Tag Archives: work

LAC’s collection of labour union charters

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Version française

By Dalton Campbell

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has a collection of approximately 300 labour union charters dating from the 1880s to the 1980s. A sample of the charters has been digitized: the images are available through Collection Search.

These charters were formal documents granted by unions to the locals when they were officially accepted into the union. The charters in the LAC collection can also tell us a lot about the unions, their membership, Canadian workers and work life in the twentieth century.

For example, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes charter features a detailed illustration showing the range of jobs done by its members, including tending to trains in the yard, inspecting and maintaining the rails, signals, water towers and buildings, as well as clearing the wreckage of rail cars.

Textual document titled International Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes featuring a drawing of a train station filled with people and railcars at the top of the document.

Charter granted by the International Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes to the Parry Sound Lodge no. 447, Parry Sound, Ontario, April 1909. (e011893857)

This charter, like many of the charters in the LAC collection, includes the names of the members of the local, potentially making charters a small piece of documentation in family history research. Some charters are also a window into social history. For instance, the members’ names listed in the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) charters show the industries and companies where women were employed in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.

Illustrations of union members at work and their workplaces are a common theme in the charters. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners charter uses a series of illustrations of workers in different workplaces as well as illustrations of workers receiving benefits from their union.

The International Association of Machinists charter features a workshop scene without any workers, showing only a lathe, drills, workbenches, clamps and hand tools—leaving it to the viewer to picture the tasks performed at each workstation.

Document titled International Association of Machinists featuring text and drawings of machinery.

Charter granted by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) to Local 574, Brandon, Manitoba, July 1910. (e011893856)
This charter is very different from the charter granted by the same union 20 years earlier, in 1890, to Pioneer Lodge no. 103, Stratford, Ontario. (See: MIKAN 4970006)

The International Chemical Workers Union used the same theme, featuring the beakers, flasks and glass tubing of a laboratory in the foreground with an external view of a chemical plant in the background. The Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers took a different approach, using text to list the many trades and industries in which the union membership worked.

Many of the charters in the LAC labour collection rely primarily on text, with few or no illustrations. Some feature a small illustration such as the union’s seal or logo, something associated with the industry, or something representative of union membership in general (such as a handshake). In some cases, illustrations of figures such as Benjamin Franklin or a bald eagle clearly show that the Canadian local was part of a U.S.-based international parent union.

Some of the text-only charters use detailed, colourful and eye-catching lettering, as seen in those from the International Typographical Union and the Hotel and Restaurant International Employees’ Association.

Textual document titled International Typographical Union Charter.

Charter granted by the International Typographical Union (ITU) to the Ottawa Typographical Union, Local 102, Ottawa, Ontario, 1883. The charter states the local was in “Ottawa, Canada West;” Canada West had been renamed Ontario in 1867. (e011893860)

The most ambitious and arguably most artistically successful charter in the collection is the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) charter, designed by CLC artist Harry Kelman in the 1950s.

Textual document titled The Canadian Labour Congress.

Charter granted by the Canadian Labour Congress to the Musquodoboit Sawmill Workers’ Union, CLC Local 1619, Upper Musquodoboit, Nova Scotia, September 1964. (e011893866)
For a detailed explanation of the illustrations in this charter, please consult: MIKAN 2629372.
The CLC also printed this same charter in a different colour scheme: see, for example, Buckingham Plastic Workers’ Union, Local 1551, Buckingham, Quebec. (e011537977)

The illustration in this charter uses realistic figures and symbols to show a brief history of the Canadian labour movement from the nineteenth century to the 1950s. The bottom panel shows working conditions in the nineteenth century. This was the time when, as historian Desmond Morton wrote, there was the “harsh reality of […] appalling rates of sickness, death and injury” in lumber camp bunkhouses, high rates of death in mining, and an “appalling toll of life and limb, often of young children” in factories and mills.

The vertical panels on the left and right of the charter show life in the twentieth century. The workers step into the light to work in an industrialized Canada, manufacturing cars and refining minerals; they then move into the “space age,” where they are building and operating rockets, aircraft, skyscrapers and telecommunication systems. The horizontal panel at the top shows the founding convention of the CLC in 1956. The CLC charter has an optimistic tone. The workers contribute to economic and technological progress and they share in the benefits. The present is bright and the future will be brighter.

Looking at the LAC collection of charters, it’s also interesting to look at what is under the surface and what that can show us of life in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

The workers depicted in the charters have little or no safety equipment, reflecting the standards of the era. The charters feature few images of desk workers, but it seems that only a small percentage of locals in the early to mid-twentieth century represented clerical and other office workers.

Additionally, the flag shown in the charters of the Machinists, the Brotherhood of Painters and other unions was the old Red Ensign. The unions designed these charters years, and sometimes decades, before the current Canadian flag was adopted in 1965.

