Dumont Press Graphix and Workers’ Control

The Division of Labour Is Not Inevitable

Steve Izma

This article appeared in issue 1 of YU Free Press, Winter 2014. I can’t remember the circumstances that brought it about, and the website for the publication seems to no longer exist. It had been a project of a group of York University students.

The dozen or so of us who organized Dumont Press Graphix in early 1971 proceeded along the same lines of everything else we had been doing over the previous few years. Immersed in the student radicalism and counterculture evident on most Canadian campuses, we reflexively thought and acted co-operatively. As student journalists on the University of Waterloo campus with an aversion to hierarchy and bosses, we had converted the campus newspaper, The Chevron, into a collective. Other student organizations behaved similarly: radio stations, food co-ops, day-care centres, even some academic programs. Within this milieu, most people lived communally, sharing resources and household tasks — more-or-less successfully.

But the contrast between what appeared to be a student culture (in fact it’s better characterized as a youth culture, since many members of the counterculture had left or had never attended university) and the dominant culture didn’t make a lot of sense: if we can behave non-hierarchically in almost everything we do, so the feeling went, then why doesn’t everyone try it?

And so the frustrations of political activism on campus — conflicts with more conservative groups (such as students in engineering programs), stalemates with university administrations who were solidly backed by society’s elite, and the mounting evidence we weren’t changing the world — pushed us to look for opportunities outside of the so-called ivory tower of higher education. Producing community alternative newspapers seemed like an obvious next step towards becoming more relevant to those groups most likely to support social change: labour unions, citizens’ groups, those involved with poverty-related issues.

Consequently, we started producing On the Line in neighbouring Kitchener in 1970. The newspaper dealt with community issues, especially political ones, and tried to cover labour activism in the region. Published every two weeks from the late winter of 1970 until late summer of that year, it engaged many of the political counterculture in the Kitchener-Waterloo area whose raison d’être at the time was essentially to bring about revolutionary change. Most of the participants conceived of this kind of change as peaceful, but encountering physical repression in anti-war and other political demonstrations made us considerably wary of the forces organized by the status quo. This became particularly evident at the time of the final issue of On the Line, produced in response to the Federal government’s declaration of the War Measures Act and the subsequent arrest of hundreds of activists in Quebec in October 1970. But once this crisis wound down, the staff of On the Line found themselves almost completely burned out. The amount of labour required to produce each issue of the newspaper exhausted people, and one of the most complicated tasks in the process was the typesetting.

At this point a small group formed to raise money from sympathetic academics and to behave like budding entrepreneurs in front of bureaucrats providing loans in banks and federal government offices. By May of 1971, we had bought our own equipment, a Compugraphic phototypesetter, and set up shop in an old button factory in Kitchener. Most of the facilities — paste-up benches, light tables, walls, shelves, darkroom — were constructed by hand. Some equipment was acquired at the auctions of traditional printshops recently bankrupted (a sign of the times). But once set up, our facilities seemed to fulfil the promise that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.”

The Dumont crew produced about six issues of The Chevron during the summer. By September, we also gained the contract for The Cord, the student paper at Waterloo Lutheran University (soon to become Wilfrid Laurier University), and The Spoke from Conestoga College. These two were each published once a week, while The Chevron’s schedule for the main part of the school year was twice weekly, so the collective typeset four papers across a Sunday-to-Saturday span.

That coincided with starting up a food co-op — all part of various strategies, including communal living, to keep our living costs low.

Right from the beginning, Dumont was the kind of place with no bosses: everyone rotated through all jobs, wary of anyone settling into one responsibility, as if they owned it. Instead, we believed that we could make an old slogan work: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

Our ideals and habits fostered an atmosphere of constant experimentation and self-reflection. Given that the round-the-clock work required scheduling shifts, we communicated through meetings and written messages to keep the workflow as logical as possible. A logbook became a particularly useful way of linking the work teams. While a great deal of technical information could be passed on this way, some of the commentary also went along the lines of “This is what we’re doing wrong,” in general, or more specific complaints like “Why didn’t you do the dishes?”

The political nature of the organization very strongly favoured taking on jobs with primarily New Left content. This related to an interesting convergence of counterculture and politics. On campus, especially in the years leading up to about 1969, the people who most clearly identified publicly with the New Left were just “straight” Marxists. They tended toward a fairly academic Marxism, rooted in a critique of the political economy. Their lifestyle did not at first overlap much with the counterculture, but soon the community developed into a hybrid, overcoming the distinction (and sometimes the antagonism) between a hippy lifestyle and the critical thinking of the New Left.

