, 216. 46. Hardy, Clothing Workers, 103. 47. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, Cohen to Toronto Joint Board, Cloakmakers, 8 Oct. 1935.

316

48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

NOTES

PAO,

Deputy Minister of Labour, Correspondence, Louis Fine to Deputy Minister, Ontario, 7 May 1935. PAO, Dept of Labour Correspondence, Thos Learie, Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, to M.M. McBride, Minister of Labour, 9 Feb. 1938. In 1933 the ACWA shirtmakers saw an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 members in an eight-week period. Carpenter, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 649. Canadian membership in the clothing unions rose from 3,000 in 1931 to 8,307 in 1938. Canada, Report on Labour Organizations in Canada (Ottawa, 1939). NAC, MG30, A94, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers, Cohen to Bernard Shane, 18 Sept. 1935; Cohen to Toronto Joint Board, Cloakmakers, 8 Oct. 1935. Ibid., file 2181c, Cohen to ILGWU, Toronto, 10 Sept. 1935. Ibid., file 2181a, B. Shane to Cohen, 7 Aug. 1935. For further details, see ibid., vol. 4, file 2396, ‘ACWA and the Industrial Standards Act’. An Order in Council approved 27 Feb. 1935 made obligatory the terms of the ACWA agreement with the Associated Clothing Manufacturers of Quebec and the Montreal Contractors’ Association and applied the wage and hours settlement across the whole province. See Labour Gazette, Mar. 1935, 238–9. Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, ‘Minutes’, 21 Dec. 1938, in private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. Chas Foster to Thos W. Learie, 15 Dec. 1938, ‘Correspondence’, in private files, Men’s Clothing Manufacturers Association, Toronto. In 1936 Maurice Duplessis’s Union Nationale replaced the Quebec Liberals and remained in power until 1940 (regaining power in 1944). The Union Nationale changed the labour laws of the province. It amended the Arcand Act, including a clause on the right to trade union association. It repealed the Minimum Wage Act for women and replaced it with a new Fair Wages Act covering both men and women. The minimum-wage legislation gave the government the authority to set wages and hours of work independently of the negotiated collective agreements. See Michael Piva, ‘The Rise of Industrial Unions in Montreal, 1935–45’, Relations Industrielles 37, 4 (1982): 846–7. Grauer, Labour Organization, 53–4. The Ontario Industrial Standards Act was also amended in 1936 and 1937. Under the Ontario Act either employers’ or employees’ representatives could ask the Minister of Labour to call a meeting to negotiate wages and hours. The schedule, once accepted by the minister as having sufficient numbers of employers and employees represented, was then made binding and adminis-

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60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

317

tered by the Industry and Labour Board, which also administered the Minimum Wage Act. B. Young and J.A. Dickinson, A Short History of Quebec: A Socioeconomic Perspective (Toronto, 1988), 237–8; Linteau, Durocher, Robert, and Ricard, Histoire du Québec contemporain, 113. This point is made in a letter from J.L. Cohen to the ILGWU in Toronto, 10 Sept. 1935: NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 3, file 2181a, J.L. Cohen Papers. See also Cohen to Toronto Joint Board, 8 Oct. 1935. Interview with Issy Glouberman, Montreal, 1985. Frank Breslow to Dubinsky, 20 March 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. Interview with Issy Glouberman, Montreal, 1985. B. Shane to Dubinsky, 21 Oct. 1935; Dubinsky to Shane, 22 Oct. 1935; Jennie Brenner, Jack Kussin to Dubinsky, 29 Nov. 1935, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, Montreal Joint Board, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Frank Breslow to Dubinsky, 30 Dec. 1935, Dress Cutters Union, Local 205, Montreal, in David Dubinsky Papers, Montreal Joint Board Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. Shane to Dubinsky, undated, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, 1935–9, ILGWU Archives. PAO, MHSO records, reel 2/#158, ILGWU Toronto records, Local 72, ‘Minute Book of the Joint Council, Dressmakers’, 4 May 1936. Ibid., ‘Minutes’, 8 Apr. 1936. Interview with Eva Shanoff, Toronto, 1984. NAC, Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying, Exhibits, no. 412, YWCA Report, 1935. Canada, Report on the Women’s Factory Clothing Industry in Canada (Ottawa, 1937). Ibid., table 3. Hyman Langer to Dubinsky, 31 Mar. 1937, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. The plan allowed for ‘six to eight months of activity . . . to make inroads in the trade, gradually to surround the employers with union shops and at the same time jacking up prices slightly so that when the moment strikes, you have a ready army.’ Hyman Langer to Dubinsky, 31 Mar. 1937, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. Ibid. Ibid. Frank Breslow to Dubinsky, 20 Mar. 1935, ibid. Szacka, ‘Fragmentation du Mouvement Ouvrier’, 135.

318

NOTES

80. Y. Charpentier, ‘Our Debt to the Union’, in ILGWU, Local 262, Souvenir Album, 51. 81. Interview with Leah Roback, Montreal, 1972. 82. For Pesotta’s experience of the campaign, see Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters, 253–77, esp. 254; Justice 15 Dec. 1936. 83. Interview with Leah Roback, Montreal, 1972. 84. Ibid. Claude Jodoin went on to become Liberal member of the Quebec legislature until 1944, Quebec vice-president of the TLCC, and later director of the Canadian Labour Congress. See Horowitz, Canadian Labour in Politics, 164–9; Irving Abella, Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour (Toronto, 1973), 215. 85. Rose Pesotta, ‘Montreal Dress Drive in High Gear Now’, Justice, 15 Dec. 1936. 86. Rose Pesotta, cited in ILGWU, Montreal Dressmakers Union, Les Midinettes 1937–1962, 70–1. 87. Ibid., 71. 88. Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters, 160. 89. Interview with Leah Roback, Montreal, 1972. 90. Bernard Shane, quoted in ILGWU, Montreal Dressmakers Union, Les Midinettes, 114. 91. The Gazette, 9 Apr. 1937. 92. Ibid., 19 Apr. 1937. The Union Nationale introduced what is popularly known as the Padlock Law in 1937. The law banned the distribution of Communist literature anywhere in the province and gave the AttorneyGeneral’s office the power to padlock any premise when authorities suspected the occupants of advocating communism. For further discussion of the Padlock Law, see Ivan Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada (Toronto, 1975), 113; Merrily Weisbord, The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials, and the Coldwar (Toronto, 1983), 53–4. 93. The Gazette, 19 Apr. 1937. 94. Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters, 269. 95. The Gazette, 23 Apr. 1937. 96. Ibid., 27 Apr. 1937. 97. Ibid., 30 Apr. 1937. 98. ILGWU, Montreal Dressmakers Union, Les Midinettes, 118. 99. The Gazette, 5 May 1937. 100. Ibid., 3 May 1937. 101. Ibid., 6 May 1937. Shane’s recollections set the date of the meeting as 8 May 1937: Bernard Shane, ‘From Sweatshop to Security’, in ILGWU, Local 262, Souvenir Album, 19. 102. Bernard Shane to Sam Kraisman, 24 May 1937, in ‘Correspondence’,

