#work placements

Non-working benefit recipients face mandated work placements #mandatedwork #Non-workingbenefit #recipientsface

“Given the prevailing sense that unemployed single men represented disorder and potential danger, especially before the federal government took responsibility for them, city relief officials in Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg employed policies designed to reduce their number on city relief rolls whenever possible. One way of accomplishing this was to charge them with vagrancy and put them in jail. 

Another was to shift responsibility to the family. As one relief officer in Edmonton explained: 

It has been the practice of this Department in handling adult children of married couples that are on relief, to include them as part of the family. The method of handling the adult male dependent now is unquestionably cheaper than the meal and bed system, and provided there is accommodation in the home, it cannot be very much improved on.

Finally, cities occasionally offered single men some of the meanest work possible, explicitly discouraging them from waiting on the city for relief altogether. Edmonton’s relief officer, for example, suggested that the city’s engineering department should 

put on a good substantial force of single men with brooms sweeping the muck to the side of the street in little piles. . . . The offering of this work, day by day, until the whole street is cleaned up, would likely have its effect in reducing the number of men reporting for work, and consequently for relief.”

In this sense, work relief had different functions for different categories of relief. City relief departments simultaneously used work to maintain married men in the city and to remove single men from the city.

Far more common, however, were municipal efforts to remove single men by encouraging them to take up farm or camp work well outside the city. In this goal, city officials in Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg were far from alone. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, for instance, made substantial allowance for programs to take young single urban men from the cities and place them in the “healthy” surroundings of the American “wilderness,” there to fight forest fires, clear brush, plant trees, and build bridges. According to historian Jeffrey Suzik, Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps emerged out of the president’s “personal interest in the conservation of natural resources; but even more so, it grew out of a societal concern about the uncertain occupational prospects of America’s jobless male youth.”

Farm work was not an unusual or new response to the “problem” of single men, who had long relied on harvest work in the autumn through the three decades leading to the Depression. And farmers, too, welcomed a cheap and available labour supply of single men—and, less commonly, married men—to be available to work during the busy harvest season when wheat had to be threshed before the first frost. Encouraging single men to work on farms would, according to Manitoba provincial officials, “help solve the farm labor problem.” The idea made good sense to municipal, provincial, and federal officials for two reasons. First, paying part or even full wages to single men working on farms was cheaper than maintaining them in cities. Second, most officials recognized the added benefit of removing the idle and potentially dangerous men from city street corners and giving them something useful to do. Alberta’s Premier John Brownlee, for one, believed that “the situation has to be handled carefully as otherwise we may have a considerable amount of disorder and possibly damage.”

Also of concern was the danger that single men, if left without work for too long, might never learn the value of honest labour. “For God’s sake,” one exasperated man begged Edmonton’s Mayor James Douglas, “relieve me of this deadly incubus idle for a very long time.” The “deadly incubus” was the man’s twenty-five-year-old “terrible burden” of a son. In the father’s opinion, his son’s main problem could be attributed to deteriorating values among young people in general: 

“I’d clean toilets before I’d be a burden to anyone, but the youth of the present day just want to ‘glass cock’ around with powder comb glass, long hair, no cap or hat and they make me sick in the head and stomach—two foot wide pants, trailing in the gutter.” 

The mayor replied a few days later by letter: 

My advice to you would be to put that boy on a farm where he would be compelled to do a little at least for his board, and you might make a man of him.

It was when the three levels of government began to jointly initiate organized farm placement programs that seasonal farm work became work relief designed to serve a particular purpose. This began early in the Depression, as exemplified by Saskatoon’s co-operation with the provincial and federal governments in placing single men on surrounding farms in early September 1931. By mid-month, some one thousand single men had been placed with farmers, and another thousand were set to go. The city’s relief officer also instructed investigators visiting the homes of Saskatoon families on relief to advise any single men living there to “take advantage of the threshing season.” As an added incentive, City Commissioner Andrew Leslie declared that “no more meals were to be served to unemployed single men, unless they were certified unfit for harvest work by the medical health officer.” Those single men still unwilling to take up harvesting jobs that autumn “would have a tough row to hoe when they apply for work in the relief camps this winter,” warned the mayor, who vowed to convince provincial officials to offer them space in the camps only after all harvest workers had secured a place.

In Saskatoon in the autumn of 1931, all three levels of government promised to contribute to paying urban single men five dollars per month to work on farms. The scheme was made more attractive to single men by allowing farm workers to “receive whatever wages from the farmer they could bargain for” over and above their room and board.138 A further five dollars per month would be paid directly to the farmer to take care of the extra costs associated with housing and feeding the men. In Winnipeg, the scheme worked a little differently, with the three levels of government together paying the single man a total of twenty dollars if he signed up to work on a farm for one year. The twenty dollars, representing five dollars per month for four months, would be held for the man in trust and paid out at the contract’s conclusion, leaving him a small amount of cash in his pocket when he left the farm.

Provincial authorities had some concerns about the program’s “bonus to farmers,” since it, perhaps unfairly, privileged farmers by assisting them in paying their labour costs. Despite these concerns, provincial officials believed that the costs were worth the removal of single men from the urban centres. The same benefit would not extend to other industries inside the cities because they could not remove single men from the cities. When two Winnipeg lumber dealers wrote Manitoba’s Department of Public Works seeking a similar five-dollar supplement to the wages of workers whom they secured from Winnipeg’s unemployment rolls, the department’s assistant deputy minister replied that such a scheme would set the dangerous precedent of providing aid “not only for every type of industry, but also for every individual firm which might desire to make a similar proposal.”

