Searching Strikers' Homes in Fort William's Coal Docks Section, 1909.
One outcome of the rapid expansion of shipping and industrialization at Thunder Bay was an intensification of labour unrest. For the hundreds of non-organized immigrants working in the railway freight sheds of both cities, unrest was fomented by numerous factors. Some of the factors were the low basic wage of seventeen and a half cents an hour, as compared to twenty-five cents paid unskilled labour in most union contracts; long but irregular hours ranging from eighteen hours one day, to five the next, and perhaps none the following day; a bonus system forcing workers to stay on the job until the end of the season or sacrifice the extra amount; and a daily fight for a place in the line-up for work. Between 1902 and 1912, the freight handlers rebelled against their situation by several strikes with those of 1906 and 1909 against the Canadian Pacific Railway marked by serious violence. On those occasions, the arrival of heavily armed Canadian Pacific police by train from Winnipeg provoked the Italian and Greek strikers to a shooting match at the entrance to the freight sheds (where a monument to the old Fort William fur trade post now stands). The violence of 1906 ended when Fort William Mayor E.S. Rutledge mediated the dispute. At the beginning of the 1907 shipping season, however, the C.P.R. replaced the Italians and Greeks with new immigrants; but when these men struck, the railway used its former Italian and Greek employees to break the strike. In 1909, the freight handlers struck again. While the arrival of a railway police force as a prelude to imported strikebreakers prompted a gun battle as in 1906, this time the local militia and detachment of Royal Canadian Mounted Rifles from Winnipeg were brought in to restore order.
The photograph shows soldiers searching the homes of freight handlers in Fort William's coal docks section during the 1909 strike.