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Toronto Joint Board, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University. 103. ‘Victory Crowns Great Montreal Dress Strike’, Justice, 1 June 1937. 104. The 1940 agreement in the Montreal dress industry still contained the differential wage clause for the work of pressers. 105. Interview with Issy Glouberman, Montreal, 1985. 106. ILGWU, Montreal Dressmakers Union, Les Midinettes, 120. 107. Maurice Mandel, quoted in ILGWU, Local 262, Souvenir Album, 59. 108. The strike committee contained mostly men: Raoul Trépanier, chairman; Bernard Shane, ILGWU; Paul Fournier, from the Millinery Workers Union; Albert Eaton; Albert Bourgon; Raoul Robitaille; Jack Bonchuck; Max Kysen from the dresscutters’ local; and Claude Jodoin, the Liberal Party member appointed as organizer. Outlined in Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters. 109. ‘GEB Spends Busy Week in Montreal’, Justice, 1 July 1937. 110. Copp, ‘Rise of Industrial Unions in Montreal’, 850. See also Palmer, Working-Class Experience, 263–5; and Dumas, Bitter Thirties in Quebec, esp. ch. 3. 111. Toronto Joint Board, ‘Highlights and Activities of the Toronto ILGWU since 1937’, in David Dubinsky Correspondence, ILGWU Archives. 112. NAC, MG30, A94, vol. 5, file 2522, J.L. Cohen Papers, ‘Agreement between the ILGWU, Local 72, and Employers in the City of Toronto’, Jan. 1937. 113. ‘Report to the General Executive Board’, Toronto Joint Board, Dressmakers, undated, misc. file, ILGWU Archives, Cornell University.

Chapter 9 1. Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters, 277. 2. Jane C. Ollenburger and Helen A. Moore, A Sociology of Women: The Intersection of Patriarchy, Capitalism and Colonization (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992), 85. 3. Pesotta’s own words for the position she held during the Montreal campaign. Pesotta, Bread upon the Waters, 260. 4. This poem was read aloud at a union rally for the ILGWU strike of Montreal garment workers in Feb. 1910. Montreal Star, 25 Feb. 1910.

Index

Act Concerning Communist Propaganda (‘Padlock Law’), 241, 318 n.92 Action Liberale Nationale, 240 Act Respecting Workmen’s Wages, 240, 248, 249, 251 Advance, 119 Agreements. See Collective agreements. Aikman, Mary, 19, 37 Alberta, 198, 213, 309 n.49 All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL), 134, 215, 312 n.84 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), 62, 64-6, 69, 94-7, 99-101, 107, 108, 116, 119-21, 124, 127, 128, 130-8 passim, 140, 141, 143, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 158, 161, 180, 186, 187, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 207, 210, 226, 237-8, 239, 240, 241, 286 n. 38, 287 n. 49, 294 n. 43, 294 n. 47, 296 n. 74, 296 n.78, 299 n.32, 310 n.54, 312 n.2, 316 n.50, 316 n.55; Local 211, 134; New York office, 125, 135; women members, 87, 89 Amalgamated Garment Manufacturers Council, 167

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 59, 87, 99, 100, 138, 288 n.65, 289 n.71 Andrews, Nellie, 65 Anglophones, 17, 22, 51, 52, 59, 60, 74, 138, 139, 140 Anti-Semitism, 66, 241, 245, 249 Apprenticeship, 15, 18, 43-4, 76, 137, 185, 205 Arbitration, 96, 97, 111, 112, 125-8, 174-5, 189, 207, 208, 211, 287 n.49, 294 n.42, 294 n.43 Arcand, Joseph, 209-10, 211, 213, 234 Arcand Act. See Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act Armstrong, Hugh, 37 Armstrong, Pat, 37 Artisans and artisanal culture, 3, 23, 24, 32, 34, 48, 50, 61-2. See also Craft work and workers A. Sommer and Company, 75, 94 Associated Clothing Manufacturers (Que.), 312 n.2, 316 n.55 Associated Clothing Manufacturers of Toronto, 97, 153, 157, 168, 206, 213, 240, 312 n.2 Associated Hebrew Charities, 84 Association of Clothing Manufacturers, 153

320

INDEX

Association of Manufacturers of Cloaks, Suits, and Ladies Garments, 234, 312 n.2 Bacchi, Carol Lee, 72, 284 n.142 Baldwin Garment Company, 38 Balfour Dress, 147-8 Baltimore, 66 Bankruptcy, 146 Barnum, Gertrude, 81, 82 Beaver Shirt Company, 137 Bégin, Archbishop L.N., 279 n.62 Bellanca, Dorothy, 237 Bennett, R.B., 159, 160, 161, 212 Bertram, Gordon, 8 Bertrand, Rev. Jean, 248 B. Gardner and Company, 102 Binary oppositions, 2-4 Biss, Irene, 158, 183 Blugerman, Bertha (Dolgoy), 17, 18, 30, 45, 113, 131, 136, 178 Boileau, Abbé Aimé, 208, 209 Bonchuck, Jack, 319 n.108 Boris, Eileen, 27, 37, 38, 57, 72, 199 Bosses, 54, 55, 82, 90, 103, 113, 185, 188, 203 Boston, 66 Bourgon, Albert, 319 n.108 Boycott, 83 Bradbury, Bettina, 39 Branagan, Josephine, 237 Brecher, Michael, 95, 126, 207, 211 Brenner, Jennie, 242 Breslaw, Joseph, 133 Breslow, Frank, 242-3 British Columbia, 9, 200, 309 n.49 British North America Act, 198 Broad Silk Manufacturers’ Credit Bureau, 250 Brooklyn, 76 Brown, Mrs A., 41 Bruchési, Archbishop P.N., 279 n.63 Buck, Tim, 130, 132, 226, 297 n.97, 299 n.26 Budish, James, 61

321

Buller, Annie, 150 Bullock, Harriet, 73 Business agents, 74, 87, 90, 91, 134, 238 Business unionism. See New unionism Buyers and buying, 114, 118, 156, 161, 207 Canada Packers Limited, 161 Canadian Association of Garment Manufacturers, 115, 148, 152, 163, 312 n.84 Canadian Cloak and Dressmakers Union, 152 Canadian Forum, 158, 159, 163, 183 Canadian Garment Workers of Montreal, 283 n.110 Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), 227, 318 n.84 Canadian Labour Defence League, 158 Canadian Labour Party, 281 n.88 Canadian Socialist League, 290 n.83 Canadian Textile Directory, 26 Cape Breton, 130 Capitalism, 2, 16, 40, 110, 160, 175, 206, 261 n.3 Carlyle, Margaret, 25 Carpenter, Jesse, 106, 193, 194, 195 Cassidy, Harry, 143, 146, 161, 197, 202, 203, 204 Catholic unions. See Quebec Champagne, Aline, 18, 19 Charpentier, Alfred, 208-9 Charpentier, Yvette, 219, 245 Chatelaine, 18 Chicago, 81, 132, 133, 136, 137, 294 n.48, 303 n.85 Chikofsky, Brother, 137 Child labour, 58, 70, 71, 79, 81, 95, 101, 199, 200 Chown, Alice, 82, 83, 284 n.142 Christman, Margaret, 268 n.60 Civil rights, 158