Another way of describing this evolution on campus in 1968: there was a tension between people who focussed their activist interests narrowly on politics, and those who were breaking out of everything, people who were pushing against not just capitalism as a political economy, but capitalism as a morality that dominated everyday life.

Working in a co-op reinforced that. A classical strain of Marxism suggests that investment in technology should relieve you of labour time. Capitalists normally keep that benefit (arising out of reduced costs for manual labour) for themselves; now, according to this theme within Marxism, workers would keep that technological benefit for themselves. That, at least, was what we aimed for.

The 1970s saw rapid development in the printing industry, with new equipment and techniques having only a short lifespan before becoming obsolete. Most other companies operating locally had better access to capital and technology than Dumont did. Banks were more keen to work with those enterprises showing a greater willingness to minimize the cost of labour and use newly acquired systems to reduce the skills needed. Such attitudes result in cashflows and reinvestment policies more acceptable to the providers of capital; they had little faith in the idea that a business could be run by workers proud of the fact that they had neither business degrees themselves nor a dependance on managers with such credentials.

Of course, greater access to capital also comes with some difficulties: most competing businesses probably operated with a much greater debt load than Dumont but also likely had a much greater cashflow per worker.

But the main practice that kept Dumont income lower than conventional businesses was the allowance for people to respond to the boredom of work: when a particular task became too monotonous, you took a break, switched to another type of job (e.g., from keyboarding to proofreading or camerwork), or had a meeting to rotate things. This kept the work at a human scale, but it also resulted in a pace of work that produced less income.

As a result, wages at Dumont were driven down. Trying to grapple with such collective and business issues also took up a lot of time, but given the current state of the world and the deterioration of working standards, I consider this to have been time well spent.

Content mattered. The kind of work we laboured over made a difference to our ability to endure what sometimes became a daily grind. Right from its beginning, Dumont had a policy that allowed groups with whom we were sympathetic to come into Dumont during times when the equipment was not needed for commercial work. They would use the typesetting equipment to produce their own publications, reimbursing Dumont for the materials and sometimes even adding extra if they could afford it. Dumont volunteers would help them out. It became clear to me through these experiences that when you actually share someone else’s labour you make much deeper connections then by merely attending meetings or engaging in political debates with them. This probably has a lot to do with “walking the talk”: when you see the relationship between what people say and how they behave (especially in shared tasks) you get to know them a lot better.

Having control over one’s work is never a solitary process. All work in our society, even artistic work, always takes place within a human network. So even though at the bottom of workers’ control is the mutually reinforcing relationship between control over one’s job and the satisfaction one derives from the work, this dynamic more often than not is social rather than individualistic.

On the other hand, the reigning work ethos has us convinced that Canadian society will collapse to Third-world status without our constant effort to increase per-person productivity. It’s a kind of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Working under the gun means not only working fast but working under coercion — the decisions you make in the work process, either on a production line or writing a newspaper article, are no longer your own or, at least, the size of your creative space becomes very constrained. As the division of labour becomes more and more specialized, even for the work available to university graduates, the amount of decision-making in a job diminishes. One’s actions become more and more repetitive.

Going it alone cannot solve this dilemma. “Workers’ control” can only be plural.

Workers who have real control over their own work turn production into art. Those who control other people’s work use the clock to beat those creative energies into submission. In the same way that an artistic endeavour takes its time to accomplish its project, workers’ control, in doing what is necessary for both the quality of the product and the quality of the time spent on it, is incompatible with the economy as we know it.

Yet restructuring the economy on the basis of more creative and human-scale values won’t happen as long as production processes (and the capital that finances those processes) are controlled by people who can think only of increasing the return on their investment — rather than by people who give much more value to a daily life characterized by meaningful and collectively directed activities.

Steve Izma was part of a typographers’ collective, Dumont Press Graphix, which operated in Kitchener, Ontario, from June 1971 until April 1987.

It was an eclectic crew that came together to establish Dumont Press Graphix. A worker-controlled co-op, tools to publish community-based alternative newspapers and magazines, a resource to offer to progressive groups and publications around southern Ontario, and of course, an opportunity to put theory into practice. What dreamers we all were!

Here are some of the folks who facilitated that dream.

One of the early treasures of the current People's History project, this half-forgotten and mostly unknown document was discovered in the Dumont Archives just a few months ago. It was written around March 1971 and scanned from the original document in August 2020, and then digitally remastered, edited solely for spelling and punctuation and reformatted for Web publication in October 2020. The Need to Print is a foundational document outlining the process and the vision which guided the establishment of Dumont Press Graphix that same year, and many more after that. The writing of the document was probably a collaborative effort. Gary Robins was one of the co-authors, but beyond that we are just not sure. What we do have here, however, are the roots to the whole Dumont Press adventure.

