Even though they are thought of as a single region, the three prairie provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, exhibit tremendous geographical variety. There are natural contrasts between their plains, mountains, forests and deserts, and their historical development has maintained huge areas of sparsely populated wilderness while also producing bustling commercial centres. Before World War I, the character of the workforce also differed from province to province. In 1911, for example, agriculture employed 64 percent of Saskatchewan workers, and only 39 percent of Manitoba workers; and as Saskatchewan's population became increasingly rural, Manitoba's grew increasingly urban. Manufacturing employed 8.4 percent of workers in Manitoba but only 3.2 percent of those in Saskatchewan. The ratio of rural to urban population was stable in Alberta, a province where logging also served an important function in the economy.
While important differences existed, certain generalizations can be advanced about the Prairies and its workers. Once the railway was completed from Central Canada to the West, wheat was the agricultural staple that permitted the settlement and continued development of the region. Though the seasons and the fortunes of a one-crop economy largely determined the experiences of this society of newcomers, the Prairies represented virtually unlimited opportunity during the economic "boom" that lasted very roughly from the mid-1880s to World War I.
During the summer when workers were engaged in long hours of frenzied activity, labour shortages were chronic in all sectors of the prairie economy. Although efforts were made to increase the efficiency of production through technological improvement, immigration was the device ultimately selected to satisfy the immediate demand for more workers. Federal, provincial and local governments recruited immigrants by portraying the Prairies as a region of abundance. The availability of land, resources, and the possibilities for employment were advertised; consequently, male and female workers were attracted by what they perceived as a chance for self-improvement. They came from abroad in the belief that imagination, sacrifice, and hard work would free them from the dismal and exploitative environment they had known. The mystique of the Canadian Prairies was its newness and its promise of prosperity and prestige.
Into the society that emerged on the Prairies, these immigrants introduced the ideas, practices and experiences of their homelands. While these had many practical applications, they were also the source of confusion, division, hostility and conflict. When it became apparent that an instant fortune eluded all but a very few, the remainder found solace and support in their own ethnic community while gradually adapting their cultural baggage to new circumstances.
One of the realities of prairie life was that the wheat economy imposed a seasonal rhythm upon workers so that during the harsh winter, wage-earning prospects were limited. Gradually, a significant proportion of workers came to see themselves as part of a class distinct from their employers. They recognized that there were others in like circumstances, and this awareness became crucial to the development of a uniquely western Canadian working class which, especially after World War I, expressed itself as both a social and political force.
First Prairie Workers
The commercial exploitation of natural and human resources began on the Prairies with the activities of the Hudson's Bay Company whose sole objective was the profitable pursuit of the fur trade. A British-based monopoly, it dominated its competitors by early in the nineteenth century; as the region's first employer, it hired local as well as imported workers. At its posts scattered throughout the Rupert's Land territory, mostly British employees were engaged in a variety of tasks associated with the collection, packaging and transport of furs. A larger number of common labourers, some from Europe and many from the local Indian and MΘtis populations, performed dull and difficult work for the company under spartan living conditions. Having few other options, these men generally remained with the Hudson's Bay Company until retirement. The company assumed no responsibility for their welfare once they were no longer employees.
Railway Workers
A more systematic exploitation of prairie resources followed Confederation when considerable efforts were initiated to improve communications between Central and Western Canada. The National Policy, with its emphasis on western settlement and transportation, became a vehicle for western integration. Between 1880 and World War I, the railways employed a sizeable percentage of migrant workers as three transcontinental main lines and countless branch lines were constructed. For the immigrant, railway work was often a first job taken to finance another endeavour, usually homesteading.
Railway construction involved jobs ranging from menial tasks to highly skilled work such as that done by surveyors and engineers. Immigrant "navvies" provided the brawn for pick and shovel jobs, whereas the better positions were generally held by those who spoke English. All were subjected to long hours and the extremes of the prairie climate. Accidents were frequent, especially in the mountains where men were killed and injured by rockfalls and the misuse of explosives. Work camps consisted of tents, rough temporary bunkhouses or residential boxcars. Complaints of overcrowding, poor food and inadequate sanitation fell on deaf ears. In the estimation of Canadian Pacific Railway President Thomas Shaughnessy, "Men who seek employment on railway construction are, as a rule, a class accustomed to roughing it. They know when they go to work that they must put up with the most primitive kind of accommodation." Any protest by the men in the form of work stoppages was easily controlled in the isolated work camps. If necessary, police intervention was used to protect the companies' work schedules from interruption.
