Module 2 - Addendum Lecture - Canadian Labour History PDF

Chapter 2: The History of the Canadian Labour Movement Chapter Overview The purpose of this chapter is to trace the development of the Canadian labour movement, including both the organized and unorganized portions through three stages of development: from craft through industrial to public sector...

Chapter 2: The History of the Canadian Labour Movement Chapter Overview The purpose of this chapter is to trace the development of the Canadian labour movement, including both the organized and unorganized portions through three stages of development: from craft through industrial to public sector unionism. It also considers the role of government in the development of the Canadian labour movement, the nature of political involvement entered into by Canadian unions, and the role played by international unions, or unions headquartered in the U.S. but with branches in Canada. I) The Development of Canadian Unions: A Brief Overview The Canadian labour movement has come a long way from its days as a small, locally based movement in the early 19th century. In addition to obstacles common to most Western labour movements, such as employer and government opposition, it has had to contend with a number of problems peculiar to Canada: a) Canada's late industrialization, b) sparse population, c) a high degree of outside control over the Canadian economy, and d) the fragmentation of the labour movement into separate English and French movements. But the most serious barrier of all may have been the tendency of Canadian unionists to join American-based internationals rather than unions based in Canada. During the previous 20th century, government played an important role in the labour movement's growth, primarily by passing legislation designed to encourage union growth. The Pre-Industrial Period While there is some evidence of organized labour activity, including strikes, as far back as the 18th century, such activity was rare in Canada prior to the First Industrial Revolution, which began about 1850. Most Canadians were self- employed, and even those who worked for someone else typically worked for a relative, friend, or neighbour in a paternalistic employment relationship. Union activity was strongly discouraged by harsh anti-conspiracy legislation. Those few unions which did exist often represented themselves as "friendly societies" providing members with a degree of mutual insurance against death, illness, or unemployment. Most were purely local and rarely confrontational. Labour conflict increased with the arrival of large numbers of unskilled Irish, British, and Scottish immigrants, who would often engage in spontaneous "crowd" behaviour to protest alleged employer injustices. During the 1840s, Irish canal labourers began to engage in more highly organized forms of labour action to protest against their wretched pay and appalling working conditions. Early Labour Organization in Quebec Effective labour organization developed even more slowly in Quebec than in the rest of Canada. Like other Canadian governments, the Quebec government banned unions as criminal conspiracies in restraint of trade. But its restrictions on worker protest did not end there. Public protests over high prices were treated as seditious, and craft organizations were subordinated to the Catholic Church and not allowed to play a meaningful economic or political role. Later, discrimination against Quebec workers seeking jobs on the canals and railways caused many of them to seek their fortune in the U.S. rather than in English Canada, a fact which further retarded the development of a strong movement in Quebec. Labour in the First Industrial Revolution Canada's first sizeable factories appeared shortly after the middle of the 19th century. These new establishments and the mines, railways, and lumber mills that also emerged about this time often employed hundreds of people, instead of three or four as the earlier craft shops had done. Employers now had to make profits to compete in larger markets on the basis of cost and to pay for their expensive new machinery. To do this, it was necessary to control their labour costs: the one cost most had some control over. The result was the introduction of "coercive drive" management which sought to extract the maximum possible effort from workers. Workers' response to these harsher conditions was to form craft unions, many of which affiliated with American internationals. Other key events during the "First Industrial Revolution" were the formation of "nine-hour leagues" which sought to reduce working hours, the creation of the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, the country's first national labour federation, and the expansion of the U.S.-based Knights of Labor into Canada. Though ultimately the Knights would not endure in either country, during their time they posed a significant challenge both to employers and to conventional craft unions, with their emphasis on education, political action, and wide-reaching social transformation. The federal government grudgingly recognized working people's greater political power by passing a Trade Union Act in 1872. Though the act gave unions real powers, it did remove peaceful picketing from criminal prosecution and to some extent enhanced unions' legitimacy. Labour in the Second Industrial Revolution A second industrial revolution began in Canada during the 1890s. Factories became larger and even more capital-intensive, and supervision grew even stricter and more brutal. Sensing that conditions were ripe for a new wave of union organizing, American Federation of Labour (AFL) President, Samuel Gompers, enlisted the