Men and Boys Were Constantly Left Out of Workers’ Rights in Ontario
Men and boys were left out of workers’ rights in Ontario
Ontario’s labour history is usually taught like a simple story of progress: child labour laws, factory laws, minimum wage, the eight-hour day, modern employment standards. But that version hides something ugly. A lot of early “worker protection” was never written for workers as human beings. It was written around children, girls, and women, while older boys and men were treated as the disposable labour class.
Starting with the 1884 Factory Act. Ontario banned factories from hiring boys under 12 and girls under 14. Children under 14, girls 14-18 and women were limited to 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week. Meal-break protections applied to these children, young girls, and women. So a boy would age out of those protections at 14 and be pushed into the adult male labour category, while girls and women remained legally protected their whole life. At an age we would now clearly recognize as still being a child, a boy was not seen as a human being, but as a resource for the state.
In 1920, Ontario created minimum-wage protection for many female workers, but not male workers. A labour board was organized to evaluate women’s labour rates and set a minimum wage. In Toronto this was roughly $12 to $12.50 per week. By 1937, Ontario had 438,500 male non-agricultural wage labourers with no wage protection at all. Many were married with dependents, and some earned less than the legal minimum set for a single woman in Toronto. Ontario finally gave itself the power to set male minimum wages in 1937, but by the end of 1939 it had used that power only once: for male textile workers, at about $832 a year, or $16 a week. For most men, the “right” still did not exist in practice.
In 1944 Ontario finally created an eight-hour day and 48-hour week for covered workers, but the law still carved out whole sectors: agriculture, railway and steamship workers, stevedores, commercial fishermen, municipal fire departments, most professions, domestic service, wartime industries, managers, supervisors, and others. Many sectors that employed primarily men or boys. So boys and men in those sectors could still be left outside basic hours-of-work protections. This is not the history of men and boys simply “having rights.” It is the history of male suffering being normalized, male bodies being used, and then that exclusion being written out of the story.
Even today Ontario still prioritizes women and girls through a women’s forum, other programs, and funding streams. All based on the premise that it is women and girls who have been disadvantaged, who have been oppressed, or held back. Fewer boys still graduate high school, the majority of drug overdoses are male, the majority of suicides are male, and much more. The NDP, Greens, and Liberal parties of Ontario all have gender equity sections that only mention women’s and girls’ issues. Which leads them to then make the claim that men are targeting women via GBV since they don’t recognize or see the GBV men and boys face.
I also know of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930. That denied rights to many men. Once again showing that men’s rights, in this case workers’ rights, were never granted to them because they were male. In fact, governments worked to deny men and boys these rights so that they could benefit from them as a disposable group.
What did the history of workers’ rights look like in your country? Were men and boys denied equal protection there too?