Once Upon A City: Toronto’s labour pains
The city has witnessed more than a century of fighting for workers' rights

thestar.com
By Janice Bradbeer
Sept. 1, 2016

It’s a colourful reminder of a dark day in labour’s history.

The mosaic Breaking Ground: The Hogg’s Hollow Disaster, 1960 - by fabric artist Laurie Swim - permanently hangs in a glass case in the York Mills subway station. The two-by-six-metre quilt, set in place in 2010, illustrates workers crouched in a tunnel.

That tunnel was 11 metres underground and five of those seven workers were Italian immigrants who lost their lives on March 17, 1960.

Pasquale Allegrezzo, 27, John Correglia, 30, Giovanni Fusillo, 23, and brothers Alessandro, 25, and Guido Mantella, 23, were trapped when a fire broke out while they were digging a water main that passed under the Don River in Hogg’s Hollow, near Old York Mills Rd. and Yonge St.

The “sandhogs” were working overtime without safety equipment in the cramped space when the blaze occurred and the tunnel filled up with water and silt.

“Hope gone for four trapped under Don,” announced the headline in the Toronto Daily Star on March 18, 1960, the day after the accident.

(Allegrezzo’s body was pulled out earlier that morning and a two of the seven men trapped in the tunnel managed to escape or be rescued.)

“It’s no use,” said job foreman and member of the rescue team Frank Kubas, of any chances of the finding the remaining men alive.

“What this unfortunate event did was to put in place a royal commission that addressed all the concerns of the worker in the workplace and his safety,” Michael O’Brien, an executive member of LIUNA Local 183, representing North American construction workers, told the Star in 2010.

Following the tragedy, unions pushed for the Ontario government to take workplace health and safety seriously. This resulted in the Industrial Safety Act, the foundation on which the Canada Labour (Safety) Code, which passed later in the 1960s, was built upon.

One of the earliest labour movements in Toronto dates back to April 12, 1871, when the Toronto Trades and Labour Assembly was founded by representatives of Hogtown’s emerging economy, such as printers, bakers, barrel makers, cigar makers and metalworkers.

This organization’s power would be put to the test close to a year later. On March 25, 1872, printers with the Toronto Typographical Union went on strike to fight for a nine-hour workday instead of their gruelling 60-hour, six-day work week. The Assembly led the printers’ strike of 1872 and three weeks into the strike they organized a march to support the cause. The parade on April 15 swelled from 2,000 to about 10,000 by the time it reached Queen’s Park - where a plaque now commemorates their actions.

Striking was illegal and Toronto Globe publisher George Brown - who had hired replacement workers - had the 24 leaders of the printers’ strike committee arrested the next day on charges of conspiracy to restrain trade. Canada’s first Prime Minister, Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald (who cared little for Liberal George Brown) saw the political benefit in the strike and the protestors were soon freed.

Although the Nine-Hour Movement was unsuccessful, it led to the passage of the Trade Unions Act on June 14, 1872, which legalized and protected unions. This was the first piece of legislation to recognize the right of labour to organize.

The printers’ march became an annual spring event. In 1894, Ottawa declared Labour Day as an official holiday and designated it as the first Monday in September.

The Toronto Star itself was created almost overnight on Nov. 3, 1892 by 21 striking Toronto News printers and four teenage apprentices. The future mayor of Toronto, social reformer Horatio Clarence Hocken, founded the newspaper, originally known as the Evening Star and then the Toronto Daily Star. Another later Toronto mayor, Jimmy Simpson, would also have a hand with Hocken in the Star’s creation. But the paper faltered, going through several owners.

On Dec. 13, 1899, journalist Joseph E. Atkinson, 34, was appointed editor of the paper. Atkinson, who came from humble beginnings, made the Star a “Paper for the People” with his burning social conscience. The Evening Star became the Toronto Daily Star in January 1900 and Atkinson was editor and publisher of the paper until his death in 1948.

