Cracked: How Telephone Operators Took on Canada’s Largest Corporation ... And Won

By Joan M. Roberts

2015 Ontario Historical Society Alison Prentice Award — Winner
2016 Heritage Toronto Book Award — Nominated

The story of the Bell Canada union drive and the phone operator strike that brought sweeping reform to women’s workplace rights.

In the 1970s, Bell Canada was Canada’s largest corporation. It employed thousands of people, including a large number of women who worked as operators and endured very poor pay and working conditions. Joan Roberts, a former operator, tells the story of how she and a group of dedicated labour organizers helped to initiate a campaign to unionize Bell Canada’s operators.

From the point of view of the workers and the organizers, Roberts tells an important story in Canada’s labour history. The unionization of Bell Canada’s operators was a huge victory for Canada’s working women. The victory at Bell established new standards for women in other so-called “pink-collar” jobs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Dec 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781459731745

Joan M. Roberts

Joan M. Roberts served as a union organizer for the phone operators at Bell Canada. She later worked as a development consultant for the Labour Council Development Foundation. She has also served as a city councillor. Currently, she runs a training and consulting practice. She lives in Toronto.

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life.

Introduction

This book tells the tale of how a group of women working as telephone operators — women living otherwise ordinary lives as wives, mothers, and girlfriends — stood up to the largest private-sector company in Canada to claim their rights as workers and a share of the economic pie.

I felt this was a story that needed to be recorded and told to a broader audience while most of those courageous activists were still alive. It is a historical account of working-class women taking control of their des­tiny while confronting a telecommunications monopoly and institution in twentieth-century Canadian daily life — Bell Canada.

The story occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s in Toronto, a time when change that had been percolating since the 1960s led to sweeping demands for more democratic, less authoritarian structures in government, corporations, and the family; as well as grassroots struggles for civil rights, workers’ rights, and equality for women.

I was there. I lived this story as a minor player and always knew how privileged I was to witness and take part in a major event in Canadian labour history. After thirty years of waiting for someone else to tell the story, I have decided to step forward and tell it with as much objectivity as is possible for someone who was part of it. I will share my own story, too.

Key Themes

First and foremost, this book provides a comprehensive written record of a union organizing campaign and a first contract strike in the late 1970s, the beginning of a historical period when technology changed the nature of work itself. It was also the period that saw the beginning of the drive toward globalization and the gutting of the branch-plant manufacturing economy in central Canada. The story of workers fighting back is an important and noteworthy one in Canadian labour history.

Second, the book gives a historical account of a group of high-profile female workers. As almost everyone engaged with a telephone operator at some point in daily life during the twentieth century, the job was a familiar one, and one that many women passed through — a pink-collar ghetto. (The bargaining unit also included the staff of the company’s cafe­terias [Dining Service] — a small percentage of the overall membership — also primarily women.)

The telephone operator campaign parallels other pink-collar organizing campaigns of the time, including those by nurses, teachers, and public sector workers. While middle-class women were advocating for reproductive choice and trying to break through the glass ceiling of the corporate hierarchy, working-class women were fighting to better their lives, too.

Last, the book chronicles and explores company unionism in the context of this occupational group, as well as the system of labour relations in the early telecommunications industry in the middle and late twentieth century.

The Reason I Wrote This Book

Obituaries for operators with whom I had worked started to appear in the local papers. Time was marching by, and as a student of working-class and social history, I did not want this story forgotten as has happened to so much of herstory.

I sometimes feel great despair as a result of the backlash against the gains women have made in society, the workplace, and the home. Many young women now express reluctance to do the difficult organizing work needed for social and political change. I want to show them the value of face-to-face organizing and of building relationships, and how major social change comes about from all the groundwork undertaken by grassroots organizers, primarily through the relationship-building that occurs in one-on-one conversations and group meetings.

Although I am sometimes disappointed with the pace of social change, as I reach middle age I find myself grateful for the wonderful life I have had, despite being a woman from a working-class background. The successes I have had in my life were made possible by supportive government policies that helped me get a university education, and societal changes that permitted me to work at meaningful employment and create a successful life for myself and my children. I could not have had this life without a great public school education, an inexpensive university education, affordable child care, and the opportunity to work in non-traditional occupations.

