Women workers have much to celebrate

This Labour Day, we should admire the efforts made by Canadian women in utilizing unions to better their lives

Authors of the upcoming book Women United: Stories of Women’s Struggles for Equality in the Canadian Auto Workers Union

It has been 130 years since the 1885 Factories Act in Quebec limited working hours to 60 hours a week for women and children, and started Canada on its path to addressing workplace health and safety issues. Another 60 years later, the Female Employees Fair Remuneration Act of 1952 was passed in Ontario, which mandated equal pay for men and women doing the same job. Women workers have come a long way since that law was enacted 75 years ago – a fitting topic for reflection on Labour Day.

Historically, heavy manufacturing industries such as autos and aerospace have largely employed men. However, since the earliest days of these industries, women have fought their way in, attracted by higher wages and better benefits – the result of hard-won union representation and actions. It was during the Second World War, with many men off in combat, that an influx of women made their way into the industrial work force. Unions increased their efforts to organize women by emphasizing issues like equal pay; before legislation like Ontario’s Fair Remuneration Act came into being, women could legally be paid less than men.

At first, equal-pay initiatives were more of an effort to prevent women’s wages from undercutting men’s pay when they returned from the front. But over time, in tandem with the war effort – which was a battle against fascism and discrimination – the issue of fairness resonated at home. Equal pay became an issue of human rights.

Even the postwar pressure to push women out of the paid work force and back into the home didn’t extinguish in Canadian women the flame of independence and equality. Some women never left the work force, and others were enticed further, lured into new industries by higher pay.

While equal pay was still an organizing goal, child care was also emerging as a challenge for working women. In the postwar era, many thought that if women wanted “men’s jobs,” then they needed to “think like men” and solve personal problems, like child care, on their own.

As second-wave feminism took hold, the push for women to join the work force increased in both the public and the private sectors. But suddenly, women faced the accusation that they were taking men’s jobs away from them, since men were “the natural breadwinners.” The workplace culture could be hostile. Some men just didn’t want to work with women, accusing them of invading what had been “male spaces” where men could feel comfortable posting sexist pin-ups on the walls.

With time, major manufacturing unions like the United/Canadian Auto Workers (now called Unifor) incorporated women’s equality into their organizational goals. By the end of the war years, structures like women’s committees, women’s departments and conferences organized by unions provided an institutional home for the feminist activism that would follow within the labour movement.

However, a hostile culture in the workplace persisted for decades, with conditions only changing when some women took on the extraordinary burden of refusing to leave. These courageous pioneers, encouraged by some progressive men, forced open doors to good-paying jobs for others.

While unions have been maledominated in industrial sectors throughout their history, they have also provided the institutional heft to transform workplaces for women. The economic power of those unions, with their ability to shut down giant industries, fostered the perfect environment to advance women’s rights.

Today, unionized women build vehicles alongside their unionized male colleagues. Their lives are much better for it and their grandmothers would be thrilled.

Still, there are many industries that women have either been shut out of in a leadership capacity, or where they still face much hostility: the military, law enforcement, construction and resource extraction, just to name a few. Any job sector can create an unwelcoming environment for women, reproducing the same pressures that women in manufacturing have always faced: isolation, sexism, lack of child care, inflexible schedules, shunning by colleagues and so on.

The groundbreaking work of women in heavy-manufacturing industries offers helpful guidance for those looking to advance women’s rights today: organizing as women, even when numbers are very few; getting involved in the union and taking every union education course possible; finding allies who can offer support and guidance; using union structures to advance women’s rights; showing solidarity with the broader women’s movement; and standing your ground and never giving up.