Although living conditions were bad and the work was hard and dangerous, wages for railway construction appeared attractive. Yet when the companies deducted charges for room and board, blanket rental, transportation to and from the job site, and medical expenses, the worker had little left at the end of the construction season. When it ended in early winter, the men were dismissed and left to drift to other jobs.
Compared with construction, railway maintenance was less dangerous but it also employed fewer people. The work still involved wrestling with ties and track and shovelling countless cubic metres of ballast, but the men usually worked directly for a railway company rather than a contractor. Living conditions tended to be better as most maintenance workers were able to return to their homes and families each evening.
For hundreds of service and shop workers the railway station or the roundhouse became the centre of their working lives. Usually residing within walking distance of the railway tracks, ticket agents, baggage handlers, express employees and clerks operated out of either small centres with a single station or major divisional points such as Winnipeg or Calgary. In the larger places, shop craft workers like boilermakers, machinists and carpenters were among the thousands employed by the railroads.
Workers in the running trades, including firemen, brakemen and conductors, improved their situation through the development of strong unions, but it was the engineers who smugly considered themselves the elite of the railway workers. Because of the skill and responsibility required by their work, they attained well paid and relatively secure positions through a high degree of organization.
Agricultural Workers
Despite their importance to the economy, seasonal agricultural workers, like the navvies, were considered a necessary evil. Agriculture was the region's primary industry, but farmers viewed farm labour as simply another contributor to the cost of wheat production. Since agriculture was only labour intensive in the spring and fall, comparatively few farm employees were engaged full-time. According to the 1911 census, there was only one farm hand for every four prairie farm owner / managers; moreover, we do not know how many of these were full-time. Immigrant homesteaders relied on their immediate families to keep costs down; therefore permanent farm help was usually kept only by the better established, English-speaking farmers who held more land. (For the role of children as agricultural labourers see Canada's Visual History, Volume 32, The British Child Migration Movement.)
The wages received by the farm hand seldom reflected his skills. Requiring knowledge of the care of livestock, and not only the operation of horse-drawn machines but also the new gasoline-powered devices, a farm hand's work involved long hours in an isolated environment. Working full-time on a farm was often endured just long enough to perfect farming techniques or until more satisfactory employment could be secured.
Farmers' wives contributed significantly to prairie farming without financial remuneration. In 1911 women were still outnumbered three to two by men and were therefore in great demand as companions and to bear children. Young farmers also recognized that the tending of livestock and poultry by farm wives made it possible to expand farming operations. Continental European homesteaders were noted for their assumption that women could toil as long and as hard as men while also fulfilling all the domestic duties associated with the home and children. Sufficiently well-established English speaking farmers hired domestic servants or home help for their wives; but the demand for these young women always exceeded the supply.
In Manitoba, for example, there were at least two vacancies for each of the five thousand domestics working there in 1908. In conjunction with various church groups, federal and provincial governments responded to this demand by undertaking vigorous recruitment drives. Such concerted efforts brought many women to the Prairies, but like the farm hands, they often rejected the low wages (in 1914, $15 to $21 per month plus board), isolation and boredom of the farm. Since most came from urban centres in Britain, they were attracted to prairie cities by shorter hours, better wages, more comfortable accommodation and greater social opportunities.
The overwhelming majority of farm workers were employed seasonally or part-time. Some short-term tasks, such as bush cutting, stone picking or fence building, were poorly paid, whereas those associated with the harvest were well rewarded. Many urban workers lacking year-round employment depended on money earned during the harvest to support them through the winter. Even railway construction sometimes approached a standstill as workers abandoned it in favour of the harvest.
The successful recruitment and distribution of thousands of harvesters was critical to the economic well-being of the entire region. Cities were scoured for available men, and railway companies ran special harvest excursions from Ontario, QuΘbec and the Maritimes to meet the demand. In the peak year of 1911, thirty-three thousand came to the Prairies by harvest train. The call for harvesters also went to the United States and Great Britain with over fifteen hundred coming from the latter in 1906. Money was the magnet.