When I look back, I realize that I developed many of my leadership skills in the union campaign and strike that are the subject of this book. I discovered a voice that could be harnessed to advocate for change, that I had nothing to be ashamed of for having working-class parents, and that by assuming a leadership position in the campaign, I could contribute to making real financial gains for myself and others.

I now earn my living as a trainer and consultant and have the privilege of teaching young people and newcomers to Canada. Through many conversations and a lot of research with both groups, I have come to believe that both could benefit from learning about union struggles and how we gained gender, human, and workers’ rights through engaging in collective action. Without education about how existing rights were won, new generations will fail to discover that it was people just like them who engaged in the struggle for them. My hope is that new generations will continue the struggle for equality and better working conditions that has stalled with the economic restructuring and global­ization of the last twenty years. I hope the stories in this book will inspire readers to organize with others and confront the growing poverty and inequality in Canadian society.

Research and Structure of the Book

Although the union organizing campaign and strike involved the employees of Bell Canada in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, this book focuses on the activities in Toronto. Sometimes I mention events or organizers from Quebec or other areas in Ontario, but I have focused on Toronto because of the richness of the historical documents and the accessibility of key organizers. I do not intend to downplay the contributions of anyone not mentioned in this book, and hope that projects will be undertaken to capture the activities outside Toronto.

* * *

My starting point for this book was a forty-four-page paper I wrote in 1981 for an undergraduate Women’s Studies course at the University of Toronto. In addition to that paper, I did a literature review of journal articles about women and union organizing. Additionally, I had the wonderful opportun­ity while working on this book to research primary sources related to the Bell Canada organizing campaign due to the amazing diligence of Ed Seymour, formerly a national representative with the Communications Workers of Canada. Ed had the foresight to collect and catalogue all the original documents used in the campaign and strike, and he deposited those documents with the William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Furthermore, Janice McClelland, the first president of the telephone operator local (CWC Local 50), provided me with the personal files that she had kept from the campaign and strike.

During 2011 and 2012, I interviewed many of the original organizers, both telephone operators and staff with the Communications Workers of Canada. The recordings of these oral interviews will be deposited with the Ed Seymour Archives at McMaster University. The interviews bring to life the chronology of events, and I thank the following people for sharing their memories and recollections with me:

Irene Anderson

Laurie Cumming

Bill Howes

George Larter

Janice McClelland

Helen Middlebrooks

Ann Newman

Fred Pomeroy

Ed Seymour

Cynthia Tenute

Linda Young

Except for this introduction and part of the conclusion, I have written the book using the third person and used endnotes to identify information sources. However, I was there and played a role, and I can sometimes provide a unique perspective. So, when needed, I have added a personal explanation, speaking in my own voice about my experiences. This material is boxed and italicized.

Description of the Chapters

The book begins with a chapter describing the employer, Bell Canada (Bell Canada Enterprises). Bell — originally incorporated as the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, its name was changed by federal legislation to Bell Canada on March 7, 1968 — has been the largest private-sector company in Canada for over a century, and after the federal and provincial governments, is one of the country’s largest employers. Management runs the company with a private-sector sensibility, but it functions like any large bureaucracy, with occasional accusations of being out of touch and insensitive to customers and employees.

The second chapter explores the historical occupation of telephone operator and the unique characteristics of company unionism at Bell Canada.

Subsequent chapters describe the conditions that led to a desire for change among employees, the pre-campaign activities, the organizing campaigns, the reaction of the CUC, the vote campaign, the wait for the decision, the second campaign, and the eventual strike.

The concluding chapters identify what happened to the major organizers after the strike and the impact of the campaign and strike by CWC Local 50.

Some readers may question why I use the term campaign rather than raid to describe the card-signing campaign by the Communications Workers of Canada (CWC) directed toward the membership of the Communications Union of Canada (CUC). While it is true that Bell Canada telephone operators and its few dining service employees were technically members of a union, the CUC was a not a member of the mainstream union movement, which was best represented by the Canadian Labour Congress. The CUC evolved out of an internal management-employee consultative process, and proudly asserted a no-strike policy. Many CUC members and other unions considered it a company union. According to the grassroots organizers, It didn’t act as a union so it could not be raided like one.

