The Jobless

For thin, worried Gabriel Tremblay, 39, it was a sorry Labor Day. A onetime Montreal restaurant owner, he had been working at the Canadian Vickers, Ltd. shipyard in East Montreal. There he made better wages than ever before, but heavy medical expenses and old business debts made saving all but impossible. Now that he had been laid off, he did not know what to do. Said he: "The soldiers are coming back . . . and they have to have jobs. But us, we have to live, too." His pretty wife Marianne had it all figured out: unless Gabriel found a job soon, they and their five children would have to live on unemployment insurance of $14 a week plus $26 a month in family-allowance payments. It did not look like nearly enough. They pay $25 a month for their tiny apartment on Montreal's Rue St. Andre, and food costs about $22 a week.

The Gabriel Tremblays were not alone in their troubles. Some 30,000 other war workers had been laid off in Montreal alone. Across the Dominion, thousands more were looking for new jobs. Some took the situation stoically; many protested.

P: At the Government-owned Small Arms, Ltd. plant near Toronto, a thousand workers staged a sitdown strike against layoffs.

P: On the Pacific coast, discharged workers demanded that shipyards be kept going whether ships were needed or not.

P: The Canadian Trades & Labor Congress asked that the Government pass a law prohibiting pay reductions, and suggested "reconversional pay" (a month's wages for each year's war work).

P: A spokesman for the United Auto Workers of America said: "The C.I.O.'s slogan from now on will be 32 hours of work for 42 hours' pay. We will never go back to low wages."

The Government at Ottawa was still brightly optimistic about it all. Cried big, bluff Labor Minister Humphrey Mitchell: "There's nothing to get hysterical about. In six months our problem may be to fight a boom." The understandably worried workers certainly hoped so.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.