The smokestacks in the CLC charter are symbols of progress and wealth and not pollution and environmental damage.

As well, the workers depicted in the charters are almost entirely white men. The CLC charter includes a few women workers; the only other depictions of women in charters are as customers or grieving widows. Racialized workers and workers with disabilities are absent from the illustrations.

According to files in the labour fonds, it appears that many of the charters in the LAC collection were returned to the union, and later donated to LAC, when the local dissolved, the membership of the local voted to move to another union, the union merged into another union or the union asked the local to leave the union.

In some cases, locals in good standing sometimes had old charters in their offices. In 1972, the CLC asked its locals to return any old charters to the head office and then the CLC would in turn donate the old charters to LAC.

Originally created as official documents to mark the affiliation between locals and the unions, these charters also fostered a sense of shared identity and membership while providing a visually appealing addition to the offices and meeting rooms of the locals. Today, the charters have a secondary value as a window into the unions, workers, workplaces and work life of the twentieth century—and as an introduction to LAC’s collection of labour archives.

Further research:

  • Charters of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) (MIKAN 107969)
    • The Canadian Labour Congress Charter. Development and interpretation of its imagery (MIKAN 2629372)
  • Charters of the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL) (MIKAN 107924)
  • Charters of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL) (MIKAN 107906)
  • Charters of the Trades and Labor Congress (TLC) (MIKAN 107903)
  • Charters of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) (MIKAN 191424)
  • Charters of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) (MIKAN 130940)

Published sources on Canadian labour history:

  • Titles available to read online:
    • Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage, Union power: solidarity and struggle in Niagara (OCLC 806034399)
    • David Frank and Nicole Lang, Labour landmarks in New Brunswick = Lieux historiques ouvriers au Nouveau-Brunswick (OCLC 956657952)
    • Eric Strikwerda, The wages of relief: cities and the unemployed in prairie Canada, 1929-39 (OCLC 847132332)
  • Other titles:
    • Desmond Morton, Working people: an illustrated history of the Canadian labour movement (OCLC 154782615)
    • Steven C. High, One job town: work, belonging, and betrayal in Northern Ontario (OCLC 1035230411)

Dalton Campbell is an archivist in the Science, Environment and Economy section of the Private Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada.

The roots of Labour Day

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By Dalton Campbell

Labour Day first became a national holiday 130 years ago in 1894. In April of that year, labour leaders met with Prime Minister Sir John Sparrow David Thompson. They made a number of demands; he agreed to only one, saying that he would work towards establishing Labour Day. By summer, legislation was enacted to make the first Monday of September a statutory holiday.

A parade through city streets.

Labour Day parade, Main Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1895. Sir William Van Horne fonds (e011367824-005). Desmond Morton writes that in the 19th century, “[p]rocessions, with floats, banners, and regalia, were a form of mass entertainment and a demonstration of order and respectability rather than militancy.”

By choosing early September, the Canadian government chose a date for a national holiday that would bridge the gap between July 1 (now Canada Day) and Thanksgiving, fit into the rhythm of the seasons (when summer turns to autumn) and avoid any associations with the overtly political May Day.

Parade through city streets.

Labour Day parade, Front Street, Belleville, Ontario, 1913. Topley Studio fonds (a010532).

A national day celebrating labour was not a new idea in 1894. The holiday had been recommended five years earlier in the final report (1889) of the Royal Commission on Relations of Labor and Capital in Canada.

The Commission’s recommendations were not implemented. However, the report still represents a significant document in Canadian labour history. It included testimonies from workers and their family members discussing the unsafe working conditions, long work hours, low wages, workplace fines, discipline, child labour and other problems. Factories in 19th century Canada were, as Jason Russell describes, “dark spaces with machinery that lacked guards to protect the workers operating them. The factories were places of boilers, steam engines and open flywheels […] and achieving even a 10-hour workday was a major objective for craft unions.”

Before Labour Day was proclaimed, local labour day celebrations had been, as Craig Heron and Steven Penfold write, “an established event on the local holiday calendar in several cities and towns.” There was a long tradition of people taking over public spaces for parades and festivals throughout the 19th century in Canada; in the 1880s, “unionized craft workers in the country took over the traditions [of parades] and made up a new one.”

A parade with marching band through city streets.

Knights of Labor procession, King Street, Hamilton, Ontario, 1880s. Edward McCann collection (a103086). Originally from the United States, the Knights of Labor entered Canada when they became established in Hamilton in 1881. They quickly expanded to become one of the most important labour organizations in 19th century Canada.

Miners in Nova Scotia organized what appears to have been the first local labour holiday in 1880, followed by Toronto in 1882 and then by Hamilton and Oshawa (1883), Montreal (1886), St. Catharines (1887), Halifax (1888), Ottawa and Vancouver (1890) and London (1892).

