"The "carrot" of incentive wages could never have been enough alone to keep the steelworkers working, however. After all, the men might have set their maximum output, just as nineteenth-century craftsmen had frequently done. In fact, during World War i, workers did not maintain the productivity expected of them once full employment in the wartime economy removed the whip of threatened poverty. Steel-plant owners and managers had to look to sterner measures for maintaining and increasing productivity. For the most part, they placed the "stick" of discipline in the hands of front-line supervisors.
The superintendents and foremen were given responsibility for pushing workers to reach their peak productivity and for maintaining discipline and respect for managerial authority. Their role was not so different from that of many nineteenth-century foremen, but the pressures from cost-conscious senior managers undoubtedly intensified their anxieties and, in turn, brought the screws down still harder on the workers in their departments. A harsh, blunt, often abusive authoritarianism resulted from this so-called "drive system" and, with the partial exception of the small groups of more skilled workmen in some areas of the plants, these departmental despots ruled their industrial bailiwicks with iron fists.
In part, their authority was a matter of theatre. Most of these supervisors developed reputations for gruffness, profanity, and physical prowess, which was intended to instil fear and deference, and which was laced with a strong dose of racism toward the non- English-speaking workers. Yet they also had real, tangible power to wield over the workers in their departments. Despite the top-level administrative reforms of the new systematic management, superintendents and foremen were left with a surprisingly wide range of authority. Initially they had clear powers to hire, promote, and fire workers, and even after the creation of more centralized employment offices in each of the plants just before the war, they held onto that authority in practice through quiet instructions to the personnel departments. Virtually all the oral history covering the work experience in Canadian steel plants before World War One, from both management and labour sources, has revealed that front-line supervisors had not sacrificed one bit of their effective power in this area. Favouritism flourished in such circumstances. Most commonly, English-speaking workers needed some connection or sponsorship inside the plant. Soon after Disco's plant opened, workers were complaining loudly about the preference shown to Americans in hiring, promotion, and layoffs by the American supervisors that the corporation had brought up to oversee production. Those patterns persisted. One steelworker at Sydney remembered that his brother, an electrical worker at Disco, had enough pull to get him hired in 1922. "I think you had to have influence somewhere to get on as an apprentice," he reflected. Another worker from Algoma described how a neighbour who was a department foreman arranged to get him hired in 1928, even though 200-300 unemployed men were milling about in front of the gate by the employment office every day:
if you were a good friend of the foreman or a good friend of the superintendent and he sent word to the employment man at the gate 'Send me such and such a boy,' in you went, and otherwise you could have went there day in and day out and never got a job.
Another retired Algoma worker explained that for "almost any of the steady jobs in the plant there was a lot of family preferences." The same was true at Stelco, according to a man who got his job there in 1936 because his father was the foreman:
The Anglo-Saxons were in there as brothers or cousins. I was kept on, even though others with years of experience were being laid off, only because I was Bill Martin's son.
Fraternal lodges could be equally crucial for getting hired and getting ahead in a Canadian steel plant. In Sydney, one retired steelworker explained, the mechanical department was dominated by the Masons, the foundry by the Oddfellows, and the open-hearth by the Knights of Columbus. He recalled:
Your chance of promotion depended to a very great extent on your association. I know in the machine shop it would be embarrassing sometimes to see the people that would be promoted simply because of the ring or pin they wore and a better man would be laid aside.
Another Sydney worker made similar use of his connection to the church that his supervisor attended. Europeans, blacks, and even migrant Newfoundlanders most often had to pay for such opportunities, even for the most unpleasant jobs on the bottom rungs of the occupational ladder where they started. A 1910 strike at the Hamilton steel complex first brought to light the practices of foremen in demanding a fee for the job from immigrant workmen and a weekly retainer for holding onto it. The corporation made a great show of publicly decrying such practices and firing two foremen involved in them, but by the 1920s and 1930s these practices were nonetheless flourishing in all the steel centres. In 1921 unemployed steelworkers in Sault Ste. Marie publicly denounced foremen who "were in the habit of taking booze, cigars, and money for giving employment," and a Hamilton unionist reported "a great deal of talk floating around the mill about some of the members being able to buy soft jobs."
The memories of retired steelworkers are full of stories about these demands for money or goods and services. Foremen routinely insisted on bottles of liquor in return for guaranteed employment or re-employment after a layoff. At Disco "the foreign people had to buy the job," said one retired Ukrainian steel worker who started there in 1933, but that was not the end of the tribute to be paid to supervisors:
Well, if you wanted to work steady in Sydney, you had to give the boss a bottle every week. . . . There even was an agent in the open hearth and the mixer, he collected two dollars from each one there and gave it to the boss, so those fellows could stay on the job.
A Stelco employee remembered a rotation system where a different worker brought the foreman a bottle every day. On other occasions a worker in the plant would be expected to "stick five dollars in a pack of cigarettes and hand it to the foreman." At Algoma, the bricklaying department (in charge of relining furnaces) was "the worst of them all," according to one old-timer who started there as a bricklayer's helper in the 1920s and had to keep the liquor flowing to his foreman if he wanted a promotion to brick-layer. That arrangement for promotion would work "until you fell out with him and then you were finished." An Italian blast-furnace worker in the same plant described to an interviewer how in the late 1920s he and his best friend had carried a big bottle of whisky, a goose, and a duck to a foreman to get his friend a job. Clearly these practices ran through all the departments where immigrant workers were found. Besides retaining the power to hire, promote, and fire, superintendents and foremen were allowed a remarkable flexibility in setting wage rates for particular jobs. In 1903 Disco admitted that foremen had this power, while by 1915 Scotia explained that its foremen still determined workers' individual wage rates, except "when important changes are made, in epoch-making crises, which only occurs every few years. . . ." By the end of World War 1, steelworkers were complaining about the multiplicity of rates paid for the same work in a department. A Sydney worker later recalled that "if you were a good fellow with the boss, well, he'd give you a few more cents an hour. It wasn't a man's ability at all - just being a good fellow." Amidst such arbitrariness and uncertainty, workers could live in dread of losing their jobs. One Algoma worker who had bought his job was afraid to report his hernia to his foreman lest he not be rehired after recuperating. Supervisors used this anxiety to get themselves invited to weddings and other celebrations. Stories have survived about the two men who ran the Algoma employment office, who "used to go around the west end on visits, and . . . come back half tight or loaded with cheese and salami and everything else." Occasionally this tyranny could extend to demands for the sexual favours of workers' wives. All workers felt the insecurity of this system of management. In the words of a Sydney steelworker
the boss would send you home if he didn't like the colour of your hair, if he didn't like the church you went to, if he didn't like the way you voted on election day. He could send you home and there was no questions asked.
Another man concluded with deep bitterness, "The foremen were kings!"
- Craig Heron, Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883-1935 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 93-96.