The need for haste in harvesting prairie crops meant that farmers were prepared to offer several times the prevailing wage to attract able-bodied help. Job qualifications consisted of strength, endurance and enough common sense to keep out of trouble. Tedious and exhausting, the harvesters' workday stretched from sunup to sundown, six days a week, with workers moving from farm to farm as needed. Once the sheaves of grain were stooked and the weather began to deteriorate, many harvesters departed. Those that stayed were attracted by the still higher wages offered for the more skilled job of threshing which had to be performed under the ever-present threat of the onset of winter. Provided bad weather had not inflicted long periods without work and the threshing had not been delayed until spring by winter closing in too quickly, most men returned home satisfied with their earnings when the harvest was over in October or November.
Workers in the Lumber Industry
Men who did not return east for the winter or who did not drift into the prairie cities often moved north to the lumber camps. A voracious construction industry intent on creating towns and cities overnight saw up to three thousand men in the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, area alone produce 177,000 cubic metres (75,000,000 board feet) of lumber in the year 1908. Given the bitter northern climate with temperatures of -30 to -40C for weeks on end, lumbering was difficult and dangerous. Restricted by heavy clothing, lumberjacks felled trees in deep snow. Even though the winter workdays were shorter, most looked forward to the return of spring and the end of isolation.
Some migrant workers may have been familiar with the ways of camp life, but for the novice the bunkhouses built by the lumber companies offered crude comfort. While they barely kept out the cold, the air inside was heavy with the smell of dirt, smoke and unwashed clothing.
Miners
Many prairie workers sought winter employment in mining with the result that each spring there was an exodus of workers from mining towns similar to, but not as great as, that from lumbering camps. Migrant workers participated in mining, but the majority of seasonal miners appear to have been homesteaders living in the vicinity of the mine.
Three out of four coal mine employees worked below ground where the work place was a cramped "room" prone to cave-ins and explosions. Boys aged ten to seventeen were employed as slate pickers, greasers, coal car switchers and pick carriers. Considering that the industry was continually plagued by shutdowns and that the probability of miners contracting "black lung", a respiratory disease, was high, their remuneration was modest. The highest wages were earned by contract miners who were paid according to the amount of coal they mined. They were the elite professionals of the mines.
Three quarters of prairie miners worked in Alberta in such places as Lethbridge, Drumheller, Edmonton and the Crow's Nest Pass. There, in 1914, over eight thousand miners produced almost four million metric tons of coal to fuel the trains and heat prairie homes. Although the mines tended to be located in the most beautiful locales, the scene the miner and his family confronted above ground was often as dismal as his place of work.
Mining towns invariably featured small, uniform, company-owned houses for married men and bunkhouses for single men. Ugly utilitarian buildings clustered around the pithead in a landscape composed of mountains of mineral waste. Inescapable was the company store, that exploitative institution to which almost every miner owed his soul because there was nowhere else to shop.
Surprising because of the hazardous working conditions and undesirable surroundings, prairie mining communities were relatively stable prior to 1914. Compared with the numerous and protracted coal mining strikes in British Columbia and the Maritimes before World War I, overt expressions of discontent were rare on the Prairies.
The Urban Experience
Single men in particular were attracted to the cities. One disgruntled farmer, unable to keep help, complained:
The cities were bright; there were people, moving picture shows, taverns, music halls, churches, life and electric light. There was work in the city at good wages; and the hours of such work were regular, just so many hours per day. Evenings and Sundays were for pleasure and self indulgence.
By 1911, 36 percent of the prairie population lived in the cities and towns which provided goods and services to the surrounding countryside. As the principal urban centre, Winnipeg served the entire region, while Saskatoon, Regina, Moose Jaw, Edmonton and Calgary met local needs.
For migrant workers, the city was a recruitment point for railway, bush and farm work as well as a social refuge from rural isolation. But, while winter on the farm might be a time of rest for the single unskilled worker, winter in town could mean unemployment. An easy life was not assured, as numerous city residents also found themselves out of work at that time of year. Competition was fierce and the hostility towards non-residents intense. If a migrant was not lucky enough to find short-term employment, he had to stretch his summer savings as best he could. The alternatives, soup and prayer at the Salvation Army hostel or municipal relief until spring, were humiliating.
