Writing Diaries #10, Earning our daily bread

When your job collides with your nature, mental health is at risk

My first experience of working was a summer job in 1961. I was twelve. I spent six weeks in a Montreal lingerie factory, where my mother worked, snipping hanging threads from finished garments.

I was underage, of course, but Mamma had convinced her boss to take me on to keep me from loafing on our front stoop with my friends, Renee and Rose Marie. Not that I had ever had a lot of loafing time. Since the age of ten, as the eldest of three, I’d spent entire summers caring for my young siblings. My sister was four, and my brother two. My chores also included housework and rudimentary cooking year round.

In the summer of 1961, however, my father was unemployed—the first of many such periods to come—so he decided to look after the little ones. It was his idea to send me to work. He didn't, of course, do any of the housework or cooking. My mother and I did that when we got home from work and on weekends.

Mamma's boss, Mrs. Weldon, who was also one of the owners, patted me on the head, led me to a big table, gave me sewing snippers and showed me how to cut the threads hanging from the seams of finished garments. She said my pay would be twenty cents an hour.

The pay seemed not too bad when I could buy a fudgesicle for five cents.

I liked Mrs. Weldon. Mamma said she'd been in a concentration camp during the war. Because of what happened to her there, she couldn’t have children, she said, shaking her head. I'd never heard about concentration camps and couldn't figure out what it had to do with having kids.   

The clothing industry was the largest source of manufacturing jobs in Montreal for most the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the city teemed with factories from downtown northward along and around rue Saint-Laurent--aka The Main-- to Mile End, where we lived.

Our street, Saint-Dominique, was one street east of The Main. We lived on the street level of a row house.

Immigrant women populated the factory floors: Eastern Europeans and Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s, followed by Italians, Greeks and Portuguese after the Second World War.

Mamma was one of those Italian workers. She worked on an industrial-size Singer sewing machine.

The work was hard; the pay poor. Seamstresses earned an average of ninety-nine cents an hour; the men, who cut the materials for them to sew, averaged $1.50.

We started work at eight in the morning and went until four-thirty or longer if they had a big order to ship out. Sometimes we worked also went in for a half-day on Saturdays.

I stood at the table with the clipper in my right hand, cutting threads, bundle after bundle. Unused to the repetitive finger flexing needed to use the clippers, my right hand throbbed and then numbed.

The factories had no air conditioning. Montreal summers were brutal with high temperatures and oppressive humidity, and the machines' motors added to the heat so that by mid-afternoon I yearned to lie on the floor and go to sleep.

The work itself wasn’t hard once I got used to it. I snipped long threads from the seams of cotton baby doll pajamas, silky panties, glossy full-length and half-length slips, and lovely, sheer négligées in pretty pastel colours, then stacked them neatly, bundle by bundle.

My problem was having to stand still all day long. I was a high-strung, anxious kid and hadn’t learned how to deal with the stress caused by the monotony. I endured real mental anguish.

From the moment I stepped into the factory in the morning, I waited for the first break to come. After lunch, the time I spent at the finished table seemed to slow even more. I tried not to keep looking at the clock. The minutes crawled by and by about four o'clock I would have jumped out of my skin--anything to get away.

It consoled me to remember that my ordeal would end by September. But not for Mamma and the other women who hunched over their machines day after day, week after week, year after year. It puzzled me that they accepted the monotony of their jobs without complaint. It didn't bother them at all. Although they did get heated up about the wages.

At the end of my first week on the job, Mrs. Weldon handed me an envelope containing $7.50.

I skipped ahead of my mother all the way home. I was thrilled. When I got home, my father was waiting. He took the pay packet, leaving me with just fifty cents to spend as I liked. A flash of hated went through me like a shiver.

That was my first but not my last summer job working in a factory until I graduated university in 1970. Needs must. I had to pay for my education.

But I never got used to the setting. I promised myself that when the time came to work full-time, it wouldn’t be in a factory. Although I found an office job when the time came, it wasn't much better than working in a factory, except for the air-conditioning.

(My next blog will cover my job as an “information operator” with Bell Canada, which was even more restrictive than Montreal's garment factories.)