The Great Depression

by Pierre Berton

  The throne speech was everything King hoped for. He immediately called in eight senior Liberal politicians (all former Cabinet ministers), told them his plan, and swore them to secrecy. “We must not hand over our tactics to the enemy,” he warned.

  Then, on January 21, he pounced. His was the only Opposition reply to the speech. In it he suggested that Bennett’s apparent change of heart was offered only as a means of grabbing votes, a view that was beginning to dawn on the electorate. He praised his own party’s record on social legislation and compared it with that of the Tories. Then he sprang his surprise. He would not move the usual no-confidence motion. His party would offer no amendments. He wanted Bennett to get on with it so the House could debate each proposal on its merits.

  Bennett, caught by surprise, was furious. King had outwitted him and his own impetuosity had trapped him. The government had drafted only one bill, that for unemployment insurance. The others would have to be rushed to completion. And the Price Spreads Commission had not yet brought down its report. He was able to present only six bills before illness put him out of action. Long before that, a majority of the electorate had come to accept King’s suggestion that Bennett’s election promises in 1935 were worth no more than those he had made in 1930.

  Yet the long-term effect of Bennett’s proposals cannot be discounted. His legislation may have been hastily drafted and some of it unconstitutional, but the impact of his words remained. Here was the leading Conservative, the spokesman for the Right, the self-made millionaire, rejecting laissez-faire and opting for the much despised principle of government intervention on a scale not known before. Bennett made that philosophy respectable. Bit by bit it came to be adopted, provincially and federally. Within a generation, the principles that R.B. Bennett enunciated in his famous series of broadcasts would be commonly held by all but the most moss-backed of Canadians.

  2

  Speed-up at Eaton’s

  On January 15, 1935, four days after Bennett’s final New Deal broadcast, the Royal Commission on Price Spreads, which had been sitting for much of the winter, again turned its attention to the needle trades in the province of Quebec. Its real target, however, was the T. Eaton Company of Toronto, which was buying much of its merchandise from sweated labour in Victoriaville. Four young women, none of whom spoke English, appeared before the commission that month to describe, through an interpreter, the appalling conditions in the factories of the two largest garment manufacturers in that community, Fashion Craft and Rubins Brothers.

  Eleanor Hamel, a twenty-five-year-old seamstress, testified that she had gone to work at the age of thirteen – an example of child labour that smacked of the nineteenth century. It was, of course, illegal. The minimum age was sixteen, but nobody, it seemed, paid any attention to the law. The minimum wage was ten dollars a week, but nobody paid any attention to that, either. Miss Hamel made seven dollars a week at Rubins, and when she asked for ten she was denied it. The foreman jollied her along and when she threatened to go to Fashion Craft told her she would be blacklisted in the community. It was well known that anyone who quit one firm could get no work elsewhere.

  Another seamstress, twenty-three-year-old Berthe Nolin, was paid six dollars for an official fifty-five-hour week (including five hours on Saturday). Actually, she worked much longer. Her work day began at 7 a.m. and was supposed to end at 6 p.m., with an hour for lunch. But she often worked until 10:20 p.m., although the foreman punched her time card out at 6:15 to maintain the fiction that the company was obeying the fifty-five-hour law. Because of these long evening hours, Berthe Nolin and her fellow workers often went without supper. The Minimum Wage Board winked at this and similar infractions. Its vice-chairman, Eugene Richard, was the owner of Fashion Craft.

  The women who testified before the commission were unemployed as the result of a strike for better wages and shorter hours. It had lasted only four days. At the first hint of trouble the companies called in strikebreakers and the mayor ordered the fire department to turn its hoses on the picket line. Fourteen provincial policemen arrived and, according to Berthe Nolin, ordered the strikers to go back to work. But Miss Nolin and some fifty others weren’t taken back. The strikebreakers had their jobs.

