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The Development of a Capitalistic Labour Market in Canada*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

H. C. Pentland
H. C. Pentland*
Affiliation:
University of Manitoba
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Extract

It has been the custom of economists since the Mercantilists to assume the existence of a capitalistic labour market. It appears that this abstraction was adopted, not from ignorance of labour conditions–Malthus, who sponsored the bleakest model of a labour market, after all possessed exceptional knowledge of contemporary social conditions–but because it simplified the economists' main task, as they conceived it, of expounding how a capitalist economy works. The abstraction had the disadvantage, however, of diverting attention from how a capitalistic labour market might develop. This question, besides its historical and sociological interest, is relevant to the study of labour markets, and of “economic development.” Yet, in Canada, it has received only brief attention. This paper proposes a more detailed view of how our capitalistic labour market arose.

By a capitalistic market is meant one in which the actions of workers and employers are governed and linked by impersonal considerations of immediate pecuniary advantage. In this market, the employer is confident that workers will be available whenever he wants them; so he feels free to hire them on a short-term basis, and to dismiss them whenever there is a monetary advantage in doing so. Hence, the employer takes no responsibility for the workers' overhead costs: labour, to the employer, is a variable cost. From a broader viewpoint, the capitalistic labour market represents a pooling of the labour supplies and labour needs of many employers, so that all of them may benefit by economizing on labour reserves. Economy is possible because the labour requirements of employers collectively are less than those of employers individually, to the extent that short-term needs for labour dovetail, and to the extent that a worker can stand as a reserve to many employers. When the demand and supply conditions of labour are dependable enough to permit this pooling, the overhead costs of labour can be transferred from individual employers to the market, that is, to the workers themselves and to the community at large. The essential historical aspect of the capitalistic labour market, then, is the development of the supply and demand conditions that will support it. Two questions are especially critical: How are workers induced to flow into the labour market pool? And how are they prevented from flowing out again?

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , November 1959 , pp. 450 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1959

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Saskatoon, June 5, 1959.

References

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7 Lunn, Alice J. E., “Economic Development in New France, 1713-1760,” Ph.D. thesis, McGill, 1942, 12.Google Scholar The name “panis” is supposed to come from “Pawnees,” exceptionally docile Indians who were easily captured by the Foxes and sold to the French.

8 Canadian Archives, Report, 1899, 86 Google Scholar; Fauteux, J. N., Essai sur l'industrie au Canada (2 vols., Québec, 1927), II, 477.Google Scholar References to negro slavery in the last quarter of the eighteenth century are numerous, e.g., Greaves, The Negro in Canada, 10-16; but a census of 1784 reported only 304 slaves in Lower Canada.

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16 As in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In Canada, the Price interests were able to operate a vicious system of debt slavery on the Saguenay. Blanchard, R., L'Est du Canada français (2 vols., Paris, Montréal), 1935, II, 67–70.Google Scholar

17 Nute, Grace Lee, The Voyageur (St. Paul, 1955), 14.Google Scholar

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24 In the early years the wage rates were set to draw workers from France, and were considered outrageously high. Apparently by 1749, and more clearly by 1800, they were two-thirds or less of what other skilled workers received. However, the benefits and disadvantages of company housing and store, which can only be guessed at, affect the comparison.

25 Some of these developments were discussed in Pentland, H. C., “The Role of Capital in Canadian Economic Development before 1875,” this Journal, XVI, no. 4, 11, 1950, 457–74.Google Scholar

26 Censuses reported 524,000 French in Lower Canada in 1844 and 14,000 in Upper Canada in 1842. See Henripin, Jacques, “From Acceptance of Nature to Control,” this Journal, XXIII, no. 1, 02, 1957, 10–19.Google Scholar

27 The Durham Report exaggerated the situation, however, in its claim that between 1784 and 1826, the population of the seigneuries had more than quadrupled, while the quantity of land under cultivation had increased only a third. Durham, Earl of, Report on the Affairs of British North America (4th ed., London: Methuen, 1930), 217.Google Scholar The claim seems to rest on a bad census of 1827, which yields an amount of land per household that is completely at variance with earlier and later returns. Other censuses indicate that the proportion of land to households was well maintained, but the averages undoubtedly hide deterioration on the seigneuries.

28 Parker, W. H., “The Geography of the Province of Lower Canada in 1837,” Ph.D. thesis, Oxford, 1958, 55–8Google Scholar; “A Revolution in the Agricultural Geography of Lower Canada, 1833-1838,” Revue canadienne de géographie, 1957, 189–94.Google Scholar

29 Parker's study implies that the rebellion of 1837 followed from failure of the wheat crop.

30 Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Assembly Appointed to Inquire into the Causes and Importance of the Emigration Which Takes Place Annually, from Lower Canada to the United States (Montreal, 1849)Google Scholar (Sessional Papers, 1849, Appendix (AAAAA)).

