How much were switchboard operators paid at the turn of the 20th century?
“At the turn of the century, the work day at Bell Telephone was ten hours long for technicians and eight hours long for operators, and the work week was six days long… “Bell Telephone tried an experiment in Toronto in 1903, when repairs reduced the work land and led to a temporary surplus of labour at the main exchange. The work day for operators was decreased to five hours, with no pay cut, but the fifteen-minute breaks every two hours were eliminated. The idea, according to the company, was to make the operators work more intensely over a short period of time. “In fact, things turned out differently. Although the operators’ salaries weren’t lowered, they were frozen at twenty-five dollars a month, while salaries everywhere else in the company were rising. Since it was impossible to live on twenty-five dollars a month, operators did two successive five-hour shifts.” Rens, Jean-Guy. The Invisible Empire. A History of the Telecommunications Industry in Canada, 1846-1956, translated by K