322 ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE Class and class system, 2-4, 7, 9, 37, 55, 85, 103, 105, 106, 107, 132, 188, 192, 193, 231, 290 n.83; collaboration, 175; construction of, 68; middle class, 3, 16, 17, 23, 33, 65, 67, 72, 87, 98-9, 108, 144, 255, 257, 265 n.14, 279 n.63; relations, 7, 73; upper class, 23, 98, 279 n.63; working class, 3, 5, 7, 12, 17, 19, 23, 39, 57, 98, 102, 105, 106, 108, 131, 142, 255, 258, 264 n.4, 264 n.5, 272 n.110, 282 n.98, 299-300 n.34 Clinton, Ont., 27 Closed shops. See Union shops Coalmines, 111 Cockburn, Cynthia, 50, 52, 231 Cohen, Alex, 238 Cohen, Fannia, 85, 289 n.71 Cohen, Hyman, 304 n.85 Cohen, J.L., 123, 191, 194, 196, 223, 226, 227, 228, 231, 233, 238, 239, 313 n.9, 315 n.36 Cohen, Magistrate, 83 Cohen, Max, 304 n.85 Collective agreements, 6, 9, 10, 52, 57, 58, 94, 107, 120, 121, 125, 169, 174-5, 190, 197, 210, 219, 220, 228, 236, 239, 240, 287 n.49, 294 n.43; and gender, 8, 91, 97; and ethnicity, 8; and power, 8 Collective bargaining, 52, 54, 96, 111, 122-3, 125, 127, 188, 190-2, 208-12, 226, 237, 255; class-based, 207; European, 208 Collective Labour Agreements Extension Act (Arcand Act), 198, 210, 211, 212, 213, 219, 220, 222, 231, 232, 240, 241, 245, 248, 257, 259, 310 n.56, 313 n.17, 316 n.58 Communist Party (Russia), 175 Communist Party (US), 130 Communist Party of Canada (CPC),

114, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 150, 157-8, 178, 179, 226, 242, 244, 295 n.66, 299 n.26; disbandment of ‘red’ unions, 177-8; Women’s Department, 139 Communists and communism, 123, 129-36, 140, 149-52, 157-8, 175, 176, 177, 178-81, 193, 226, 241, 243, 247, 248, 318 n.92; defeat of in union movement, 237, 313 n.9 Company unions, 240 Competition, 26, 114, 165, 238 Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC), 208-10 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 152, 227, 253, 313 n.9 Conrad, Margaret, 15 Conservative Party, 159, 161, 166, 204 Contracting and contract shops, 6, 29-33, 55, 57, 64, 69, 76, 96, 97, 114-16, 119, 120-1, 128, 144, 146, 147, 148, 161, 164-6, 169, 187, 197, 222, 234, 293 n.26, 303 n.85 Cook, Warren K., 163, 165, 166, 213, 311 n.80 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 158, 159, 206, 313 n.9 Copp, Terry, 252 Coppley, Noyes and Randall, 156 Cornwall Pants Company, 148 Cost of living (1933), 201 Craft unions, 60, 61-2, 107 Craft work and workers, 20, 23, 289 n.75 Crawford, A.W., 167, 212 Crawford, R.P., 78 Creighton, Donald, 161 Criminal Code, 122, 158 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 111 Cruikshank, Douglas, 152

INDEX

Custance, Florence, 139, 140, 297 n.97 Custom work, 23, 24-5, 29, 41, 45, 121, 222 Cutters, 35, 61, 70, 75, 79, 94, 95, 97, 102, 103, 140, 171, 174, 176, 241, 251, 252, 253 Daley, Margaret, 77 Daniels, Cynthia, 72, 275 n.24 Darwin, May, 287 n.54 Davidson, Michael, 29 Davies, Scott, 268 n.55 Denmark, Catherine, 89 Department of Labour (Canada), 13, 28, 150, 307 n.22 Depression. See Great Depression Derry, Kathleen, 99 Designers, 79, 117, 118, 231 Deskilling, 3, 34, 47-8, 50-2, 60, 108, 115, 184, 185, 222, 232 Desrochers, R.A., 245 Dessaules-Béique, Caroline, 279 n.63 Dolgoy, Max, 150, 177, 243, 305 n.107 Domestic economy, 14 Domesticity, 56, 57, 255, 265 n.14 Dordick, Fagel, 84 Dressmakers Guild, 248, 249, 250, 252 Dressmaking and dressmakers, 15, 23, 34, 44, 51, 54, 86, 87, 93, 99, 103, 108, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 132, 140, 144, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 159, 169-77, 180, 182, 183-4, 186, 187-8, 235, 236, 239, 241, 253, 297 n.96; union organizing in Montreal, 241-52, 254 Dress Manufacturing Organization, 249 Dubinsky, David, 110, 123, 133, 150, 163, 175, 176, 189, 195, 196, 197, 213, 230, 233, 234, 242, 244, 252, 254, 256, 305 n.103

323

Dumping, 153 Dundas, Ont., 89 Duplessis, Maurice, 240, 241, 245, 250, 316 n.58 Durable Cloak, 229 Durocher, Margo, 188 Eaton, Albert, 242, 315 n.36, 319 n.108 Eaton, Timothy, 83 Eaton’s. See T. Eaton Company Eisenstein, Zillah, 86 Electricity, 26 Eley, Geoff, 9 Elizabeth, NJ, 237 Employer-employee relations, 111, 113 England. See Great Britain English Canadians, 66 English language, 67, 68, 221 Enkin, Max, 156, 157 Equal pay for equal work, 73, 74, 98, 100 Ethnicity, 4, 9, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, 36, 48, 51-2, 59, 60, 66, 67, 75, 76, 88, 96, 99, 100, 108, 170, 257, 267 n.42, 283 n.132, 303 n.85 Europe, 21, 22, 30, 88 Factories and factory system, 23, 41, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 65, 78, 81, 117, 119, 146, 161, 182, 183, 185, 186, 189, 199, 201, 206, 302 n.68; as public sphere, 2; legislation, 198-9; numbers of workers in, 170; production, 25-7 Factory Acts, 199, 200, 201 Factory inspectors, 148, 201, 222 Fair Wages Act (Que.), 316 n.58 Family and home, 3, 4, 7, 14, 15-22, 24, 28, 35-41 passim, 100-2, 205, 254-5, 259, 264 n.5, 279 n.63 Fascism, 88, 241

