The Great Depression (42 page)

Although the
Gazette
tried to pretend that the public was “shocked and startled” by the broadcasts, the general attitude was favourable. The Cabinet, however, was split, and the Premier of Quebec, Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, wanted no part of Bennett’s proposals, many of which infringed on provincial sovereignty. Mackenzie King, who had been advocating many of the same measures, was enraged because he was convinced that Bennett had filched his ideas from
Industry and Humanity
, his dense 1918 tome. “It is plagiarism of the most obvious kind,” King wrote indignantly in his diary after the first broadcast, “with the most nauseating self sufficiency & egotism … the effrontery of it all – the downright hypocrisy – when I think of his money – the money that he is paying for the broadcasts no doubt – having been made largely from the life blood of women, some in the graves, of Eddy Mffg. Co – & his talking of standards in industry – humanitarianism & the like fills me with indignation too great for utterance.”

It is hard to picture the impatient and impulsive Bennett wading through King’s opus, but the former prime minister, who was convinced he had written an imperishable classic, was equally convinced that his opponent had purposely stolen his stuff. The more he brooded over it, the angrier he grew: “… this theft of my ideas … this effort to appropriate ideas, plans, etc – It is the most gigantic plagiarism and steal of another man’s aim, work etc & those of a political party that I believe has been made at any time anywhere, by one man. This is ‘the strange thing’ that is to try me [a reference to a prophetic vision], the theft of my life’s work & endeavour by Bennett to make his own.”

Bennett’s broadcasts, of course, constituted his election platform. He knew that under the constitution he must go to the country no later than October. He had seized on Herridge’s advice as a means to embarrass the Liberals, and on the face of it, his strategy seemed brilliant. How could they oppose his New Deal, which embraced so many of their own stated principles? If they did find a way to oppose it – and Bennett hoped they would – he would call a snap election, make the New Deal a campaign issue, and sweep the country. He had presented the Opposition with an apparently hopeless dilemma. As R.J. Manion put it, “If
King backs Bennett he is merely trailing, and if he abuses him, he’s a reactionary. I really think Bennett has scooped him rather badly.”

But Bennett was up against the wiliest politician in Canada. Mackenzie King’s original plan had been to oppose
any
Conservative legislation, fight it all the way in Parliament, and hope to force an election. On January 15, however, he heard Bennett declare, during the course of an address broadcast from Montreal, that his promised reforms would be laid out in the Speech from the Throne. King immediately changed his strategy. To his delight, the details of Bennett’s New Deal could be debated in the House. Bennett, as usual, had plunged hastily – even recklessly – into his reform plan without drafting the legislation. That would come after he had won the election.

Now King prepared to call his opponent’s bluff. Instead of opposing the New Deal, he would offer sweet co-operation and urge that specific legislation be placed before the current session so that it might be debated and passed. His attitude, King decided, would be “that not only of willingness but anxiety to join with him in getting a reform programme completed before any appeal to the electorate, [and] Bennett’s bubble will be pretty effectively pricked. He will be like a flattened tire.…”

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.

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 from 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.