Les débardeurs au port de Québec: tableau des lutes syndicales, 1831–1902 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Les débardeurs au port de Québec: tableau des lutes syndicales, 1831–1902 Robert C.H. Sweeny Les débardeurs au port de Québec: tableau des lutes syndicales, 1831–1902. Peter C. Bischoff. Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 2009. Pp. 451, $32.95 Unskilled, casual, seasonal, and often racially or ethnically diverse, longshoremen face particular difficulties organizing unions. In this detailed and sympathetic sketch of the ship labourers of Quebec City, Peter Bischoff describes how they overcame these chronic difficulties to create a remarkably stable and effective labour union. Bischoff argues that the staple trade in wood created a three-tiered social structure within the port. A dozen merchant firms leased the coves and commissioned almost all the vessels. A relatively stable group of roughly forty stevedores subcontracted for the loading of vessels. These stevedores hired thousands of individual ship labourers, on a vessel-by-vessel basis, to carry out tasks associated with loading square timber and the thick planks of wood known as deals that were an [End Page 771] increasingly important part of the trade. The difficulty and danger of these tasks meant that experience mattered. In the first half of the nineteenth century, failure to properly load the cargo frequently led to catastrophic losses at sea. In this context, working-class solidarity, enforced by the threat of, and occasional recourse to, collective violence in defence of work rules adopted by their benevolent society allowed the ship labourers to control their working hours, conditions, and pay. The book is organized chronologically into eight substantive chapters. Each one focuses on a particular stage in the struggle, for opposition to ship labourers was persistent and powerful. The introduction posits the staple theory and establishes the degree of skill involved in being a ship labourer. There follows an analysis of why the stevedores were unable to organize effectively in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Their failure is then contrasted with the success of the ship labourers in gaining legal recognition of their benevolent society in 1862 and how this charitable institution was transformed into a labour union, complete with detailed work rules. Their strength lay in numbers, so Bischoff stresses the role of public parades in establishing an early legitimacy and political weight, as much as he does the strikes of 1866 and 1869. Bischoff then addresses the problem of ethnic divisions; these he argues have been exaggerated. In a context of declining trade and therefore work, ethnicity was a potential cleavage, as demonstrated by riots in 1879 and 1880. However, the majority of French-Canadian ship labourers stayed with the Irish-led benevolent society, where the combination of a local branch structure and an innovative quota system ensured a fairer work allocation. In the wake of the failure to split the workers along ethnic lines, repeated attempts were made to revoke the society's status as a charitable institution, yet when this was finally achieved the labourers continued to resist and informally enforced their work rules well into the twentieth century. Finally, Bischoff 's analysis of seasonal migration, particularly among the Irish, to American cotton ports suggests that not just experiences, but organizational strategies and work rules were shared across a wide swath of the Atlantic seaboard. Very little documentation created by the union or its members has survived. This study is based on a systematic combing of the city's newspapers, in particular the commercially oriented and surprisingly sympathetic Quebec Morning Chronicle, supplemented by court records, petitions to, and debates in Parliament. Individual ship labourers who were prominent in the public record are then described using [End Page 772] the Laval's phsvq census databases for 1852 to 1901. The resultant narrative is necessarily a view from the outside and is therefore better on description than explanation. An eight-hour day, good wages, and control over hiring and working conditions were for achieved most longshoremen only in the 1940s and 1950s, if then. Viewed in this light, the achievements of the Quebec ship labourers were truly remarkable and they will now be better known, thanks to this detailed description. An adequate explanation remains, however, elusive. The particularities of a port dominated by a single staple...