324

ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE

Fashion, 116-17, 144, 169, 183, 188 Fashion Craft, 286 n.38 Faue, Elizabeth, 264 n.5 Fédération Nationale du Vêtement, 245 Fédération nationale Saint Jean Baptiste, 67, 279 n.63 Female job ghettos, 16 Female labour force participation. See Women Femininity, 4, 16, 39, 57, 255 Feminism and feminists, 72, 255, 260, 261 n.3, 279 n.63, 287 n.54 Fester, M., 168, 291 n.7 Fine, Louis, 165, 213, 216-17, 233, 315 n.36 Finkel, Alvin, 15 Foner, Phillip, 63, 66 Forbes, 78 ‘Foreign agitators’, 76 Forsey, Eugene, 158, 276 n.35 Foster, Charles, 168, 240 Fournier, Paul, 319 n.108 Frager, Ruth, 17, 20, 22, 62, 68, 83, 84, 88, 265 n.14, 284 n.149, 288 n.56, 299 n.34 Francophones, 17, 74, 138, 217 Francq, Gustav, 202, 209 Fraser, Steven, 154-5, 184, 195, 197 ‘Free speech’ movement, 158, 226 French Canadians, 18, 22, 66-7, 70, 71, 84, 95, 99, 101, 119, 120, 122, 134, 138, 170, 174, 177, 180-1, 184, 185, 245, 246, 247, 257, 258, 303 n.85 French language, 67, 75, 76, 86, 170, 171 Galarneau, Anne, 245 Ganong Brothers, 15 Garment Worker, The, 36 Garraugh, Mrs, 297 n.97 Geary, Mayor, 83 Gender, 1, 2-8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 22, 24, 37, 45, 47-8, 51-2, 65, 67, 68, 85, 86, 91, 96, 97, 99, 100-1,

108, 126, 128, 135, 170, 181, 185, 187, 192, 195, 205, 222, 225, 231, 236, 251, 255, 257-60, 264 n.5, 268 n.55, 282 n.98, 289 n.75; and class, 7, 9, 105; and wage discrimination, 233-4, 237, 258; language of, 15, 217, 254; oppression, 9-10; union locals based on, 63; workplace exploitation, 54 Gentiles, 62, 67, 84, 99, 101, 184, 185, 283 n.132 Gérin-Lajoie, Marie, 279 n.63 Germany, 26, 95 Gershman, Joshua, 150, 171, 176, 177, 180 Girard, M. Léonce, 209 Glenn, Susan, 16, 17, 23, 35, 48, 55, 98, 303 n.85 Globe, The, 76, 82 Glouberman, Issy, 251-2 Gold, Sarah, 137 Gompers, Samuel, 59 Great Britain, 16, 21, 22, 26, 269 n.70 Great Depression, 20, 140-1, 142-89 passim, 190, 198, 202, 206, 253 Greenberg, Issachar, 250, 304 n.99 Groban, Brother, 86 Guarantee Clothing, 55 Gutteridge, Helena, 98, 287 n.54 Halifax, 27 Hamilton, 26, 27, 62, 69, 89, 237; 1913 strike, 77-8 Hart Manufacturers, 278 n.58 Hart, Schaffner and Marx, 64, 287 n.49, 294 n.42 Health inspectors, 113 Hébert, Gérard, 310 n.56 Hebrew Trades and Labour Council, 75 Heller, M., 229 Helpers, 43, 44 Henderson, Rose, 73, 281 n.88 Henry, Alice, 66

INDEX

Henry, G.S., 309 n.44 Herald, The (Montreal), 30 Herron, Belva, 87, 89 Hillman, Sidney, 64-5, 125, 126, 127, 128, 132, 149, 154-5, 168, 186-7, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 287 n. 49, 294 n.42 Hillman and Sable Fur Company, 142 Hobsbawm, E.J., 282 n.98 Hochman, Julius, 122, 140, 186 Home to Work, 27 Homework and homeworkers, 6, 23, 25, 27-9, 31, 33-4, 39, 47, 57, 62, 64, 81, 82, 147, 161, 199, 259, 275 n.23, 275-6 n.25; and public health, 60, 275 n.24; as slaves, 72 Hours of work, 79, 82, 112, 116, 149, 152, 192, 195, 197, 198, 199-200, 201, 207, 208, 212, 220, 233 Hungarians, 76 Hutchison, Winnifred, 164, 182, 183, 202, 203, 205, 301 n.61, 308 n.39, 309 n.47 Hyde Park Clothing, 138 Ideal Dress, 183, 251-2, 304 n.85 L’Illustration Nouvelle, 247 Immigrants, 2, 9, 15-22, 24, 29, 30, 55, 60, 83, 88, 98, 131, 138, 184, 241, 303 n.85; anti-immigrant attitudes, 62 Immigration Act, 158 Immigration policy, 20 Independent Labour Party, 290 n.83 Industrial Canada, 25, 43 Industrial Disputes Investigation Act (1907), 111, 198 Industrialization, 8, 12, 14 Industrial legislation and regulations. See Legislation, names of individual Acts Industrial Recovery Act (US), 192 Industrial standards, 52, 199

325

Industrial Standards Act, Ont. (ISA), 157, 198, 213, 216, 219, 220, 223, 229, 231, 232, 235, 236, 237, 238, 240, 244, 257, 259, 313 n.17, 316 n.59 Industrial Standards Board (Ont.), 37 Industrial unionism, 60 Industrial Union of Needle Trades Workers (IUNTW), 132, 150, 151, 152, 158, 159, 171, 174-81, 193, 210, 216, 237, 241, 242, 243, 247 Industry and Labour Board (Ont.), 316 n.59 Inside shops, 31, 93, 144, 234 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 1, 18, 58, 61, 62-4, 67, 68, 78, 85, 86, 89, 91-4, 99, 102, 106, 108, 110, 116, 121-3, 124, 127, 130-6 passim, 140, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158, 159, 161, 163, 167, 168, 170-7, 180, 181, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 207, 210, 213, 216, 220, 228, 230-5 passim, 237, 239, 241, 242, 245, 246, 276 n.30, 285 n.9, 286 n.20, 289 n.71, 296 n.70, 304 n.93, 305 n.103, 312 n.2; Local 13, 133, 282 n.106; Local 14, 78; Local 25, 87, 132; Local 61, 282 n.106; Local 72, 243, 251, 290 n.89; Local 112, 282 n.105; Local 205, 242-3, 246; Local 262, 247, 252, 254, 290 n.89; membership, 141; New York office, 92, 99, 125, 135, 138, 139, 247; 1910 Montreal strike, 69-76, 319 n.4; 1912 Eaton’s strike, 79-84; 1937 Montreal dressmakers’ strike, 247-50, 252, 253; women members, 87, 89-90 Irish, 21, 279 n.62 Italians, 16, 21, 22, 51, 66, 88, 134, 285 n.9

