THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK IN THE MARITIMES: 1867-1925
D.A. Muise
Introduction
Remnants of a once vital industrial establishment, the scores of abandoned mines and factories are proof that dozens of communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were deeply affected by the industrial transformation that followed Confederation. Only Prince Edward Island, physically isolated and richly endowed, retained its predominantly agricultural- and fishing- based rural economy. Communities like Amherst, New Glasgow, Sydney and Moncton forsook their earlier reliance on the sea and surrounding land. Their work forces changed dramatically as well. By the turn of the century, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had developed an industrial working class equivalent to that of many other parts of the country. These workers responded to their new circumstances in a variety of ways.
The Pre-Industrial Era
Struggles between Britain and France to control the northwest Atlantic fishery occasioned the founding of the region's first urban centres. By 1700 St. John's, Newfoundland, had become the focal point of British activity. After the reduction of its territorial claims to Newfoundland at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France established Fortress Louisbourg on Île Royale (Cape Breton) to protect its continuing interest in the world's richest fishery. A further half-century of confrontation prompted the founding of Halifax by the British in 1749, as a response to the menace presented by Louisbourg. Selected for their strategic positions and developed to assert various claims over both the fishery and surrounding territories, all three port towns attracted immigrants and became centres of commercial and political activity.
The Maritimes' first urban working classes emerged in these active ports. Fishermen, sailors, port labourers, carpenters and stonemasons intermingled easily with officials and arriving settlers. While we know little of the day-to-day experience of these earliest urban workers, we have some idea of their functions. Their labour gave substance to the dreams of an empire that rose and fell through the eighteenth century. Most were transient, selling their labour to the highest bidders, for given the chronic labour shortages even the unskilled enjoyed the flexibility of moving off in search of better lives. These workers pursued their own dream of freedom and security in the new world. While prospects and wages often appeared better than in Europe, town life in the turbulent port communities of the colony was fraught with seasonal uncertainty for most workers. Only the wealthy or highly skilled could hope for a life uninterrupted by periodic underemployment or outright poverty.
After its conquest of Canada in 1763 and the loss of its older American colonies only two decades later, Britain set out to integrate the Maritimes more fully into the imperial economy. Over most of the next century, the colonial interests would be subordinated to the broader objectives of imperial policy. Maritimers, like all colonists, were supposed to produce wealth for the mother country's commercial system and secure strategic commodities where necessary. Farm, timber and fish products were needed to fuel Britain's industrial transformation and to supply its needs during intermittent wars with France. For several decades after the American Revolution, Maritime producers were preoccupied with exporting fish, lumber and agricultural staples to the "Sugar Islands" of the West Indies, whose highly prized commodities were otherwise unavailable in Europe.
Most settlers arrived with little more than they were able to carry and virtually no funds. Establishing themselves often involved intense hardships. Pre-industrial labour requirements featured a complex of seasonally dictated work rhythms. Timber was cut during the winter and rafted to tidewater where there was often frantic activity on the docks during peak shipping seasons. In rural areas, where the different types of seasonal employment sometimes complemented one another, a lucky worker might hope to achieve freedom from debt and some control over his own farm or fishing gear. By mid-century almost all of the region's arable land had been allotted. Soon the existing farms proved incapable of absorbing second and third generation farm sons and daughters, and thousands of workers were forced to seek alternative employment in the region's towns and cities. Up until the last half of the nineteenth century, however, the population remained largely rural and staples commodity oriented.
In urban areas, workers often had to contend with the problems arising from the labour surpluses created by successive waves of immigrants. Skilled workers had their labour devalued as mobile and adaptive young workers, anxious for any form of steady employment, flooded onto the labour market from neighbouring farms. Shipbuilding and coal mining, which began as seasonal and generally low-skill endeavours, gradually evolved their own sophisticated year-round work forces and soon became the region's first large-scale industries. This process of developing a specialized full-time work force was to be replicated in a number of other industries following mid-century.