  The commission then turned its attention to the T. Eaton Company, concentrating on its Factory F-8 in Toronto, where garments such as women’s blouses and dresses and men’s trousers were turned out on a piecework basis. Here the Depression had a devastating effect. In the first four years piecework rates were cut by more than half. By 1933, a seamstress who had once made $3.60 producing a dozen voile dresses was making only $1.75.

  These drastic reductions presented Eaton’s with a problem. Under the Ontario Minimum Wage Act, the company was required to pay its own women employees at least $12.50 a week. In 1929 the seamstresses had had no trouble earning that amount. But the cuts made it difficult for many and impossible for some to come up to the minimum wage. Eaton’s was required to pay the difference between what the women actually earned and what the law required. To save money, the company instituted a speed-up system to force its employees up to the minimum – a practice that reduced some of them to a state of nervous exhaustion.

  It had not been easy for the commission to persuade witnesses to outline Eaton’s employment practices. The previous spring, one of the Stevens committee investigators had interviewed Winnifred Harding, a pieceworker in the factory. As soon as the foreman learned of this, he fired her for being “a poor producer.” But Miss Harding was a determined young woman. Her production was no poorer than that of many of her colleagues who kept their jobs, and she didn’t intend to be pushed around by the country’s leading department store.

  Off she went to Queen’s Park to confront the attorney general himself. That forced an investigation. After two meetings with an official from the Department of Labour, Eaton’s agreed to find another job for Miss Harding – but in a different division.

  Again, the women who testified before the commission in Toronto – as in Victoriaville – had lost their jobs because of union activity. From thirty-eight who had been fired the previous July the commission selected several witnesses. All told of being bullied, threatened, and nagged to speed up their work so that they would produce enough goods to earn the minimum wage, saving Eaton’s the cost of making up the difference.

  “We were badgered, harassed, and worried,” Annie Wells testified. “You were told to work and work so hard at these cheaper rates … and you were threatened if you didn’t make $12.50 you would be fired. You felt insecure with your job.” Mrs. Wells was a veteran employee. She had worked for Eaton’s for eighteen years sewing skirts, blouses, and dresses and later as an instructor, training new girls. Eaton’s high-powered counsel, R.L. Kellock, K.C. (a future Supreme Court Justice), couldn’t shake her testimony. “You had to sit at your machine from a quarter to eight until twenty minutes to one and go as hard as you could,” she told him. “You had no time to get up and have a drink of water or powder your nose or look at anybody, you just went on working. And, of course, they expected you to make and make more than you really could.”

  Mrs. Wells’s daughter, Winnifred, another long-time employee, told the commissioners that she was so tired at night she couldn’t eat her supper. Before the Depression, she had been supplied with a stool while examining dresses. In those days “you could sit down for a few minutes and kind of ease off the tension.” But after 1933, when the stools were removed, no examiner was allowed even that brief rest. Miss Wells was on her feet the whole day, so tired that she dreaded getting on the streetcar when she went home “because if I sat down I could not get up again, my knees and my legs would be so stiff.” Yet her take-home pay was less than half what it had been in 1929.

  Miss Wells swore that Carrie Cuthbert, the woman who worked beside her, suffered a nervous breakdown as the result of the speed-up. It kept her off work for two months – a perilous situation that everybody dreaded in those days when seamstresses lived fro
m week to week fearful of being sent home for failing to make the quota. This actually happened to Winnifred Wells when she was found to be seventy-five cents short of the minimum wage. Her supervisor told her to stay home, without pay, and not to return until she was sent for. When Miss Wells accosted a foreman to demand an explanation, he told her the company was trying out a new system: every time a girl fell behind in her work, she would be laid off for a week.

  “I asked him how I was going to live. I said to him: ‘If I come back at the end of the week and I fall down again on my money, what is going to happen then?’ He said: ‘You will go home again the second week.’ I … asked him how he thought a girl was going to live if she was going to be sent home every time she fell down on her money. He said it did not matter to him, none of his business, and got very angry about it.”

