O RGANIZACIÓN DE LOS DATOS ESPACIALES

Many of the most influential studies of the nineteenth century journey to work utilized a method of approximation that assumed that workers were being employed by the closest employer for which they were deemed qualified to work (Dennis R. , 1984; Deskins, 1972; Greenberg, 1980; Hershberg, Light, Cox, & Greenfield, 1981; Pooley C. , 1984; Vance, 1967). This paper suggests that this method of approximation leads to a significant misrepresentation of the true relationship between work and home, leading to an underestimation of the time spent traveling to work each day. A framework to overcome these assumptions has been outlined above, but the improvement has yet to be demonstrated.

To perform a comparative analysis between the two methods, I needed to find the closest workplace to each worker’s home that would employ a worker with a related occupation, then compare that distance to the actual distance the worker was travelling to work each day. To estimate what would be the closest workplace for which a given worker was qualified, I first needed to link each worker with his/her industry of employment. However, due to the large number of industries (158) and workplaces (2295) — each of which would require a separate analysis — I elected to use a sample. I chose two types of workplaces representing two different industries, breweries and cigar factories. They were chosen because they represent workplaces that were not listed in multiple industry categories in the business directory, and thus provide a more direct relationship between home and a potential closest employer. Additionally, while they are both medium-sized industries in which workers commuted from a wide geographic area, they have differing levels of skilled labour and industrialization. Breweries employed 95 workers, a mix of skilled and semi-skilled labour, in a heavily mechanized environment. Maltsters, brewmasters, and coopers made up the skilled class, while semi-skilled

workers included bottlers, packers, warehouse clerks, and teamsters. Some unskilled positions were also found in the city’s breweries, such as those whose tasks were to shovel grain, load wagons, or clear rodents out of vats and barrels (Phillips, 2000). Cigar manufacturing, a rapidly growing industry in 1881, was a modest operation with products made by hand by individual workers using a limited number of simple tools such as a rolling board, knife, and wrapping leafs. A total of 118 workers in our database were working in cigar factories. The 1889 Royal Commission on Labour and Capital includes testimonies from Londoners that suggest that many more individuals were employed in

cigar making. They were primarily young women and children, recent immigrants who were ‘secured by indenture’ and paid the lowest of wages to complete the simple task of rolling tobacco leaves into cigars (Canada, Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889). We do not capture many of these indentured workers in this study. Those we do capture, however, represent a sample similar to that discussed in the Royal Commission reports, comprised of unskilled cigar makers, packers, and wood planers, including many who are women and teenagers.

To find the closest potential workplace on the road and pedestrian path network, I utilized the Closest Facility Analysis tools in Network Analyst. Workplaces were loaded as facility locations using the network location fields created for the journey to work analysis. The workers were loaded as incident locations, again using the default geometry location functions. Routes were calculated between each worker’s residence and the closest workplace within their industry. The exported result has a name field that indicates both IDs from the facilities (workplaces) and incidents (workers) separated by a hyphen (eg. 125 – 50). These IDs needed to be separated so the distance calculations to the closest facility could be joined to the dataset with the worker’s actual distance to work. To facilitate, a new field was created and the following VBScript run in the field calculator: Left( [Name] , ((InStr ( 1, [Name] ,"‐",1) ‐2))). The difference between the actual and potential distances was calculated with a 0 difference denoting that the worker was working at the closest employer and any positive number reflecting the difference in metres. Table 4.7 charts the results, while Figures 4.9 and 4.10 provide graphic

representations of the differences between closest and actual employer for brewery workers and cigar makers, respectively.

Total Workers Work at Closest Actual Workplace Mean Difference in Meters

Brewery 95 19 76 496 Meters

Cigar Factories 118 13 105 528 Meters

Table 4.7– Working at Closest Workplace vs. Actual Workplace: Brewery and Cigar Factory Workers

It is observed that only 19 of 95, or 20%, of brewery workers are employed at the closest brewery to their residence, resulting in a difference of nearly half a kilometer in their average journey to work. A closer look reveals that of the 19 workers who did work at the closest brewery, 10 were employed as maltsters, a job that requires careful attention to the germination of the cereals used to create the malt for beer production. Grains had to be crushed, weighed, and boiled into mash, then cooked, filtered and drained, and boiled again with hops before fermentation (Phillips, 2000). This delicate chemical process required constant attention and maltsters were on call seven days a week, living near their workplace in case they were needed to suddenly stop a malting that might finish early. Of the remaining nine workers, two were watchmen and another two held positions of responsibility as ‘engineer’ and ‘foreman’. For cigar factory workers, only 13 of 105, or 12%, were employed at the closest factory to their residence, resulting in a difference of a half a kilometer in their average journey to work, similar to the brewery workers. With the exception of one foreman, a John Gerlach of WT Rutherford & Co’s, the availability of inexpensive, convenient accommodations appears to be have

influenced the housing decisions of those who worked at the closest employer. All of the other cigar workers who worked at the closest factory were boarding either in a

residential hotel or in a dwelling with non-related individuals. More than half of the women were under the age of 20, and another two were fifteen-year-old boys who were

neighbours and worked together at William Kelly and Sons cigar factory, suggesting that we are picking up a few of the underrepresented workers in the city directory. Most of the city’s cigar factories were located in the downtown core among other medium-sized factories that used paper and wood products, such as furniture manufacturers, carriage factories, and paper bag makers. Rents were low in this district of the city with most residential offers being in hotels or above storefronts, thus allowing an opportunity for the lowest paid cigar factory workers to find accommodations close to work, reducing their commutes to help compensate for the long work shifts that were demanded of them. It is recognized that many factors go into residential and workplace choice; however, these two examples, each with their peculiarities in occupational demands or residential needs, help illustrate that there are significant errors and omissions if one assumes that people work for the closest employer for which they are qualified. By establishing true home-work links, we can not only better understand what was a more realistic daily journey to work, but can also begin to provide some insight into residential choices made by workers in the nineteenth-century walking city.

Figure 4.10 – Cigar Factory Workers: Differences between Closest and Actual Employer