Work and labour organization in Upper Canada

Trade unions were illegal in Britain until 1825. Their legal standing in Upper Canada is uncertain. However, as the Owenite socialist movement in England and America gathered steam in 1834 they created Grand Trade Unions bringing tradesmen of many professions in one union in both continents. A similar movement took place in Upper Canada. A builders union emerged in 1834, followed by a typographers union shortly thereafter. By 1836, the tradesmen (called "mechanics" then) formed a petitioning organization, the "Mechanics Association," in order to further the political issues important to workers - the use of prison labour in particular.^[1]

In Britain, the "Combination Act" of 1799 made labour unions "criminal conspiracies," illegal until 1825, when the Act was finally repealed. Some have argued that the Combination Act never applied in Upper Canada; English criminal law applied in Upper Canada because the House of Assembly accepted all English criminal statutes as of 17 September 1792, seven years before the Combination Act was passed. However, other acts passed after the reception date were subsequently accepted as law. If the Combination Act was taken as received, its repeal in 1825 was a separate issue again. As the matter was never settled in the higher courts in this period we can only point to the general "indefinite area of toleration" for such combinations evidenced in the magistrates' manuals for Upper Canada. W.C. Keele's "The Provincial Justice, or Magistrate's Manual... compiled and inscribed by permission, to His Majesty's Attorney General" was published in 1835 and stated without qualification that any justice of the peace could have any striking worker jailed,^[2] its untested formal legality notwithstanding.

The drive to form labour unions in Upper Canada resulted from a fundamental change in the way building projects in Toronto were contracted. The change to general contracting happened first in government construction projects, then private ones, leading to labour strife.

General contracting was introduced in the building trades in the 1820s in Britain. General contracting reorganized the bidding process by which construction contracts were awarded, and in so doing, challenged the master-journeyman system. General contracting began in the British "Office of Public Works" during the Napoleonic Wars; they obtained competitive tenders for the whole project by a single builder at fixed cost for the first time. This was a means by which they could limit their liability for cost overruns. By 1825, the system became common in the northwest of England, resulting in a steep fall in wages.^[3] General contracting was introduced in Upper Canada in the construction of public works such as the new parliament buildings in Toronto, beginning in 1829.^[4] This placed the project in the hands of a single master builder who subcontracted portions of the project to the other trades. Rather than "job" the work to a subcontractor, the general contractor would provide his own building materials, hiring masters and their journeymen as labour only. By limiting "jobbing," the general contractors also eroded the traditional measures by which these jobs were costed. This gave the general contractor more profit, and the masters less.

The general contractors had no interests in perpetuating the master-journeyman system and its traditional standards of payment, and abused the apprenticeship system by hiring unqualified workmen. General contracting was clearly an issue in Toronto as early as 1831 when the members of the United Amicable Trade and Benefit Society of Journeymen Bricklayers, Plasterers and Masons rejected the general contracting system.^[5]

The general contractors used debt to bind workers to them. Workers complained of "great delay in obtaining payment" in June 1833, when the friendly society of carpenters and joiners called on their employers "for more punctual payments than what we have had in time past." They demanded "$5 per week on account, and a settlement at the end of each month." According to an anonymous "Master Builder" (contractor), "they receive from 3 to 5 dollars per week, at an average; and a settlement when the employer gets in his money, or obtains installments upon his contracts, when the Journeymen are often paid from £5 to £20 of arrears."^[6]

Thomas Dalton, editor of the Patriot, retorted:

It is indeed incomprehensible, how laboring mechanics generally, can by possibility live in comfort, or decency, with arrears of wages due to them, to the amount of £20... However scarce money may be, and however long credit may be expected, it is very absurd to expect such credit from Journeymen who ordinarily can only supply their families from hand to mouth. It is the rich alone who can afford long credits... Is it just, to put the laborer in the predicament of being fleeced when his toil has actually won the fleece?^[7]

These workers could not easily change jobs when those general contractors owed them substantial back-wages.

