Thousands march in Toronto's 141st Labour Day Parade

The 141st annual parade's theme is 'unite against austerity.'

Statutory holidays like this Labour Day, regular days off, vacations, sick leave, maternity leave, public education, decent pay, compensation for working overtime, pensions for those too old to work, pensions for those disabled by accidents on the job, or by job-induced illnesses, pensions for surviving spouses and families to prevent them falling into destitution, prohibitions on child labour, a minimum wage and, of course, the eight-hour work day - in short, just about all that holds together the basic social infrastructure of middle-class life, we owe to unions.

Amid glib assurances that unions are no longer necessary because capitalism is kinder now, it's easy to forget that none of these benefits we assume as rights were bestowed out of generosity or concern.

The price of our comfortable assumptions about equity and entitlement was the tears and tribulation and toil of all the people in those unmarked graves.

Everything we assume as our entitlements were hard-won concessions, wrested from a brutal, dog-eat-dog capitalism that fought - in some cases with barbarous savagery - to deny them.

In 1899, for example, fishermen wanted a stable floor price for salmon so unscrupulous merchants couldn't conspire to bid down the price. When they struck at Steveston to spur negotiations, the army broke the strike for cannery owners. Seven organizers were jailed.

The three magistrates who signed the order for military intervention all had cannery interests, labour historian Jack Scott wryly noted in a speech at the University of B.C. in 1969.

An investigation later discovered that two justices of the peace who signed the requisition for military force did so during a meeting at which cannery owners resolved to do whatever it took to obtain army intervention on their behalf. The third magistrate to sign turned out to be a cannery owner, Scott said.

In 1877, a strike in Nanaimo disrupted the highly profitable mines of coal baron Robert Dunsmuir.

"He fought unions with threats, spies and blacklists," writes historian Ross McCormack in Reformers, Rebels and Revolutionaries: The Western Canadian Radical Movement, 1899-1919, a book analyzing the repressive forces that radicalized the labour movement. "When Dunsmuir could not break a strike with scabs, he was sufficiently influential to have the provincial government call out the militia."

So the Royal Navy dispatched two warships to Nanaimo. It later turned out that three of Dunsmuir's business partners were Royal Navy officers. And the officer commanding the army unit that broke the strike married Dunsmuir's daughter soon afterward.

Workers' protests over mine safety, wages and working conditions came under the army's guns again in 1890, and in 1900, and in 1913.

In 1912, when working men gathered on Carrall Street in Vancouver to hear speeches from the Industrial Workers of the World, the city passed a bylaw banning outdoor meetings. When the men declined to disperse, citing their civil right to lawful assembly and free speech, troops in civilian dress blocked side streets while 100 police, some on horseback, charged into the crowd swinging clubs and injuring many.

The most effective and there-fore most troublesome unionists, like Vancouver railway organizer Frank Rogers and Trail smelterman Albert "Ginger" Goodwin, were shot down with apparent impunity....


One would think the sheer bloodiness of ordinary people's long fight for an eight-hour work day, for workplace safety and so on, would be at least as important to a well-rounded education as memorizing the names of politicians and generals who sent others to accomplish their deeds for them.

The standard response, how-ever, appears to be a studious averting of eyes from the some-times violent crucible in which the civil society we share today was forged.

Statutory holidays like this Labour Day, regular days off, vacations, sick leave, maternity leave, public education, decent pay, compensation for working overtime, pensions for those too old to work, pensions for those disabled by accidents on the job, or by job-induced illnesses, pensions for surviving spouses and families to prevent them falling into destitution, prohibitions on child labour, a minimum wage and, of course, the eight-hour work day - in short, just about all that holds together the basic social infrastructure of middle-class life, we owe to unions.

"Lemmy" said
That sounds an awful lot like "I'm not a racist but....".

"OnTheIce" said


We owe a lot of things to a way that used to be.

However, that doesn't mean we turn a blind eye to the current reality of our finances and economy.

"andyt" said
What about the lower class? Forgetting about them again, or just making the excuse that they're all teens and semi-retired seniors.

Nothing wrong with what OTI said, except it came from him, so we know the context: "nothing wrong with high CEO salaries, but those greedy union guys need to get real." We do all need to share the pain, above a certain minimum. And those able to take the most pain are at the top, so they should give the most.

bootlegga"]You're partially right - we need to worry about our finances - but that shouldn't be done on the backs of the middle class alone.

Everyone should 'suffer' if we want to pay down the deficit/debt. I'm all for wage freezes on workers if there are corresponding tax hikes on the wealthy.

I think everyone is suffering to a degree.

I think there's this myth that it's being done on the backs of the middle class only. The middle class don't all work for unions and many of the middle class in the non-union sector have suffered a lot more than their middle class counterparts who are unionized.

We have one group of middle-class people who continue to receive wage increases and maintain their jobs while other non-unionized environments are seeing job cuts and pay freezes.

Many Unions, especially the public sector unions are acting like even suggesting changes to wages and benefits are an outrage; an "attack" on the middle class. It's neither...it's just time they caught up with the rest of us.

[quote="andyt" said
What about the lower class? Forgetting about them again, or just making the excuse that they're all teens and semi-retired seniors.

"Gunnair" said
What about the lower class? Forgetting about them again, or just making the excuse that they're all teens and semi-retired seniors.

Nothing wrong with what OTI said, except it came from him, so we know the context: "nothing wrong with high CEO salaries, but those greedy union guys need to get real." We do all need to share the pain, above a certain minimum. And those able to take the most pain are at the top, so they should give the most.

"andyt" said

You want to take blood from a stone? And they always do shoulder responsibility - take a look at what Campbell did as soon as he came in - shifted to user fees that are a flat tax and hurt the lower income more. Cut programs that help low income people. The low income always take the hit when it's cutting time, they don't need to take any more.