A large crowd gathers outside the General Motors plant in Oshawa, April 9, 1937. The strike was a key moment in the fight for industrial unionism in Canada and a significant event in the history of the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Photo courtesy the Oshawa Museum.
Class struggle unionism, auto workers, Reds, and the 1930s
Originally published: Canadian Dimension on August 19, 2025 by Ken Theobald (more by Canadian Dimension) | (Posted Aug 22, 2025)
The current moment is an ominous one for the workers’ movement in North America. In response to Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, there has been a noticeable lack of class struggle perspectives or even basic solidarity coming from labour leaders on both sides of the border. The top leadership of some of the largest unions in the United States, notably the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Steelworkers (USW), and the Teamsters Union, have embraced the tariffs, while, in Canada, many unions have fallen into the “Team Canada” trap of allying with the largest corporations and the state.
Tony Leah
Baraka Books, 2024
One of the main priorities of the now ascendant far-right is to undermine workers’ collective power in order to better serve the interests of capital. Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE,” have terminated 30,000 federal employees, ignoring their unions and their collective agreements. The recently published Global Rights Index for 2025, produced annually by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest labour federation, states that “the Donald Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers and brought anti-union billionaires into the heart of policymaking.” Many employers have followed suit, taking a hard line or refusing to bargain with unions and aggressively resisting organizing drives. At the same time, far-right politicians like Trump and Pierre Poilievre pose as friends of workers while camouflaging their true anti-union agenda.
Canada’s federal election on April 28 was yet another sobering wake-up call for the left and the labour movement. While a Pierre Poilievre government was avoided, the Conservatives did win a record high share of the popular vote, at 41.3 percent, and made significant inroads among working class voters. The Conservative gains were the most startling in the Windsor-Hamilton corridor, the former industrial heartland. This is home to auto workers, steel workers, skilled trades, and workers in many other sectors. The NDP lost all its seats in Windsor, Essex County, and Hamilton and now has no MPs from Ontario. This was the worst electoral outcome for the NDP since its founding in 1961. As Sid Ryan, former president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, noted in Canadian Dimension, the election result was “a catastrophe for the entire labour movement.”
In North America, the workers’ movement has been stagnant for far too long. Unions have seen a steady decline in membership, in bargaining strength, in impact, and in political power. Since 1954, union membership in the U.S. has been declining steadily. Union density reached a record overall low of 9.9 percent in 2024, and only 5.9 percent in the private sector. In Canada, union density has declined to 30 percent of the overall workforce and 15 percent in the private sector.
Before it descended into the morass of business unionism and embraced social democratic gradualism, organized labour had a long history of militant class struggle, direct action, and effective organizing both north and south of what was, until recently, the world’s longest non-militarized border.
Since its inception, the workers’ movement has grown in often dramatic and sometimes unexpected surges. These historic moments, when workers overcame their sense of powerlessness, brought about real change. These periods of progress were often followed by renewed offensives by employers and the state, forcing labour to constantly fight to defend its hard-won gains. There is renewed interest in these eras of union growth and militancy. They vividly demonstrate the importance of class struggle perspectives, of uniting the whole class, and of solidarity.
One period that stands out sharply is the 1930s: a time of dramatic working class struggles and radicalization against a backdrop of far-right ascendency and austerity. Against overwhelming odds and with few resources, workers built new forms of organization—industrial unions—as vehicles of class struggle, resistance and defiance.
Sam Gindin, former research director of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), writes about the significance of the 1930s in his article “Resuscitating the Working Class”:
When it comes to inspiring Canadian trade unionists, the 1930s stand apart. Few narratives match the era’s dramatic sit-down strikes, the on-to-Ottawa trek and the triumph of modern unionism. Moreover, the 1930s are not just an inspirational marker. It was then that capitalism last faced a degree of economic uncertainty comparable to the present and it was also at the beginning of that decade that labour last experienced an identity crisis akin to what unions now face.
Of the thousands of struggles waged by workers during the Great Depression, a number have had an enduring impact. One notable example is the dramatic sit-down strike by workers in Flint, Michigan, against General Motors, in 1937, the eighth year of the Great Depression. This was followed, within a few weeks, by workers in Oshawa, Ontario, going on strike against GM.