The Trades Union Advocate, a weekly labour newspaper, described the July 1882 labour parade in Toronto in detail.

The parade featured workers from various craft unions with small workstations set up on flatbed wagons. As they went through the city, they presented their work to the crowds: the lithographers printed leaflets and pictures, the cigar makers rolled tobacco “with remarkable dexterity and nimbleness,” the seafarers had equipped their trailer as a ship and so on. The parade included dignitaries, union members marching on foot holding banners and signs and a dozen marching bands scattered among the floats. The Toronto Globe reported that at least 3 000 people marched in the parade and 50 000 watched from the sidewalks.

In addition to the Trades Union Advocate, the LAC labour collection also has a number of Labour Day photographs: some of these images are included here and others are available in this LAC Flickr album, with all of them being available through Collection Search.

A woman at a microphone.

Labour leader and social activist Madeleine Parent at the microphone. Labour Day, Valleyfield, Quebec, 1948. Madeleine Parent and R. Kent Rowley fonds (a120397).

The LAC labour collection also includes approximately 50 Labour Day messages from the 1930s to the 1970s by labour leaders A.R. Mosher, Pat Conroy, Jim MacDonald, Donald MacDonald, Jean-Claude Parrot and others. The messages touch on universal themes: the gains of labour unions, the need to organize more workplaces and the vital role of workers to corporate profits, production and the economy. Each year’s message also touched on contemporary events, making the speeches a small historical snapshot of that year. The perennial message, however, was one of support for workers. In 1966, Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) president Claude Jodoin captured this in words that still resonate in the 21st century, “Trade unions have devoted a major part of their efforts to obtaining for workers the right to leisure and relaxed enjoyment of the fruits of their labour.” Labour Day, a holiday enjoyed today by millions of Canadians, is one of the results of those efforts.

Further research:

Published sources:

  • Craig Heron and Steven Penfold, The workers’ festival: a history of Labour Day in Canada (OCLC 58545284)
  • Jason Russell, Canada, a working history (OCLC 1121293856)
  • Desmond Morton, Working people: an illustrated history of the Canadian labour movement (OCLC 154782615)
  • Report of the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital in Canada (OCLC 1006920421, Government of Canada publications publications.gc.ca 472984)
  • Greg Kealey, ed., Canada investigates industrialism: the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889 (OCLC 300947831)

Dalton Campbell is an archivist in the Science, Environment and Economy section of the Private Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada.

Textiles made in Canada: the archives of the Dominion Textile Company

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By Jennifer Anderson and Dalton Campbell

Archives can reveal the details of Canadians’ everyday work lives, suggest to contemporary researchers what earlier generations experienced in the workplace, and show how the Canadian economy has changed over time. A case in point: the extensive photographs in the collections of Library and Archives Canada (LAC) related to the production and marketing of Canadian-made textiles. Many of these photographs have been digitized and are available through the LAC collection search.

A colour photograph of five packages of Texmade sheets, in different colours and styles.

A promotional photograph for Texmade products, a Dominion Textile brand (e011201409)

For generations, the Dominion Textile Company was synonymous with Canadian-made cotton textiles. Established in 1905 through a merger of four independent textile firms, Dominion Textile originally operated 11 mills, producing primarily griege cotton and finished cotton cloth for Canadian markets. As the company consolidated its position, it began to expand its reach in the textile industry and across the country. The firm’s headquarters were in Montréal, Quebec.

When the first textile companies were founded, the majority of Canadians were making their own clothing. According to Serge Gaudreau, the textile industry, like the railroad, was a visible symbol of Canada’s modernity at the beginning of the 20th century, a complex industry that combined human labour with machinery. Facing competition from the United States and the United Kingdom, Canadian companies were given tax breaks under Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s National Policy, allowing the Canadian textile mills to make headway in the competitive 1870s market.

In the textile industry, race/ethnicity, gender and class had relevance. As was commonplace in the Quebec manufacturing sector in those days, the workforce that carried the industry into the new era was largely Francophone and Irish, with English-speaking managers. The cotton itself would likely have been produced in the American South. Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but the sharecropping system that replaced it continued to exploit racialized and poor labourers.

Textile mills in Canada relied on a very high percentage of female workers, as Gail Cuthbert Brandt has shown in Through the Mill: Girls and Women in the Quebec Cotton Textile Industry, 1881–1951 and Joy Parr in The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950.

A black-and-white photograph showing men and women posed in a factory with large machines in the foreground.

Seven male and three female factory workers posed behind machinery, ca. 1895, Magog, Quebec (e011213545)

Dominion Textile maintained its own archives before transferring the documents to LAC. The archival fonds includes a rich collection of photographs, textual records and audiovisual recordings documenting the work life and community of employees, the architecture of mills in diverse locations, the process of textile fabrication, and the finished products. Like many company towns, the cotton mills organized sports teams, whose legacy lives on in the archives.

