Today is Labour Day. For many Canadians, this national
holiday is just the last long weekend of the summer, for others having the
first Monday of September off is a chance to catch their breath and to get
ready for the start of school, fall recreation programs and the cold weather
that is coming. For those who have to work, the national holiday is simply a
chance to get paid time and a half. Relatively few Canadians are aware that
Labour Day is a Canadian invention and that it has its roots in a strike by the
Toronto Typographical Union's 1872 strike demanding a 58 ( no - that is not a
typo) hour work week. Twenty seven other unions joined the protest. At a parade
in April, 10,000 people marched in support of the strike. There were numerous
arrest but eventually the government of the day both revoked some of the more oppressive
labour laws and changed the number of hours in a work week. Far too many of us
forget that some of our grandfathers and great grand fathers marched and in
some cases put their lives on the line so that we might have protection from unscrupulous
employers.
By coincidence I have been reading a book by Bill Waiser, a
professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan called Park Prisoners - The Untold Story of Western
Canada's Parks, 1915-1946. Unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly it is
a bit dry, lacking in human interest stories. None-the-less it is fascinating read
in that it discusses in some detail the history of how the infrastructure of
some of our best known national parks in Canada got built.
During WWl there were a number of foreign nationals (people
who had come to Canada to work and to live but were from countries that were
allied with Germany) were interred into labour camps and forced to, under very
harsh conditions, to clear bush and to build roads within the national parks. There
was no indication that these men were a risk to the Canadian government. They were
interred for the simple reason that they appeared to be not quite the same as
others. Some of the language of their
Anglo-Saxon peers demanding that they be locked away is reminiscent of the
language used by Mr. Trump and his supporters when discussing either Muslims or
Hispanic/Americans.
A decade and half
later, during the Depression the Government of Canada re-instituted the
program. On the surface, it seemed like a win-win proposal. The national parks
would get some desperately needed work done and men who were unemployed would
get the chance to work and to do something useful. In reality for many men,
especially the single men who were supervised by the Department of National Defence,
it was a horrendous experience. The men had very little choice. If they chose
to not work in the parks, they lost the right to get welfare. The conditions in
the camps (again specifically the DND camps) was horrendous with men initially
spending part of the winter months in tents insulated by bales of hay. The
clothing they were offered was inadequate, the food frequently insufficient and
the work was physically demanding (for example - clearing a road from Golden to
Revelstoke mainly by manual labour and hand tools). While the program was successful in that a
number of structures and roads were built (and are still being used today), it
is clear that program's main emphasis was to get the single men out of the
large cities were they were both draining the financial resources of the municipalities
and talking to each other about the need to protest the lack of jobs and
opportunities. The government did not want people to get together and to
organize. The spectre of workers overthrowing the government as they had done
in 1917 in Russia was still far too fresh in the minds of politicians and capitalists.
Sending them all to remote camps seemed like an ideal solution.
It didn't work. The men did go on strike in the camps, they
did talk about the need to organize and to in some cases overthrow the
government. The On to Ottawa Trek and the subsequent riots in Regina in 1935 had
its genesis in the labour camps on the West Coast. While neither of those two
events closed down the labour camps directly, the next federal election saw the
Conservative Government lose its power to the Liberals who did close down the
program.
Canadian labour history is full of successful protest/strikes
that changed how the companies interacted with their employees. Those changes
affect how we in 2016 live. The number of hours we work each week, the
conditions of employment in terms of safety, how many holidays we get and what
protections we have under law to ensure that we are treated fairly are all
there because someone fought for them, because someone thought it was important
enough to risk something to get them.
We forget, at our peril, the hard work done by those who
fought for us. As important to some people as are the sacrifices soldiers make
on behalf their country, the sacrifices made by union members are equally as
important. Virtually all of our employment rights are ours because someone
fought for them.
We should, at least once a year, take a few minutes to give
thanks.
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