labour ski l ls
installation immigrant stories by simon rabyniuk
toronto survival handwork
6 garments, 4 machine-made, 2 hand-tailored
De-skilling the Garment Industry (6 garments, 4 machine-made, 2 hand-tailored) , is a sculpture originally produced for the exhibition, the Grand Trunk, at the Gladstone Hotel, in Toronto, Canada. Curator Casey Hinton, provided ten artists with an historic newspaper article and a suitcase, asking each artist to imagine what the person described in the article may have been carrying with them. Or, to start from a place of fact, and tease out a deeper narrative, fictionalising the story. De-skilling the Garment Industry looks at a period in Toronto’s history from the early 20th century. Jacob Galinsky becomes an exceptional character not for his individuality – represented by his petty personal offences – but for how his life experience is a part of the larger story of how one ethnic group came to dominate an industry. It explores the relationship between immigration, labour and transition within the garment industry.
Galinsky’s family was part of the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Ontario between 1910 and 1930. His father came first, travelling from Kielce, Poland to Toronto, via Warsaw, Berlin, Antwerp and Halifax. Arriving before World War One, he delayed sending for his family when war broke out. Jacob’s mother followed eight years after her husband’s emigration, negotiating state borders to weather the fourteen day sea voyage with Jacob. They were greeted in Halifax by a Jewish mutual aid society who helped usher them on their way to Toronto. His two oldest brothers came several years later, separately. His father earned the money required to send for his family as a rag picker. Working in harsh conditions he sorted through worn clothes gathered from across the city, lashing bundles together to be sent to the mill for reprocessing into cloth. Each load of rags brought more filth into the workshop and the possibility of another
In 1945, The Toronto Star reported that Jacob Galinsky defrauded the Gladstone Hotel of $7.00 and that he stood accused of participating in the theft of clothing from a landed Jewish German retailer along Spadina Avenue. Galinsky was a sewing machine operator working for T. Eatons Company, out of their Terauley Street factory. He spent his working days sewing the inner lining into the shells of ready-to-wear suit jackets; one of the one hundred and fifty discrete operations required to make a single jacket. He had the aid of an assistant who worked between three other sewing machine operators, taking the finished jackets and delivering new shells, ensuring no breaks in the operators process. The success of the modern ready-to-wear clothing factory: every employee was a specialist, each part of the garment being handled by a different operator.
stillborn infant. It was a predominately Jewish workshop. New immigrants worked longer hours and were paid less then their naturalised equivalents. They were afforded the flexibility to leave work early on Friday to prepare for the Sabbath, although they were required to be back by Saturday after sunset – a wearing issue. ‘How is one to be at rest, when your mind is only thinking about the work you must do later?’ – a common question posed at worker-only meetings, organised to struggle with the issue of unionisation.
On Site review 24
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