page_title: Work and labour organization in Upper Canada
section_title: General contracting and the building trades
hierarchical_section_title: Work and labour organization in Upper Canada / The trades and their unionization / General contracting and the building trades
caption_attribution_description: The parliament buildings of Upper Canada, designed by Thomas Rogers and constructed between 1829 and 1832, stood at Front and Simcoe streets. York/Toronto, Canada.
context_page_description: The cultural and legal framework within which tradesmen contracted for work, and hired men was similar to that of Great Britain. These immigrants quickly sought to establish and regulate the basic institutions of the trades: Friendly societies, the house of call and apprenticeship. Friendly societies were worker controlled mutual insurance organizations. They provided an income in the case of strike, injury or economic downturn. Their association with specific trades also made them useful vehicles for trade union organization.
context_section_description: The drive to form labour unions in Upper Canada resulted from a fundamental change in the way building projects in Toronto were contracted. The change to general contracting happened first in government construction projects, then private ones, leading to labour strife.
  General contracting was introduced in the building trades in the 1820s in Britain. General contracting reorganized the bidding process by which construction contracts were awarded, and in so doing, challenged the master-journeyman system. General contracting began in the British “Office of Public Works” during the Napoleonic Wars; they obtained competitive tenders for the whole project by a single builder at fixed cost for the first time.  This was a means by which they could limit their liability for cost overruns. By 1825, the system became common in the northwest of England, resulting in a steep fall in wages.  General contracting was introduced in Upper Canada in the construction of public works such as the new parliament buildings in Toronto, beginning in 1829.  This placed the project in the hands of a single master builder who subcontracted portions of the project to the other trades. Rather than “job” the work to a subcontractor, the general contractor would provide his own building materials, hiring masters and their journeymen as labour only. By limiting “jobbing,” the general contractors also eroded the traditional measures by which these jobs were costed. This gave the general contractor more profit, and the masters less.
  The general contractors had no interests in perpetuating the master-journeyman system and its traditional standards of payment, and abused the apprenticeship system by hiring unqualified workmen. General contracting was clearly an issue in Toronto as early as 1831 when the members of the United Amicable Trade and Benefit Society of Journeymen Bricklayers, Plasterers and Masons rejected the general contracting system.
  The general contractors used debt to bind workers to them. Workers complained of “great delay in obtaining payment” in June 1833, when the friendly society of carpenters and joiners called on their employers “for more punctual payments than what we have had in time past.” They demanded “$5 per week on account, and a settlement at the end of each month.”  According to an anonymous “Master Builder” (contractor), “they receive from 3 to 5 dollars per week, at an average; and a settlement when the employer gets in his money, or obtains installments upon his contracts, when the Journeymen are often paid from £5 to £20 of arrears.”
  Thomas Dalton, editor of the Patriot, retorted:
  It is indeed incomprehensible, how laboring mechanics generally, can by possibility live in comfort, or decency, with arrears of wages due to them, to the amount of £20… However scarce money may be, and however long credit may be expected, it is very absurd to expect such credit from Journeymen who ordinarily can only supply their families from hand to mouth. It is the rich alone who can afford long credits… Is it just, to put the laborer in the predicament of being fleeced when his toil has actually won the fleece?
  These workers could not easily change jobs when those general contractors owed them substantial back-wages.
  The tension between general contractors and the building tradesmen came to a head in 1833 with the construction of Chewett's block by general contractor John George Howard. Chewett's building, was a “splendid block of lofty brick houses is erecting on King and York Streets, to comprise eight or ten tenements for stores or dwelling houses, with an extensive hotel at the corner… ”   Its designer and general contractor was a new British emigrant, John George Howard.  Howard was to become one of Toronto's most famous architects and builders:  besides Chewett's building, he built 4 large houses in Toronto the year he arrived and predicted he would build twenty of the one-hundred houses that would be built the next year.
  Just before Christmas, the workers on Chewett's block went on strike after Howard refused to pay them their wages
caption: Third Parliament Buildings of Upper Canada (1834)
exif: {}