Canada's workers movement: uneven developments

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2007 by Michael Goldfield, Bryan D. Palmer

Third, one wing of the generalized North American youth radicalization of the 1960s opted in Canada for an increasingly left-inflected nationalism. This dissident contingent intersected with elements of organized labour that were then chafing under the bureaucratic yoke of a us-dominated 'international' unionism that was strongly economistic in its day-to-day dealings with employers and conventionally conservative it its relations with the political culture of the time. The result was a small, but growing, contingent of left-nationalist trade union forces that precipitated a politically influential breakaway movement of unions that separated themselves out from the US-headquartered, AFL-CIO unions. Often this coming together of radical youth and independence-minded trade unionists broke through barriers of complacency to try to organize the unorganized or bring union protections to the most vulnerable, immigrant workers. (36) Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, this fusion of youth radicalism and labour nationalism exercised a considerable impact among west coast smelter and metal-working tradesmen, pulp and paper workers, energy and chemical labour, retail clerks, building tradesmen, and within the Ontario and Quebec garment trades, where Kent Rowley and Madeleine Parent were standard-bearers of an alternative unionism. (37) This contrasted sharply with the US experience. There, an entrenched anti-communist but often reform-sympathetic labour leadership had countenanced a tenuous alliance with the elements of a revived early 1960s left. But as the mid-1960s saw growing militance around opposition to the war in Vietnam, a shift from civil rights activism to black power, and the countercultural challenges of youthful rebellion, US trade union leaders moved decisively to marginalize student rebels and radical African American activists. New Leftists and organizations like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers found themselves excluded from any possible positions of common work or influence in the trade union movement. (38)

With the late 1970s, a rise of 'independence' among Canada's organized workers meant that at that time only 50 per cent of the country's labour movement was affiliated with trade unions whose leaderships were rooted in the US. Three decades later this nationalist trend has continued, with roughly 7 in 10 Canadian trade unionists belonging to purely Canadian unions. The Canadian Automobile Workers [CAW], splitting from the us-based UAW in 1984, parlayed some of this now routinized attachment to independence, and the view that it could sustain a more radical trade union project, into its successful breakaway and its growing alliance with unions in the public sector. The result was that the CAW helped to create a pole of militant attraction, in which postal workers, government employees, health care workers, and select industrial unionists sustained a distinctive and separate Canadian unionism associated with broadly social democratic commitments. (39)