Trades and Labor Congress of Canada

views updated

Trades and Labor Congress of Canada

Canada 1883

Synopsis

First meeting in Toronto in 1883, the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (TLC) was the first long-standing labor central in Canada. TLC formed within the larger context of a developing national political economy—the recent confederation of the former British North American colonies into one nation in 1867, the rise of large-scale manufacturing enterprises, and the concomitant formation of a working class. The organization was an expression of the growing call for labor unity and political independence emanating from the turbulent trade union and Knights of Labor (KOL) agitation and struggles of the 1870s and 1880s.

Timeline

1863: Opening of the world's first subway, in London.
1869: Completion of the first U.S. transcontinental railway.
1873: Typewriter introduced.
1876: Four-stroke cycle gas engine introduced.
1878: Thomas Edison develops a means of cheaply producing and transmitting electric current, which he succeeds in subdividing so as to make it adaptable to household use. The value of shares in gas companies plummets as news of his breakthrough reaches Wall Street.
1881: In a shootout at the O.K. Corral outside Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, along with "Doc" Holliday, kill Billy Clanton, Frank McLowry, and Tom McLowry. This breaks up a gang headed by Clanton's brother Ike, who flees Tombstone. The townspeople, however, suspect the Earps and Holliday of murder. During the same year, Sheriff Pat Garrett shoots notorious criminal William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
1883: Brooklyn Bridge completed.
1883: Foundation of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labor by Marxist political philosopher Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov marks the formal start of Russia's labor movement. Change still lies far in the future for Russia, however: tellingly, Plekhanov launches the movement in Switzerland.
1883: Life magazine begins publication.
1885: Belgium's King Leopold II becomes sovereign of the so-called Congo Free State, which he will rule for a quarter-century virtually as his own private property. The region in Africa, given the name of Zaire in the 1970s (and Congo in 1997), becomes the site of staggering atrocities, including forced labor and genocide, at the hands of Leopold's minions.
1889: Indian Territory in Oklahoma opened to settlement.
1893: Henry Ford builds his first automobile.

Event and Its Context

The Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (TLC) dates to the 1870s, when Canadian workers agitated for a shorter working day. Marked by the considerable expansion of manufacturing, the rise of significant urban populations and markets, the beginnings of a national railway, and the political and administrative consolidation of the Canadian Confederation, the 1870s also witnessed the first concerted attempts at national labor mobilization. Struggles for a shorter working day in Canada vaulted onto the national stage in 1872. Inspired by similar protests that had shook Britain and the United States in the 1860s, skilled craftsmen in central Canada's burgeoning industrial cities—Hamilton, Montreal, Toronto—forged a network of "Nine-Hour Leagues" to agitate for a shorter working day. The leagues developed a strategy of mass agitation and staged industrial conflict to back up their demand for the nine-hour day. Hamilton machinist James Ryan, the leading spokesperson and agitator in the Nine-Hours movement, established the Canadian Labor Protective and Mutual Improvement Association (CLPMIA). The CLPMIA also sought to provide a political voice for labor, drawing representatives from the key industrial centers of southern Ontario and Montreal. However, the autonomous craft union components that comprised the Nine-Hours movement were ultimately unable to agree on concerted strike action. Consequently, employers were able to isolate and defeat the first strike in Hamilton, which eventually put an end to the movement, although a select few of the most highly skilled workers won a reduced workday.

The struggle for a shorter workday nonetheless provided an important ideological precedent to the efforts by labor to organize around political and economic demands beyond the narrow confines of craft or industry. Citywide trade associations and assemblies sprouted up in the 1870s in the key industrial centers of the main provinces of Ontario and Quebec. A layer of pro-working-class intellectuals, dubbed "brainworkers" by historians such as Phillips Thompson, J. L. Blain, and George Wrigley, used their positions as activists, editors, journalists, and lecturers to popularize sharp critiques of the capitalist system, encourage united working-class struggle, and articulate alternative versions of society. Popular newspapers such as the Ontario Workman in Toronto and the Northern Journal in Montreal publicized labor's message on a wider basis. A growing cadre of working-class leaders, who looked to independent representation to advance labor's political aims, coalesced around the city-based assemblies and, building on the example of the short-lived CLPMIA, formed another central labor body in 1873, the Canadian Labor Union (CLU). Reluctant to break from the patronage politics of the mainstream parties, the CLU remained committed to political reforms that promoted the interests of labor such as an end to prison and child labor, legal rights for unions, and trade policies that created employment. In 1872 and 1874 the first explicitly working-class-supported candidates won political office at the federal and Ontario provincial level, respectively. Strike activity escalated in many industries in the first half of the decade, the previously aloof engineers were brought into the labor fold, and, as severe economic depression in the closing years of the 1870s spawned large-scale unemployment, workers across trade and skill lines joined together to protest the jobs crisis.