My Background and Role

I started at Bell Canada in Dining Service in Toronto in 1973 at the age of seventeen, working part-time in the winter and replacing full-time staff in the summer while I attended high school.

At that time, Bell Canada provided freshly prepared food in cafe­terias for its staff (although many operators might disagree with the fresh label), and most of the company buildings that housed telephone operators and other office staff had cafeterias. I first worked at 76 Adelaide Street, looking after the short-order grill and vending machines on the tenth floor near the Traffic Department (switchboard operators) offices. I later learned to prepare meals and desserts in the larger cafeterias during summer vacations.

It was hard work, but I was young, and as the eldest child in a working-class family, I was already used to cooking and cleaning. The money was better than what I had made at a Zellers department store in a local shopping plaza.

From the tenth floor at 76 Adelaide Street, I watched the CN Tower go up, floor by floor, until the crowning moment when the giant Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter, nicknamed Olga, put the 102-metre communications mast on the tower, making it the tallest tower in the world for the next thirty-four years.

In Dining Service, I worked with other students on the weekends. During summer vacations, I got to work in the big kitchens preparing food for the cafeterias. The regular staff was made up predominantly of older women, almost all first-generation immi­grants. The chef would usually be male and, again, from an immigrant background. The staff was from many ethnic and racial backgrounds; the workplace was very diverse, without a main ethnic identity, as was then common in the factory workforce in Toronto. I remember that the chef at 76 Adelaide was Bulgarian, the dishwasher was a lovely Jamaican woman, the baker was Polish, and the pudding maker was Scottish. On a daily basis, they shared their lives’ lessons with me and fondly forgave my mistakes.

Working with them was comfortable and pleasant, as I had grown up in a multicultural, working-class community in downtown Toronto. My parents were from Newfoundland, and at that time Torontonians labelled Newfoundlanders as stupid Newfies and mildly discriminated against them. I could easily have passed as a native Torontonian with my Anglo name and local accent, but I identified more with the newcomers, who suffered much more intense discrimination and racism than my parents or I ever experienced. I had grown up in an immigrant neighbourhood, watching the ongoing exclusion of newcomers on the playground and in the classroom; I had decided discrimination was unjust and that I wanted to confront and stand up against it.

So, when I saw that in the midst of this multicultural cafeteria workplace, the Communications Union of Canada union rep was an English woman, who, although an immigrant herself, was privileged in this WASPish corporate setting and sat up on her high horse, spewing judgmental and racist pronouncements on any topic that came up in conversation, I quickly began to see she was part of the problem, not the solution.

High school went to Grade 13 in those days, and I was nurtured by extraordinary teachers who exposed me to feminist and working-class history in my last year. I did a major project on the Great Depression; I learned how the financial follies of the rich and government policies designed to serve the interests of private corporations left the poor to suffer with a small share of the economic pie. It was not much of an intellectual and emotional leap to apply the same political analysis gleaned from the lessons of the Great Depression to what I was experiencing in my job.

Sometime later, I was making pudding in a steam kettle and listening to my co-workers complain about being mistreated. Not thinking about any repercussions, I joined in and said that they needed a union — a real union — to resolve their problems with the company. They replied that they had a union already but it never helped. What good would a new one be? they asked.

I told them about the benefits of unions (knowledge absorbed at the kitchen table from my father’s experience as a member of the United Electrical Workers and from what I had learned in school). The conversation went on and I continued making my pudding. All of a sudden, in walked the supervisor, a young woman maybe five years older than I. She hurriedly approached me and asked what I was talking about. She went on to say there should be no talk of unions here. I nodded and kept my mouth shut, wondering who had squealed on me. I guessed quite quickly that it was the sandwich maker, the only non-immigrant working there. (The sandwich maker acknowledged later that she had reported me to management.) I decided not to confront her, but vowed to do something when the time was right. I think this was my first experi­ence of the maxim: Don’t get mad, get even.