  Lilian Johnson’s forelady was horrified when she found that Lilian was $3.60 short of the $12.50 at the end of the week. Some late orders had come in, so she kept Lilian on in the hope that she could make up the difference. “She said to me: ‘Now you will have to work like the devil.…’ So I worked on it, and she told the girls, none of them to speak to me, and I did not look up from my machine from that work until I went home.… I was so all in and I worked so hard that when I went home I did not bother about my supper. I just laid on the bed with my clothes on, and there I stayed all night.”

  The threat of being fired was always present. Jean Chambers, a veteran of ten years with Eaton’s, told of being nudged in the back while she worked and ordered to go faster. A large chart at the forewoman’s desk showed how far each girl was behind in her quota. “You had better hurry up, speed up, because you are going to be fired, you are not going to be kept on if you cannot make it,” the forewoman warned.

  Nervous tension brought some employees close to tears. “You had to work so hard, you were driven so fast that it just became impossible to make $12.50 and you were a nervous wreck,” Kate Nolan testified. “… It almost drove me insane.… I went into hysterics several times, and I had to go to the hospital and the nurse said, ‘What is the matter? You girls are always coming here.’ ”

  The evidence made it clear that the T. Eaton Company had purposely chosen to evade the spirit of the Minimum Wage Act, if not the letter. Under the Act, the company wasn’t required to pay the minimum wage to part-time workers, handicapped workers, or apprentices. The law allowed Eaton’s to pay these people – up to a maximum of 20 per cent of the workforce – only for the piecework they did. The provision wasn’t meant, of course, to apply to regular employees, but Eaton’s lumped all its workers together and refused to pay the minimum wage to the lowest 20 per cent. Eaton’s saved money because the faster workers in the top 80 per cent required a smaller bonus to make up the difference between what they earned and the minimum wage to which they were entitled. Eaton’s refused to increase its piecework prices because it was cheaper to pay a small number of bonuses to the faster workers than it was to raise the rates for everyone.

  Many of these practices had come to a sudden end after the formation of the Stevens committee was announced in February 1934. Eaton’s quietly stopped laying off the poorest producers and threatening them with unemployment. By that March, the company had also decided to place all its women employees under the Minimum Wage Act and raise the piecework rates.

  But it had no intention of letting the women organize a union. Nonetheless, some of them formed a committee in the factory and joined the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Then, on July 11, 1934, a new and more intricate dress pattern was introduced, one that required fifteen separate operations to make. Twenty-eight union members stopped work that afternoon on the grounds that the dress was so complicated no seamstress could earn the minimum wage producing it. They asked permission to consult their union headquarters on Spadina Avenue before resuming work. Eaton’s gave them permission to leave the building but warned them they must be back at work before 5:30 that afternoon. It proved impossible for them to walk to the union office and back before the deadline. The following morning, Eaton’s locked them out.

  Had the company been less hasty in its actions, had the women not lost their jobs in such a brutal fashion, the commission would not have had their testimony and the company’s treatment of its piecework employees in the early Depression years might never have come to light. But the record is there, to be quoted and requoted and to haunt the T. Eaton Company down through the years. Today, a work stoppage at Eaton’s and a subsequent lockout could not be kept from the media. In 1934, the women did attempt to distribute handbills and carry sandwich boards to publicize their grievances, but the press paid no attention. Not a word of the trouble appeared in any of the four Toronto dailies, all of which treated both Eaton’s and Simpson’s as sacrosanct because of their pages of advertising.

  This was a story perfect for the age of television: young women being exploited by a powerful corporation, carrying placards and picketing the biggest store in town. But in those days, even radio (which was less beholden than the papers to department store advertising) didn’t have the facilities to cover this kind of news. No reporter ventured out into the streets with a microphone. Tape recording hadn’t been invented. The tough, probing interview belonged to the future. And so the story went unreported until the following January, when the commission heard it from some of the union members, and even then newspaper readers in Toronto had to look hard to find it.

