CANADIAN LABOUR DAY HISTORY
Murphy Browne © Thursday, August 26, 2021
CANADIAN LABOUR DAY HISTORY
Labour Day in Canada is celebrated on the first Monday in September with a national holiday and a parade by mostly unionized workers. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the celebration of Labour Day in Canada came as a result of a group of unionized workers (Toronto Printers Union) demanding the right to work less than 12 hours a day. Apparently, this alarmed their bosses who were horrified that their workers wanted to work a mere nine hours a day. The workers had petitioned their employers in 1869 asking for a reduction of their daily work hours. By 1872 the workers were demanding a nine-hour work day. The supporters of what became known as the Nine Hour Movement went on strike (March 25, 1872) and George Brown, owner of the Globe newspaper (forerunner of today’s Globe and Mail) not only brought in replacement workers but he also sued the Toronto Printers Union.
Union activity was considered a criminal offence according to Canadian law in 1872, a law which dated back to 1792. The 24 members of the strike committee were arrested and jailed. On April 14, 1872 a parade of approximately 2000 workers marched through Toronto, led by two marching bands in solidarity. A supportive crowd swelled the number to 10,000 by
the time the parade reached its destination at Queen's Park.
The struggle of the workers caught the sympathetic attention of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and on June 14, 1872 his government passed a Trade Union Act, which legalized and protected union activity. The parades held in support of the Nine-Hour Movement and the printers' strike led to an annual celebration and on July 23, 1894 the government of Prime Minister Sir John Thompson passed a law, making Labour Day a national holiday.
Although this history of Labour Day refers to the struggle of “workers” the labour movement was not diverse or inclusive. In “The Worker's Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada” published in 2005, Craig Heron and Steven Penfold write: “By the early 1900s, the absence of the less skilled and non-union workers meant that Labour Day parades consisted preponderantly of white anglophones and francophones. There was rarely any space for Africans and native Canadians or for the newcomers from Asia and southern and eastern Europe who increasingly filled the jobs at the bottom of the occupational ladder and were rarely unionized before the First World War.” In describing the first nationally recognized Labour Day parade in Canada on September 3, 1894 Craig Heron and Steven Penfold write: “The marshals had their hands full pulling together the three thousand workers who converged on Market Square in London, Ontario on 3 September 1894. It was the first nationally recognized Labour Day in Canada, and the local labour movement was out in force. Eventually, the first union contingent headed off down the city’s main streets in the
blazing noonday sun. Leading the way was a group of seventy-five butchers on horseback, who set the tone of respectable craftsmanship with their crisply white shirts and hats and clean baskets on their arms.”
Racialized people have been a part of Canada’s labour force for centuries, including the contribution of native Canadians to the fur trade which enriched European traders, enslaved Africans who laboured without pay (1628-1834) and the Chinese who built the railroad with massive loss of life. Yet as Heron and Penfold have documented there was blatantly racist exclusion of these workers from the celebration of Labour Day in those early days. Thankfully the Labour Day parade has come a long way since the days that Heron and Penfold describe in The Worker's Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada: “On the few occasions when people of colour appeared in these marches they were presented as curiosities not fellow workers. Plumbers’ unions sometimes used black youngsters as comic accents to the gleaming white-enamel fixtures on their float. In one case in Toronto, the tableau was an older woman trying to scrub the “dirt” off a black boy.”
Even though we are no longer in the days when African Canadians were considered “curiosities” and used as “comic accents” in Labour Day parades we still have a long way to go to see racialized people in leadership positions in the Labour movement. A look at the leaders of the Labour movement shows that the diversity of the workers who attend the annual Labour Day parade is not reflected in the leadership of the Labour movement which remains overwhelmingly white and
male. It continues to be a struggle for racialized people in the labour movement; hence the need for organizations such as Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU,) Asian Canadian Labour Alliance (ACLA) and Latin American Trade Unionists Coalition (LATUC.)
While working in unionized workplaces may offer more security for racialized workers than in workplaces where workers are not organized, racialized workers sometimes do not have the same access to services from their unions as White workers. Looking at the leadership of the labour movement, from the individual locals to the national bodies, it is quite obvious that we still have a long way to go for equity and equality in the labour movement. In 2021 Employment Equity is as much needed as Pay Equity!
Murphy Browne © Thursday, August 26, 2021
