The question of salaries for school teachers cropped up regularly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In general, salaries were very low, and especially so in the smaller rural school sections. Advocates for better education regularly called for better salaries and better training for teachers, but those efforts produced no major changes.
There were several reasons for the abysmal salary levels. First of all, many of the farmers who sat on the rural boards placed little value on education. As well, they were a tight-fisted lot who squeezed every penny in their coffers. In many cases the compensation they offered their teachers included room and board at a local farm in lieu of salary.
Consequently, there was an immense turnover among the teachers, who spent much time scanning the “Teachers Wanted” columns in the daily newspapers as they sought positions that paid a little more money. It was rare for rural teachers to stay more than two years at one school.
Most rural teachers were women. They could become teachers after a single year of training following high school. Many of the young women would teach only for a few years until they married. Female teachers were invariably single. Most boards would not even consider the employment of a married woman.
Men who followed a career in teaching usually taught in high schools or in multi-room public schools in towns. Most male teachers in the town schools were principals. They tended to stay in one place longer than women, and they often earned three or four times as much as women. Boards defended the salary differential by claiming that most male teachers had families to support.
One of the consequences of the First World War was a shake-up of social conditions and employment at home in Canada. A number of women were promoted to principals in place of men who enlisted. There was a general labour shortage, and that meant that some boards were willing to hire older, married women as teachers.
Another consequence of the war was a rapid inflation from 1917 until the early 1920s. The cost of virtually everything escalated rapidly, and employees scrambled to keep pace. Salary demands produced a flurry of strikes and organizing efforts by unions. The teaching profession in Wellington County was not immune.
In the spring of 1920 a group of teachers decided it was time to organize and press their demands for better salaries. They called a Saturday afternoon meeting for May 15, 1920 in Elora, and invited all public school teachers in south Wellington to attend.
The meeting attracted only about 35 teachers, a small minority of the teaching profession in the area. Interestingly, male teachers dominated, even though they were in general much better paid than women. Teachers were present at that meeting from Elora, Fergus, Arthur, Erin and Rockwood, along with a sprinkling from the dozens of one-room schools in the area. The featured speaker was Martin Kerr of Hamilton, who had a university degree and served as head of the Male Teachers Federation of Ontario. He told those present that teachers had, for a long time, lagged behind the rest of the labour force in income. They must band together to secure better remuneration, he told the teachers.
At the conclusion of Kerr’s remarks the meeting voted unanimously to organize as a group, and to press for better salaries. The meeting expressed support for the Salary Circle that had been developed by the Ontario Educational Association. It called for salaries between $800 and $2,000 for teachers and principals, depending on the amount of training and experience they had. Rural teachers were then earning as little as $500 per year, and although many boards had reluctantly granted minuscule increases over the past few years, those increases fell far below inflation.
The teachers left the Elora meeting fired with zeal for their cause. As it turned out, public reaction was largely negative, as the aims of the teachers would impact their tax levels at a time when most people were already struggling with rising prices and costs. Even so, the teachers had some supporters who believed education was sufficiently important that it should attract the best people possible as teachers.
Most disappointing to the teachers, though, was the lack of support they generated among their colleagues. Most teachers, especially those in the one-room schools, rejected the idea of joining the union.
Among the vocal critics of the teachers’ unionization movement was Bill Fairweather of Elora. He wrote a lengthy missive to the Elora Express, which appeared in the issue of June 2. He noted the teachers had “the assistance of agitators” in their mission to increase their wages. He claimed that school boards had been generous with salaries.
He backed up his claim by stating that the Elora board had increased its salary levels a year earlier, and had received a flurry of applications for an opening in the staff later that year. During the year, the board had granted an across-the-board increase of $50 per teacher.
Fairweather predicted there would soon be a lessening in the cost of living pressures. In the meantime, boards could grant increases as were deemed necessary to keep pace with inflation.
Over the previous century, Fairweather noted, teachers salaries had doubled. He pointed out other advantages teachers enjoyed, such as ample summer vacations and other holidays. For women, a teaching position in a rural school was one of the few employment opportunities available, and they often enjoyed the benefit of boarding in a happy home during the school year.
As well, they were free of the risk of layoffs or shortened hours, and they enjoyed a higher social position than most people in the community.
The greatest argument to be made against Fairweather’s remarks was that he did not make a distinction between the town boards, such as that in Elora, and the rural schools where the problems were most acute. Elora’s salaries were higher than those in the country, and teachers in the towns such as Elora did not need to deal with eight grades, as did those in the one-room schools. Obviously, a position in Elora was much more desirable than one in a rural school. Indeed, some rural schools were experiencing difficulty in finding qualified teachers at the pay rates they offered.
In the end, the teachers union movement of 1920 soon fizzled out. Union advocates failed to sign up a sufficient number of teachers to make their organizational efforts successful. On the other side of the issue, rural boards soon realized that they needed to boost their salaries to attract applications for vacancies. Had the 1920 union movement been successful the history of education in Wellington County might have evolved along a much different path.
As events unfolded, pay for teachers in rural schools remained low. The great depression a decade after the 1920 unionization attempt further depressed the pay rates for rural teachers. In many cases, rural boards lowered their salary levels in the 1930s. That trend ended with the war years of the 1940s. In the 1950s the general prosperity of the time helped to increase the salaries of rural teachers. Much greater gains came with the closure of the one room schools and the provincially-mandated county board system. As well, training and educational qualifications for teachers also increased. But that is a story for another time.