I learned a few valuable lessons that day. First, my workplace was not much different from the non-organized workplaces of the thirties. Management was still deathly afraid of unionization, but didn’t consider the CUC union that represented the workers a threat. That left me questioning just what kind of union it was. Second, I became aware there were potential scabs in the very cafeteria where I worked, and I could get in trouble just for talking about and advocating for workers’ rights. Wow! I also learned that the historical conditions that led to the workers’ actions that I had read about were playing out right then and there. I realized that superhuman beings aren’t the ones who make history; it could be anybody who reacts against what is happening right in front of them. This gave me much to ponder.

After Grade 13, I went to the University of Toronto and tried to learn more about working-class history. I took sociology and a lot of history and political science. By that time, a number of histor­ians had emerged who were devoting themselves to the history of Canadian workers, so I immersed myself in that subject. I began to develop a solid class consciousness and started campaigning for the New Democratic Party (NDP) in elections.

I moved out of my parents’ home right after Grade 13 and was paying my living expenses and tuition with my earnings from Bell, so I decided to see if I could get a higher-paying position as a telephone operator. The company always needed operators, and it was not long before I got a transfer to the toll (long-distance) unit at Dufferin Street. I received training as an operator on the old cord switchboard. The first day at work, I took my seat in a chair that had a back that provided no support. Chairs with good back support were something all operators desired, but few got. If there were any decent chairs, the full-time operators had already grabbed them. I did not blame them, but seven and a half hours sitting and working in a chair without proper back support was the beginning of lifelong back problems. The message I got from the company through these broken-down chairs was that my welfare was not important. It was not the last message of this ilk.

Soon after I arrived at Dufferin Street, I heard that the Traffic Operator Position System (TOPS), a term used to describe computerized switchboards, would be coming soon. With the changeover to TOPS, there would not be enough operator positions at Dufferin Street, so I would be transferred elsewhere. I can’t recall the options I was given, but I transferred to the SOST office at Asquith Street. SOS stood for Special Operator Services; the T maybe stood for traffic (traffic meaning the routing of telephone calls). The special services included mobile and marine calls. Operators considered these the most interesting telephone operating functions.

I really enjoyed my time at this office. The calls were more complex. In fact, you could spend many minutes on a call with a customer who was trying to reach a particular person on board a ship. Most of the people who owned mobile telephones were salesman carrying big phone apparatuses in the trunks of their cars. They were very friendly and flirted with all of us. I thought this was what it must have been like in the early days of the telephone.

It was at SOST in the summer of 1978 I learned about the CWC organizing campaign and became convinced I should join. It didn’t take much to win me over — I was getting so few hours of work that I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough money to return to university for my fourth year.

I requested full-time work as an operator, knowing that I would end up in Directory Assistance, which was more boring than long-distance operating but would put me at the centre of the company union territory. During the following two years, I organized for the CWC while taking one university course a year. I knew I was in the midst of something special, and to capture history as it was happening, I wrote a paper about the campaign and strike. This paper recorded the events in real time and became the backbone of this book.

The Context: Working-Class Women’s Work and Union Struggles

I was a young woman in the 1970s. My generation grew up watching Leave It to Beaver on TV. Although filmed in the 1950s, the show played incessantly in reruns during the sixties and seventies. It depicted middle-class family life, but a version where the dad worked and the mother stayed home. Much of the culture of the fifties and sixties duplicated this idealized picture of the family and sent the message that the nuclear family and a stay-at-home mother were the norm. Betty Friedan[1] and other second-wave feminists countered this widespread cultural belief with the assertion that many women suffered from being locked into this stereotype and needed meaningful work outside the home for creative expression and a sense of purpose. Maybe this was the case with middle-class women, but most of the women I knew were already working. They worked, as my mother had, as soon as their children started school or they could get a good babysitter. They went to work because they needed the money.

This was no different from earlier generations of women. Working-class women had always worked because they needed the money — and many working-class women needed the money because they were the principal breadwinners for their families or themselves.