Language as well as skill determined not only the remuneration and status of the prairie worker but whether or not he might be rehired once work resumed in the spring. While most "foreigners" came to farm, many were obliged to earn money first in lumbering, railway construction or in industry. When in the city to find work, non-English-speaking people tended to seek each other out with the result that most prairie cities developed ghettos of Eastern and Central European immigrants, the most well-known of which was Winnipeg's North End.
Unfamiliar with Canadian customs, such immigrants were vulnerable to exploitation and anti-immigrant abuse; and, after 1913, when the economy began to decline, many were dismissed from their jobs. Newly arrived Englishmen, distinguishable by accent and clothing, were resented because they were more favourably received and tended to be better off. However, non English speaking immigrants often discovered that placing their trust in their own ethnic community did not ensure immunity from the pitfalls associated with getting established in a new country. Newcomers could be easily taken advantage of by people who spoke the same language. Unscrupulous labour contractors and con men saw them as easy prey, and many immigrants found themselves paying exorbitant rents for ghetto accommodation. Overcrowding and inadequate sanitation facilities promoted disease in such districts with the smallpox epidemics in Edmonton and Winnipeg in 1904 being the most striking examples.
The urban expansion which occurred before World War I created jobs for forty-five thousand men in 1911. Employed as bricklayers, masons, carpenters, painters, paper hangers, plumbers and boilermakers, men who worked in construction were generally well paid due to the demand for their services. Their earning potential must be qualified, however, as the work tended to be seasonal. Reflective of the boom were the large number of firms dedicated to meeting the apparently insatiable demand for construction materials. Sash and door factories and brickyards, for example, all employed half a dozen men or more in production and sales.
Manufacturing employed thirty thousand men (or 5.4 percent) of the prairie labour force in 1911, but compared with Central Canada the manufacturing capacity of the Prairies was never great. Winnipeg was the only centre producing hundreds of products from engines and musical instruments to harnesses and overalls for the prairie market. Other prairie centres concentrated on processing agricultural products. Tanneries, abattoirs, creameries and flour mills employed hundreds of people when there was a demand for their products and when farmers could supply the raw materials.
Women in the cities worked in semi and unskilled occupations as store clerks, dress makers, milliners, waitresses, cashiers, laundresses and kitchen help. Some were employed in small factories producing commodities such as garments, cigars and chocolates. For a fifty to sixty hour work week, a mature woman received between $6.50 and $12.00 in 1914. Girls under twenty-one received less on the assumption that they lived at home, and the wages of restaurant workers took into consideration "free" meals taken at work. Even women in the best paid professions, such as teaching, earned far less than the average male labourer and only about a third of what a skilled tradesman could make on construction. Relatively few had the opportunity to train as nurses and teachers, and the numbers of "clean" jobs, such as working for the telephone company, were limited.
Most workers' pay envelopes provided only enough for shelter, basic meals and modest clothing. Many families relied on backyard gardens or meat and vegetables supplied by farming relatives to supplement what they could buy. With the help of family, neighbours, friends, church agencies and, if necessary, municipal relief, workers and their families made do to the best of their ability.
Every able-bodied individual over the age of fourteen was expected to work; unemployment was viewed as a personal disgrace. While on the job, workers were expected to toil quickly and continuously with few breaks. Hours of work ran from eight in the morning to six in the evening, either five and a half or six days a week. Rest periods were at the discretion of employers who considered idleness tantamount to ungodliness. To avoid on the job hazards, employees had to be skilled and alert as few regulations governed industrial health and safety. Compensation was not available until after World War I, and personal misfortunes such as injury or prolonged illness could be economically devastating. Under such circumstances, older children might be forced to enter the labour market by leaving school early.
At least on the Prairies the soot and grime of the older industrialized areas, and their attendant health and social problems, were absent. DesPite the clamouring of the three provincial governments for more industry to break the seasonal dependence on agriculture, the Prairies remained an area with few large factories.
In the hope of improving their lot, prairie workers typically drifted between farming and city jobs. Moving to seemingly greener pastures was an easy escape route from the frustration of urban life when the frontier and the farm were at one's doorstep. After being highly mobile for several years, most came to realize that significant social and economic improvement was not within their grasp, and eventually they settled either in the country or the city.