After four months of set-up and initial operation, the workers at Dumont Press prepared to move into the next stage of production with an expanded publishing workload. This of course would require additional staff and a set of guidelines for anyone interested. Not quite a Help Wanted ad, but much more than your regular job description, Dumont's very first hiring criteria was published in August of 1971.

In an organization as complex as Dumont Press, consistency in standards and production techniques was essential. This recently-unearthed rare first edition procedures manual introduces the new Dumont worker to the finer points of typography and page design and establishes a set of technical and moral standards for effective workflow within a co-operative environment, along with a passion for excellence in the creation of a printed page.

Recently unearthed from the dusty bins of the Dumont Press archives, these ancient docket sheets provide provide essential clues as to how the newly-formed collective tracked commercial clients and production workflow. It was all learn-as-you-go, but it mostly seemed to work.

By Ken Epps

What better way to launch the first official history of Dumont Press Graphix than by handing it out as party favours at the big fifth anniversary celebration in June 1976. Five years was once a long time (when we were younger), and it seemed like an appropriate and opportune chunk of time to acknowledge and commemorate with a good kick-ass part and a bit of serious reflection. This documant covers the latter.

Written by a young, once-promising math scholar, lured astray by a band of rowdy, fun-loving socialist typesetters, this volume, Dumont – The First Five Years, was a critical success, establishing the author, a Mr. Kenneth Epps of Waterloo, as a promising historian and a fairly decent proofreader. This is a good read.

When Dumont Press was first getting established, the criteria for employment was fairly broad and general. Working in a non-hierarchical environment was pretty new to all of us, we had lots to learn and figure out. This relatively unknown document emerged from the Dumont Archives recently, apparently written in early 1974 by the noted Lennonist scholar and paste-up specialist Anon. This is a digitally remastered document, scanned from the original in December 2020, edited solely for spelling and punctuation, and then reformatted for Web publication.

Commitment:  a process, a sometimes elusive goal, a way of working and being, an important component to any collective process. Process was a big deal to the staff at Dumont Press. This document was part of an ongoing discussion.

My memories of the Dumont collective are mixed up of caring and conflict.  I remember good times of laughter, play, trying new things, the delight and relief of getting a big job done well, and deep comradeship. I remember arguments, anxiety, and tension between specialization and collectivity. The years 1978-1981 were very difficult to keep the shop going as major contracts disappeared, bills piled up, deadlines and production suffered, and debates about direction, efficiency and commitment tore at the core of the Dumont community.

As said at a crucial meeting in December 1979 when discussing whether we’d restructure to stay alive, or dissolve the shop:

”We despair of ourselves and others to act efficiently and well without change....
We have to be careful to understand our past and how came here through energy of past Dumont workers.”
“It has been said that typesetting will be obsolete in 5 years. We should be planning ahead for our lives.”

My memory is not good of those turbulent times. Thankfully this Dumont People’s History project has unearthed the minutes of those debates, and a paper I wrote to try to describe what I was good at and could learn more about, what I could back-up and what would be a challenge to do, but needed attention.  I’ve attached it as a snapshot of life at the shop when we teetered between life and dispersal. 

What happened in 1980 for me, was a shift to part-time work at Dumont in  until 1983, job-sharing with Kae between Waterloo PIRG and Dumont.
In 1983 I moved to Toronto Island, where I still live.

This recently-unearthed document from the Dumont archives takes a look at the ongoing struggle (discussion, conflict, conundrum, concern?) between the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective. Yes, there were so many levels to our worklives together.

Written in 1975, it offers a fairly valuable and timely reflection on what we were trying to achieve together:

"I see no reason to despair of the shop. All of the people working here are good people trying to build something important to them. Of course we have plenty of problems, plenty of areas needing improvements, but then we're (so rumour has it) human. And we often forget that we are supportive of one another even if we aren't patting one another on the back. There is some way to go before we develop the trust where we can offer criticism without fear of hurting but it's not so impossible for the future. Since I began at the shop my life has never been so 'full', and despite the confusion, hopeful for the future. I don't see why that, at least, should change."

Throughout Dumont'd history, staff at the shop were engaged in ongoing discussions about how to create a workplace that was equitable, efficient, respectful, engaging, democratic and fulfilling. It didn't aleways work out. Differences in experience, technical skills, commitment, vision, a work ethic and personal situations all brought their own challenges into the collective. It wasn't always pretty, often reminiscent of your basic shared-housework debates, but on a somewhat larger scale.

