Toronto grew very quickly in the second half of the nineteenth century and the city experienced its industrial revolution. These two interrelated processes -- rapid urban growth and the coming of industrial capitalism -- transformed every aspect of Toronto society. Most historical writings view these changes from the vantage point of national politics. Urban and industrial growth were necessary to the development of the young Canadian nation, and Sir John A. Macdonald's National Policy of 1878, which encouraged this growth, was the great national achievement of the nineteenth century. The Laurier years which followed saw the National Policy mature and national prosperity prevail -- or so the story goes. In this visual essay we will consider the coming of industrial capitalism from a very different perspective. We will show how it affected Toronto's working class, who made up the vast majority of Toronto's population and were the producers of the wealth upon which economic development depended.
The Economy and the Working Class
Toronto was never a heavy industrial city like Hamilton in the twentieth century nor was its economy ever dominated by any single sector as was the case in northern Ontario mining towns. Instead, it developed a balanced industrial base which focussed mainly on consumer goods. Manufacturing of clothing and furniture, distilling and brewing, and meat packing were among the city's leading industries. In the 1860s and 1870s substantial tobacco and shoe industries existed, but both experienced a rapid decline in the late nineteenth century. The city also possessed two specialized industries, printing and musical instruments, which employed highly skilled workers. Heavy industry in Toronto was centered on the foundry and machine shop sector and, after 1881, in Massey's agricultural implements works. In the early twentieth century iron and steel fabrication expanded, and the new rubber and electrical products industries became important.
The great variety of Toronto's industrial pursuits meant that the city's working class was highly differentiated. Toronto workers ranged from highly skilled printers, moulders, and building trades workers to unskilled and woefully paid day labourers and women who worked at home and in sweatshops in the Toronto needle trades. For much of our period distinctions between workers seriously divided their class: skilled workers sometimes saw themselves as socially superior to their less skilled brothers and sisters; Protestant workers looked with disdain on their Irish Catholic colleagues; later, the English-speaking workers dismissed new Italian and Jewish immigrants as being inferior. Though often divided, workers tried frequently to unite around common goals. From the Knights of Labor in the 1880s to the industrial union attempts in the needle trades before the Great War, workers tried to create trade unions to defend themselves against their employers and to build a political movement which could win them justice in society at large.
Poverty and Working Class Life
Poverty is often attributed to unemployment, illness and death, or even to idleness and criminality. Yet in the Toronto of 1880-1914, poverty was an integral part of working-class life. Almost all workers, even the most skilled, lived in fear of it. Workers knew that only a very thin line separated them from their less fortunate brothers and sisters. Low wages contributed to this insecurity, but much of the problem flowed from two major components of nineteenth-century industrial capitalist society -- seasonality and the business cycle.
Canadian winters shut down most outdoor work. Thus from November to April Toronto building trades workers, longshoremen, and most day labourers found themselves without work. This was true for many factory workers as well. Peak seasons of production in the needle trades, for example, when workers were employed nearly around the clock, were followed by months in which jobs were impossible to find. Even the Toronto foundries and agricultural implements industry were shut down for months at a time due to overproduction.
Every winter menaced Toronto workers to some degree, but some were far worse than others. The constant ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle caused frequent periods of depression when businesses failed and unemployment rose. The years 1873-1896 are often described as "the Great Depression". This description only slightly exaggerates a very bleak economic picture. The years 1874-1879 were very bad, but then the economy recovered for a few years with the industrial burst which accompanied the National Policy tariff. It again declined in 1882 and recovered for a short term from 1884 to mid-1887. A relatively brief decline that year was followed by a surge until the dismal depression years of 1893-1896. The prosperous period that followed lasted until around 1905. Three very slack years were followed by three good years in 1909-1911. From 1912 until the middle of the war the economy was again in a slump. It is evident that the business cycle of industrial capitalist society brought workers far more years of high unemployment and distress than years of prosperity. Moreover, the fluctuations of the capitalist business cycle intensified the structural problems of seasonality and both combined to bestow upon Toronto's working class an existence characterised by a high degree of marginality and insecurity. Thus, although the Canadian economy grew from 1880-1914, Toronto workers did not share many of the fruits of that growth.
