International Day of Mourning takes place on April 28th to remember workers killed or injured in the workplace. At Toronto’s Columbus Centre politicians gather along with a who’s who of the Italian community to honour Italian immigrants killed on the job. In 2016, the Italian Fallen Workers Memorial Wall was built to honour 1000 Italian immigrants who died on job sites. The following year the names of fallen workers of Italian origin from across the country were added, dating back to 1900. Today, the memorial wall includes over 1,300 names.
This year’s event fell on a rainy day, and the ceremonies were held indoors. Ninety-two-year-old Marino Toppan, who founded the Fallen Workers Memorial Wall, spoke about an additional 2000 names of Italian immigrants who died at work, but there is no space to inscribe there names as the memorial wall is full. My mind flashed back to my mother telling me to go outside and wait for my father, Corrado, to get home from work. As soon as I saw him, I would run to greet him. I would grab his hand and walk with him, and he would barely acknowledge me. With lunch pail in hand and construction boots covered in mud, he wanted to get home, have dinner, and rest up for the next day. He worked installing gas pipes, and then pouring cement, until a back injury forced him to leave the construction trade. After his back injury, he was never the same and he died young.
Early in the evening, Toronto’s Little Italy would come to life with the men returning from work looking haggard and worn from another day on construction sites, the women leaving the factory floor rushing home to cook dinner, and the streets teeming with energetic youngsters. Our neighbour and family friend Rocco Petrini would get home at the same time as my father, and I would see him across the road slowly walking with a noticeable limp, struggling to open his backyard gate. After years of working in construction pouring cement between streetcar tracks and then bent on his knees finishing concrete, his knees were ruined. He required surgery but refused to do so and continued to go to work until one day he suffered a heart attack and was forced to retire. Like my father, Rocco did not have much of a retirement and lived with pain.
Marino Toppan emigrated to Canada in 1955, worked as a bricklayer, and remembers how appalling conditions were for construction workers: “It was a jungle in the residential field, with contractors not paying you, and they would disappear in the middle of the night. There were no minimum wages and no laws. I earned 75 cents an hour and barely had 30 minutes for lunch – just enough time to swallow a sandwich and return to the scaffold,” he recalls.
The Italian immigrant experience remains an indelible part of Canadian history as hundreds of thousands emigrated to Canada when labour laws barely existed and there was no social safety net. After World War II, 500,000 Italian immigrants arrived in Canada as the economy was booming and labour was in demand. The Italians left poverty searching for a better life and discovered that the road was not paved with gold, but with hardship.
Their dawn-to-dusk work ethic acquired from working long hours back on the farm in Italy served them well as they took on the most dangerous jobs in mining, railway building, steel plants, and construction. In 1960-61, the average yearly pay for Italians working in Toronto was $4,520, the lowest compared to other ethnic groups, among them British, French, Jewish, German, and Ukrainian. Italian women earned even less, averaging $2,394 per year. “We had a mass of poor Italians with no education; they didn’t speak English, they worked like animals in the beginning, and they were able to build their part as workers and employers,” stated the author of The Italians Who Built Toronto, Stefano Agnoletto.
The Italian Fallen Workers Memorial, in the gardens of Toronto’s Columbus Centre, was inaugurated in 2016. Each column, representing a decade beginning in 1900, contains the names of workers who died on the job. (Photo: Francis Crescia)
Today, Hogg’s Hollow is one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in Toronto, known for its English cottage homes. But in 1960 it was nothing more than swampland. It would become the site of a tragedy and expose the exploitation of Italian immigrants. Construction was taking place on a water main under the Don River, which needed to be connected to a pumping station on the other side. Italian-born workers with no training in tunnel work were working 10 meters underground in cramped quarters when, towards the end of their shift, a fire started that spread quickly. Six workers managed to escape, and a seventh was rescued. But Italian immigrants Pasquale Allegrezzo, 27, Giovanni Fusillo, 23, John Correglia 30, and brothers Alessandro and Guido Mantella, 25 and 23 years old respectively, were suffocated. “Sealed In A Hell Hole” ran the front page of the Toronto Telegram.
The construction company was in financial trouble, work was a year behind schedule, and the bosses were cutting corners to finish the job. Rescue worker Nester Buchinski was brought in from another site, and he and three men entered the tunnel. They had no special equipment; ninety meters into the tunnel they could not go any further. “It was dark and there was a lot of water. We found one body lying over the top of the pipe,” he remembers. “The remaining bodies had been trapped in water and silt.” It took nearly five days to pump out the water and bring the remaining bodies out.
The Hogg’s Hollow tragedy ignited a flame in the belly of the Italian community, as fatal accidents had become too frequent. Outrage ensued and the media attention put the government under tremendous pressure to act. Union leaders began to organize and strikes took place during the summer of 1960 and 1961 that would paralyze the construction industry. The Ontario government’s Royal Commission report called for significant changes in industrial safety, including licensing all buildings, contractors, and subcontractors, and replacing the Building Trades Protection Act of 1911. It was the first major rewrite of labour laws in 40 years. The Industrial Safety Act was passed that put workers front and centre and made health and safety the mutual responsibility of management and workers. Canadian workers emerged with new powers: the right to refuse unsafe work, the right to know about hazards in the workplace, and the right to participate in health and safety discussions.
Quilt detail: Brothers Alessandro and Guido Mantella; representation of how their bodies were found in the 1960 Hoggs Hollow disaster. (Photo: Francis Crescia)
The Hogg’s Hollow tragedy put a stop to the exploitation of workers and led the Italian community to find its voice and demand change. The community turned tragedy into triumph, producing the country’s greatest labour victory and ending the era of exploitation. Italians would go on to achieve success in their new country, but it would not have been possible without the extraordinary sacrifices of immigrants who crossed the ocean and taking a chance at a new beginning. Their hard-fought experiences paved the way to make life easier for future waves of immigrants.
In 2010, the city of Toronto installed a commemorative quilt at the York Mills subway station to honour the Hogg’s Hollow disaster. The quilt shows workers sitting in a tunnel and two brothers facing each other praying. Those who died were not lost in vain, as their deaths led to major changes in labour laws. The province of Ontario became the leader in workplace safety, benefitting workers everywhere, and helping make Canada a more prosperous country.
Based in Toronto, Francis Crescia writes about political, economic, and cultural issues.
