International trade unions in the construction industry of Quebec (18871930)

INTERNATIONAL UNIONS EXPANDED in the construction industry in Quebec between 1887 and 1930, and came to dominate the trade union landscape. These years are also those where unions sometimes managed to get rough-hewn labour relations with employers to negotiate and sign collective labour contracts. As in the rest of North America, international construction unions provide a model of labour relations that differs from that prevailing in manufacturing. Like unions in these industries, construction workers want to achieve shared control over their workplace by imposing or negotiating contracts specifying the scale of wages, hours of work, the role of union representatives and arbitration conflicts. But they attach paramount importance to obtaining closed shops and setting up union hiring halls. It must be said that the fluidity of workplaces and the instability of jobs mean that construction workers, more than other workers, live in insecurity. The strategy used by trade unions to overcome this insecurity and to improve working conditions consists of bringing together vast majority of workers in a trade in a given city and obtaining closed shops on building sites:They provide hiring halls for their members, which makes union membership attractive, as this becomes a source of work for union members. It also represents a form of joint management of the demand for labour and for the trade unions, a certain control of labour supply. Within the period of the study, the unionization of construction workers earned them significant benefits in terms of wages, working hours and rules governing the organization of work. In Montreal, bricklayers and carpenters doubled their real wages from 1901 to 1930 and saw their work week reduced from 60 to 44 hours for some of them.