“I hope that when people look around them and see these buildings, they don’t just think about the people who got to name the buildings,” Fairweather says. “They think about the people whose labour have been performed in those buildings – whose labour we don’t see, but our lives rely on.”

Part of Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Heritage Lunch and Learn, the talk will be delivered online Oct. 9.

Invisible hands

Fairweather has been working, for around two years, with the non-profit BC Labour Heritage Centre. She is one of the organization’s two paid part-time staff members. Driven by a curiosity about women’s labour, she took an interest in researching Vancouver’s garment industry.

“It’s highly skilled work, where the skills have usually been passed down from worker to worker to worker, from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter through the generations,” she shares. “It’s only very recently that garments have become commodified and industrialized.”

The project manager adds that all clothing “is still handmade.” While parts of the process have been mechanized, she emphasizes how “hands” – or human labour – is still used in garment production.

“All that labour is hidden, and a lot of that labour is done by women,” she adds. “A lot of that labour in Canada, at least, is racialized.”

Fairweather has been conducting archival research into the garment industry of 1900s Vancouver. Her sources include city and provincial archives.

Newspapers also provided valuable information, particularly as labour reporters documented workers’ struggles. Fairweather’s research uncovered knitting mills and other factories.

“Even from the very beginning, that work was racialized,” she says. “When Universal Knitting opened in 1915, they advertised that they used only British help.”

She adds that the word “British” indicated “white” – a typical practice at the time. By the 1960s, the labour force shifted to immigrant women from parts of Asia, including those of Chinese and Indian backgrounds.

Changing demographics

According to Fairweather, this shift reflected business owners’ desire to lower costs. Immigration policy changes, such as an end to the Chinese Exclusion Act, led to the availability of women workers from different demographics.

“These were very low paying [jobs] because employers could get away with it,” Fairweather says. “Because these women didn’t have a lot of opportunities, they were forced to accept wages that were lower than what European women would be demanding.”

The project manager adds that Marjorie Hamilton was another local garment manufacturer and had a workforce that was “95 per cent Chinese women” by the 1980s. Fairweather points out that union formation was difficult in this industry.

“The women who were working these jobs were very disadvantaged in terms of power dynamics,” she says. “They were new immigrants. They might not have had the English skills to express what they needed to supervisors or to company owners.”

The project manager adds that threats of being fired or “sent back” also made it difficult for workers to organize. These threats were particularly effective during a time where racialized women had few economic opportunities. Despite these challenges, Hamilton’s workforce eventually formed a union.

“It took them two and a half years to get a first contract,” Fairweather explains. “When they did have a contract for workers to vote on, only four workers came to vote on the contract, and that was because the rest of them were too afraid of company retaliation.”

Her talk will include photos and audio from oral history interviews – bringing “these stories to life.” For Fairweather, this history is a cautionary tale about the consequences of excluding racialized workers from unions.

“Employers have long exploited racial division to be able to treat workers poorly,” she says. “These stories have the power to galvanize us to work together as a working class.”

This talk is also part of BC Culture Days.

For more information on the talk, see www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org

For more information on Natasha Fairweather’s work, see www.labourheritagecentre.ca/vancouvers-garment-industry