326 ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE Jack Canuck, 80, 283 n.132 Jacob-Crowley Manufacture Co. Ltd, 19, 115 Jacobs, Rabbi, 83 Jewish Eagle, 21 Jewish Labour Lyceum, 55 Jewish National Workers’ Alliance, 277 n.51 Jews and Jewish workers, 16, 17, 18, 21-2, 24, 27, 30, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 96, 131, 136, 139, 140, 170, 171, 174, 176-7, 181, 184, 241, 242, 245, 246, 257, 265 n.19, 275 n.15, 277 n.51, 283 n.132, 299-300 n.34, 303 n.85, 305 n.103; blacklisting of, 176; Communists, 178-9; ‘Jewish unions’, 180; population growth, 267 n.44 Job classifications, 1, 4, 5, 10, 48, 49, 52, 96, 195, 217, 219, 222, 223-5, 226, 230-1; sex labelling in, 257 Job training, 43 Jodoin, Claude, 246, 250, 318 n.84, 319 n.108 John Peck and Company, 286 n.38 Johnson, Laura, 33 Johnston, William, 206-7 Journeyman Tailors Union of America (JTUA), 60, 107, 132, 282 n.99 Juridical extension, 208 Justice, 85 Kamarofsky, Rose, 19, 45 Kealey, Gregory, 152 Kealey, Linda, 287 n.54 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 3, 4, 15, 59, 63, 105, 135, 199, 205, 264 n.5, 274 n.13, 289 n.69 Kidwell, Claudia B., 268 n.60 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 14, 28, 30, 31, 160, 197 Knights of Labor, 59, 62

Kraisman, Sam, 163-4, 213, 230, 235, 236, 250, 297 n.97 Kysen, Max, 319 n.108 Labelle, Fred, 180 Labour Conditions in the Men’s Clothing Industry, 158 Labour Gazette, 42, 75, 105, 307 n.22 Labour law. See Legislation Labour market, 39, 56 Labour movement, 56, 57 Labour process. See Production process Labour Zionists, 242 Ladies’ Garment Worker, The, 81, 84 Landers, Samuel, 21 Langer, Hyman, 233, 234, 244, 315 n.36 Lapides, Beckie, 131, 136 Laskin, Bora, 205 League for Social Reconstruction, 158, 159, 161 Learie, Thomas, 115, 155, 165, 168, 238 Leblanc, Marie, 35, 44 Leftists, 129-36. See also Communists, Socialists Legislation, 8-11, 97, 111, 123, 157, 193-5, 198-205, 208, 236, 257, 258, 310 n.56. See also Ontario, Quebec Lenin, V.I., 175 Lesniak, Jule, 138 Lewis, George, 297 n.97 Liberal Party, 158, 197, 246 Liberman, Sam, 102 Ligue Catholique des Ouvrières des Industries de L’Aiguile, 245, 248, 249 Lipton, Charles, 69 Little Daisy Dresses, 304 n.85 Livingstone and Johnson, 268 n.58 Loi des syndicats professionnels, 210, 240, 310 n.56

INDEX

London Boot and Shoe Union, 99 Louvic Garment, 167 Lovitch, Dora, 196 Lown, Judy, 37 Lumber workers, 130 Lumber Workers Industrial Union, 150, 178 Lunn, I.M., 203, 204, 308 n.39 Mabelle Dress, 117 MacGill, Helen Gregory, 18, 265 n.21 Machinery, 108, 114 Macmillan, J.W., 122, 291 n.7 McNab, Mary, 89, 140, 204 Made-to-measure clothing. See Custom work Magerman, Abe, 185, 315 n.36 Mandel, Maurice, 252 Mandel, Soshke (Sophie), 10, 19, 46, 188, 230, 236 Manitoba, 9, 200, 213, 309 n.49 Manley, John, 295 n.66 Manley, Lewis, 117, 118 Manual of the Textile Trades in Canada, 169 Manufacturers, 6, 11, 18, 25, 26-7, 29-30, 32, 33, 36, 41, 45, 48, 54, 55, 57, 59, 71, 76, 84, 94, 97, 101, 102, 107, 108, 113-16, 118, 125-9, 137, 144-8, 149, 150, 152-7, 161, 164-71, 176, 184, 185, 187, 189, 198, 200, 204, 207, 213, 220, 222, 223, 225-6, 228, 229, 232, 235, 236, 239, 252, 253, 302 n.68; anti-union, 95, 120, 124, 154, 155, 175, 248; violations of law, 202-3 Manufacturers’ associations, 10, 106, 116, 120, 152-7, 164, 167, 169, 207, 213, 216, 220, 229, 234, 248, 312 n.2 Markets, domestic, 6; retail, 8 Marsh, F.R., 216 Marsh, Leonard, 210, 220 Marx, Karl, 26

327

Masculinity, 4, 39, 57, 255, 257, 289 n.75 Mays, Martha, 40 Men: cultural role, 6, 15-16, 101-2; as ‘the boys’, 11, 190, 234, 235; as breadwinners, 54; as spokespersons for union movement, 65, 89-90, 102 Men’s clothing industry, 9, 19, 29, 31, 40-1, 42, 43, 49, 51, 62, 64, 76, 89, 94, 97, 98, 104, 108, 110, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 126, 129, 132, 141, 143, 146, 149, 153, 154, 155, 164, 166, 169, 185, 206-7, 212, 222, 229, 235, 239-40, 311 n.75, 312 n.2 ‘Men’s jobs’, 13 Middle-class reformers, 33, 65, 71, 72, 98-9, 206 ‘Midinettes’, 71, 102, 252 Milkman, Ruth, 288 n.65 Mine Workers’ Union of Canada, 150, 178 Minimum wage, 174, 198, 200-5, 207, 218, 219, 230, 236, 257, 266 n.24, 308 n.37, 314-15 n.35; laws, 112, 161, 164, 201, 204-5, 206, 209, 258, 291 n.8. See also Ontario, Quebec Minimum Wage Act (Ont.), 316 n.59 Minimum Wage Act (Que.), 316 n.58 Monteith, J.D., 167, 212, 309 n.44 Montreal, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 35, 54, 55, 61, 62, 64, 667, 81, 86, 91-7 passim, 99, 102, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 126, 129, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 140, 143, 144, 147, 150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 163, 165, 167, 178, 180, 185, 186-7, 192, 197, 208, 211, 230, 232, 233, 236, 239, 240, 241-52, 254, 257, 259, 281 n.79, 282 n.107, 286 n.38, 287 n.49, 290 n.89, 294 n.48, 299 n.32, 303 n.85, 311 n.75; ILGWU strike, 69-76; 1934 IUNTW