Immigration
Given these considerable economic problems it should come as no surprise that the labour movement condemned massive immigration to Canada. Workers understood that a surplus of labour in the job market destroyed their bargaining power. They also knew that many of the immigrants were so desperate that they would work for any wage, no matter how low. Thus, while Canadian manufacturers under the National Policy enjoyed a high tariff wall to protect their Canadian goods, Canadian workers were forced to compete with immigrants in a wide open, free labour market. Labour argued that the National Policy tariffs drove the prices of the goods they consumed up, while National Policy free immigration drove the price of their labour down. The immigrant experience in Canada in these years fulfilled labour's fears.
Until the 1880s immigration into Canada was largely from the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, from Germany. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and reaching a peak in the period 1900-1914, an increasing number of Southern and Eastern Europeans came to North America. Italians and Russian Jews were the two major immigrant groups in Toronto. By 1911, 3,000 Italians and 18,000 Jews lived in the city. Some of them came to Canada because of economic and political pressures in their homelands. Russian Jews from the Pale region had not been able to own land and were hard pressed by competition in their trades. Many chose a new life in a strange country over factory work in their home countries. Other immigrants hoped to spend a few years working in Canada to accumulate enough capital to buy land in the old country. The Italians, among other groups, followed this pattern. Single men migrated to Canada to work in railway construction and in the building trades. To save money they lived in cheap boarding houses. Savings were sent back to their villages and sometime a chain of migration began.
Living Conditions
Immigrants formed a distinctive sector of Toronto's working class. When an immigrant came to Toronto where did he live? The choice of living arrangements depended on whether or not the immigrant brought his family. Single men and men separated from their families often lived in overcrowded boarding houses. Many of these rooming houses were in the York and King Street area and along the rail yards. These lodgings provided unsanitary and crowded living conditions, but a certain amount of camaraderie existed among the men, who most often chose to live with their fellow countrymen.
One important immigrant community was "The Ward," an area near the centre of the city bounded by College, Queen, University and Yonge Streets. Here many immigrant families lived side by side with Canadian working-class families of British origin. In 1911 this district contained a population of 53,175 persons. Of this number, two-thirds were of British origin and one-third were European immigrants. Of the European immigrants two-thirds were listed as "Jewish", probably from Eastern Europe. Even in this immigrant area a substantial number of the working-class poor were of British origin. Immigrants represented only eighteen per cent of Toronto's population in 1921.
In 1900 over eighty per cent of the Ward's housing was rented. Social workers, reformers, and city officials feared that the problems of the Ward would spill over into adjacent areas. The Ward was overcrowded: there were seventy-one persons per acre as compared to twenty-one per acre for the rest of the city. Despite the increasing commercial value of the area, landlords were reluctant to make improvements. Many houses were unsanitary and airless; some lacked toilet facilities, others running water. Rents were increasing, especially for the four or five room brick dwellings facing the front of the street. Landlords charged twenty to twenty-two dollars per month for them in 1918. Cheaper housing of two, three of four rooms, built on the rear of a lot, could be had for eight to twelve dollars per month. These small "cottages" were often little better than shacks.
Toronto's rapid growth meant a housing shortage which hit the working-class poor and unemployed most severely. Some resorted to one room accommodations for the whole family; eating, sleeping, cooking, and socializing occurred in the same room. Others resorted to hastily constructed shacks or erected tents in backyards. Still others squatted illegally or slept in the streets.
Because of the seasonality of the job market, winters were the most difficult period for the working poor and the period of highest unemployment. Food prices were higher in the winter and fuel had to be purchased. The poor could seldom afford to buy a cord of wood or a ton of coal and therefore had to buy in smaller, more expensive amounts.
In the columns of Toronto's newspapers reporters revealed the hardships of the poor in some detail. In February of 1883, a reporter visited number 23 Lombard St. and talked to Mr. George Gloynes, a day labourer with a wife and six children. Mr. Gloynes was ill and out of work. Usually he earned one dollar a day hauling ice in the winter and doing shovel and spade work in the summer. His wife earned eight to ten dollars per month scrubbing. His children attended school. Mr. Gloynes estimated that his children ate meat (salted only) two or three times a week. He himself ate meat every day that he worked. For his house he paid five dollars rent each month. The reporter described the house as dreary and gloomy:
There were bare-stained walls, nothing more, for the cold snap had chased the family upstairs where the stove spread its warmth . . . . Not a book lay on the table, not a picture hung on the walls to relieve their dirty monotony . . . there was a terrible sameness all around, for a man with a dollar a day and six children.