The Flint and Oshawa workers were members of the recently founded United Auto Workers (UAW), which held its first national convention in 1936. Previous auto unions, mainly organized by communists and leftists, laid the basis for the UAW. In Canada, communists organized the Workers’ Unity League (WUL), which pioneered industrial unionism in many industries. These WUL unions included the Auto Workers Industrial Union (AWIU). The WUL operated from 1929-36 before merging into the new CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).
Tony Leah has written a fascinating text about this period, The Truth About the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike, recently published by Baraka Books. Leah is a long-time union activist with extensive experience in bargaining, shop-floor representation, labour education, and political mobilization. He worked at GM Oshawa for almost 40 years and is a member of CAW Local 222. He has held many positions at the local and the national union level. He also holds a master’s degree in labour studies from McMaster University.
Based on extensive research and primary sources, Leah’s book is a captivating reconstruction of a dramatic event and period in working class history. Leah focuses on the roots of radical industrial unionism, taking a “peoples’ history” approach to researching and writing about the 1937 Oshawa strike. His book is a riveting account of what was happening on the ground in Oshawa, on the shop floor, in the workers’ frequent mass assemblies, and in the broader community. He succeeds in capturing the class and power dynamics of the time.
Leah describes the horrible working conditions in the auto plants, where assembly workers were averaging about $600 a year in income. The mammoth plants were generally filthy, unventilated, noisy, and unsafe places. Workers endured irregular shifts, speed up, arbitrary wage cuts, and long layoffs.
They were subject to relentless efforts to intensify their work and were under constant observation by supervisors who had total power to fire workers on the spot for any reason.
In the U.S., plants were often segregated by race as well as gender. Women were in the lowest paying jobs such as sewing or sorting parts. GM frequently used spies and thugs to try to intimidate workers. Workers were not even allowed to talk during their lunch breaks, and joining a union was a fireable offense.
The militancy of the new industrial unions like the UAW had dramatic effects. The gains won by the unions made a significant difference in the individual lives of members and the working class as a whole. These unions improved workers’ wages, working conditions, and job security. They gave workers a voice on the shop floor and in the community. At a societal level, the new industrial unions advocated for social programs and fought for the rights for workers and the oppressed. They fought for racial and gender equality. They promoted workers self-activity, class and political consciousness.
Union membership in the U.S. grew from less than three million in 1933 to almost 15 million by 1945. Union growth in Canada lagged slightly behind the U.S. during this period. But, by the early 1950s, Canada’s unionization rate had caught up to the U.S. and then surpassed it beginning in the 1960s with the organizing of the large public sector unions.
The Great Depression
The 1930s were a turbulent and contradictory period which saw a devastating global depression, and the rise of militarism and fascism. It was also a decade which witnessed a heightened level of class struggle.
In corporate circles in North America at the time, there was notable sympathy for fascist ideals. Faced with a looming war against Nazi Germany, many in elite circles favoured non-intervention. Government and corporate bosses were much more worried about the “red menace” than fascism.
The Great Depression began in the fall of 1929 and lasted for a decade—one of most severe economic crises in the history of capitalism. An eight-year drought that decimated the prairie economy started the same year. The length and severity of this global economic slump, which was preceded by a drop in world commodity prices, dealt a devastating blow to workers, farmers, small businesses, and communities. Factory closures, cuts to production, and job losses soared. Homelessness, displacement, poverty, and hunger were all widespread.
After 1929, the U.S. ramped up its protectionist measures and world trade dwindled. By 1933, Canada’s GNP had fallen by 42 percent and 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed. The unemployment rate remained high in Canada until 1942. For those who still had a job, wages were cut by as much as 40 percent, hours of employment were irregular, and the conditions of work deteriorated. For many, austerity and hardship continued during the war years.
Despite the hardship and despair of a seemingly endless depression, working class people organized, mobilized and fought back on a massive scale. For workers, the 1930s was a period of struggle, resilience, and resolve.
Leah emphasizes the significance of “the particular moment in history” when the Flint and Oshawa strikes took place.
Fascism was on the rise and international rivalries were setting the stage for a world war. The Western capitalist powers were trying to respond to the deep economic crisis of the Depression, then in its eighth year. Popular movements in opposition to the devastation wreaked by the Depression, war, and fascism, were calling into question the continuation of the capitalist system.
