05 Feb 2010
So here we have three articles under the analysis. These are “The Honest Workingman and Workers’ Control: The Experience of Toronto Skilled Workers, 1860-1892″ by G. S. Kealey , “Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889″ by P. DeLottinville, “After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Class of British Columbia 1849-1890″ by J. Lutz. Every article is telling its own unique story about the development of a working class in America.
The first Article “The Honest Workingman and Workers’ Control: The Experience of Toronto Skilled Workers, 1860-1892″ by Gregory S. Kealey is divided into three parts and tells us about the struggle of three working classes (coopers, moulders and printers) for their rights and deserved wage. In each part of his work the author describes all the difficulties the workers had to overcome to achieve the aims set. The author uses great number of historical documents and newspaper articles of that times to show the real picture of the situation happening at that time. The subject of the article is underlines in the following sentences of the article: “In the late nineteenth century Toronto skilled workers came to terms with the new industrial society but the terms they arrived at were those of constant resistance and struggle. The successes that they and other workers achieved forced management and government to devise entirely new strategies which have become commonly known as “scientific management” and “progressivism”. This analysis applies to workers undergoing the process of industrialization and will account for the Coopers* early Toronto experience but in studying the history of Toronto moulders and printers we will need other explanations” (Kealey, 1976. p. 34)
The article is build up in four paragraphs. First three describe the life of three working groups of people (coopers, moulders and printers), their work and difficulties they met on the way of industrialization and capitalism. His own position the author reflects with such words “proud and respectable workman surrounded by unscrupulous capitalists and unmanly workers who have given up their self-respect in order to carry out the evil tasks of the monopolistic bosses” (Kealey, 1976. p. 37). This statement reflects not only the attitude of the author to the situation but his feeling of the nation and let us see how he is empathizing with the difficulties of the working class met on their way of good working conditions. Using different devices the author brings the reader into the center of the struggle, gets the reader acquainted to all the sources and methods of reformation the labour in the end of the 19th century. “Alf Jury, a Toronto tailor and labour reformer, denounced “the wage system as a modified form of slavery””, – quotes the writer a well known figure at that times and the whole text is filled with such quotations they perfectly describe the atmosphere and tension that was an essential part of the life of every cooper, moulder and printer. Labour unions played a great role in the struggle between the capitalist world and labourers, who wanted all their rights were kept up. “Toronto workers, who had struggled throughout the late nineteenth century for shop floor control, were about to face new. more virulent battles. The custom of workers’ control, widely regarded as a right, had become deeply embedded in working class culture. The fight, initially to maintain and later to extend this control, became the major locus of class struggle in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
Thus even in the cases where craft unions abandoned the traditional practices of the “autonomous workman” in return for concessions or out of weakness, the leadership could not always assure management that the membership would follow union dicates. As one investigator noted about the foundry business” (Kealey, 1976. p62)
Another article “Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889″ by P. DeLottinville shows the life and the battle for the rights of another layer of the working class. The article tells us of a port area and a particular tavern Joe Beef Canteen, which was some kind of shelter for the working-class. The main subject of the article is “description of the working-class culture which grew around Joe Beefs Canteen and analysis that culture in terms of the community which supported it.”( DeLottinville,1981 p.10) It was very interesting to note the fact that the author describes the particular figure, who influenced the whole working class movement at some period of time. Joe Beef (Charles McKiernan) was the owner of the tavern and among the middle class of the Montreal he was associated with all the unattractiveness and depravity of the working class: “Drunkenness, blood sports, and street brawls associated with the waterfront taverns could not be permitted to flourish if all workers were to adopt the disciplined virtues of the new industrial society” (DeLottinville, 1981. p.11) Joe Beef was an essential part of this life and the author calls Montreal “a city of contrast” (DeLottinville, 1981. p.9); Joe Beef was very respectful man among the working class of a waterfront, but he and his tavern were considered to be resident evil among the middle class people. I can say that this article seemed to me a kind of biographical review of a particular person in the light of certain events. The author described different activities of Joe Beef from the time he opened his tavern until his death. It can be told without any doubts that he played a great role in events happened 1878 during the strike: “Strongest support for the strikers came from the waterfront community. Practical in all things, McKiernan realized that strikers, like the army, travel on their stomachs. On the morning of 20 December, he sent 300 loaves of bread, 36 gallons of tea, and a similar quantity of soup. These supplies required two wagons to be delivered” (DeLottinville, 1981. p.21). Until his death the person of Joe Beef was among the central figures, which played a great role in the process of formation labour unions to make the workers of the port area more socially safe: “Besides using his Canteen to take care of the strikers’ physical needs, McKieman also used his skills as an orator to attract public attention to the strikers’ demands. By 1877, Joe Beef was a figure of some notoriety in Montreal and the local press found that his exploits made good copy. His support of the strike was reported extensively in Montreal and even in one Ottawa newspaper”. (DeLottinville, 1981. p.22). It is very important to know that Joe Beef was central figure in uniting the working class of Montreal: “In assessing the significance of Charles McKieman to the Montreal working class in the 1870s and 1880s, one must remember that when McKieman arrived in 1868 he did not create the working-class culture associated with Joe Beefs Canteen. That culture, which had grown out of the daily routines of the casual labourers on the docks, already existed. What Joe Beef accomplished was to give that culture a public face and voice, a figure upon which the local press and reformers could focus. In doing so, Joe Beef saved that culture from the obscurity which generally surrounds work cultures” (DeLottinville, 1981. p. 37), “Joe Beefs Canteen illustrated the complex nature of working-class culture. In the narrow, traditional sense of culture as artistic creation, the satiric verses, engravings or cartoons by McKieman and others about Joe Beef contributed in a minor way to the nineteenth-century radical literature in Canada. Local historians of Montreal were well aware of this tradition left behind by Joe Beef” (DeLottinville, 1981. p.39).
