From: University of Toronto Quarterly - Volume 69, Number 1 Winter 1999/2000- Letters in Canada

Although often assumed to be a recent phenomenon, Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager persuasively illustrate that `Unemployment has a long history in Canada.' Unwilling Idlers explores the world of the working class and particularly the experiences of those men and women who were forced out of work in six Canadian cities - Halifax, Montreal, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria - at the end of the nineteenth century. It was during this first stage of industrialization in Canada that `the problem of unemployment' was first `discovered.' And, as Baskerville and Sager note, although workers had been frequently out of work earlier in the century, it was not until a growing portion of the working population, increasingly dependent on wages, were periodically forced into `idleness' that Canadians began to recognize that the problem was not rooted `in moral failings' or the traditional seasonality of work `but in the class relationships of industrial capitalism.' But who were they - the men and women forced into idleness? and what impact did this have on their families and communities? Echoing the findings of Alexander Keyssar in his study of the unemployed in Massachusetts, Baskerville and Sager present a `qualified acceptance of the lottery paradigm.' All urban workers in Canada - women and men of all ages and of varying ethnicities and religions - had the potential to become unemployed. At the same time, the authors conclude on the basis of a detailed analysis of the 1891 and 1901 censuses, that unemployment was not random; it was `related to a set of overlapping conditions' including among others, literacy, age, skill, ethnicity, industry worked in, and place of residence. What was also not random was the impact that unemployment had on individuals and their families. What is particularly fascinating is the authors' explorations of the spatial, familial, and community dimensions of unemployment. Not surprisingly, unemployed households were more crowded than those of the employed. And the families, the `first line of defence' of the jobless, all coped in varying and creative ways to ameliorate their situation. But this did not mean that the unemployed and their families shared similar views of what should be done to correct the fundamental structural problem. In Vancouver, for example, unemployed neighbourhoods `were characterized by a profound racial cleavage.' In short, there was `no community of the unemployed.' As a result, working-class responses to unemployment `were often fragmented.' And even within the unions, and private and state agencies, there was no agreement about the roots of the problem or how to solve it.

Unwilling Idlers is an essential corrective to our understanding of working-class life in urban Canada at the turn of the century. The study's exhaustive and at times imaginative analysis of the census, which rests on a comprehensive appreciation of the American, British, and other Canadian literature on the social and economic history of the period, offers the first detailed, comparative study of urban unemployment. Although the authors make a concerted effort to explain their methodology and their conclusions, for someone not versed in the use of statistical analysis parts of Unwilling Idlers can be hard going. However, Baskerville and Sager's ability to meld their statistical findings with the physical, social, and intellectual reality of urban working-class life at the turn of the century is impressive and persuasive. So too are the implications of their study for Canadians today. As the authors periodically remind the reader, the problem of unemployment remains with us today and continues to have real economic and social costs. Indeed, `the pedlar, the washerwoman and the scrounger' who were commonplace figures on the streets of Canadian towns and cities a hundred years ago are with us still. And in this current age of uncertainty, they remain part of `the great parade of job seekers.'

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