328 ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE strike, 176; union activity in dress trade, 170-7 Montreal Cloakmakers Union, 102 Montreal Contractors’ Association, 316 n.55 Montreal Star, 71, 74, 77 Montreal Trades and Labour Council, 75, 246, 250 Montreal Women’s Suffrage Society, 72-5, 281 n.87, 281 n.88, 281 n.90 Moore, Sister, 137 Moore, Tom, 215, 216 Morrison, W., 167 Munroe, John, 297 n.97 Myerson, Rose, 171, 176 National Associated Women’s Wear Bureau, 209 National Consumers’ League (US), 37, 38 National Federation of Settlement Houses (NY), 17 National Industrial Recovery Act, US (NIRA), 163, 193-4, 195 National Industrial Recovery Board (US), 195 National Recovery Administration, US (NRA), 195, 196-7, 207, 222 Negotiation. See Arbitration, Collective bargaining New Brunswick, 198 New Deal (US), 193, 197, 198, 239 New Jersey, 76 New unionism, 106-8, 113, 123-8, 168, 184, 189, 193, 197, 207, 233, 237 New York, 16, 23-4, 62, 63, 69, 70, 76, 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 106, 132, 133, 134, 137, 143, 170, 186, 233, 238, 284 n.142, 295 n.68, 298 n.10, 303 n.85 New York Times, 195 Non-union labour and shops, 55, 146-7, 153, 156, 167, 182, 189, 197, 223, 229, 233, 311 n.75 Nova Scotia, 79, 198, 200

O’Brien, James, 25, 28, 30 Odell, May, 72, 75 Olin, Mrs, 75 Ontario, 4, 9, 11, 19, 20, 21, 25, 79, 143, 146, 147, 149, 152, 165, 217, 222, 228, 229, 231, 233, 238, 239, 240, 310 n.56; Department of Labour, 148, 153, 165, 167, 206, 215, 234, 309 n.44; labour legislation, 198-205, 208, 219-20; Liberal government, 213, 216; Liberal Party, 158; Minimum Wage Board, 112, 122, 166, 168, 201, 204, 206, 291 n.7 Ostry, Sylvia, 198 Outwork. See Homework Overproduction, 153 Padlock Law. See Act Concerning Communist Propaganda Paris, Erna, 284 n.149 Parr, Joy, 4 Parsons, Mrs Horace, 291 n.7 Passon-Baldock, Anita, 288 n.62 Pasto, John, 102 Paternalism, 72, 76 Patriarchy, 2, 5, 6, 7, 16, 24, 35-41, 86, 101, 104, 115, 170, 176, 254, 257, 259, 261 n.3, 272 n.110 Pesotta, Rose, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255 Philadelphia, 66, 132, 133, 140 Picket lines, 57, 68, 73, 75, 77, 82, 83, 102, 104, 111, 124, 137, 140, 143, 160, 171, 226, 241, 247, 249, 260 Piecework, 45, 46, 50, 64, 76, 90, 93, 97, 102, 103, 119, 121, 125-9 passim, 135, 136, 144, 149, 150, 154, 168, 170, 182-9, 203, 229, 230, 237, 307 n.8 Poalei Zion, 277 n.51 Polish, 22, 76 Pope Leo XIII, 208 Poverty, 36, 143, 164

INDEX

329

Quebec, 9, 11, 20, 21, 22, 98, 146, 147, 149, 152, 156, 165, 176, 197, 201-3, 204, 206, 207, 212, 213, 217, 219-20, 231, 238-41, 262 n.15, 310 n.56; Catholic unions, 208-10, 244, 245, 248, 249, 279 n.62; Department of Labour, 174, 241, 243, 249; labour legislation, 198-200, 208, 209; Liberal Party, 210, 246; Minimum Wage Board, 112, 202, 209; provincial assembly, 234 Quebec City, 99 Quebec Official Gazette, 211, 248, 249 Queen City Dress, 247

Reisch, Sadie, 140 Reproduction, 7 Retailers, 118, 156, 300 n.44, 300 n.46 Riley, Denise, 261 n.4 Roback, Leah, 176, 245, 247 Robb, J.M., 204 Robitaille, Raoul, 319 n.108 Rochefort, Candide, 315 n.36 Rochester, NY, 62, 96, 294 n.48 Roebuck, A.W., 212-18 Roman Catholic Church, 67, 210, 241 Rompre, Blanche, 288 n.62 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 193, 197, 198, 307 n.8 Rose, Sonya, 3, 5, 15, 274 n.147 Rose Dress Manufacturing Company, 145, 171 Rosenberg, Abe, 92, 285 n.19 Rosenbloom, Frank, 127, 128, 294 n.47 Rosenblum, Harry, 77 Royal Cloak, 19 Royal Commission on Price Spreads and Mass Buying (Stevens Commission), 115, 143, 147, 148, 156, 160-4, 182, 190, 193, 197, 202, 203, 213, 244, 298 n.16 Royal Commission on the Relations between Labour and Capital, 27, 28, 273 n.128 Rubin, Lionel, 25 Rubin Bros, 25 Russell, Bob, 111 Russia and Russians, 32, 46, 131, 132, 175. See also Soviet Union

Racine-Delise, Louise, 245 Ready-made clothing, 24, 25, 29, 31, 34, 41-3, 45, 65, 68, 107, 108, 276 n.26 Reconstruction Party, 166, 311 n.80 Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), 130, 179 Regent Tailors, 127-8

Said, Joseph, 117 Saint-Jean, Idola, 246 Salsberg, J.B., 150, 216 Salsberg, Joseph, 81 Samuel, Raphael, 269 n.70 Samuel Hart Clothing, 120 Sangster, Joan, 130, 139, 179 Santora, Mamie, 65

Power, 8, 52, 103, 254, 259 Pressers, 35, 70, 75, 94, 95, 140, 171, 174, 176, 184, 251 Price committees, 57-8, 90, 149, 188, 189 Price-cutting, 147, 153 Pricing, 115-16, 118, 149-50, 169 Prince Edward Island, 79 Printing trades, 52 Private sphere, 3, 5, 255 Production process, 23-4, 29, 42-5, 87, 114-17, 144, 149-50; fragmentation of, 28, 31, 32, 43, 45, 48, 108, 185; gender divisions, 6 ‘Protocol of Peace’, 106, 107 Public Affairs, 205 Public assistance. See Social relief Public sphere, 2, 3, 5, 255 Public utilities, 111

330

ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE

Sarnia, Ont., 37 Saskatchewan, 198, 200, 309 n.49 Scab labour, 76 Schlesinger, Benjamin, 58, 84, 99, 134 Schubert, Joseph, 122, 207, 229, 309 n.54, 315 n.36 Scientific management, 54, 114, 149-50, 153, 175, 183, 298 n.10 Scott, Frank R., 143, 146, 158, 161, 163, 197, 202, 203, 204 Scott, Jean Thomson, 53, 65, 308 n.32 Scott, Joan, 45, 68, 261 n.4 Seasonality, 36, 104, 114, 117-18, 143, 144, 169 Segregated workplaces, 4 Semi-Ready Company, 95, 286 n.38 Settlement houses, 66 Sewing machine operators, 29, 43, 44, 45, 53, 231, 297-8 n.4 Sewing machines, 26, 47; as a craft tool, 47 Sexual division of labour, 2, 6, 28-9, 31, 37, 40, 44-5, 48, 50, 57, 85, 91, 235, 288 n.65 Sexual exploitation and harassment, 56, 81, 98, 109, 288 n.56 S.F. McKinnon, 26 Shane, Bernard, 163, 175, 176, 177, 228, 231, 233, 234, 236, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 304 n.99, 315 n.36, 319 n.108 Shanoff, Eva, 7, 19, 46, 90, 171, 174, 176, 178, 181, 187, 243 Shanoff, Israel, 231 Shapiro, Anna, 64-5 Shiplacoff, Abe, 95 Shlakman, Vera, 21 Shop Delegates League, 132 Shop floor. See Workplace Shorey, Hollis, 25, 27 Shur, Max, 150, 296 n.71 Sigman, Morris, 134