The process of labor unity would receive a critical boost with the coming of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor (KOL) to Canada in 1875. In its 30-year history, the Canadian KOL built impressive support in the major cities of Canada as well as many smaller towns and villages, including numerous industrial towns and cities in the French-speaking province of Quebec. As in the United States, the KOL combined workplace struggle around economic issues with rich political and cultural ideas and practices borrowed from religious brotherhoods, political reform groups, and fraternal orders. As Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer have demonstrated, the KOL stood for inclusive working-class unity and buttressed their initiatives for labor reform on a complex amalgam of oppositional culture and ideological alternatives to capitalist exploitation and oppression. Moreover, the KOL promoted labor unity among all elements of the working class and organized women workers. The organization tackled questions of national chauvinism, especially anti-Irish sentiments, although regional Knights' organs retained racist stereotypes of and organized against immigrant Chinese workers. Yet, most importantly in terms of political organization and unity, the KOL spurred efforts to mobilize workers through independent politics.

Throughout the 1880s, the KOL, many of whose members also belonged to locals of international craft unions based in the United States, organized political reform associations in various cities and marshaled support for a diverse body of labor candidates at the local, provincial, and federal level. The KOL won impressive shares of the vote and elected numerous alderman and mayors. Increasing arguments for greater workplace unity among the various craft locals and the KOL accompanied developments in the formal political theater. It was KOL leaders and leading craft unionists, such as Daniel O'Donaghue, Alfred Jury, and Charles March, who would build on their base in the urban trades' councils, especially the well-organized Toronto Trades and Labor Council (TTLC), to found the first permanent central labor body in 1883, the TLC.

The TLC first met in Toronto in 1883 as the Canadian Labor Congress and soon after renamed itself. The TLC mounted consistent lobbying campaigns at the provincial and federal levels for factory legislation, increased male working-class suffrage, more resources for the public education system, equal pay for women workers, and a reduced workday. It also agitated against immigrant workers, especially the Chinese, who were seen as unsavory pawns used by capitalists to lower wages and undermine unions. Anti-immigration policies would form a common thread in the early trade union movement in Canada. The TLC was active in supporting working-class political candidates and passed resolutions eight separate times between 1883 and 1899 for independent working-class political representation. In the 1890s it worked in concert with populist groups, such as the Single Tax Association and the Patrons of Industry, to advance a farmer-labor populist agenda.

Until the twentieth century, the TLC was dominated by trade unions from the large urban centers, especially Toronto, yet there was minority participation from delegates outside the large cities. Unlike the bitter divide between the KOL and the AFL in the United States, the TLC was a much more homogenous body: delegates were accepted from the KOL and purely local unions as well as from the international craft unions, who worked together to advance a common labor agenda. Indeed, KOL delegates, including the first two women to participate in a TLC convention in the 1880s, Elizabeth Wright of St. Thomas and Emma Witt of Toronto, often constituted a clear majority of delegates in the TLC conventions of the nineteenth century. Various KOL members also served as presidents of the TLC throughout the period, demonstrating the order's continuing influence in working-class communities long after the power of the KOL south of the border had waned.

By the late 1890s, however, the international unions increased their influence in the TLC as the KOL gradually declined. The TLC of the twentieth century largely rejected independent political organization and opted for purely economic trade unionism consistent with the philosophy of the American Federation of Labor, even if socialist and other rank-and-file militants within the craft unions continued to raise broader political concerns until the mid-twentieth century. In 1953 the TLC merged with the industrial union central, the Canadian Congress of Labor, to form the Canadian Labour Congress, the main organized labor central in Canada today.

Key Players

Jury, Alfred Fredman (1848-1916): Jury was a Toronto tailor who figured prominently in the Nine-Hours movement of the 1870s and in the KOL and the TTLC. He was a founding member and leading activist in the TLC during the 1880s. He later worked for the federal Department of the Interior, where he was responsible for organizing the sea passages of orphan children to Canada for Dr. Barnardo's Homes, a settlement scheme designed to bring British orphans to live in Canada.

March, Charles (1849-1908): March was a long-time Toronto trade unionist and labor reformer who helped initiate the TLC. He served as the first president of the labor central.

O'Donoghue, Daniel (1844-1907): O'Donaghue, an Irish immigrant who came to Canada at the age of eight, is considered the "father of Canadian trade unionism." He was a long-time member of the International Typographical Union (ITU), the Knights of Labor (KOL), and a leading political activist in the early Canadian trade union movement. Founding member, secretary, and later president of the Ottawa Trades Council, formed in the wake of the Nine-Hours movement in the 1870s, he also participated in the Canadian Labor Union (CLU) in the 1870s. O'Donoghue became one of the first elected labor politicians in Canada, winning a seat in the Ontario provincial legislature in 1874. After moving to Toronto, he continued to play a key role in the ITU, the KOL and the Toronto Trades and Labor Council (TTLC), and later helped create the TLC. He ended his career as an inspector for the federal Department of Labor, investigating and publicizing workplace conditions across the country.

Thompson, T. Phillips (1844-1933): Thompson was the most prominent of the pro-working-class intellectuals who emerged in the course of the early Canadian trade union movement. He wrote and lectured extensively on trade unions, working-class politics, and the KOL from the 1870s to the 1890s and, in the twentieth century, was active in the Socialist Party of Canada. His book, The Politics of Labor, is the definitive contemporary statement of working-class radicalism in the late nineteenth century.

See also: American Federation of Labor; Knights of Labor.