So long as they were preoccupied with producing staples for more mature societies, colonial economies remained vulnerable to fluctuations in the demand for their products. The addition of lumber, coal and ships to the more established fish and farm staples diversified their economy somewhat but did not change its basic export character. Shipbuilders and owners could enjoy a healthy profit from moving staples and supplying manufactured goods to settlers. They also provided employment for the thousands of men engaged in building and operating their vessels. Eventually their financial resources pushed colonial economies to the next level of development. Anxious to establish complementary industries, they began reinvesting profits from their commercial ventures in other sectors of the region's economy. Servicing the empire's interests had been a comfortable niche, but it would pale in comparison with the challenge of building a new nation. Though objectives were somewhat narrowly defined in the beginning, initiatives in the manufacturing sector would ultimately transform regional economics and politics.
The Workers' Response
The beginnings of the labour movement in the Maritimes are not well recorded. Loosely organized workers' associations appeared as early as the Napoleonic Wars, when building tradesmen, especially those working on the fortifications of Halifax, enjoyed high wages during a wartime construction boom. A certain amount of solidarity was also achieved by longshoremen, particularly in Saint John, where the seasonal nature of timber exporting put them in a strong bargaining position for brief periods each year. Ships' carpenters in larger centres occasionally organized to resist encroachment by less-skilled workers, but they could hold their ground only if the demand for their services was high. If they were badly outnumbered by workers willing to accept lower wages or if the demand for ships was in one of its cyclical slumps, they had more difficulty. Early attempts by workers at organizing aimed at some mutual protection against the risks of seasonal underemployment, job-related injuries and old age. Primarily benevolent associations offering a sense of brotherhood, they seldom attempted to set the terms of labour through collective bargaining.
Pre-Confederation unions, such as they were, struggled against virtually insuperable odds. Workers could sometimes prevent arbitrary wage cutbacks by spontaneously downing their tools, but they lacked the freedom to form permanent or effective organizations. Such organizations were outlawed by legislation modelled on British precedent. Employers could call on the military to give force to the law if workers challenged their subservient position. Governments, dominated by conservatively oriented commercial and propertied elites, responded quickly to employers' calls for help. In a predemocratic era workers had little choice but to submit, however reluctantly, to the arbitrary power and sometimes brutal force of the law. Their only real alternative, apart from open rebellion, was to tramp on to some more inviting locale, often the United States, where the promise of available work always exceeded the reality.
The Maritime labour force remained extraordinarily transient throughout the nineteenth century. It was also volatile and difficult to control, either by employers or by union organizers seeking to harness its numbers for effective collective bargaining. Urban workers, because they were relatively few in number and somewhat scattered, had great difficulty articulating any sort of class position no matter what their situation. The increasing availability of labourers from both the region and abroad combined with the introduction of new technologies to provide employers with an ever expanding labour pool. In face of this capitalist free labour market, skilled workers were forced to a collective defence of their limited established rights within the system. In the labour struggles that would ensue, Maritime workers employed many of the same strategies used by fellow workers in Britain and elsewhere in North America, for they were swept along by the ideas and practices that everywhere accompanied the process of industrialization in the latter third of the nineteenth century.
The Rise and Fall of Maritime Industries
An expansive world trade boom at mid-century stimulated staples production, offsetting the detrimental effects of the gradual dismantling of British protection for colonial products. Meanwhile, "Responsible Government" awakened new economic and social potential, as the rail road emerged as the harbinger of change within colonial societies. The failure of attempts to cooperate on the construction of an intercolonial rail road did not stop each colony from embarking on its own rail road building course. Halifax and Saint John sought railroads as a means to strengthen control over their respective hinterlands. In Nova Scotia a line completed across the peninsula in 1858 linked Halifax to Truro and Windsor. Over the following decade, it would be extended north and south to Pictou and Annapolis. During the same period New Brunswick built lines from Saint John to Shediac, Saint John to Fredericton, and Saint Andrews to Woodstock. Prince Edward Island entered the railroad game a little later, but quickly completed a line the length of the island in the early 1870s. Even before the Intercolonial Railway was finally built by the new government of Canada in 1876, there were hundreds of kilometres of railway criss-crossing the region.
Railroads changed forever the relationship between government and the economy. The subsidies and funding required to build and operate railroads committed politicians to economic involvement as never before. Looking for a means to end the insecurity of colonial status, partly because the United States refused to extend the terms of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 beyond ten years, they embraced an ambitious alternative strategy. Economic interdependence among the provinces of the new Dominion was the essential objective of Maritime leaders during the Confederation negotiation, that and a firm commitment to complete the Intercolonial Railway. Confederation would pull the Maritime economy away from its traditional preoccupation with the sea and export staples by offering a landward orientation geared to expanding manufacturing potential. Clearly this development would have enormous implications for the shaping of the Maritimes' urban work force.