One of the scheme’s greatest difficulties, according to Winnipeg relief officials, was that “by far the greater number of single men on relief in Winnipeg are without farm experience.” Selection of suitable men for the program was based on their health and cleanliness, as well as their farming experience. Some men, of course, had little or no farming experience. These were the “labourers, mechanics, carpenters, railway maintenance or section workers”: in other words, the young men who had grown up in the city. One single man, for example, signed onto the scheme in early 1932 and was assigned to a farm some one hundred miles north of the city. He subsequently made his way north through “the extremely severe weather of early February.” When he arrived, the farmer discovered that the man did not know how to milk a cow and consequently “told him to be on his way.” The man was then forced to walk the seven and a half miles back to nearest town, arriving there with “his face badly frozen.” Both the farmer and the single man were recent immigrants from Central Europe, and the employment offices organizing the movement of men to farms had evidently believed that the farmer would treat “one of his own countrymen” with more compassion. 

Other farmers were quite happy to take in city men. In 1931, Vegreville farmer P. Kostynuik wrote to Edmonton’s mayor offering to take two men from the city’s relief rolls to work on his farm in return for their room and board on the understanding that the three governments would pay their wages. Economic benefits aside, Kostynuik felt that the rural experience would be good for the men, who would, he suggested, “live better than in the city and bring there’s childern [sic] up in good and better habits.” The city quickly found two men willing to take the job.

But despite the “good and better habits” that Kostynuik’s rural experience promised the urban unemployed, the transition from city to country was not necessarily easy. In August 1931, farmer Leo Bunting complained that the two relief workers sent to his farm in Wildwood were “not worth their board.” The two men did not like the work and, after some time, elected to return “to Edmonton to be fed mush and drink soup.”

Cattleman Charles Henry McKinnon discovered other difficulties associated with taking on unemployed city workers at his ranch. “You couldn’t even use them,” he recalled later, “because if you’ve got other men working on the ranch they’re drawing a certain wage and some other fellow working partly for the government, works that way, and he don’t fit with the rest of them very long. They don’t associate well.” It seemed, at least on McKinnon’s ranch, that employing regular wage workers and relief workers made for a volatile working environment, in part because the relief workers were receiving a government subsidy while the others had to work for all their wages.

Another case ended more happily. Before being placed, all applicants for farm work underwent a medical check by a physician at the relief offices. When one young man arrived seeking placement on a farm, the physician reported that the man “was found to be very weak.” The man “reluctantly admitted that he had not had a real meal for weeks, and had come for relief only after every other means had been exhausted.” On the doctor’s orders, he was promptly admitted to a convalescence room for one week, during which time he regained his strength. Shortly thereafter, he was placed on a Manitoba farm where he, according to relief officials, received hearty meals and a warm bed.

How the single men felt about the farm-placement scheme is difficult to gauge in any general way. Some men signed up quickly while others not only refused but also counselled their fellow single unemployed not to accept any farm relief jobs until the various governments agreed to pay something more than “starvation wages.” Some men, whom Saskatoon’s relief officers designated “ringleaders,” attempted to convince single unemployed men not to accept the jobs until the city agreed to pay their fares. The so-called ringleaders appeared to have some success in their campaign. In January 1930, R. Briscoe, a Saskatoon employment officer, reported that “there were a large number who were not keen to take jobs on farms for their board.

For many men, however, remaining in the city meant no work or relief, and possible vagrancy charges. These bleak prospects drove them to the relief offices seeking farm placements. In Winnipeg, some fifteen or thirty single men could be found at the relief office each day at three o’clock in the afternoon “waiting for the doctor to give them the once over” before being placed with a farmer seeking labourers. There, to pass the time, they engaged in “good natured banter” that reflected their shared experiences as young single unemployed men. In good humour, according to relief officials, some speculated that they would take a trip to Europe or the Mediterranean once they received their payment at the end of the season. Others joked that they would get married or that, with the payment in hand, they would soon be ready for retirement.

They told stories, too. An apparently popular one was of a farmer who had hired two men from the relief office. A friend of the two men wished to go along. When told by the farmer that there was work only for two men, not three, the third invariably said, “Oh don’t let that worry you.  You’d be surprised at how little work it takes to keep me going.” Another story revolved around an inexperienced young city man sent for the first time to a farm to work. On being told by the farmer how hens produce eggs in their nests, the man deduced that he had found a cow’s nest when he discovered a pile of condensed milk cans. While stories like these represented single men’s efforts to “keep up their spirits,” according to Winnipeg relief officials, running through the stories was “a note of pathos,” for “still in them is the hope that it won’t be long until they can return to their chosen work, with some assurance of permanence and stability in that work and in the homes they try to build.” 

That assurance, for many single unemployed men, must have seemed worlds away from their current realities. One Saskatoon man spent $1.30 on a railway ticket to get to a promised harvest job. He arrived only to discover that the farmer had already finished his threshing and only needed a man to do some light cleanup work. The farmer paid him $1.50 for three-quarters of a day’s work, leaving him with only twenty cents for his work after deducting the railway fare. Moreover, according to Saskatoon’s Mayor Joseph Underwood, some unemployed workers complained “that farmers were making them work all day Sunday for their board.” In the mayor’s estimation, expecting the men to do any more than regular chores on Sunday “hardly seemed reasonable.” 

Filling harvest jobs was no easy matter even where wages and work were reasonable. Some unemployed men in Edmonton, for example, refused to accept temporary harvest jobs on farms, fearing that the city would cut them off relief as soon as they left town. Only with relief officer T. S. Magee’s assurances that their fears were groundless would men finally accept farm job offers.”