Development of Working-Class Consciousness
Except for Winnipeg, urban areas on the Prairies were small, and the sparse population between them made it doubly difficult for workers to seek and find a common ground. This was only one of the obstacles to the development of a cohesive working class. The nature of the prairie environment and its people created almost as many tensions between workers as it did between social classes.
Communication among the newly arrived was difficult because of the number of languages spoken; consequently, establishing worker strength through unionization was virtually impossible on some jobs. Continental European immigrants were so eager to work, moreover, that they were willing to accept a lower standard of living than those who had been in the Prairies longer. Migrant agricultural workers had a limited commitment to their jobs if not to the region, and some workers, especially recent immigrants, still clung to their belief that the Prairies would provide them with a bright future. The workers were difficult to organize, therefore.
When even landowners periodically worked for others to raise necessary cash, fixed social roles were less apparent than they had been in the old country. Moreover, distinctions recognized elsewhere were reduced by the arrival of many on the same social and economic footing, and people were judged more on merit than on family background, a tendency which baffled those accustomed to a more structured class system.
Despite this homogenizing force, the contrast between the lives of workers and their employers became more apparent as prairie towns and cities cast off their frontier appearance and assumed an air of stability and permanence. The commercial elite built substantial dwellings on secluded tree-lined streets commanding the best views in the community. They joined golf, country, polo and businessmen's clubs where they arranged the affairs of all to their own advantage. They supported mainly the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, had their names in the social columns, and accumulated material objects, automobiles and summer homes befitting their status in the community.
Workers' small houses were crowded together on narrow 7.6-metre-wide (25-foot-wide) lots measured out by rapacious land developers. Unable to afford cars, the majority of workers lived close to their jobs in the industrial part of town where land was cheaper and the sound of train whistles and shunting boxcars continued day and night. In these working class neighbourhoods with their gravel streets and wooden sidewalks, it was pool rooms, hotel beer parlours, schools, churches, stores and playgrounds that became important meeting places.
While environment and lifestyle expressed the social and economic gulf between employer and employee, these differences were also felt in the work place where employers made paternalistic gestures to bridge the gap rather than offering wage increases or other benefits. Company sponsored picnics for employees and their families, company supported sports teams, Christmas parties, and year-end bonuses were all provided by employers as acknowledged business undertakings designed to buy worker loyalty to the firm.
Without any real improvement in the situation of prairie workers, an awareness of belonging to a distinct class gradually developed with the help of certain traditional working class institutions imported to the Prairies early, particularly from Britain. Popular sports such as soccer, and later baseball, provided a common denominator for working people and were inexpensive to play. Similarly, the Orange Lodge and the Sons of England attracted working-class membership, which later shifted to the Oddfellows, the Moose and the Elks, their American counterparts.
Trade-Union Activity
Real worker solidarity sometimes emerged when ruthless employers challenged the dignity of their employees. Desiring to protect themselves against low wages, poor working conditions, long hours and other mistreatment, railway workers were one of the first groups to organize. The militant actions of those hired to construct the main transcontinental railway across the Prairies in the 1880s often faltered and died, however, when strikebreakers and mounted police were brought in to keep construction going.
Somewhat more successful were the attempts of prairie miners to organize and press for better wages and conditions. They had the advantage of greater stability and skill in their work; moreover miners brought with them a class consciousness which already had been developed in Europe or the United States. The Western Federation of Miners, which first cut its teeth in labour wars to the south, and later the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), successful in Lethbridge and the Crow's Nest Pass fields, both realized gains for prairie miners, but only at the price of strikes and violence. A lengthy UMWA organizing campaign in southeast Saskatchewan's less valuable coal fields produced frustration in its confrontation with the operators and politicians, and, ultimately, failure in the courts in 1907-8.
Cities were the primary centres of trade-union activity on the Prairies, but labour unrest there never rivalled the protracted disruptions which characterized British Columbia's mines and labour camps in the pre-World War I era. Large scale resource industries played a lesser role in the prairie economy; therefore skill served as the basis for union strength enjoyed by that region's railway brotherhoods and crafts locals. They were organized under the umbrella of the central Canadian based Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, which often provided the organizing talent and money to get unions started.
