Toronto is a city wrapped in the rhythms of work. All night vehicle lights surge and recede along the urban expressways, as fluid as arteries and pulsating as if propelled by the city’s beating heart. At dawn packed buses wallow in the curb lane, moving like migrating manatees. An hour later the subway is stuffed with commuters who sway in silent communion as the train scythes around a bend in the tunnel, while above them, at kitchen counters and crowded street corners, coffee cups are raised and lowered and raised again in sleepy salute to the day.
In this precise, punctual, tightly scripted city–”New York run by the Swiss,” as playwright Peter Ustinov is claimed to have once remarked–we rely on these rhythms. Torontonians shove past sidewalk laggards and chafe at waiting in line. We view the weather report-snow squalls in Barrie, flurries along the 401, light rain near the lakeshore-less as a meteorological phenomenon than as a kind of calculus for plotting our commute into work. In this city, where time is indistinguishable from money, we shout into cell phones whenever there is a lane closure, a lag on the subway line or a stalled streetcar in our path. We are always in a hurry to get to work, as if failing to do so on time would jeopardize not only our gainful employment but the very essence of our being.
In Toronto we have grown accustomed to think of the great battles over work as having been fought elsewhere and a long time ago, in Germany and England or perhaps in Winnipeg. In an era of employment standards acts, employment insurance, human rights 
tribunals and public health care, most of us have come to take work-if not always our own jobs-for granted. As unionization levels continue to decline, we consider strikes an intrusion into the orderly progress of urban life, particularly when the striking workers are public servants who pick up our garbage or drive the buses many of us take to work. We have grown even to dislike the word “worker,” with its connotations of lunch buckets and blue collars, preferring to think of ourselves as professionals, even consultants. We watch television programs like The Office with rueful recognition, but fail to see in them any meaningful reflection of our own working lives. If we are unhappy, overworked, undervalued or work in unsafe conditions, we blame our boss or coworkers. If we sense that some structural imbalance underpins the relations of production, we joke about it or keep our mouths shut. Everyone has to make a living, don’t they?
More than a century after trade unions and other labour organizations took up the cause of workers’ rights in Toronto, and in the long decades since legislation was grudgingly and gradually enacted to even out the balance between employers and working people, it is easy to forget the appalling working conditions that led to those demonstrations and labour stoppages and the sharp social schisms that pitted people against one another. Yet, Toronto’s history is in many ways the history of an industrial city. Moreover, many of the same labour issues that prompted demonstrations and strikes in the early part of the century persist today in an era of globalization and lean production.
This week, among other works, we will be discussing Hugh Garner’s classic novel depicting working-class Depression-era Toronto, Cabbagetown (Ryerson, 1969), Earle Birney’s Down the Long Table (McClelland & Stweart, 1955), Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (McClelland & Stewart, 1969) and Emily Schultz’s Heaven is Small (Anansi, 2009).
This week’s slides are available here.
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