Women also belonged to unions. The largest employer of working-class women in Toronto was the garment trade, and many of my friends had mothers who were seamstresses working in the rag-trade businesses around the intersection of Spadina and Queen. And many of these garment workers were members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, whose precursor union, the Cloakmakers’ Union, had launched a strike for the forty-four-hour work week in 1919.[2]

Women worked in manufacturing plants as well, especially during the Second World War, when the corporate sector recruited women for the workforce in Toronto’s wartime manufacturing plants, since much of the male workforce had joined the armed forces. In 1943, only one plant had a majority female workforce that was unionized — Inglis Home Appliances (formerly John Inglis and Company). Its workers had signed up with the United Steelworkers of America.[3] Although popular history depicts women returning to the home during the 1950s, there were still plenty of women working outside the home. Women were driven out of the manufacturing plants to make room for the men who returned after the war, but they were still in demand in pink-collar ghettos like retail stores and hospitals.

Between 1948 and 1952, the United Steelworkers launched a drive to unionize the female workforce at Eaton’s department store, headquartered in Toronto. The drive, led by strong woman organizers, was not successful. Although the campaign ultimately failed to win a union, the employer was forced to spend millions to increase women’s salaries and offer them pensions — all this just to stop them from organizing.[4] The desire to unionize Eaton’s continued after the period covered by this book with a campaign by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Local 1000.

Between 1965 and 1975, the number of employed women in Canada increased by 79 percent. High inflation rates prompted many women to seek employment to offset the decline in their family’s standard of living. In 1965, only 16.6 percent of all union members were women; ten years later the figure had jumped to 26.3 percent.[5]

This increase was largely due to the rapid unionization of the public sector, where nearly half of all workers (not including management) were women. By 1975, the Canadian Union of Public Employees had become the largest single union in Canada, representing the largest number of women.

Women needed the strength and power that came through unionization, as they faced many barriers and challenges in the workplace. Women’s pay rates were locked in at about half the pay rates of men. Often there were clearly discriminatory clauses that compensated women less or penalized them for maternity leave. Most traditionally male occupations were closed to them. Childcare was solely the woman’s problem, and if she needed to take time off, she could get fired.

The amazing thing is that women did fight back. Despite having to go home and fix dinner, do housework, and make sure their kids did their homework — while overcoming their own fatigue and demoralization — they fought back. And sometimes they even won.

Chapter 1

Bell Canada: The Company

Bell expects that the public will use his instrument without the aid of trained operators. Any telegraph engineer will at once see the fallacy of this plan. The public simply cannot be trusted to handle technical communications equipment. Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form … we leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications. In conclusion the committee feels that it must advise against any investment whatever in Bell’s scheme.

— Minutes of a Western Union meeting, circa 1880 [1]

Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone in 1874. With his new invention, he transmitted speech in 1875 and received the Canadian patent in March 1876. He received the master patent for the telephone in the United States in the same year. Although many others laid claim to the invention, Canada’s thirty-seventh Parliament passed a Canadian Parliamentary Motion on June 21, 2002, affirming that Alexander Graham Bell was indeed the inventor of the telephone.[2]

Bell on the telephone in New York (calling Chicago) in 1892.

The word telephone is derived from two Greek words: tele (far-off) and phone (voice or sound). The earliest examples were no more than pairs of wooden hand telephones that operated between two locations, such as from a store to a nearby warehouse, or from a business to an executive’s residence, similar to what we know today as walkie-talkie systems.

Bell Canada, formerly known as Bell Telephone Company of Canada (BTCC), was developed over 130 years ago in Ontario and Quebec to provide everything associated with telephone systems: not only the telephone apparatus, but also the physical infrastructure, including the phone lines and switching stations to facilitate phone calls.

Bell Telephone Company of Canada and then its renamed version, Bell Canada, has always been one of Canada’s most important corporations. In 1975, the government listed it as the fifth-largest company in the country. It has played a pivotal role in changing business, social, and family life in central Canada and has always employed a large workforce, hiring many members of every community and neighbourhood. This book will explore the history and role of the telephone operator in providing telephone calling assistance to the customers of Bell Canada, in the broader context of these workers’ struggle with the company.

Canadians became early adopters of the first telephones, as they did with mobile phones in the late twentieth century. The new invention helped to overcome the geographical distances of this vast country. Because the monopoly corporation had a captive market, and its financial interests were protected through federal regulation, it became a blue chip stock attractive to the middle class. From early on, the firm used the slogan A telephone business run by Canadians for Canadians.