The tension between general contractors and the building tradesmen came to a head in 1833 with the construction of Chewett's block by general contractor John George Howard. Chewett's building, was a "splendid block of lofty brick houses is erecting on King and York Streets, to comprise eight or ten tenements for stores or dwelling houses, with an extensive hotel at the corner... "^[8] Its designer and general contractor was a new British emigrant, John George Howard. Howard was to become one of Toronto's most famous architects and builders: besides Chewett's building, he built 4 large houses in Toronto the year he arrived and predicted he would build twenty of the one-hundred houses that would be built the next year.

Just before Christmas, the workers on Chewett's block went on strike after Howard refused to pay them their wages in full. The workers now refused to work for "any person whatever, other than a Master of their respective Trades, except it be direct for the Owner or Proprietor of Buildings." Howard's intermediary role as general contractor was clearly a point of contention. The striking workmen were up against the Family Compact. James G. Chewett was not only the deputy surveyor general of the province, but also a magistrate. Chewett, building owner and magistrate, had William Jarvis, sheriff of the Home District and elected representative for the city lay charges against the men. This is Toronto's first major strike. No court records survived of the case, but 6 weeks after they first struck for the payment of back wages they received £85.

This incident appears to have emboldened the masters and their journeymen to petition their member of the Legislative Assembly, Sheriff William Jarvis (the man who had arrested them for striking) to prepare for a "lien law somewhat similar to an act of that name now in force in New York, by which the wages of the workmen employed in buildings are very adequately protected." The law required the commissioner of a building to withhold labourers' wages from installment payments made to contractors, and to pay those labourers directly. The Assembly prepared a "Mechanics Protection Bill," but as William Lyon Mackenzie correctly predicted, "Nothing will be done on it this parliament. It may pass the next, if the legislative council be new modelled."^[9]

The city's 20 journeymen printers in the Typographical Union of Toronto struck in October 1836, for higher wages and a limit on the number of apprentices per shop.

These craft-based friendly societies organized themselves as a "Mechanics Association" in 1836, with branches in Kingston, Toronto, and Dundas. It was first organized in Kingston in 1833 as a result of opposition to the use of convict labour in the new penitentiary. The artisans argued that convict produced goods would compete with their own, lowering prices, and impoverishing them. As the penitentiary neared completion in 1835, the mechanics of Kingston again petitioned the legislature. A similar public meeting was called in Toronto in March. By August 1836 they formed a Mechanics Association. Key to coordinating the associations were Charles Sewell, a Kingston watchmaker who moved to Toronto that year; and William Lesslie, a Kingston storekeeper in a family business with branches in Toronto and Dundas, who moved to Toronto in 1835.^[10] Sewell went on to become the secretary of the new association. In explaining the need for such an innovation, they stated

whilst all other classes have some methods of co-operation sufficient for their purpose, the Mechanical interest, for such purpose were wholly unrepresented: that the Commercial interest through their Board of Trade, and from the constant intercourse of the merchants in the Reading Room have immediate notice of any matter affecting their interests, which can be instantly attended to, and quietly remedied, without any person except themselves knowing of its existence - whereas the Mechanical interest in similar cases, have hitherto had no other method of making known their complaints, but by public meetings, generally an inefficient instrument for that purpose, and moreover cannot be resorted to very frequently, and not at all by those who may perhaps be the greatest sufferers (Courier, 17 August 1836).

The formation of a "political union" for the purpose of organizing petitions was the primary form of political activity of the era, and had resulted in the "Great Reform Act" of 1832 in Britain.^[11] The new Association was intended to politically represent the "mechanical interest" only – that is, masters and their journeymen – "either by petition to the Legislature, or to any other branch of Government, for any alteration or extension of duties, by inforcing the law against such as may violate it to their injury, by addresses to the public or its own members."^[12] As such it is similar to the National Union of the Working Classes (founded in 1831) in London, which was to instigate the Chartist movement in 1838, or the American Workingmen's party in New York.