Happily, Dumont's staffing complement included a number of innovative and energetic young activists hoping to put theory into practice in a worker-contolled environment, good people with a vision (or several, actually) who wanterd to build a strong community within a better world. This position paper, written by Mary Holmes in 1975, proses a process for crafting and building that greater vision.

In the beginning, there was hockey. Not that it precluded our collective interests in political activities, but in those days it was pretty much engrained into our psyche and our spirit... well, the male psyche for sure. When the sticks came out, it was time for mass struggle, it almost seemed intuitive.

Within the genre, road hockey had a long and storied tradition. Certainly it was much easier and more flexible to set up a pick-up game. Any quiet parking lot or back alley would do. By golly (to quote Howie Meeker), it was almost spontaneous, more egalitarian, and nobody seemed to mind that we often forgot to keep score.

Astute observer may note an eerie familiarity with some of the players on these rag-tag teams. Yes, more than a few of the Dumont Ducks got their start out on the asphalt. A team spirit was germinating, ready to sprout with the warm winds of Spring. These were indeed heady and happy times.

Although the early days of Dumont Press carried a lot of excitement, there was no shortage of challenges... not ever, really. This letter, written by Winnie Pietrykowski (Lang in those days) in Dumonts first year of operation, attempts to build and broaden the discussion of how to make it all work. It was written around March 1972 and scanned from the original document in January 2021, and then digitally remastered, edited solely for spelling and punctuation and reformatted for Web publication. PDF copies of the original document are available, from the Archivist. 

As the '70s were drawing to a close, the collective at Dumont Press found itself confronting an increasing number of significant challenges. On a financial level, some major ongoing contracts (most notably, the Chevron) had been lost, undermining economic stability, the new partnership with Between the Lines was unsteady, leading to additional cashflow pressures, and desktop publishing was looming as a new technological challenge.

In addition, staff turnover had led to inequities in both technical and organizational skills, the political landscape was shifting and factionalizing, and all of these things compromised working and interpersonal relationships, and ultimately eroded trust.

On the other hand, nobody ever figured it would be easy. The shop continued to hold a strong level of community support, and Dumont Press was seen as a valuable resource by activists and progressive organizations across the region and the country.

Solidarity may have faltered, and these were indeed difficult personal times for many of the Dumont staff, but a strong effort and extensive discussions to try to address the big issues. This report from a Dumont staff meeting in December 1979, along with related proposals and discussion papers, offers a handy overview of the challenges, and the options to be explored.

This story contains several digitally remastered documents, scanned from the originals in October 2020, and later edited solely for spelling and punctuation, and then reformatted for Web publication. Raw scans of the original documents are available on request from The Archivist.

It’s been over 30 years since the doors were shut on Dumont Press for the final time. We might ask, why this current flurry of activity to examine our history together? Well, we can blame the pandemic to a certain extent. Our isolation has prompted many of us to reach out to old friends, colleagues, even former lovers. At the same time, we are coming to the growing realization that we’re not all still here on this mortal plane anymore. We have all lost good friends, and family too, and with that, their experience and knowledge, their wisdom, their values and dreams – and for all of us – cherished and important relationships.

Accordingly, many of us are noticing gaps in the collective memory banks. We can probably blame the pandemic for much of that as well, and now as we try to reimagine and rebuild our sense of a new normal, it becomes valuable and useful to draw on the lessons of the past. This 50th anniversary thing is merely a clever ruse.

Dumont Press had a huge impact on several hundred people and more. It allowed the assembly of resources, particularly around publishing, but also around community grassroots activism, and other related progressive issues. That’s all part of it.  

But Dumont was also an expression of the times, culturally and politically. It was one of those places where we were able to assemble a critical mass for a while, for a long while, for a number of years – all to be able to achieve our particular expression.

It was a place that attracted people who came from other parts of Canada because they wanted to become a part of it all, to work there with the rest of us, to learn and to grow. That continued, always shifting and evolving as the cast of characters shifted and evolved. As well, priorities shifted and moved in different directions as other opportunities presented, or as other realities confronted us.  

Hopes and Dreams

As I reflected on this Dumont anniversary project, I first envisioned a massive collaborative collections of photographs, but then quickly realized that there ought to be stories to chronicle people’s life experiences around Dumont and the informal extended family that sprung up around it. It should also include our collective social and political activities, and all the community-based initiatives that we supported and facilitated, both within our own community and throughout southwestern Ontario.  All of this is what lies at the core of a people’s history. 

Further to this are the questions: What did we learn? What did we contribute – and how has it shaped our later lives?

Certainly, Dumont gave us the skills, the tools, and the sense of where we wanted to go. It was that melting pot of activism, of new thoughts and new ideas, that carried so many people on to really interesting adventures that we just hadn't foreseen.  