The third article is “After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Class of British Columbia 1849-1890” by J. Lutz. It tells us how does the aboriginal inhabitants of Canada played their role formation of working class.
In the beginning of the article the author set a number of questions and subdivided the article of several parts according to the question. The subject of the article is to show the significance of aboriginal working class and to find the answers on some questions connected with the motivation of “the Natives” as the author calls aboriginal people (according to historical documents he used in his work) to work on wage.
One of the most important things to know about that times is the fact that the aboriginal people were the main working force at that time in Britich Columbia. And their contribution into the development of that area was really great. At first they were coming to the settlements of white people for trading “One of the commodities aboriginal people sold was labour” (Lutz, 1992. p. 73) and then stayed there for season work mostly connected with agriculture and something like that: “There is virtually no information on how aboriginal people were recruited into the preindustrial labour force for agriculture and public works or the manifold handicraft industries sponsored by the Hudson’s Bay Company and others. It seems clear however that with aboriginal abundant in and around the settlements of British Columbia, recruitment was not difficult” (Lutz, 1992. p. 82).
All the recruiting was connected with the chiefs of the tribe. They were in some part recruiters for their people: “The white recruiters visited the Sliammon chiefs on the Sunshine Coast in 1882 and told them that their people would earn $3 a day at the Fraser River canneries” (Lutz, 1992. p.83) It was a typical situation and aboriginal people did everything to stay alive in the quickly developing society in the era of industrialization: “Aboriginal people apparantely found that these new forms of work could be used like the fur trade, to enhance their position in their own society. In 1853, for example, using the wealth they had accumulated from working around Victoria, the Songhees people hosted a potlatch, Three thousand aboriginal people, perhaps a tenth of population of the entire coastal area, attended this feast” (Lutz, 1992. p.88).
The author noted a very interesting fact that capitalism culture was using the labouring forces of the Natives and they were using capitalism and wage system on their own purpose: “While the capitalist economy needed the vast pool of aboriginal labour, aboriginal people used the capitalist economy for their own cultural purposes. Wage labour was one juncture where the potlatch system and capitalism were curiously complementary. Aboriginal people fitted seasonal paid work into their own economic cycle and, in the era described, were able to maintain a level of control over their participation in both” (Lutz, 1992. p.92 )
I think that all three articles are too different to be compared. Each was written in its own unique way and they use different ways in proving the points of view. One similar fact is in that every article is based on the historical facts supported with numerous historical documents and newspaper articles of that times. To my mind these articles could be subdivided on more informative and more thrilling and interesting. The first article is built in logical parts describing in every part a separate working class layer with its peculiarities and in the end the author makes a final conclusion. In the second article the author takes a particular figure, who influenced a lot the culture of the working class and “tells his story” in the retrospection of certain events of past. The third article gives us the facts that the author gathered little by little from the sources. The information of the third article is often based on logical assumption based on the historical materials and the last article doesn’t yield the first one in informativity.
Every article has certain peculiarities and I think that they have the same idea: to clear for the successors the history of Canadian laboring history supporting the historical documents available. Every author used different devices to bring the reader into the atmosphere of the late 19th century and to feel the breath of that times in the beginning of 21st century.
Sources:
- Kealey, G. S. (1976) The Honest Working Man and Workers’ Control: The Experience of Toronto Skilled Workers. Labour vol. 1, 32-68
- DeLottinville P. (1981) Joe Beef of Montreal: Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889. Labour vol. 8-9, 9-40
- Lutz, J. (1992). After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Class of British Columbia, 1849-1890. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, vol. 3, n° 1, 69-93
Custom essay writing service Essay-911.com. Buy essays!
Tags: article review, custom essay, Free Essay