Prairie unions tended to be more conservative in their pursuits than the mining unions to the west. Locals concerned themselves mainly with improving the material lot of their membership. Driven largely by simple self-interest, urban unions sometimes found themselves embroiled in jurisdictional disputes with other unions at the work place. Regardless of affiliation, however, union locals served as mutual insurance and death benefit societies, as fraternal organizations and as social meeting places for kindred souls.
By 1910, most union members were in contact with the entire North American union movement through international journals or local publications such as The Voice from Winnipeg, Labors Realm from Regina, and the Bond of Brotherhood from Calgary. These papers borrowed from other labour papers and contained lengthy columns of commentary on matters of importance to believers in the class struggle and the socialist alternative. Clearly, some unionists felt it was necessary to transcend the immediate "bread and butter" issues if the situation of workers was to be improved. Unionists formed branches of the Socialist Party of Canada in the cities, and in the Crow's Nest Pass mines the Social Democratic Party drew support from workers, especially those from the Ukraine.
In an effort to wrest control of government from businessmen and developers, labour candidates ran in municipal and provincial elections. Increasingly reluctant to rely only on lobbying to bring about labour sensitive legislation, unionists and workers did manage to elect some labour or socialist representatives to civic bodies and the provincial legislatures of Alberta and Manitoba. The political results never equaled the effort expended, however.
Union leaders made every effort to demonstrate to the rest of the community that the labour movement was a serious and growing force in prairie society. The yearly Labour Day celebrations included a parade, sporting events and a grand ball as the showpiece for each city's organized workers.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century then, the growth of unions indicated that a genuine class consciousness had developed among prairie workers. When the militia was used in Winnipeg against striking street railway workers in 1906, the connection between the role of the state and its support of capital became apparent to many workers. In the years between the opening of the Prairies by the railway and the start of the First World War, harsh actions by anti-union employers also contributed to the awareness that, by definition, workers constituted a distinct and less privileged segment of prairie society. Union expansion in the buoyant economy after the turn of the century attested to a growing self-assurance among organized workers.
The Working Class as a Social Force
Prairie society was a synthesis of the old and the new. Immigrants hungry for freedom inevitably brought many old ways to the new land, but the heady atmosphere before 1913 created a permanent view of the Prairies as a place where there was both the opportunity for financial gain and where innovative and sometimes radical approaches to problems could be entertained unfettered by convention. In time it became apparent that the fate of the region and its workers was inextricably bound to the vicissitudes of the wheat economy. Outside industrial, financial and political forces played with the fortunes of the region, while the toil of both farmers and workers went to fuel the industrial capacity of Central Canada.
When the depression of 1913 wiped out many of the gains made earlier by organized workers, numerous locals collapsed and union membership declined. Some workers found themselves no better off than when they arrived on the Prairies, still chasing seasonal jobs wherever they existed or facing lengthy periods of unemployment. The majority, however, had enjoyed at least some improvement in the quality of their lives in the quarter of a century during which the rough edges of frontier life had been rounded off. They had more of the amenities possessed by workers elsewhere in the country, as well as many of the same problems.
While their motives and aspirations may have resembled those of workers in other places, prairie workers could not help but be aware of the effect the local environment had on their lives and attitudes. From the start, economic, social and geographic realities militated against the formation of a strong, cohesive and independent working class. What emerged was small pockets of strength where certain conditions fostered its growth. These might be where working and living conditions had been especially bad for a long time; where concentrations of people of like background and opinion produced an ideological base; or where many workers were threatened by changes affecting their control of their trades or their work place. Mostly, however, individual self-interest prevented mutual understanding and co-operation. Lacking cohesion, strength and even commitment in some cases, the prairie working class was seldom able to pursue its ambitions. Its response to its general situation and to new threats to workers was sporadic and unsustained.
Only with the catalyst of World War I did the seeds of working-class consciousness planted earlier germinate to produce significant attempts at permanent change. The upheaval and inflation of the war caused all prairie workers to reassess their situation with the result that there were radical expressions of discontent immediately after the war. The creation of the One Big Union and the outbreak of the lengthy Winnipeg General Strike are two examples that stand out among scattered others. Virtually all of these efforts were either quelled by the state or were undermined by the social and economic conditions that characterized the Prairies before and after the war. Though the working class had encountered many formidable obstacles in the pre-war period, it had succeeded in making its presence felt, and after World War I it could no longer be ignored.