Atkinson defended workers and argued in favour of trade unions. His many causes that he championed have their modern equivalent in welfare, old age pensions, unemployment and health care.

Sometimes a strike resulted in better working conditions. Sometimes it took time for a domino effect to ensue.

In February 1907, about 400 female telephone operators in Toronto walked off the job after Bell Telephone planned to cut wages and increase their work hours.

“William Lyon Mackenzie King, the future prime minister, was assigned to investigate the circumstances leading to the walkout and due to the women’s insistence and organization, they did get improvements to their working conditions and eventually a union,” David Kidd, a CUPE member and labour historian, told the Star in 2015.

Twenty-four years later, on Feb. 25, 1931, more than 500 women of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) walked out of their Toronto garment shops and large factories, including those owned by Eaton’s, reported the Torontoist website. Thus began a long fight for a 15 per cent wage increase. Despite growing knowledge of poor working conditions, sexual harassment and pay that had declined for needle workers, the strike didn’t elicit much sympathy. This was, after all, the Depression and many Torontonians felt that the wage demands were greedy during the Dirty Thirtys.

Polish immigrant Rose Edelist recounted the 1931 strike of garment workers in Katrina Srigley’s article in Labour/Le Travail (spring 2005, issue 55). “All my life I will never forget this strike. It was so terrible that the police protected the shops, and they treated the workers like garbage...you believed in unions when you saw what was [happening],” Edelist said.

The garment worker’s strike lasted two and a half months. It failed and was given up at a mass rally that drew 1,000 supporters on May 5.

However, in mid-February 1934, the biggest news story of the year broke, says the Torontoist. A select committee investigated the causes of a large spread between the prices that major retailers received for commodities by the producer and the prices paid by the consumer. For 18 weeks, testimonies were heard before the Royal Commission on Price Spreads.

“We cannot, in frankness,” the committee concluded, “refrain from stating that the labour and wage conditions in [the needle trades] are such as to merit the most emphatic condemnation.”

The inquiry ignited increased public resentment toward big business and more sympathy for the garment workers.

By the Second World War and after, a new generation of labour unions (including the Congress of Industrial Organizations) were more effective at securing equal working conditions for those who laboured in the needle trades, as well as other factory workers, notes the Torontoist.

One of the reminders of Toronto’s union action still stands at 167 Church St. The Athenaeum Club was known as “Labour Temple” from 1904 to 1968. The club was purchased by the Toronto Trades and Labour Assembly by selling shares to members of associated unions. “A library was set up, many unions had their offices located here and for the 64 years it operated as the centrepiece of the Toronto labour movement, and many meetings [were] held here to discuss the key issues of the day,” CUPE member David Kidd told the Star.

These discussions included public ownership of the TTC and Toronto Hydro, and whether to support conscription during the two World Wars.

Today the façade is preserved as part of the “Jazz” apartments.

In April 1956, a Star editorial proclaimed “a great week for organized labor” around the merger of two labour organizations. The Trades and Labor Congress of Canada (founded in 1883) and the Canadian Congress of Labor (founded in 1940), united to form the Canadian Labor Congress.

“It can look back over years of achievement during which the TLC organized the trades and the CCL organized workers in the mass-production industries,” the editorial read.

“It can look back over years of rising wages and living standards for Canadian workers, attributable in large measure to the efforts of the union.

But, “With greater power goes greater responsibility,” the Star cautioned.

Today the Canadian Labour Congress is the largest labour organization in Canada, with which most labour unions are affiliated.

The Toronto Trades and Labour Assembly, which organized the printers’ strike in 1871, was renamed the Toronto Trades and Labour Council in 1881. It evolved into the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, which represents more than 200,000 men and women working in every sector of the economy.

The Council also organizes Toronto’s annual Labour Day parade. The largest parade of its kind in North America begins Monday at 9:30 a.m. and travels along Queen St. from University Ave., entering the CNE grounds around 11 a.m.