Simpsons, 147, 156 Singer, L.M., 167, 228, 229 Skill, 4, 10, 15, 23-4, 29, 31, 41, 42, 43, 47-8, 50-2, 54, 55, 61, 64, 102, 107, 108, 111, 117, 184, 187, 194, 205, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 230, 232, 257-8, 259; access to skilled trades, 57; definition of, 52, 231; differential, 1-2, 6; gendered definitions of, 6-8, 50-1, 128, 230-1, 314-15 n.35 Slavs, 138 Socialist Labour Party, 290 n.83 Socialist Party, 84, 131 Socialists and socialism, 64, 105, 107, 131, 136, 287 n.54, 305 n.103; technocratic, 175 Social reformers. See Middle-class reformers Social relief, 142, 159 Social security, 206 Société de Saint Jean Baptiste, 67 Society Brand, 120 Solomon, Israel, 273 n.128 Sommer, Abe, 70-1, 75 Sommer, Charles, 248 Soule, George, 61 Soviet Union, 129, 130 Sparks, R.P., 148, 169 Speed-up, 23, 37, 53, 115, 149, 183, 185, 188 Speisman, Stephen, 284 n.149 Stansell, Christine, 18, 262 n.11 Stapells, R.A., 204, 291 n.7 Stapells, Mr, 166 Stephens, Margaret, 291 n.7 Stevens, H.H. (Harry), 160, 161, 166, 206, 269 n.71, 311 n.80 Stone Clothing, 135, 268 n.59 Strikebreakers, 59, 83 Strikes, 7, 53, 57, 58, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69-85, 87-9, 94-6, 102-4, 105, 106, 108, 111, 120, 122-3, 134, 136-7, 139, 140, 152, 158, 159, 160, 167, 171, 174, 197, 226,

INDEX

230, 244, 252, 255, 278 n.58, 279-80 n.68, 280 n.72, 281 n.79, 282 n.99, 283 n.110, 285 n.19, 286 n.38, 302 n.71, 313 n.9; 1910 ILGWU, Montreal, 1, 69-76, 98; 1912 and 1913, UGWA, 76-8; 1912, Eaton’s, 78-84, 99, 284 n.142; 1934 IUNTW, Montreal, 176, 247; 1937 Montreal dressmakers, 247-50, 252, 253, 255 Styles. See Fashion Sub-contracting. See Contracting Suffragists, 72-4, 82-3, 246, 284 n.142 Sumner, Helen, 269 n.63 Superior Cloak, 229, 303 n.80 Sweatshops and ‘sweating system’, 27, 30, 36, 57, 60, 62, 64, 72, 108, 119, 148, 153, 156, 164, 211, 282 n.99 Sweepers, 43-4 Szacka, Alexandra, 245 Tailors, 34, 41, 42, 47-8, 51, 60, 77, 81, 103, 185, 222, 231, 268 n.60 Taschereau, Louis-Alexandre, 197, 240 ‘Taylorism’. See Scientific management T. Eaton Company, 32, 33, 34, 35, 44, 70, 119, 140, 147-8, 156, 161, 163, 308 n.37; factories, 183, 203; 1912 strike, 78-84, 284 n.142 Technology, 29, 43, 47 Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, 17 Theorizing Women’s Work, 37 Thomas May and Company, 26 Time work, 44, 48, 64, 188 Tip Top Tailors, 268 n.58, 268 n.59 Tomlins, Christopher, 124 Toronto, 19, 20, 26, 27, 41, 45, 54, 59, 60-4 passim, 67, 68, 69, 76, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96-8, 99, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127-35 passim, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146,

331

148, 150, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158-9, 163, 165, 167, 168-9, 177, 179, 185, 187, 192, 197, 201, 203, 206, 212, 220, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 240, 243-5, 251, 253, 257, 275-6 n.25, 287 n.49, 290 n.89, 294 n.43, 299-300 n.34, 303 n.85; 1912 Eaton’s strike, 78-84 Toronto Cloak, 101 Toronto Cloak Manufacturers Association, 228, 229, 303 n.80 Toronto Men’s Clothing Association, 155 Toronto Trades and Labour Council (TTLC), 58, 81, 83-4, 112, 135, 139, 226 Toronto Women’s Suffrage Society, 82, 84 Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLCC), 58, 59, 60, 98, 99, 163, 204, 213, 215, 275 n.23, 318 n.84 Trade Union Act (1872), 111 Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), 110, 123, 129-36, 140, 150, 179, 296 n.70, 296 n.74, 296 n.78 Trade unions and unionists, 4-7, 9-10, 33, 52, 54, 56-67 passim, 73, 78, 96-7, 106, 119-23, 129, 136-41, 170, 191-2, 199, 207, 208, 216, 234, 235, 240, 258, 290 n.83; membership, 288 n.67, 316 n.50; men and women, 85, 88, 89-91, 101-2, 107, 109, 253; militancy of, 71, 152; revolutionary unionism, 130; rightwing and left-wing factions, 113, 124, 133, 135, 174, 189, 253; union recognition, 81-2, 169. See also Strikes, names of specific unions Trade Union Woman, The, 66 Tremblay, M. Gérard, 208, 209, 210, 238

332 ANGELS OF THE WORKPLACE Trépanier, Raoul, 246, 249, 251, 254, 319 n.108 Tulchinsky, Gerald, 25 Uhra, Leo, 179, 305 n.107 Ulene, John, 251, 254 Underhill, Frank, 158 Unemployed Worker, 178 Unemployed Workers Association, 178 Unemployment, 117-18, 142, 143, 147, 159, 297-8 n.4 Unemployment insurance, 133, 206 Unionization, 55, 72, 119, 123, 276 n.35 Union label, 61, 104, 107, 275 n.24 Union locals, 61-4 Union Nationale, 240, 316 n.58, 318 n.92 Union shops, 96, 120, 127, 153, 167, 169, 257, 311 n.75 United Clothing Contractors Association, 120 United Clothing Workers of Canada (UCW), 150, 299 n.32 United Garment Workers of America (UGWA), 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 92, 94, 103, 108, 132, 279-80 n.68, 283 n.110, 294 n.42, 312 n.2; New York office, 77; strikes of 1912 and 1913, 76-8, 91; women members, 87, 89 United Mine Workers Union, 130 United States, 16, 17, 26, 27, 59, 61, 76, 87, 89, 98, 100, 124, 131, 163, 193-8, 199, 213, 222, 239, 269 n.63, 270 n.89, 274 n.13, 285 n.9, 288 n.65, 291 n.6, 303 n.85 University of Toronto, 158 Value added, 8 Varley, William, 297 n.97 ‘Videre’, 45, 46 Vie Syndicale, La, 208 Vineburg’s, 120