All of those things became part of our collective and our collaborative history. What was the glue that stuck us together? Where were the ideas, whether it was how to paste up copy more efficiently and attractively, how to work more cooperatively – or the ideas and notions that eventually sent us off in different directions?

I am hoping that this collaborative history will be fun, informative and particularly valuable for rekindling that sense of solidarity, camaraderie, community and social justice that brought us all together at one (or more) point – and then helped to move us forward into a variety of professions, interests and initiatives to help make the world a better place.

It seems straightforward enough, eh. But I also think we all still have a lot we can learn from each other, and goodness knows, that’s more important than ever in these turbulent and chaotic times.

Just a few thoughts along the pandemic trail… I don’t think we have yet come to a full understanding of where we might go with this history project, and that, of course, will be shaped by all the participants eager to come along for the ride. I think we are all just trail guides pushing the bus uphill. We’ll have to see where it takes us all. Dumont was all about community and trying to change the world. We had lofty goals, and sometimes we screwed up.

We all know better now… Mind you, these are perilous times, and the task now is not just to change the world, but to save it. Storm clouds continue to emerge on the horizon, and I continue to feel there’s a tsunami of chaos and stupidity out there that will not subside anytime soon…

Paper trails: The Dumont Archives

Some of the information we recovered from the shop’s archives is tedious, and won’t be all that valuable to most of us, but much of the other material that’s been found and shared really helps put together a broader and more concrete picture of the kind of challenges that people were confronted with in a unique workplace. Some were resolved really well, some fractured relationships, and some resulted in people leaving

There may be situations where some of us made comments, and we look back on them now and think “What a goofball I was in those days”, or “how arrogant”, or perhaps at the time we just weren’t seeing the big picture.

As Phil Elsworthy often tells me, most of us continue to share the same values we always had. It's important to understand those values, how they evolved and adjusted and changed over the years, as we continued to do meaningful work in our lives. This is what keeps a lot of us going, to be engaged in meaningful work on whatever level, whether it's fighting racism or poverty, volunteering at the food bank, working with a local nonprofit, or participating with your neighbourhood community association trying to fight some self-serving and questionable development project.

We were cooperative. We operated collaboratively and collectively as best we could at the time, and our sense of decision-making, our view of what was going on around us certainly changed as the world changed…  and that continues.

How were we able to adapt to all of those different sociopolitical conditions and maintain a reasonable lifestyle, within a creative and supportive community? Sometimes that was really meaningful and relevant, sometimes it became less relevant or engaging, and some of us just moved on to other things.

Eventually, it all brings us back to that time-honoured, poetic and well-considered question, “Will the Circle be unbroken?” In these uncertain times, we’ll just have to see.

—Gary Robins (with Peter Lang)
April 2021

As the staff at Dumont Press continued to develop as a collective unit, as skilled workers and service providers within a unique environment of shared ownership and shared responsibilities, they attracted a lot of interest and attention.

Managing a cooperative workplace without bosses, offering technical and production support to a number of alternative and community-based publishing projects, working to build solidarity and trust and common values both within the shop and in our own community was a huge agenda. Even when things were going well there were massive challenges. New ideas, extensive dialog, long meetings, passionate debates continuing late into the night (or until Last Call at the Station Hotel). We were, after all, trying to change the World.

Dumont Press was a progressive social/political phenomenon, stumbling sometimes, but for the most part trying to be the change we wanted to see. It was no surprise then that a number of writers, political analysts and historians would be interested in telling the tale, and assessing the achievements. One of the earlier attempts to document and understand the nature and dynamics of the Dumont collective came from a good friend of the shop, Terry Moore in 1975.

Terry never worked at the shop, but his proposal to compile an analytical history of Dumont Press offered a sound and thorough framework of the life and times and debates we were engaged in. Terry felt he was close enough to the shop and the staff to appreciate the problems we were faced with, but "sufficiently removed from the day-to-day struggle to be able to place specific problems within an overall context."

Terry was well-known and highly regarded, staff at Dumont were happy to participate. Although several interviews were conducted over the following year, the overall work (like so many other good ideas in all our lives) was never completed, and unfortunately, has now been lost. The accompanying document here is the initial proposal, which we felt was valuable for what it attempted to accomplish.

Although Dumont Press operated as a worker-owned and worker-controlled cooperative, the official operating structure was much more complicated than that. Indeed, the actual working model changed several times over the history of the shop. The documents attached here refer solely to the formal legal authority within the entity known as Dumont Press Graphix Limited. More astute observers will note, however, that Dumont, while always striving to be professional and progressive, was anything but formal.