  The Toronto papers handled the testimony very gingerly. On the day that Annie Wells and Jean Chambers testified, the Star’s front-page headline reassured its readers: “EATON F-8 PLANT PAID FAIR WAGE AUDITOR REVEALS.” The story failed to make it clear that Eaton’s had not changed its policies until after hearings were announced. That day the paper carried three and a half pages of Eaton’s advertisements. Throughout the session, the Star gave far more prominence to Eaton’s side of the story than to that of its employees: “HOUNDING DID NOT EXIST EATON OFFICIAL TESTIFIES”; “FACTORY WAGES ARE FAIR EATON ESTIMATOR INSISTS.”

  The Star at least put its coverage on the front page. The other three newspapers rarely did. Again, Eaton’s got kid-glove treatment. Of nine stories in the Telegram between January 16 and 23, only one headlined testimony from an ex-employee; the others favoured Eaton’s. The Mail and Empire ran six stories; the Eaton’s position was headlined in all but one. The Globe was fairer to the employees’ testimony but went out of its way to mollify the store by printing a bold-face introduction to its opening report, quoting an Eaton official as saying, “We have every assurance of the loyal understanding of the vast majority of our employees during the difficult depression period.”

  The local coverage of the testimony contrasts sharply with that of the Winnipeg Free Press, which treated the Toronto story as a major scandal: “SAYS DRIVING IN FACTORIES MADE WRECKS OF GIRLS”; “SAYS FACTORY GIRLS DRIVEN NEARLY INSANE”; “TELLS PROBE MINIMUM WAGE ACT BROKEN”; “TELLS PROBE OF WORKING BY STOP WATCHES.”

  By the time the commission completed its hearings, Harry Stevens was again the man of the hour. He had continued to dominate the inquiry. When the hearings ended in February, he lobbied the other ten members of the commission to prepare the toughest report possible and also urged the general public to force acceptance of its recommendations. He took to the platform and to the microphone to hammer home his ideas and was not above leaking the recommendations to the press. In a nation-wide broadcast, sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Youth, Stevens urged “common sense amendments to existing laws and then a fearless law enforcement.” The law as it stood, he said, had “holes big enough for millionaires to crawl through and company laws that permitted the fleecing of the public on the one hand and the sweatshops on the other.”

  The Stevens-for-Party-Leader movement was growing, endorsed by Stevens’s old sponsor, Warren K. Cook, and others who recognized that the country was in the mood for reform. One wing of the Conservative party thought that the former minister of Tr
ade and Commerce was just the man to seize the opportunity and lead the party to victory. Indeed, though the chance of hanging on to power was slim, the two leading Tories – Bennett with his New Deal and Stevens with his reputation as a dragon-slayer – might have pulled it off if they had worked in tandem, with the support of a united party. But that was clearly impossible. The right wing of the party, led by Stevens’s old adversary the white-goateed Cahan (known to some colleagues as “Dino,” for “Dinosaur”), was bitterly opposed. Stevens himself at that point had no desire for the leadership. And Bennett adamantly refused all attempts at reconciliation with a man he saw as his rival. Besides, after the effort of proposing his New Deal, the Prime Minister seemed to have run out of steam. Confined to his suite in the Chateau Laurier between February 27 and April 18 with first a respiratory infection and later a heart attack, he seemed like a forgotten hero sulking in his tent. “The colour has faded for the reform picture,” Herridge wrote to Manion in March. “The promise of performance is gone.” In fact, Bennett longed for retirement but clung stubbornly to power only to prevent Stevens from taking over.

  The ideological rupture could not be concealed from the public – not with the Opposition leader goading both Cahan and Stevens almost daily in the House. On April 12, the machiavellian King got what he wanted – a major blow-up between the two men following the tabling of the report of the Price Spreads Commission. (Indeed, the scenes the report provoked in Parliament all but overshadowed its recommendations.) King had manoeuvred Stevens into defending, once again, the pamphlet that had resulted from his speech to the Conservative Study Club the previous year – the one that had led to his resignation as chairman of the commission. That opened old wounds and brought a tough rejoinder from “Dino” Cahan. But it was not Cahan the members cheered; it was Stevens.