Program
Militants/Military
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT
Location: Room Y 318
Chair: Gregory S. Kealey
Tyler Wentzell, “The Rise and Fall of Military Strike-Breaking in Canada, 1867-1933”
Early labour organizers could expect to be confronted by every tool in the state’s arsenal, including the coercive power of the militia. This research examines 65 identified 22 instances of the use of the militia in strike-breaking from Confederation until the last peacetime occurrence: the 1933 Stratford furniture workers strike. This research adds to our knowledge by building a dataset of these events and examining the interactions amongst industry, labour, and the military, and further examines the militia as labour, that is, a group of people that was simultaneously an instrument of state power while also being substantially drawn from the working class themselves. Specifically, this research examines the impact of the 1904 transition from using local part-time militiamen with community ties, to full-time soldiers without such connections. This research draws upon the Department of Militia papers and local archives such as the Beaton Institute at Cape Breton University and the Stratford-Perth Archives.
Mason Godden, “Challenging Labour in Cape Breton: The Canadian Mineworkers’ Union (CMU), 1981-1984”
On 17 July 1981, District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) struck against the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO), halting the major coal operations in the region, and ending 34 years of industrial peace in Nova Scotia. Despite the organizational strength of the UMWA in the period, District 26 had no strike fund in place to pay its striking members. Frustrated and disillusioned with the effectiveness of their union, a group of dissident miners contacted the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU), an independent, left-nationalist labour body established in 1969 to resist American union domination, in the hopes that a stronger union in the Maritimes could be built. To the CCU, American-based international unions such as the UMWA were more concerned with building a union empire than representing their Canadian members. The CCU therefore served as the 23 institutional antithesis to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), which despite being Canada’s principal labour body was dominated by American internationals during the period.
This paper will explore the CCU’s efforts to challenge the UMWA’s organizing power in Cape Breton and detail the various experimental organizing and protest strategies used by CCU organizers to establish the independent Canadian Mineworkers’ Union (CMU) in 1981 and 1982. It will be argued that despite two unsuccessful attempts at certification from the Canadian Labour Relations Board (CLRB), the CMU was a microcosm of Canada’s militant union organizing that facilitated social change and transformation for the working class in the post-war period. Additionally, this paper will emphasize the strategic and organizational influence that left-nationalism held in the Canadian labour movement beyond its popular heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.
Speakers / Panelists
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Militants/Military
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT -
Militants/Military
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT
Mason Godden
Mason Godden
Mason Godden
Mason Godden is a PhD Candidate in the School of Labour Studies at McMaster University. Mason’s research focuses on Canadian labour history post-1945, with an emphasis on worker organizing and strikes in the private sector, and more broadly, organized labour’s relationship with the Canadian women’s movement and the Canadian left. His dissertation will examine left-nationalism in the Canadian labour movement during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s by focusing on the history of the Confederation of Canadian Unions (CCU).
Tyler Wentzell
Tyler Wentzell
Tyler Wentzell
Tyler Wentzell is an SJD candidate (PhD in law) at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. His dissertation focuses on the Canadian rule of law project, specifically on how the military was gradually removed from internal security tasks and transferred to police. His first book, Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2020. His next book is about the League for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party – a little known Trotskyist group that organized cobblers, garment workers, and miners in London, Toronto, Montreal, and New York – and is currently in peer-review. He has published his work in Labour/Le Travail, Ontario History, and Criminal Law Quarterly.