Although this document and its introduction were pulled from Dumont's 1975 archives folder, The accompanying report from the Contracts Committee was actually written and presented a year earlier. Apparently, based on the strong suggestions from Bob Mason and Steve Izma, you can revisit history and learn from your strengths and challenges.

By 1973, the staff at Dumont felt it was desirable to unionize to show solidarity with the workers whose causes they espoused and supported through their efforts. As a worker-controlled enterprise, however, there were complications in the worker/employer relationship that conflicted with the rules governing traditional union organizing campaigns. 

Thanks to the legal acumen of Brian Iler, it was determined that an employees' association was a more appropriate vehicle to accomplish the staff's goals and on December 17, 1973 the Dumont Press Graphix Employees' Assocation was born.

Shortly thereafter, the staff decided that it was better to be affiliated with an actual union and sought to organize under the auspices of the Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNTU). A union charter was issued on March 24, 1974.

Staff meetings were a regular, if underappreciated, part of life at Dumont. As the accompanying minutes show, meetings dealt with a wide range of issues not found in more traditional workplaces, including the taking of minutes itself. There was no one person tasked with recording the meetings’ proceedings and the sample shown here was done apparently anonymously. One can only assume the attendees knew who the droll scribe was but he/she has not yet been identified by the website’s editors. Readers with better memories and fewer axes to grind are welcome to reveal their choice of culprit. Hint: it was someone at the meeting.

The dates below are gleaned from payroll books, attendance lists at meetings and from names mentioned in the meeting minutes. Many people had extended times away from Dumont and many others did essentially volunteer work which has not been and cannot be independently verified. A comprehensive listing of Dumont workers appears here.

1971

A group of visionaries and optimists are busy finding income producing work, a place to do it, getting that place ready for the work and navigating the business world. These people include Ed Hale, Trudy Chippier/ Harrington, Winnie Lang/Pietrykowski, Gary Robins, Bryan (Notes) Anderson, Ron Colpitts, Liz Willick, Rod Hay, Bill Aird, Peter Lang, and Brenda Wilson. Steve Izma warrants special mention. He is the only person who was actively engaged at both the beginning and at the end of Dumont, weathering all the waxing and waning of the optimism and changing visions over the years. He is still involved in this website, perhaps an indication that there will be only one way his involvement with Dumont will ever finally end.

June 6: Dumont Press Graphix is incorporated.

June 18: Trudy and Winnie become the first employees.

August 1:  The first Dumont Hiring Call. 

August 13: John Stafford leads the pack.

September 10: The first of the annual fall group of new staffers includes Rick Astley, Mike Canivet, Cynthia Campbell, Dan Chabot, Philippe Elsworthy, Ed Hale, Steve Izma, Liz Janzen, Peter Lang, Mike Mears, and Nick Sullivan.

October 8: Dan was having such fun that Diane Chabot joined us just after Phil left, having built all the light tables and other useful items.

November 26: Peter, John and Nick all go on sabbatical; we will see them again sometime in the future.

December 1: Rick departs after only a few months. 

1972

January: Short term employment for Gord Cassleman and Ken Hanley still leaves us short staffed.

February: Reinforcements arrive in the form of Bill Aird, Bob Driscoll, Rod Hay, and Bob Mason.

March: Mike Mears departs, replaced by Marty Pollack but only for a two week work term.

April: Trudy and Bob Driscoll depart while Liz Janzen and Bob Mason go on their sabbaticals. Bill Cino comes in to replace all four.

May: John Stafford rejoins the group.

August: Ed Hale moves on to the bright lights of Toronto.

September: Mass hiring for the upcoming year: Lesley Buresh, Ron Colpitts, Liz Willick, Mary Holmes, Evalina Pan, Gary Robins, Reevin Vinetsky, and Brenda Wilson comprise the bright-eyed group of eager workers. We did re-acquire a game hardened veteran in Nick (Savage) Sullivan to help show them the ropes. 

October: Having trained their replacements, both Dan and Diane Chabot leave along with Evalina who lasted only one month.

December: Cindy, Bill Cino, and Winnie depart while Mary goes on sabbatical.

1973

January: Candace Doff joins us and Liz Janzen returns.

February: More recruits in the form of Douglas Epps and Jan Johnson.

April: A cruel month sees Jan depart after only 30 days service, along with Reevin, Candace, and Nick Sullivan, while Liz also makes her final departure.

August: Rosco Bell, Janet Stoody, and Susan Phillips get hired while Mike Canivet goes on sabbatical. John Stafford says his final goodbyes.

September: The annual fall hiring brings in Ken Epps, Joanne Kennedy, Alice Mills, Alison Stirling, and Jann Van Horne. Susan leaves after only one month.