In 1878-79 the recently re-elected government of Sir John A. Macdonald responded to calls for a new industrial strategy with the "National Policy," a three pronged program: protective tariffs for manufactured goods, transcontinental and local rail road promotion and increased immigration. This scheme promised to strengthen industry in more established eastern communities. Moreover, Nova Scotia's bountiful coal reserves were considered essential to the success of the plan. Hoping for a more sustained return on their investments, Maritime entrepreneurs eagerly transferred capital to new industrial sectors. The region's economy was quickly transformed. By 1885, with less than one fifth of Canada's population, the Maritimes held eight of its twenty three cotton mills; three of five sugar refineries; two of seven rope factories; both of its steel mills; and six of twelve rolling mills. Woollen mills, yarn factories, soap manufacturers, confectionaries, and furniture and agricultural implement factories gave substance and diversity to this new industrial base. The output of these sectors soon surpassed production in the staples area, especially in Nova Scotia, where most of the heavy industry was concentrated. Meanwhile, old coastal trade routes that had linked regional communities were replaced by an even more elaborate system of railroads.
Two types of industrial development characterized the region, each associated with particular geographical locations. A coal and heavy metals sector gave rise to a corridor of industrial enterprise in northern Nova Scotia and southern New Brunswick. A second zone of activity grew up around Saint John and more southerly Nova Scotian towns like Halifax and Yarmouth, the processing of imported staples for re-export, primarily cotton and sugar. The latter endeavours tended to be integrated with traditional West Indies' supply trades and were more likely to involve the direct participation of established entrepreneurs. Predicated on the assumption of expansive markets in Canada and abroad, these initiatives had little to do with developing local resources for domestic consumption. Hardly any survived the turn of the century, victims of a trend towards consolidation of production and development of excess capacity.
In the decades surrounding the turn of the century, the limitations of restrictive national markets intensified competition within the North Atlantic trading system. In its continual search for better rates of profit, Canadian capital concentrated first in larger plants and then in larger industrial centres such as Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton, where economies of scale and proximity to large markets provided an advantage. Smaller, less competitive producers were forced out of the marketplace as enormous wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer industrial giants. This process would suck the country's limited capital reserves to Central Canada, withdrawing capital from Maritime endeavours. Just as the Maritime economy was becoming integrated with Canada's, deindustrialization began to affect the region. The Maritimes' much heralded industrial revolution collapsed almost as quickly as it had gotten under way.
Any number of industries could serve to illustrate this process, but a comparatively small one is particularly instructive. By the 1880s three glassworks had emerged near Trenton, Nova Scotia, where a combined work force of between two hundred and three hundred men and boys were employed producing a wide range of items for both regional and national markets. Responding to the promised protection of the National Policy, these firms had implanted new technologies and skills in the region, making it largely self sufficient in glass products. Over the next twenty years Diamond Glass of Montreal, Canada's largest producer of industrial glass at the time, acquired each of the local companies. Though the takeovers had been accompanied by promises of expansion and modernization, all three factories were closed down shortly after, victims of a process of consolidation which would eventually strip the entire region of self-sufficiency, not only in glass products but also in most other consumer goods. The region, which, for a short time at least, had enjoyed a diversified industrial economy, became dependent on Central Canadian manufacturers, who increasingly maintained only warehousing functions there.
The core of the heavy steel and coal industry in northern Nova Scotia was not so noticeably affected. But as more and more of the region's urban industrial economy became focused in the coal and steel towns of Cape Breton and Pictou-Cumberland, even those interests came under the direct control of Montreal and Toronto based financiers.
Like the staples output of the earlier commercial period, coal and steel production was subject to shifts in external demand. The markets associated with the construction of transcontinental railroads and the opening of the Canadian West kept the blast furnaces of Sydney and the railway car shops of Amherst and Moncton humming for a time. Once that process was completed, however, they became just as vulnerable to deindustrialization as more consumer-oriented industries. The downturn in heavy industry sectors was delayed for a time by the economic boom associated with World War I. But curtailed investment, obsolete equipment and ruthlessly depleted coal reserves soon drove Nova Scotia's once bustling coal and steel industries to the periphery of the Canadian economy. This final collapse of the region's industrial capacity during the 1920s was both swift and decisive; its impact on the region's workers catastrophic.
