The typesetters or compositors (printers is the usual name) in the upper photograph were among the best paid workers in the city and their union, the Toronto Typographical Union, No. 91, was one of the strongest in the city. The stonecutters pictured below were also highly skilled and well paid, but like other building trades workers, they worked only eight or nine months of the year. Both printers and stonecutters had to fight battles with mechanization during this period. The printers won control of the new linotype machines in the early 1890s and the stonecutters initially resisted, but then controlled, new stonecutting machines in the decade before World War I.
Courtesy: Metropolitan Toronto Central Library, Provincial Archives of Ontario