October: Murray Noll joins -- better late than never.

November: Bill Aird departs, replaced by the returning Bob Mason.

December: A cold winter begins with the departures of Rod Hay and Janet Stoody.

1974

January: Sue Calhoun comes in out of the cold.

February: Neither Joanne nor Jann fear the cold so both depart the warm but draughty shop.

May: Alison Stirling departs for a few years.

July: Ron and Liz depart.

September: The fall hiring flurry sees Mike Canivet and Mary Holmes return from their sabbaticals, joined by first timers Jane Harding, Doug Roberts, Carol Beam, and Michael Rohatynsky. Carol shows up in the minutes for the first time although she may well have been involved previously. The experienced Lesley Buresh and Alice Mills depart, leaving the new folks with big shoes to fill.

1975

March: Ken Epps begins a sabbatical while Mary Holmes departs.

September: Claire Powers is the only fall hire.

1976

January: Carol Beam and Doug Roberts leave for new adventures.

February: Ken Epps returns, joined by Linda Lounsberry.

March: Charlotte von Bezold brings in her unique style.

April: Sue Calhoun and Bob Mason depart.

May: Brenda Wilson leaves and is missed by all.

July: Murrray Noll departs for the nation's capital and continues typesetting for many more years.

September: The fall hire catches John Dufort, John Hofstetter, and Moe Lyons.

October: Not to be outdone, Bill Culp joins us.

December: Rosco Bell hears the call of the west and inexplicably heads to frozen Regina.

1977

January: Charlotte departs but is replaced by the returning Pete Lang and Kerrie Atkinson.

March: Pete and Kerrie depart after wintering at Dumont; Douglas Epps heads west.

April: Gary Robins begins a leave of absence.

September: The fall call for recruits brings in David Arnault, Barb Droese, Kae Elgie, and Lake Sagaris. Gary Robins ends his leave of absence but just cannot ignore the call of the west and heads in that direction.

1978

January: Another busy year begins with the departure of Claire Powers.

February: It continues with the departure of Lake Sagaris.

March: And the departure of Mike Canivet.

May: Then even more with the departures of Linda Lounsberry and John Dufort.

December: The final departure for the year is Ken Epps. A short term replacement arrives in the person of Jim Morton.

1979

January: Short term replacement Jim Morton leaves but Shirley Tillotson takes his place. Alison Stirling returns to the fold, after wandering awhile.

February: Michael Kelley joins the firm.

May: David Arsenault (better known as Jacob) leaves to become the renowned Australian author David Arnault.

June: Eliza Moore is hired. There is no September hiring spree but ...

December: The outflow of staffers continues with Michael Kelley, Jane Harding, John Hofstetter, Eliza Moore, and Michael Rohatynsky all leaving.

1980

January: Catherine Edwards joins us but Kae Elgie departs.

March: Pat Ferrin stays only this one month. Shirley Tillotson also departs, along with Bill Culp, but Barb Marshall bolsters the work force.

April: Diane Ritza is hired.

June: Barb Marshall ends a short three month stay.

August: Joe Szalai joins us along with Larry Caesar.

September: No hiring blitz this year, however Larry says goodbye after his month and Barb Droese ends her three years at Dumont.

1981

June: Ralph Reiner arrives.

July: Becky Kane arrives.

August: Alison Stirling departs for the second time and Karen Luks takes her place. Alison remains as a volunteer and frequent part-timer for several more years. 

September: Mary Spies is the only fall recruit. Ralph Reiner departs after only three months.

1982

January: Eliza Moore begins her second work term.

April: April Fool's Day sees the departure of Karen Luks ...

May: ... but Marie Koebel celebrates May Day in grand style by becoming a Dumonteer.

July: Diane Ritza becomes a part-time worker while Eliza ends her second work term.

1983

January: Bruce Andor rings in the New Year by getting hired.

March: Lisa Willms begins a short stint at Dumont.

July: Larry Caesar begins another period of employment.

September: Lisa's short time ends although she appears later as a part-timer.

December: Mary Spies switches to part-time for the foreseeable future and Larry ends his second go-round.

1984

March: Greg Meadows reverses the trend by starting as a part time worker and switching to full time in November.

July: Paul Hartford decides to spend the hot summer in the shop.

September: Paul leaves as the weather cools and is joined by Diane Ritza. Catherine Edwards hangs up her pica ruler but remains available to be called in whenever needed. This is also the last official month for Steve Izma although he remains a valuable resource and part-time worker until the end. 

October: Joe Szalai ends his full time employment but pops in occasionally afterwards.