services of Hamilton carpenter John Flett, who carried out a whirlwind wave of organizing which brought more than 100 new AFL locals into the Canadian labour movement in a two-year period and firmly set the Canadian movement on an international path. This new direction was confirmed at the Berlin convention of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) in 1902, where Flett was elected Congress president and the organization banned "dual unionism," or the recognition of a national union in an industry in which an international union already existed. Though the Berlin convention appeared to set the Canadian labour movement on a moderate as well as international course, not all union members would buy into this kind of approach. The 20th century's first two decades saw a series of increasingly violent strikes in mines, railways, and logging camps on the country's two coasts. Especially in B.C., many workers were attracted by radical unions like the International Workers of the World (IWW), which placed their faith in direct action rather than collective bargaining or politics. An Alberta coal strike would lead to the passage of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act (IDI Act) in 1907. This act provided for compulsory conciliation in essential interprovincial industries. But though the act was welcomed by most of the general public and even many within the labour movement, it did little to promote union growth or enhance unions' powers, since it did not provide basic bargaining rights or protect workers against employers' anti-union tactics. Nor did it do much to stop labour-management conflict at a time of growing international political ferment and experimentation with socialism and other radical political ideologies. The First World War and Its Aftermath Wartime labour shortages, rising prices, and a wartime government ban on employer antiunion activity combined to make the First World War a period of very rapid union growth. Angry that the government had not consulted with it, as other countries' governments had with their labour movements, the Canadian labour movement initially sought to elect members to Parliament on a labour ticket. After this attempt failed, the movement turned to radical protest and direct action, culminating in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and the launching of the socialist "One Big Union" by western based radicals. Though the Winnipeg strike caused a nation-wide wave of sympathy strikes, it proved a colossal failure in the end, as all three levels of government combined to crush it in the most brutal and authoritative way possible. For all intents and purposes, the collapse of the Winnipeg General Strike marked the end of the country's radical labour movement. The Postwar Retreat The 1920s were an extraordinarily difficult decade for the Canadian labour movement. They began with a severe depression that led to massive layoffs and wage cuts, and continued with government repression, a renewed employer offensive against labour, and deep schisms within the movement itself, resulting from the launching of confessional (Catholic) unions in Quebec and the Communist Party in Ontario. Labour During the Depression Working people were hit very hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 1933, one worker in four was unemployed, 15% of the population was on relief, and a large number of young men had been consigned to a brutal life in government-sponsored relief camps which provided inmates with 20 cents a day and room and board in return for six days a week of hard labour. In the face of these desperate conditions, Canadian working people showed surprising courage and resourcefulness. Faced with conclusive proof of the failure of conventional political and economic approaches, many began to try out a wide variety of new approaches both in workplaces and in the political arena. In Ontario, the Communists' Workers' Unity League managed to organize a fair number of furniture, textile, and garment workers despite fierce government repression. In Regina, a broad-based coalition launched the socialist Co- Operative Commonwealth Federation, or CCF. This party and its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP) would eventually become the labour movement's major political allies. By 1935, developments in the U.S. were starting to give Canadian workers some hope. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" included a National Labor Relations Act providing broad bargaining and strike rights for workers. An important consequence of this act was that it facilitated unionization of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who would otherwise have had considerable difficulty forming unions. Many in the U.S. labour movement, such as the United Mine Workers' John L. Lewis, were quick to see the potential of a new, broad-based unionism known as industrial unionism. Unlike traditional craft unionism, industrial unionism sought to organize all workers in an industry and relied on political action and mass worker mobilization as well as collective bargaining. Though industrial unionism was slower to take hold in Canada than in the U.S. because Canadian workers still lacked basic bargaining rights, American industrial unions managed to sign up a fair number of Canadian autoworkers, steel and rubber plant workers, and garment workers during the late 1930s and early "40s. Labour During the WWII Years Prime Minister Mackenzie King's stubborn refusal to grant Canadian workers the kind of basic bargaining rights American workers had won through that country's "Wagner Act" virtually guaranteed labour strife during the war, when labour was scarce