In the same article, a skilled mechanic, native-born with a wife and four children, reported that he earned $1.75 a day in the summer and $1.50 in the winter. But this man estimated that he worked only two hundred days out of the year as compared to Mr. Gloynes' optimistic estimate of 313 days. This skilled mechanic calculated his income at no more than $360 per year. Of this he spent all but $39.60 on food, rent and fuel. This "surplus" had to cover all items such as clothing, shoes, medical care, furniture and other items.
In another survey three years later this newspaper calculated that the average workman and his family (5.25 persons in 1881) spent $417.75 on necessities. From a survey of 1,605 families average earnings were reported of $447.60 annually, leaving a surplus of $29.85. In these families the wife and children contributed an unspecified amount to the reported income. Of 1,605 families, 655 broke even or had a deficit. A surplus was reported by 950 families. Many families, however, could not earn $447.60 in a year. Those which did depended on the labour of the wife and/or the children. Their labour often made a critical difference to the survival of the family. Women and children provided unskilled labour and made up thirty-five per cent of the total work force in 1881, thirty per cent in 1911. The situation of the working-class family did not change much in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. The most recent research on the conditions of the working class in Toronto and in Montreal in the early twentieth century documents a dismal story of extreme poverty and marginality. Although skilled workers were somewhat more secure, they too lived lives that belie our usual, optimistic view of a prosperity shared in by all Canadians.
The Family Economy
What kind of work could women and children do? They were unskilled labourers in box factories, garment factories, boot and shoe manufacturing and cigar-making. They worked as errand boys, as shop girls, as shoeshine and newsboys. Women were employed in the sewing trades, often on a seasonal basis. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century they replaced men as clerks and stenographers for half of their predecessors' salaries.
Small numbers of married women found employment as charwomen or as boarding house keepers. An even smaller number earned money by taking care of working women's children. These establishments were called "baby farms". The children cared for were very often the offspring of a domestic servant or poor working girl who had been deserted by the father. Conditions were so appalling that the Legislature passed an at for registering the keepers of such places and limiting the number of children allowed under one year of age. The high mortality rates in these homes produced a public outcry for closer inspection and regulation. Gradually these institutional solutions were abandoned and replaced by a system of foster homes.
Contractors in the sweated garment trades took advantage of married women with children at home. Unfinished materials were given to employees who sewed them at home and were paid by piecework. Women and children had to work long hours to support themselves.
The majority of working women were single. They worked as domestic servants, shop girls, seamstresses, and factory operatives but were barely able to survive on their meager wages. When all else failed, some women turned to prostitution. Even respectable working women were suspected of having loose moral standards. Middle-class reformers deplored working conditions which threw men and women together and subjected young women to the attentions of unscrupulous foremen. Working women resented these insinuations and they upheld an ideal of "honest womanhood" based on the dignity of labour.
How much money could a women or child contribute to the family economy? Skilled men in the 1880s made nine to fifteen dollars per week depending on their trade and economic conditions. Women in the same period earned four to seven dollars in the boot and shoe factories working on the machines; shop girls started out at as little as one or one and a half dollars per week. With experience, they might earn three to six dollars. Dressmakers could earn five to seven dollars each week but the trade was seasonal. In a corset factory the wages for women ranged from three to eight dollars per week. Women who ran "baby farms" earned four to ten dollars per month for the care of their charges. In the tailoring shops during the 1890s a woman earned anywhere from one to seven dollars but the average estimated in 1896 was three to four and a half dollars. Women, then, earned half, or less, what men earned depending on the trade. In many cases women could not even earn the dollar-a-day wage of the unskilled male labourer.
Children's wages were even lower. Children employed in the box factories, in cigar-making, retail shops or garment factories earned as little as one to one and a half dollars per week. Fourteen year-old girl apprentices in the coat sewing trade were paid one dollar a week to start in the 1890s. Boys in the dry goods business earned two to six dollars per week while girls earned only one and a half dollars.
Despite the passage of the Factory Act of 1886 forbidding the employment of males under twelve and females under fourteen, some children continued to work in the factories. Child labour was not restricted in offices or retail shops. A small number of children found employment as newsboys, shoeshine boys and messengers. Known as "street arabs" these children (girls as well as boys) were often homeless, living in the streets or in cheap lodging houses. They cultivated regular customers and streetcorners and an energetic newsboy could earn five dollars in a week.
Children who did not become "street arabs" or work in the factories sometimes had to assume responsibility for the care of younger children while a parent worked. Compulsory schooling laws were not enforced. Lack of warm clothing or shoes dissuaded many parents from sending their children to school.