This new communication technology changed the culture in ways that are still emerging. In the twenty-first century, the modern version of the telephone — the mobile phone — is now used for business and personal communication on a global scale. At the same time, we are also witnessing its use as a tool of protest and for regime change in far-off dictatorships. Originally conceived of by its inventors and initial investors as a tool for business, the telephone, as with other life-changing technology, has had applications developed for easier family and social communication.

The large corporation that developed to support making a telephone call was nicknamed Ma Bell, because of its monopoly status, and it became known for its seemingly remote attitude toward customers and workers, and arbitrary business decisions. Monopoly status gave the company a pos­ition similar to the government in its influence in day-to-day life. The nickname Ma shows that Canadians in central Canada considered the company close enough to be family. Throughout the life of the company, the benefits of monopoly status, including a captive market and service rates approved by a government body, did not result in a public perception of good customer service or rates that favoured the ordinary customer.

Corporate Growth

Bell Telephone Company of Canada was incorporated on April 29, 1880, by an Act of the Dominion Parliament, to develop a telephone system in Canada based on Bell’s patents. This was just four years after the telephone’s invention, a very fast timeline for any startup com­pany to attract investors, create a corporate infrastructure, and get the national government on its side. The company’s charter from the government granted it the right, but not a monopoly, to offer services to all provinces except British Columbia (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland and Labrador had not yet entered confederation). The company would later focus its service delivery on heavily populated areas of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

In 1881, one year after incorporating, the company had exchanges in forty cities and had a long-distance line from Toronto to Hamilton. By 1890, the firm was offering long-distance service over 3,670 miles.[3] In 1880, Bell had only one hundred subscribers, but through slow but steady growth and cutthroat tactics against the competition, the number of subscribers went up to 1,500 in 1886.[4]

In the pre-monopoly period, dozens of entrepreneurs seized upon the opportunities presented by this new invention and many telephone companies were incorporated at the same time as Bell Telephone. Charles Fleetford Sise, the company’s first general manager, called the competitive environment that Bell Telephone operated in guerrilla war.[5]

Sise directed Bell to match the tactics of the competition and compete ruthlessly. This included giving exclusive privileges, including free installation and cheap rates, to railway stations and doctors, as well as stopping competitors through injunctions, cutting rates and even tampering with their phone lines.[6] Bell’s incessant lobbying of provincial legislatures and municipal councils enhanced the cutthroat competitive behaviour. Monopoly status was the goal and to achieve it, Bell sales agents were not above lying or even installing telephones for free until the competition was dead. Of course, once the competition was gone, the cost of telephone service reverted back to full rates.[7]

When telephones were first in use, marketing them as an aid to family life was not part of the company’s sales efforts, as middle- and working-class families could not even afford the rates for a telephone until early in the twentieth century. To encourage the exclusive use of phones by the business class, the company kept its rates high and even tried to increase the cost of public telephone calls.

Bell Telephone was a major corporate player right from the beginning, but growth did not come overnight or easily because the company was the subject of continuing government interest. Government regulation of phone service developed concurrently with the com­pany’s growth. An 1892 amendment to the Charter of Bell Telephone Company of Canada read, The existing rates shall not be increased without the consent of the Governor in Council.[8]

The logo used by Bell Telephone Company of Canada from 1902 until1922. Interestingly, the logo uses American flag–like stars. A later version incorporated maple leaves instead.

After the turn of the century, government regulation of Bell Telephone increased. In 1902, the government amended the company’s charter to include a regulation requiring Bell to provide service to whomever applied for it, with the allowance that the instrument would not have to be placed far from a road.[9]

The turn of the century was a time when the public was clamouring for government intervention in the delivery of what were coming to be seen as basic necessities of life, including water and electricity. These ­demands were due to the failure of the free market to deliver the commodities at a fair price and with adequate concern for public safety. Various organizational structures delivered these services, including monopolies run by the government, public utilities run by arm’s-length government bodies called commissions, and regulated monopoly corporations like the railways. The telephone company became the focus of ongoing public debate about public versus private control. Despite much competition by small municipal telephone companies, regulatory decisions by the Canadian Board of Railway Commissioners between 1912 and 1916 gave Bell Telephone exclusive