Industrial Workers Respond
Before Confederation workers' responses to proposed wage cuts or adverse working conditions tended to be fragmented even among workers in the same trades. They almost never resulted in expressions of solidarity or sustained organization. Printers' and telegraphers' unions in the region's larger towns and cities were the exception, but their very nature made communication less difficult. Moreover these workers had highly specialized skills difficult to replace on short notice. The successful experiences of Halifax and Saint John printers and telegraphers encouraged other tradesmen anxious to resist encroachments on their areas of expertise, but early collective actions were largely defensive, springing from a desire to maintain control over the labour process. Change to established practice implemented without consultation, especially technological innovations that down played skills acquired by tradesmen through a lifetime of experience, provoked the strongest response. While these initiatives were poorly coordinated and seldom expanded the workers' collective role in setting terms of employment, they did resolve specific problems for skilled workers. No matter what their limitations, such incidents contributed something to the evolution of class consciousness among Maritime workers.
It was not until the onset of systematic industrial development that a mass union of workers emerged in the region. It developed among coal miners, where work related dangers and common cultural backgrounds forced an unusual degree of worker solidarity. Between Confederation and the end of World War I the number of mine workers increased from about eight hundred to over twelve thousand. Native-born Nova Scotians were gradually integrated into the underground traditions of old-country miners recruited earlier. These British miners had brought with them centuries old work habits, including the benevolent and cooperative societies that had developed in response to the oppressive control of the coal operators. Confrontations occurred from time to time over wage cutbacks or unilateral changes to established work practices, but no permanent organization emerged to represent the miners' views prior to the National Policy of 1878-79.
Expansion following Confederation also brought disparities in wage rates and deterioration of safety conditions underground. During the great depression of the 1870s mine operators cooperated to reduce wages and to lobby for interprovincial trade through higher tariffs. When miners at the Cumberland Coal Company mine in Springhill laid down their tools in 1879 to protest yet another wage cut, a new union, the Provincial Workman's Association (PWA), came into being. Within a year almost all the miners in Nova Scotia had joined its lodges. Although industry-wide collective bargaining on wage rates was never achieved, the PWA defended miners' rights before both industry and government with some success for the next four decades.
Robert Drummond, the PWA's first Grand Secretary, set out to reverse prevailing views that miners were a clannish, undisciplined and generally disruptive element in the provincial labour force. In the Association's weekly newspaper, The Trades Journal, he asserted constantly that responsible participation by miners in decisions affecting the industry, particularly those pertaining to mine safety and working conditions, would increase productivity and generally improve the work and life of miners. Professing great loyalty to both the industry and the rule of law, Drummond led the PWA to impressive gains in workmen's compensation and safety legislation. Unfortunately for the miners, implementation of this legislation was not always rigorous and many good regulations remained unenforced long after they were passed. On the question of the association's capacity to negotiate binding contracts on behalf of its members, considerable debate and confusion remained. The Association never pushed for industry wide power, preferring instead to deal with problems at individual mines or locales as they came up. So long as Drummond and his successor James Moffatt accepted management's definition of miners as quasi-independent commodity producers, they had to accept drastically reduced earnings during hard times. There was little scope for far-reaching collective bargaining on wage rates or other terms of employment until union leaders redefined relations to a more confrontationist position.
Because coal mining led both industrialization and unionization in the Maritimes, developments there were closely watched by the rest of the regional labour community. Basic trends in collective bargaining were usually advanced there before being more widely accepted. To cut costs, the Canadian conglomerates that came to dominate Nova Scotia coal mining after 1900 began to reorganize work underground by introducing mechanization and electrification. In the process much of the control that miners previously enjoyed was lost. Even though greater coal output between 1900 and 1914 increased skilled miners' earnings from time to time, the hard-won legislative protection and the bargaining position of the PWA were eroded. More radical miners came to demand more effective representation than that offered by the PWA. Aided by the demands of Canada's wartime economy and pressure from Central Canadian labour leaders, a long and bitter struggle for recognition finally succeeded in replacing the PWA with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1918-19.