The working-class family was very important to the survival of the individuals involved. Women and children contributed to the family economy, often providing enough to keep the family from want. Because of the low wages paid to women and children many single parent families were unable to support themselves and turned to charitable agencies for help.
Social Reform: From Philanthropy to Progressivism
If a family could not survive in the market place, there were a number of private charitable societies that distributed food and fuel on a temporary basis. In the early twentieth century in Toronto there were fifty-five charitable organizations and over 200 churches which provided relief to the poor. Some of these groups like the St. Andrew's Society and the St. George's Society date back to the end of the eighteenth century when they were formed to help members of particular ethnic groups in hard times. Others like the Salvation Army originated in the late nineteenth century. These groups assisted those who could not survive the long winters when unemployment was the highest. In the late nineteenth century the Associated Charities was formed to coordinate charitable efforts in the city. Rather than temporary relief, the Associated Charities aimed to investigate individual cases and "help the needy help themselves."
The city provided inadequate temporary relief at the House of Industry, an old stone building located in the Ward. In the winter of 1890-1891 the House of Industry relieved 1,824 families as compared with 1,106 the year before. Men travelling from place to place could get shelter in return for chopping wood or breaking stone. A meal of tea and bread and a bath and bed were provided. Approximately one hundred old pensioners lived at the House and helped supervise the "casuals". These facilities, however, were woefully inadequate. The homeless poor also sought relief in the jails and hospitals of the city because of the overcrowding and stigma attached to the House of Industry. Charity requests received haphazard attention from the chief magistrate who delegated a city councillor to handle these cases.
The particularly severe winter of 1890-1891 led to demonstrations and protests by the unemployed; it also meant a large number of requests for relief, especially from women and old people. A newspaper reporter noted that most of these requests came from St. John's Ward, the location of "The Ward." He also interviewed a labourer and his family hard hit by the winter's unemployment. Nine years before, the man had settled in Canada after leaving England. He had a wife and six children and could not find work in the building trades. In the summer of 1890 he had been forced to tramp to Rochester because of a strike. Upon his return he could not find work and had contracted typhoid. He estimated that two hundred of his union mates were in a similar position.
The plight of the poor, the proliferation of slum conditions, and a fear of social disorder spurred reformers, ministers and municipal authorities to provide alternatives to a potentially dangerous situation. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the fear and concern of the middle and upper classes found a solution in a general reform movement known as Progressivism. Child welfare, urban reform, settlement houses, pure milk and many other reform issues occupied the public mind. Based on principles of business "efficiency", these reforms aimed at imposing a new order over social problems. Instead of haphazard charity, reformers preferred to conduct social surveys before deciding on solutions. Thus, this period 1890-1914 witnessed a large increase in the number of reports commissioned by reform groups and governments. These surveys and reports now provide the social historian with much of his source material for this area of Canadian history.
Before the First World War, however, the government was only beginning to assume responsibility for social welfare. Much of the social service work needed in Toronto was carried out by private agencies, individuals and the churches. The Methodist church was probably the most socially oriented of the churches and it was heavily influenced by the Social Gospel movement which appeared in Britain and the United States. Adherents of the Social Gospel believed that Christianity had a responsibility to address the burning social issues of the day -- poverty, unemployment and immigration. The churches set up boards and committees on social questions and some of them, like the Moral and Social Reform Council of Canada, became broader organizations which attracted professionals, labour leaders and politicians.
This ferment of fear. and concern about the effects of poverty elicited a variety of responses from the church and from reform groups both outside and within the city government. The Massey family, for example, with the aid of the Methodists, set up the Fred Victor Mission in 1894. Facilities were provided for a library, nursery, night school, medical center, and savings bank for the working class. Under the aegis of J.J. Kelso, the Children's Aid Society of Toronto was formed in 1891. The Society sought to care for neglected and homeless children and juvenile offenders; it also tried to enforce compulsory schooling laws. Social concern in the student Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) led to the founding of university settlement houses in the early twentieth century. Settlement houses tried to provide a range of services to the working-class poor in their area. These ameliorative agencies represented only a fraction of the groups that existed in this period. Temperance groups, prisoners' aid associations, humane societies and countless varieties of reform groups mushroomed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Reform groups benefitted from the emergence in the late nineteenth century of national women's organizations. The National Council of Women, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and numerous church groups provided support for the refurbishing of the urban and industrial environment. Concerned with the apparent and growing social chaos of the cities and the nation, these middle-class women agitated for many of the social welfare schemes that later became governmental responsibilities. As a result, women began to enter into settlement work, librarianship and public health.
