Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882 by Ruth Bleasdale (review)

Ruth Bleasdale's engrossing Rough Work: Labourers on the Public Works of British North America and Canada, 1841–1882, an account of the laborers who flocked to British North America and Canada to find employment on public works projects, is surprisingly timely. Locals had never seen so many foreigners amassed in one place, let alone camping in their fields or dancing in their taverns. Notorious for their drunken brawls, thievery, and laziness, the workers were grossly misunderstood in their time and ours as well. That is why Bleasdale's exhaustive study of the navvies who facilitated Canada's transportation revolution—covering how they worked, lived, and socialized; how they were perceived by others and themselves; and how they fought each other but united to strike—is so welcome. Bleasdale follows these laborers over a forty-one year period in which capital intensified and paternalism dissolved, leaving them to fend for themselves under increasingly dangerous conditions. Public works laborers were the first to mount steady opposition to the demands of industrial capitalism and, not coincidentally, the first to be targeted by laws written to criminalize their ways. These laws would provide a template for policing the nation's morals.

The canal boom of the 1840s and railway boom of the 1850s created an unprecedented need for labor. Irish Catholics, many escaping famine in Ireland, composed most of the workforce in the 1840s, but the workforce became increasingly heterogeneous with the entry of the English, Scots Protestants, Germans, and British North Americans in the 1850s, joined by Italians and Scandinavians in the 1870s. Migrants from the U.S. also crisscrossed the border chasing work. Much like the technologies they built, navvies were wanted and unwanted. During labor shortages, contractors aggressively recruited immigrants from worksites, ports of entry, and they even travelled abroad to retrieve them, as happened when a group of unemployed British railway workers seeking work in France became stranded. During labor surpluses, however, unemployed workers were encouraged to clear out, as occurred from 1876 to 1877 when the mayor of Ottawa distributed hundreds of train tickets to poor men. Not all workers were equally prized: British North Americans were unwanted throughout the 1840s, as were Scots, who were labelled "indolent," because they continued in their agrarian ways, refusing to adapt to the rhythms of industrial capitalism (71). Americans, once strongly recruited, were considered job-stealing intruders by the late 1870s.

Bleasdale details the laborers' work, home, and social lives, including an exceptional section on women's contributions to navvy households. She describes navvies in winter, before they could even begin their job of shifting muck, having to shovel snow and pump freezing water. In summer, workers bore the searing sun, blackfly, and malaria-bearing mosquitos. Worse were the manmade disasters, wrought by new machinery that sped up work, extended the workday into night, and multiplied injuries. Deaths from cave-ins, collapses, and explosions were deemed accidents and were so common that newspapers rarely reported them. Juries held workers responsible for their own deaths, reasoning that contractors told them not to do anything dangerous. Contractors calculated that it cost more to avoid injury than to kill a man. Haphazard housing compounded workers' poor health. Although some lived in well-maintained boarding houses, many others were—in the words of "The Man from Kent," an unnamed man who wrote to the Toronto papers to denounce the treatment of immigrants by canal and railway contractors—"herded like pigs in temporary shanties" (qtd. in Bleasdale 123). Often, laborers had to scavenge materials to build their own abodes; then "they burrowed into hills, squeezed timbers between boulders, and propped up boards against trees and fences" (124). Laborers suffered chronic gastrointestinal disorders, bronchitis, and malaria. After a cholera attack killed twenty-three at the Junction canal, contractors brought Germans from Montreal to replace them but forgot to provide...