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  • The Italians Who Built Toronto by Stefano Agnoletto
  • Bruno Ramirez
The Italians Who Built Toronto, by Stefano Agnoletto. Bern, Peter Lang, 2014. xviii, 360 pp. $87.95 US (paper).

As it has often happened in the history of industrial work in North America, it had to take a tragic workplace accident to expose and bring to public attention the shamefully sub-standard conditions to which workers were submitted by their employers and to set in motion a wave of labour militancy and government intervention that would bring order in the industry and effect significant reforms in industrial relations. The construction industry in post-World War II Toronto fits this pattern quite well. The tragic [End Page 179] death, in March of 1960, of five Italian immigrants working on a water-main under the Don River brought to public light the unsafe and exploitative conditions that prevailed in that industry. More importantly, it triggered a series of organizing drives led by Italian labour activists. Their determination in the face of the employers’ opposition drew into the action various trade-union bodies — from local to international ones — making it one of the major episodes in Toronto’s postwar labour history. It also forced the government to enact safety standards and to make collective bargaining the mechanism ensuring the protection of workers’ basic rights.

These events and their many social and economic ramifications are at the heart of The Italians Who Built Toronto. Although they have been the subject of previous studies — most notably by Franca Iacovetta in her Such Hardworking People (Montreal & Kingston, 1992) — Stefano Agnoletto recounts this pivotal chapter in the immigration and labour history of Toronto in far greater detail drawing from a wide range of quantitative and qualitative sources and, in particular, from the many interviews he was able to conduct with workers and labour leaders who had participated in those events. He rightly places these developments in a larger context, one that saw the unprecedented construction boom occurring in Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s coincided with the largest influx of Italian immigrants to the city. With the majority of them originating from agrarian backgrounds, the construction industry provided the structural conditions for their proletarization. Moreover, in engaging this pivotal chapter in Toronto’s post–World War II history, a good deal of the author’s efforts are devoted to test a variety of perspectives that have been adopted in the study of issues such as ethnicity, class, gender, identity, and transnationalism.

At the same time, by focussing on one specific sector of the industry — residential construction — Agnoletto is able to offer us an in-depth analysis of an urban universe peopled largely by Italian immigrants who, as workers and entrepreneurs, transformed that industry from an economic “jungle” (p. 163) into a sector that was forced to play by the basic rules of industrial relations. It follows that one of the book’s main innovations lies in the author’s attempt to document the process whereby an ethnic niche came into being within the wider industrial landscape of a booming Toronto. To do so, the author has undertaken a micro historical analysis of the factors — some structural, others cultural — that explains both its emergence and its reproduction through several postwar decades.

The relatively easy entry into the residential construction industry by subcontractors and contractors, coupled with the role that local and transnational ethnic networks played in the recruitment of mostly unskilled or [End Page 180] semi-skilled Italian workers, explain much of that niche’s formation. Despite the high turnover among both employers and workers, the niche enabled a number of ambitious and talented Italian immigrants to experience a substantial degree of social mobility, some of them even ascending to the highest echelons of entrepreneurship. At the same time, the unsafe working conditions prevailing in that niche condemned many others to a life of infirmity and poverty. Thus, as Agnoletto shows, the ethnic homogeneity characterizing that construction sector did not translate into ethnic cooperation or harmony: it had its inner class dynamics as employers imposed a highly exploitative labour system frequently accompanied by threats of deportation for workers who dared to revolt against it. The result...

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