Working Class Response
Ameliorative efforts by the Canadian middle class, no matter how worthy their aims, had mixed results at best. Moreover, it should be remembered that most of the reform schemes - Factory Acts, Workmen's Compensation, and later Unemployment Insurance, health insurance, and other welfare schemes - reflected early trade union demands. These social reforms have not transformed Canadian society in any basic way but they have marginally improved the lives of many working Canadians. This we owe to the struggles of the early working-class movement.
This essay has emphasized the marginality of Toronto working-class life. Yet, Toronto workers, even in the face of these adversities, not only managed to live but also built strong institutions and struggled against the system that oppressed them. There can be little doubt that the working-class family was the important base upon which all else was built. Not only was it a viable economic unit which provided defense against seasonality and periodic depression but it also provided an extensive potential network of aid and fulfilled many human needs.
Along with family ties, working-class people built neighborhood ties which also furnished aid in difficult times. This was especially true among workers who enjoyed sufficient stability to avoid the excessive moving which typified working-class life. Ethnic ties were also important sources of moral and economic support as groups like the Emerald Benevolent Association (Irish Catholic) and the Finnish Organization of Canada demonstrated.
Thus, out of the very adversity of their lives Canadian workers constructed traditions of mutuality and fraternity which they then carried into their major institutional creation - the trade union movement. Trade unions have emerged in all industrial capitalist societies as institutions of working-class defence and self-help. The first unions combined their wage bargaining functions with an extensive benefit system for members in case of unemployment, sickness or death. Carpenters and printers formed the first Toronto unions in the 1830s but with the coming of the railway and its companion, industrialization, other skilled workers embraced trade unionism. In the 1870s Canadian trade unionism formed its first national organization, the Canadian Labour Union (C.L.U.). Toronto workers took the lead in its creation using their own Toronto Trades Assembly (T.T.A.) as a stable base. The depression of the 1870s destroyed both the T.T.A. and the C.L.U. but the workers reunited with economic recovery in the early 1880s and formed the Toronto Trades and Labor Council (T.T.L.C.) in 1891 and the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (T.L.C.) in 1893. Again Toronto workers took the initiative in the creation of the T.L.C.
The city centrals (T.T.A. and T.T.L.C.) and the national groups (C.L.U. and T.L.C.) played an active role in lobbying the provincial and federal governments for legislation to aid workers. In the 1870s this fight won workers the right to form unions (1872), the right to strike (1875, 1876) and a new equality with their employers under the law of contract (1877).
The first unions involved only skilled workers but in the 1880s a new philosophy of trade unionism emerged. The Knights of Labor, an American organization which believed in organizing all workers without regard for sex, race or skill level, arrived in Canada and swept Toronto workers into a frenzy of organizational and political activity. Although the Knights suffered many defeats in the late 1880s, they had established a tradition of all-inclusive organization that was never lost by Canadian workers.
Lobbying for government reforms and providing benefits for their members were important functions of trade unions. However, their most important role was the struggle with the employer for control of working conditions and wages. Toronto workers fought more than 400 strikes in the years between Confederation and the Great War. Without these struggles their lives would have been far poorer and even less secure.
Some workers went beyond trade unionism and decided that only through working-class political activity could they achieve their broader aims of social justice in Canada. From their initial halting steps in the 1870s and 1880s emerged a socialist political tradition in Canada which, until the 1920s, was dominated by Marxist political thought.
Toronto workers played a crucial role in all these developments from the first unsuccessful independent labour campaigns of 1883, 1886 and 1887 to the early years of the Socialist Party of Canada and the Social Democratic Party, which enjoyed some electoral success in Toronto before World War I. Despite insecurity and misery, the working class created a stable trade union movement and commenced political activities which promised a world organized on the basis of equality not greed.
Poverty was not an aberration of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Canadian society. Caused by neither individual failure nor bad luck, it existed at the very core of industrial capitalist society. Working-class people have always lived in fear of it. Canadians often congratulate themselves for their varied social welfare schemes yet these programmes only hide poverty's worst blights. No capitalist society, no matter how prosperous, has been able to abolish poverty. Canadian workers, who through their unions and political parties have fought and continue to fight for a society organized on a collectivist basis, have kept a social alternative before us.