and wages were controlled but prices were not. But neither a strike wave rivalling that of 1919 nor a National War Labour Board urging King to grant Canadian workers basic bargaining rights would budge him. Only the growing political threat from the left posed by the CCF induced him to change his mind. Canadian workers finally won the right to join unions and to conduct legal strikes in 1944 as a result of Order in Council PC 1003. The bill also established the Canada Labour Relations Board to administer the act. Together with the Rand Formula (1945), which put unions on a secure financial footing by allowing members' dues to be deducted at the source, PC 1003 helped usher in a sustained period of union growth. For the most part, women did not join the new industrial unions, because public sector workers continued to be excluded except in Saskatchewan; and, governments and the country's advertisers ensured that women left the defence plants and factories where many had worked during the war, to create jobs for returning servicemen. Labour During the 1950s After the war years, the 1950s were a period of quiet consolidation and stabilization for most of the country's labour movement. No longer concerned with fighting for their right to exist, unions racked up impressive gains for their members at the bargaining table, allowing them to buy cars, appliances, and other goods which working people had previously only dreamed of owning. But union members began to view their unions more or less instrumentally, and by the early "60s” membership was on the decrease, after peaking at 34% in 1958. The decade's major event was the merger of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) and the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) in 1956, a year after the two major American federations, the American Federation of Labour (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had joined forces. The decade also marked the end of Communist influence within the labour movement. While most strikes tended to be conducted much more peaceably than they had before World War II, bitter disputes at Murdochville, Quebec and Badger, Newfoundland offered grim reminders of the labour movement's stormier past. The Canadian Labour Movement's New Face The character of the Canadian labour movement changed dramatically during the 1960s. The single most important change was public sector unionization, which began with the unionization of federal and then provincial government employees but quickly spread to the rest of the public sector. With the granting of bargaining rights to the public sector, large numbers of women and professional and white- collar workers joined the labour movement for the first time. Their addition would lead to major changes in public sector unions' bargaining agendas. The "60s” were also a decade of renewed militancy in private sector unions. But nowhere was labour militancy greater than in Quebec, where the former confessional unions emerged as the leading exponents of radicalism in the province. The high water mark of this radicalism was reached with the 1972 "Common Front" strike. The younger workers entering the labour force for the first time rebelled in a different way. Critical both of management policies and their union leaders' established, often bureaucratic ways of doing things, they insisted that there was more to jobs than a paycheque and were eventually instrumental in the development of quality of work-life initiatives. Though the period, overall, was one of great prosperity, many workers didn't share in that prosperity. In hotels, factories, and restaurants, large numbers of women and immigrants continued to toil long hours, often under appalling conditions, for the minimum wage or less. A New Era of Restraint In 1974, the Canadian labour movement was in very good shape, with rising membership rates and its political ally, the NDP, in a balance-of-power position federally and in control of three provincial governments. Starting that year, however, all this would change. With the 1973-4 energy crisis and subsequent wave of inflation and unemployment, Canada's economic and political climate turned far more conservative. In 1974, the federal NDP lost its balance-of-power position and half its seats; within the next three years, it would lose power in B.C. and Manitoba. In 1975, a three-year program of wage-price controls was introduced by Prime Minister Trudeau, who had ridiculed the idea during his 1974 election campaign. The controls infuriated the labour movement and caused it to withdraw many of its representatives from tripartite government bodies. Though "normal" collective bargaining resumed in 1978, public sector workers' rights were sharply restricted. A second energy crisis starting in 1979 led to another inflationary spiral and caused the federal government and most provinces to respond with a new round of controls, this time confined to wages and directed solely at the public sector (i.e., the 6 and 5 programme). The 1980s Recession and Its Aftermath Starting in 1981, Canada entered its most serious recession since the Second World War. Many of the high-paying manufacturing and resource jobs lost during this recession never came back. Unions sought valiantly to replace the lost members by organizing workers in banking and the retail service sector, but were generally unsuccessful due to fierce management resistance. The tough economic climate led management to believe it could get away with a much tougher line at the bargaining table. By the mid-"80s, concession bargaining (where the union was forced to accept pay cuts or reduced benefits) and two-tier bargaining, where new workers were paid