1985

January: The paying work seems to be very uneven and unpredictable so people come and go as the work load changes. Mary Spies comes back part time until August and Catherine Edwards comes back, also part time, for January, February, March, and October.

March: Bruce Andor leaves after two years. Lin McInnes and Kathy Zinger sign up for full time work from March to August.

April: Greg Meadows leaves after only one year.

June: Pam Andrews gets part time work until August while both Debbie Connors and Madeleine Clin get to stay until October.

September: Lisa Willms comes back for three months of part time work. Cheryl Hendrickson gets hired full time.

August: Larry Caesar is hired a third time, possibly a record.

1986

The last year of the struggle. Work is intermittent and hard to schedule. By the fall, discussions have begun about winding up operations and disposition of the collective's assets.

Debbie Connors returns for some part time work in April. Annette Beingessner does some work in that month as well.

New part time workers include Leslie Millard (Feb., Mar., and April), Daryl Marquette (Mar., April, and May), and Rebekah Abra (May and June).

As for the remaining full timers, Larry Caesar's third work term ends in April.

Debra Elson is a new full time hire in May while Chris Bechtel works full time as a new hire only in September.

Experienced Kathy Zinger is back for a few months beginning in April and Joe Szalai comes back in August.

Guiding the ship all year long are Cheryl Hendrickson and long time stalwarts Becky Kane and Moe Lyons.

From September 1986 to April 1987 it is unclear whether people were paid for their work. It seems that those months were spent taking care of unfinished business and the income was used to pay operating expenses and back debts.

After April 1987, all work was essentially non-commercial, performed by volunteers without pay, but collecting money to pay for the overhead of the shop. We believe that such work continued until sometime in 1989, when the shop was converted to a photography studio by Steve, Brian Cere, and Paul Hartford. That arrangement continued until around 1996 when the lease was finally given up and all remaining Dumont property was moved out.

Some records of interest:

Steve's longevity, as previously noted.

Moe Lyons has the longest, mostly continuous tenure at Dumont. She began in September, 1976 and was there until the end. 

Annette Beingessner served the shortest amount of paid time at Dumont. On April 14, 1986 she worked 5 hours and made $25. However, the government stepped in and took 61 cents as her UIC dues so she ended up with $24.39 take home.

Jim Campbell owns another dubious record according to UIC. His period of employment as our shipper/receiver began in June 1970 and ended in September, 1979. We can hope he never had to explain exactly what he was shipping during his first year.  

Imagine my surprise when I looked up from my plant world a month ago and realized that somehow in the intervening 35 years since I decided to be disinterested in politics, that I am on the right! Maybe even the far right!

Why? Because I support the Freedom Convoy for vaccine choice and to end mandates. Why? Because I support the truckers peaceful protest in Ottawa. Why? Because I have felt from the get go of this public health event that government was going too far by mandating what goes into our bodies. A long way from “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation”, the 1968 upgrade to the Canadian Criminal Code that, among other measures, decriminalized homosexuality, contraceptives and made therapeutic abortions legal. That was Trudeau Sr as Minister of Justice.

You all are old enough to remember when the same elder Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the “October Crisis”. Back then, in the now famous “Just watch me” news clip, the left, and the mainstream media (even), questioned on behalf of Canadians the abrogation of civil liberties.

And here we all are, about 50 years later with the illegal invocation of the Emergencies Act (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3PAZDinO2o), with full complicity by what we used to call “the instrument of the state”, i.e. the CBC and its private sector cronies - Global and CTV - smearing peaceful protesters, spinning the narrative, supporting Justin Trudeau and the the corrupt state of the Liberal Party.

Oh and by the way, the NDP, since the last time I looked 35 years ago, seems to have lost sight of their roots as the party of labour, with their leader also condemning the blue collar truckers.

Today the organizing committee for the truckers is calling for, what we used to call, a general strike. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57qon3Ud5b0) They are calling it “Freedom Week”, starting February 21. Call in sick. Withdraw your money from the banks before your funds are frozen without a court order, as is allowed under the Emergencies Act. Prepay fixed expenses.

You guys. Don’t rest on your laurels. If you haven’t already reached outside the Trusted News Initiative (https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/media-centre/trusted-news-initiative-plan-disinformation-coronavirus) i.e. censorship of discussion and differing opinions, then do so now. Do what you did best back in the heyday of Dumont: question authority, own the press, write, analyze, think critically, organize and fight for the rights and freedoms embedded in our Constitution so that our kids and grandkids can enjoy them as we have. The labels have changed from 50 years ago, but the corruption is still corruption, and fairness, community and family, and all the rights and freedoms we value and have taken for granted, are still something to stand up for.