31 Q222 Part 1 (P.A.C.), Aylmer to Aberdeen, April 6, 1835, is an unusual return of prices and wages in Lower Canada for 1834. Wages were shown for different seasons but averaged about 2 shillings per day for common labourers and 4 to 5 shillings per day for artisans.

32 E.g., evidence concerning French Canadians hired for construction work on the Grand Trunk Railway in SirHelps, Arthur, Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey, 1805-1870 (3rd ed., London, 1872), 197.Google Scholar The French were willing, but physically incapable of doing heavy work. The employer's explanation was that: “They are small men, and they are a class who are not well fed. They live entirely on vegetable food, and they scarcely ever taste meat.”

33 E.g., Sessional Papers, 1843, Appendix (T), deposition of Louis Isaac Larocque.

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35 Dissent must be expressed from Kenneth Buckley's view that “emigration [of French Canadians] began on a large scale to other regions, and by mid-century to growing urban centers within Quebec” (“The Role of Staple Industries in Canada's Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History, 12, 1958, 449 Google Scholar; my emphasis). The evidence is against a large movement of French Canadians to urban centres within Quebec before 1870. While it exaggerates the case to say that the French population was more rural in 1861 (86 per cent) than at any other time ( Langlois, , Histoire de la population canadienne-française, 183 Google Scholar), the French population of Montreal and Quebec, which was 7½; per cent of the French population of the province in 1851, had only become 8½; per cent of that population in 1861 and 10½; per cent in 1871. The increase between 1851 and 1871 of the French population of Montreal (31,000) and Quebec (16,000) is not much more than might be expected from natural increase of the urban population.

36 In his A View of the Art of Colonization (Oxford, 1914).Google Scholar

37 The proportions of Irish among immigrants at Quebec and Montreal were: 1817-20, 47 per cent; 1821-4, 74 per cent; 1829-31, 66 per cent; 1832-5, 62 per cent; 1842-6, 58 per cent. Official returns understate the Irish proportion in later years by counting the Irish from Liverpool as “English”: thus, in 1847 there were not just 50,000 Irish (56 per cent) as officially stated, but 75,000 or more (perhaps 85 per cent).

38 P.A.C., Public Works I: vol. XVI, Lachine Canal: Accounts, Labourers, 1819-1821 (actually, 1820-4); vol. XX, Accounts, Public Works, Labourers, 1825-1836.

39 One can be confident that it was mostly Ulster people of whom the Chief Emigration Agent at Quebec (an Ulsterman) wrote in his report for 1831: “The moment a labouring servant can save out of his wages £.10 or £.15-and which is readily accomplished within the first year if frugal; he proceeds into some of the neighbouring settlements and purcheses 50 or 100 acres of land …” (Q198 Part 2).

40 While the flow of immigrants to Canada has always adjusted itself closely to demand, the response tends to be one year late. Immigration could also be disturbed by exceptional mortality or rebellion. The collapse of immigration in 1838 and 1839 resulted in complaints of labour shortage in those years.

41 E.g., Hansen, M. L., The Immigrant in American History (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), 65–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Innis, H. A., “Industrialism and Settlement in Western Canada” in his Problems of Staple Production in Canada (Toronto, 1933).Google Scholar

42 McTaggart, John, Three Years in Canada … (2 vols., London, 1829), II, 243–8.Google Scholar

43 P.A.C.: P.S.O., C.W., 1851, no. 284, Petition of the Inhabitants of Hamilton, Feb. 12, 1851; P.S.O, C.W., 1852, no. 364, Mills to Provincial Secretary, Feb. 24, 1852; P.S.O., C.W., 1853, no. 1050, Court of General Quarters Sessions of Middlesex and Elgin to Provincial Secretary, July 7, 1853, and enclosure; P.S.O., C.W., 1854, no. 99, Mayor of London to Provincial Secretary, Jan. 12, 1854, and enclosure.

44 U.C. Sundries ( P.A.C. ), Tunney to Hillier, Oct. 24, 1827.

45 Ibid., Mackenzie to Rowan, May 7, 1834, and enclosure.

48 Connell, K. H., The Population of Ireland, 1750-1845 (Oxford, 1950)Google Scholar; Arensberg, C. M., The Irish Countryman (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; Arensberg, C. M. and Kimball, S. T., Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1940).Google Scholar

47 Wakefield, A View of the Art of Colonization, 175. Wakefield's other classes of slaves were negroes, convicts, and indentured servants.

48 Ships were scarce in 1854, and the number actually brought was probably about 2,000 (with families). Toronto Daily Leader, March 30 and May 26, 1854; Helps, Life and Labours of Mr, Brassey, 239; Currie, A. W., The Grand Trunk Railway of Canada (Toronto, 1957), 29.Google Scholar The Great Western and, later, the Canadian Pacific, also arranged large-scale migrations of skilled labour.

49 As in the first strike of Great Western railway shopmen at Hamilton and London, 1856. Hamilton, Herald, 07 5, 1902.Google Scholar

50 Berthoff, R. T., British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar; Thomas, Brinley, Migration and Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1954), 138.Google Scholar