Wages, 1, 6, 30, 31, 36-7, 39, 40-1, 43, 48, 52, 57, 58, 60, 63, 68, 70, 71-3, 77, 79, 81, 89, 92-7 passim, 111, 112-13, 118, 120, 123, 125, 126, 138, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 156, 164, 169, 174, 182, 183-4, 187, 189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 199-205, 208, 210, 212, 217, 220, 222, 226, 228, 230, 238, 239, 241, 244, 245, 251, 253, 257-8, 297 n.4, 309 n.47, 309 n.52, 311 n.75, 319 n.104; family wage, 40, 272 n.110, 294 n.47; standardized, 116, 149, 152, 229-30; wage discrimination, 232-5, 257-9. See also Minimum wage Waldinger, Roger, 63 Walkouts. See Strikes Weekwork, 93, 94, 102, 119, 121, 129, 135, 136, 170, 184, 186, 187, 189 Welfare. See Social relief Wells, W., 203 Wernik, H., 226 Whitewear, 43, 46, 99, 116 Winnipeg, 17, 19, 36, 45, 63, 115, 131, 140, 150, 151 Winnipeg General Strike, 131 Wolfson, Theresa, 87, 89-90 Women: and piecework issue, 182-9; as political subjects, 254; crossclass alliances, 98, 287 n.54; cultural role, 6; difficulty in organizing, 64-9, 98-100, 278 n.55; enfranchisement of, 65, 72; exploitation of in workplace, 57, 71-2, 98-9, 161; in unions, 87-91, 100, 102, 105, 109, 136-41, 149, 178-81, 235-8, 288 n.67, 289 n.68; ideals for behaviour, 15-16, 56; influence of on strike action, 71; in labour force, 8, 9, 10, 12-14, 19-20, 253, 277 n.47; married, 39; occupations of, 8, 13, 297-8 n.4; physical appearance of, 68;

INDEX

role of, 201-2; strike participation of, 77-8, 81-2, 260; union locals of, 63; wage-earners, 165, 200-1, 255, 258, 289 n.69 Women’s clothing industry, 9, 19, 26, 31, 40-1, 43, 54, 61, 64, 70, 110, 114-19 passim, 123, 138, 139, 140, 143, 149, 153, 154, 165, 166, 169-77, 185, 206, 212, 229, 235, 237, 240, 244, 269 n.63, 280 n.74, 312 n.2; job descriptions, 223-5 ‘Women’s jobs’, 13 Women’s Labour League (WLL), 112, 135, 139, 140, 178 Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), 81, 87, 98, 99 Wood, Alfred, 95 Woods, Bernard, 198 Woodsworth, J.S., 158 Workers’ Unity League (WUL), 139, 150, 152, 176, 177, 178, 179, 193, 212, 216, 299 n.26, 312 n.84

333

Worker, The, 142, 150, 179 Workman’s Circle, 277 n.51, 305 n.103 Workplace: control, 54, 57-8; culture, 257; social relations and values of, 45-6, 56, 66, 188; working conditions, 6, 71 Workweek, 76 World War I, 20, 25, 92, 93, 95, 96, 110 World War II, 252 Wright, Alexander Whyte, 27 W.R. Johnson and Company, 155 Yiddish, 21, 68, 74, 140, 221, 277 n.51 Yiddisher Zhurnal, 55 Young Communist League, 179 Young Men’s Hebrew Association, 242 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 164, 182 Zimmerman, Charles, 295 n.68

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THE CANADIAN SOCIAL HISTORY SERIES Terry Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty:The Condition of the Working Class in Montreal,1897– 1929, 1974. ISBN 0–7710–2252–2 Alison Prentice, The School Promoters:Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada, 1977. ISBN 0–8020–8692–6 John Herd Thompson, The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914–1918, 1978. ISBN 0–7710–8560–5 Joy Parr, Editor, Childhood and Family in Canadian History, 1982. ISBN 0–7710–6938–3

Craig Heron, Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883–1935, 1988. ISBN 0–7710–4086–5 Wendy Mitchinson and Janice Dickin McGinnis, Editors, Essays in the History of Canadian Medicine, 1988. ISBN 0–7710–6063–7 Joan Sangster, Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–1950, 1989. ISBN 0–7710–7946–X Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885–1945, 1990. ISBN 0–7710-5544-7

Alison Prentice and Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, Editors, The Neglected Majority:Essays in Canadian Women’s History, Volume 2, 1985. ISBN 0–7710–8583–4

Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy,1860– 1914, 1991. ISBN 0–7710–7283–X

Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood, 1986. ISBN 0–7710–6958–8

Mariana Valverde, “The Age of Light, Soap, and Water”: Moral Reform in EnglishCanada, 1885– 1925, 1991. ISBN 978–0–8020–9595–4

Bryan D. Palmer, The Character of Class Struggle: Essays in Canadian Working Class History, 1850–1985, 1986. ISBN 0–7710–6946–4

Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender, and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal, 1993. ISBN 978–0–8020–8689–1

Alan Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807–1914, 1987. ISBN 0–7710–5870–5

Andrée Lévesque, Making and Breaking the Rules: Women in Quebec, 1919–1939, 1994. ISBN 0–7710–5283–9

Marta Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood, and Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840–1920, 1987. ISBN 0–7710–2550–5

Cecilia Danysk, Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture, 1880–1930, 1995. ISBN 0–7710–2552–1

Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters: The Transformation of Canadian Nursing, 1900–1990, 1996. ISBN 978–0–8020–8679–2

Mark Moss, Manliness and Militarism: Educating Young Boys in Ontario for War, 2001. ISBN 0–19–541594–9

Edith Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1770–1870, 1997. ISBN 0–19–541296–6

Joan Sangster, Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law in Ontario 1920– 1960, 2001. ISBN 0–19–541663–5

Mercedes Steedman, Angels of the Workplace: Women and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Canadian Clothing Industry,1890–1940, 1997. ISBN 978–1–4426–0982–2 Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren, The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices and Politics of Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880–1997, 1997. ISBN 0–19–541318–0 Kathryn McPherson, Cecilia Morgan, and Nancy M. Forestell, Editors, Gendered Past: Historical Eassays in Feminity and Masculinity in Canada, 1999. ISBN 978–0–8020–8690–7 Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class and Race in a White-Collar Union, 1944–1994, 1999. ISBN 0–19–541454–3 Geoffrey Reaume, Remembrance of Patients Pasts: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane,1870–1940, 2000. ISBN 0–19–541538–8 Miriam Wright, A Fishery for Modern Times: The State and the Industrialization of the Newfoundland Fishery, 1934–1968, 2001. ISBN 0–19–541620–1 Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, Labour Before the Law: The Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action in Canada, 1900–1948, 2001. ISBN 978–0–8020–3793–0

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