Conditions in the early 1930s were ripe for mass radicalization. Building on the experiences of the Canadian Labour Revolt that unfolded in the period from 1917 to 1925, workers formed new radical unions and used direct action to win recognition and contracts. Workers went on strike at an astounding frequency, using new tactics such as sit-down strikes and plant occupations. There were general strikes in multiple cities. The jobless organized into Unemployed Workers’ Councils and called for “wages for all.” People physically blocked evictions and farm closures and organized rent strikes. There were frequent and militant demonstrations and mass rallies demanding relief and government assistance. Leftist were able to channel collective anger into prominent campaigns for social reforms. In the U.S., there were public campaigns against Jim Crow laws, racism, and white supremacy.
The profound shock of the economic collapse led many to question the basics and rationale of capitalism. There had been difficult periods before for workers, such as the 1919-1921 depression, which fuelled the Winnipeg General Strike and a strike wave in 1919, but nothing like this.
Many were radicalized during this period, not just workers, but also artists, writers, intellectuals, and professionals. Many became communists, socialists, left-leaning social democrats, or anarchists. After the pointless carnage of the First World War, and then the Great Depression, people were looking for an alternative social order, a better world than wage slavery.
Leah writes that:
Capitalism as an economic/political system was increasingly called into question. Communist movements gained in strength and influence as workers looked for alternatives to improve their conditions of work and life.
Job losses often hit men the hardest and the longest during the depression. Women were somewhat more insulated because they were employed in more stable sectors such as health services, teaching, domestic and clerical work. Some men abandoned their families. Others left in search of work. Women’s unpaid workload increased significantly as they were expected to maintain the household and the family during hard times with much less income.
Throughout the 1930s, women were prominent in the wave of activism and the campaigns for relief and social reform. Much of the community organizing was done by women. They provided strike support and organized protests, notably in both the Flint and Oshawa strikes. The new industrial unions were open to women and they made up a significant percentage of the membership. These new CIO unions fought for equality for women workers, including equal pay.
There were countless struggles in the garment, textile and clothing-manufacturing sectors. The bitter Dressmakers’ Strike in Toronto in 1931 lasted for two and a half months, during which the 1,500 women strikers endured assaults, arrests, and jail. In 1937, there were sit-down strikes in department stores, restaurants and hotels in the U.S. Five-and-dime sales clerks occupied their work sites.
The impact on youth growing up during the Depression was severe. In many parts of North America, schools reduced the length of the school year, or even closed altogether. Out of desperation, masses of unemployed youth and workers rode the rails, crisscrossing the country in search of work or relief. Shantytowns proliferated across the country.
Relief programs in Canada were paltry where they did exist. Single men were not eligible for any type of relief. Both the Conservatives and Liberals did not even see it as a responsibility of the federal government to intervene or to provide any help. The provinces, municipalities and private charities were expected to do that.
In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking the Great Depression,” historian Edward Whitcomb states that: “two of the most important questions in Canadian history are why Ottawa did not do more to deal with the suffering and why it did almost nothing to address the causes of the crisis.” Whitcomb notes that the federal government’s “wartime spending just a few years later jumped to over six times as much” as it spent on Depression relief.
Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, elected in 1930, did introduce make-work projects and prison-like work camps which were supervised by the military. The camps were often in remote locations and had terrible living conditions. In British Columbia, communists organized the Relief Camp Workers’ Union and took their protests demanding better relief and support to Vancouver. From there, they organized the On-to-Ottawa Trek which was brutally repressed by police and the RCMP in Regina in what was called a “police riot.” Police shot into a large crowd of strikers in Regina, injuring hundreds, and arresting 130. Two people were killed in the carnage.
At the beginning of the Depression, there were no national standards for labour rights or social programs in North America. In the U.S., the struggles of the early 1930s created mass pressure for the programs and reforms rolled out by FDR starting in 1933 as part of the New Deal. For a variety of reasons, both jurisdictional and ideological, the Canadian state was slower to pass labour legislation, but eventually did in 1944 and 1948.
The rise of industrial unionism
The most dramatic and successful development in the workers’ movement in North America during the 1930s was the surge of industrial unionism to the forefront. Previously there had only been a few unions formed on an industrial basis, most notably miners. Workers in industry were often split into a dozen or more separate craft unions. