The production of shells during WWI introduced unprecedented levels of mechanization to the metal industry. Just a couple of years before this film was made, machinists staged a series of strikes, opposing the de-skilling and work intensification that threatened their work. Yet, these struggles are absent in the detached, sublime depiction of the technology needed to make a shell. In each scene the worker is tending a machine. Labour seems to be at the service of technology, an employer’s dream, presented in a government-sponsored film made at the John Bertram & Sons Works in Dundas, Ontario. The film may be an epilogue to the labour struggles described in the work of Myer Siemiatycki and Craig Heron. Given how soon after the film was made after those labour struggles one wonders if the film didn’t help employers ‘rub in’ what was in the end, a defeat for metal worker unions.

Manufacturing an 8” Explosive Howitzer Shell, 1918, film, 6 minutes 38 seconds, Dundas Historical Society Museum Collection, accession number 1984-0413, Item number ISN 11099, Library and Archives Canada.

Film editing by David Sobel. Music by Allen Booth

Further Discussion

Siemiatycki, Myer. “Munitions and Labour Militancy: The 1916 Hamilton Machinists’ Strike.” Labour Le Travail, vol. 3, Jan. 1978, pp. 131-135.

Heron, Craig. "The Crisis of the Craftsmen: Hamilton's Metal Workers in the Early Twentieth Century." Labour/Le Travail, vol. 6, Autumn 1980, pp. 7-48.