Exploring Post War Consumption
Canadian labor unions and movements have historically been sexist as all hell. This has potentially far-reaching implications both because of how much of the Canadian workforce was female and because what it might say about how Canadian labor leaders and organizations viewed various aspects of labor and how it affected their decisions and values. Feminist labor historians have pretty thoroughly proven that “many pre-Second World War laborists and leftists assumed that productive and political work outside the home was masculine,” and moreover associated “commodity production with muscular masculinity” (Belisle, 2005, p.642). Further, this caused labor leaders and thinkers “to valorize the masculine-typed traits of rationalism, virility, and autonomy, and to denigrate the feminine-typed traits of passion, decadence, and dependance” (Belisle, 2005, p.643). In short, some aspects of labor and the working world were good and some were bad. The good ones were coded as male. The bad ones were coded as female. This is a tendency seen in many areas of human endeavor and it is very common for sucky traits to be coded female. Labor thinkers from Marx on down have a history of privileging “production over consumption” (Belisle, 2005, p.643). It is not hard to see how this could influence how labor leaders and activists would view and treat white-collar retail work and other consumption focused workplaces. Proving how and if this affected the course of labor history is the next step, and Belisle’s article on a campaign to unionize a set of huge retail department stores in Toronto as her testbed to prove the concept.
“At the middle of the twentieth century the T. Eaton Company was not only Canada’s largest department store, it was the country’s third-largest employer” (Belisle, 2005, p.643). Their Toronto stores alone had a good twelve thousand employees ripe for unionization. Over half of them were women, and being high end haute couture department stores they were firmly on the consumer/consumption end of the economic spectrum. From 1948 to 1952 the Canadian Congress of Labour launched a drive to do just that. This so-called Eaton Drive proved to be “the largest single union campaign in Canadian history,” all of which makes the attempt to unionize the stores and employees in question an excellent case study for the purposes of the questions outlined above (Belisle, 2005, pp.641-642). She does this with a heavy emphasis on primary sources in the form of newsletters and propaganda leaflets published and distributed by the union to demonstrate the gender-based rhetoric used by union organizers.
The CCL was a conservative union focused on stability and enabling workers to earn a living family wage. They rejected radical labor politics to a considerable extent in favor of supporting “liberal industrial capitalism on the condition that it could provide job security and purchasing power for all male labourers” (Belisle, 2005, p.671). This emphasis on male labourers is significant for Belisle’s purposes due to the predominately female nature of the Eaton workforce. As with late 19th and early 20th American unions many but not all Canadian unionists opposed female labor as both a disruption of traditional “patriarchal domesticity” that stole needed work and wages from men” (Belisle, 2005, p.645). These unions only supported equal benefits and pay for female employees inasmuch as it prevented them from having a competitive advantage against the male workers who should have those jobs. They supposed “equal pay for equal work because higher pay for men’s jobs imperilled men’s employment rights” (Belisle, 2005, p.652). Thus, the union “made male entitlements central to its blueprint for social change” (Belisle, 2005, p.647).
One of the problems the CCL’s organizers encountered in dealing with Eaton’s female employees was that a number of them were classified as temporary or part-time workers. Aside from giving them theoretically less stake to buy into the union, this coupled with sexism on the part of union organizers contributed to them being classified “as unskilled workers doing unskilled work” (Belisle, 2005, p.650). It was taken as a given that “working-class wives entered the workforce only because their husbands’ wages were inadequate” (Belisle, 2005, p.651). This view of female employees as second-class citizens of the working world generated contradictions between organizers’ sexism and their desire to unionize the company that ultimately contributed to the union drive’s failure.
The article is ultimately inconclusive and fails to prove any its hypothesis one way or another. It confirms some things that other scholars had already argued, such as that “the CCL’s postwar trajectory was conservative” and that “a few CCLers challenged patriarchal and modernist conventions” (Belisle, 2005, p.672), but does not prove either way what effect either of these had on the failure of the Eaton unionization drive or what larger lessons can be drawn from the case study. It concludes by saying that further research is needed on the subject. Unfortunately, further research is what Belisle’s article was supposed to provide.
References
Belisle, D. (2005). Exploring Postwar Consumption: The Campaign to Unionize Eaton’s in Toronto, 1948-1952. The Canadian Historical Review, 86 (4), 641-672.