A black-and-white matted photograph of a soccer team, with the players in striped jerseys and the coaches in suits.

Montmorency Association Football Club soccer league champions, 1915, Montmorency, Quebec (e011213574)

The collection contains the administrative and operational records of the parent company as well as minute books and financial records of 62 other firms associated with Dominion Textile. These firms include the original four predecessor companies that merged in 1905, subsidiary companies and the independent textile companies acquired by Dominion Textile as it expanded to become Canada’s largest textile firm.

For some fabric companies, the Dominion Textile merger was a necessity. Montmorency Cotton Mills, established in 1898, produced a variety of products (grey cloth, hosiery yarns, towelling, sheeting and flannels) for domestic and international markets. The company was forced into the merger in part because of the effects on international trade caused by the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Montmorency mills remained operational well into the 1980s. The archival photographs at LAC illustrate the mill’s longevity and the powerful waterfall that produced energy for its operations.

A black-and-white aerial photograph showing a factory beside a river, with a large waterfall in the background.

Dominion Textile Limited, 1925, Montmorency, Quebec (e011213592)

In 1929, as part of a larger acquisition, Dominion Textile also acquired what would be called the Sherbrooke Cotton Company. The acquisition included the stock of the Sherbrooke Housing Company, which sought to build a model city for the mill’s employees. The plant, retooled to manufacture synthetic fibres in 1935, continued to operate until the 1990s.

A page from a binder featuring a colour aerial photograph of a factory in a town, near a river, with statistics printed below the photograph.

Sherbrooke Fabrics, ca. 1980, Sherbrooke, Quebec (e011213596)

Penman Manufacturing Company, first incorporated in 1882, dates back to 1868, when its first knitted goods factory opened. Under John Penman, the company became the largest knitting firm in Canada when it assumed control of six smaller knitting mills in Port Dover, Paris and other towns in Ontario and Quebec.

In 1906, the company was acquired by Dominion Textile and reorganized under the name Penmans Limited. The company continued to expand, producing hosiery, underwear and other knitted goods.

A page from a binder featuring a colour aerial photograph of a factory with a chimney near the centre, surrounded by trees and a town, with statistics below the photograph.

Penmans plant, ca. 1980, Paris, Ontario (e011213581)

The Dominion Textile photographs depict mills in towns and cities across central and eastern Canada, representing the close proximity between factory buildings and the local community and workforce. They are complemented by archival material in other collections at LAC.

The material also shows changes to technology as well as health and safety protections in the workplace, and it reflects the industry’s evolution.

A black-and-white photograph of two women standing and operating devices in a laboratory, with machinery and a large window in the background, and pipes and fluorescent lighting overhead.

Testing laboratory, ca. 1945, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia (e011213547)

A black-and-white photograph of a man wearing jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt monitoring a spooling machine.

A worker monitors a spooling machine at Long Sault Fabrics, 1984 (e011213534)

The archival collection also includes textual records related to the negotiation of the 1987 free trade agreement with the United States, and the expected impact on the textile industry.

The collection shows that the marketing of Canadian-made fashion was also about cultural diplomacy and international trade. Over the years, economic pressures, market competition and difficult work conditions often led to restructuring and downsizing, which met resistance from the workforce. The collection includes images related to strikes and labour unrest at the textile mills.

A black-and-white photograph of a group of people marching in the street, carrying a banner that reads “Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Textile, CSD [Centrale des syndicats démocratiques], Usine de Montmorency” [Textile workers, CSD (Congress of Democratic Trade Unions), Montmorency factory].

Protesters in labour dispute, ca. 1970 (e011213559)

The fonds also includes vibrant promotional imagery and moving images featuring the finished products, which made Dominion Textile quite literally a household name in Canada.

A colour photograph of two women wearing patterned cotton dresses, jackets and headscarves, walking on a runway.

Fashion show, 1986 (e011201412)

We look forward to seeing how researchers will incorporate the recently digitized photographs into new projects on the importance of the textile industry in Canada and further explore the breadth of the resources preserved at LAC. If Reference Services can be of assistance, please reach out to us.

To see more images related to the Dominion Textile Company and textile manufacturing, visit our Flickr album.

Here are some other sources at LAC:

Hamilton Cotton Company fonds

Lennard and Sons Ltd. fonds

Mercury-Chipman Knit Ltd. fonds

Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union: Textile Division fonds

Jacob Lawrence Cohen fonds

Madeleine Parent and Kent Rowley fonds

Margot Trevelyan fonds

Royal Commission on the Textile Industry

Department of Industry records

Jennifer Anderson was an archivist in the Reference Services Division, and Dalton Campbell is an archivist in the Science, Environment and Economy Section, at Library and Archives Canada. The authors wish to thank Kerry O’Neill for her contributions to this blog.