far less than experienced ones, had become commonplace. Life became even more difficult for the labour movement following the 1984 election of a Conservative government under Brian Mulroney, whose agenda featured: a) free trade with the U.S., b) large-scale privatization of public enterprise, c) deregulation of regulated ones, and d) relaxation of foreign investment controls. This agenda would lead to even more layoffs and plant closures, as employers sought to cut labour costs. Throughout the "80s”, the Canadian labour movement also suffered from serious internal problems, including major schisms within labour federations, breakaways of Canadian branches from international unions, and increased union raiding (attempts by one union to sign up members of another). The most serious schism was the departure of twelve building trade unions from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) over issues of the Congress' support for the NDP and partial Quebec autonomy. These unions formed their own federation, the Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL), which operated from 1982 through 1997 on strict Sam Gompers principles of business unionism and political neutrality. Other major schisms occurred in Quebec. Breakaways were caused both by a growing climate of nationalism within the Canadian labour movement and by more specific frictions such as disagreements over politics, bargaining and strike strategy, and the alleged inadequate servicing and funding of Canadian branches of U.S. internationals. The most famous of these breakaways was that of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) from the parent United Auto Workers union in 1985. Union raiding resulted from attempts by the big industrial unions to make up at least some of the membership lost through economic restructuring and deindustrialization. While understandable, it sometimes caused the labour movement serious embarrassment, as in the celebrated dispute between the CAW and the United Food and Commercial Workers over the right to represent Atlantic Canadian fisheries workers. Canadian Labour in the 1990s Major changes in the economic and political environment made the 1990s an even more difficult decade for Canadian labour than that of the 1980s. The single most important development was the formation of a North American trading bloc, following implementation of Canada-U.S. and North American free trade (NAFTA) agreements in 1989 and 1994. The trade agreements, by intensifying competition, put even greater pressure on employers to cut labour costs and led to an even greater wave of restructuring, downsizing, plant closures and mergers and acquisitions. An important consequence was the growth of atypical work arrangements (e.g. telecommuting), most featuring little if any job security and few if any benefits. The decade was particularly hard on public sector workers, who have been subject to large-scale layoffs, harder work for those who had kept their jobs, and severe restrictions on collective bargaining rights. In response, these workers staged large numbers of strikes and other public protests, including a Parliament Hill protest against the federal government's decision to appeal the Human Rights Tribunal's pay equity award. The labour movement also responded by consolidating large numbers of smaller unions into six key private sector unions and by renewed attempts to organize the private service sector Politically, the labour movement began to revisit its links with the NDP and Parti Quebecois, chiefly as a result of anger over what these parties had done to the labour movement when they had formed the government. The NDP's poor showing in the 1999 Ontario provincial election and 2000 federal election may, in part, have been attributable to continuing anger over the earlier NDP government's "social contract," which forced public sector workers to take unpaid time off. Canadian Labour at the Dawn of the New Millennium The changes to the economic and political environment of the Industrial Relations system over the fifteen years (1985 to 2000) were not merely cyclical ones. Rather, they represented a fundamental “sea change” in the way work was organized and scheduled, in employers’ and unions’ strategies, and in national governments willingness and ability to regulate their economies and IR systems. Even as the economy “recovered,” insecurity of employment remained the rule, and the loyalty and sense of mutual obligation that were once common features of labour management relations became extremely rare, with even highly profitable firms not hesitating to wield the ‘layoff axe’ to provide shareholders with even greater short-term gains. Moreover, with the formation of broader regional trading blocs all around the world, it was no longer possible to pretend that Canada could insulate itself from larger world economic developments. More and more frequently, unionized workers in Canada found themselves competing with workers in Third World countries working for extremely low wages and under appalling conditions. In addition, the new generation of workers now entering the workforce appears to have extremely individualistic values. Major challenges for today’s unions include: a) providing representation to an increasingly diverse and geographically dispersed work force, many of whom do not even have a regular workplace, b) countering increasingly fierce employer opposition to unions (as evidenced by a growing willingness to use replacement workers); and c) finding an effective political partner to help with legislation and political advocacy, whether that partner be a renewed NDP or some other party—perhaps one that doesn’t even yet exist.