These miners took the lead in redefining radical labour activity in the region. J.B. McLachlan, perennial secretary of the UMWA, urged all Maritime workers towards a more class based definition of their position within the regional economy. With other regional labour leaders he attempted to instil a greater awareness of workers' subservient position within the existing capitalist system. Espousal of socialist concepts marked the emergence of a powerful new voice for the region's workers. Though unsuccessful in their several attempts to achieve political representation at provincial or national levels before World War I, these new socialists effectively articulated their position among workers. More importantly they offered workers an alternative to the capitalist consensus regarding the economy's structure and their role in it.
Labour strife, endemic in the coal fields from the turn of the century onward, became more generalized in the decade following World War I when a widespread depression forced cutbacks everywhere. Workers in many sectors struggled for the right to choose representatives to bargain collectively. Among the highly skilled, labour organization had commonly been used to respond to employers' attempts to deflate their centrality to the work process. As binding contracts between industrial workers and their employers became the norm throughout North America the trend towards collective bargaining spread to the Maritimes as well. Coal miners may have been quicker and clearer in redefining relations between capital and labour, but throughout the region workers were agitating for more control over their working conditions and wages. Unfortunately this consciousness emerged just when their bargaining power was most seriously reduced by the process of deindustrialization.
Conclusion
Most early labour confrontations had been caused by employers' refusal to allow workers any role in defining the work process. Maritime workers, like workers everywhere, defended traditional practices during the formative years of union organization. Despite the hostility of employers, the number of active unions in the region expanded from only a few in the 1880s to over two hundred by the 1920s, representing all levels of skills in widespread communities. Some were but tiny branches of larger national or international unions; others integrated mainly local responses to regional conditions. Inclusion of increasing numbers of less skilled trades and occupations was a feature; this was ironical since the earliest unions among artisans were created specifically to eliminate competition from the less skilled. In spite of these trends, however, the vast majority of Maritime workers remained unorganized through to the 1920s. Apart from coal miners, primary sector workers were untouched by unions; large gaps remained in the industrial community, where groups as important as the steel workers remained fragmented and unorganized until after World War II.
That there was ever an effective region-wide working-class consciousness motivating Maritime workers remains open to debate. Industrialization after 1880 brought an almost entirely new urban work force into existence, much of it only one generation removed from its rural roots. Struggles for recognition may have been conducted in isolation from one another, but labouring men clearly began thinking of themselves as a class, however narrowly their objectives were defined. Like most aspects of Maritime life, any overall sense of regional unity was probably more apparent than real given the prevailing political and social fragmentation. Nova Scotia's coal miners redefined class relations through militant actions more than any other group. Though influential, they were probably not representative of the broader regional community, which tended more towards moderation and integration with North American norms.
Heavy industry towns, particularly coal and steel towns, were the most advanced in labour organization and sustained worker politics. From their large concentrations of skilled workers emerged a core of experienced "labour aristocrats," anxious to exert some control over the labour process and decisions affecting the general well being of their communities. Unions in these towns closely paralleled those developed elsewhere in North America during industrialization. Skilled workers in New Glasgow, Amherst and Moncton shared the same challenges and sought the same role as their counterparts in Ontario, or in Pennsylvania for that matter. Their unions affiliated with national or international equivalents. They led the drive towards the formation of national labour federations. Within their own communities, they often combined in political action to lobby for expanded workers' rights before local and provincial governments. They may not have been as successful as they would have liked, but they were prepared, when called upon, to act in concert to achieve commonly held objectives. What distinguished the Maritimes was the wide range of industrial experience within the region and the consequent fragmentation of class consciousness.
When the process of deindustrialization culminated in the collapse of most of the region's industrial base, Maritime workers lacked any effective strategy to reverse the drain of capital and jobs. The transfer of capital to other parts of the country left unions with little room to manoeuvre. When nonresident capitalists chose to close down factories rather than negotiate with workers' representatives, even well established unions were hamstrung. Coal miners faced overwhelming pressures after World War I when the British Empire Steel and Coal Company attempted wage reductions of as much as one third. The bitter sequence of strike and violence that culminated in their final defeat in 1925 signalled the rest of the community that militant unionism could not reverse the process of decline.
When the alternative to wage cuts was indefinite unemployment or relocation outside the region, those who stayed accepted reduced earnings and a diminished role in determining the work process. The result for the Maritimes was a legacy of industrial turmoil and a fractured labour movement chronically weakened by the emigration of its strongest leaders, leaving workers with a comparatively minor role in regional affairs.
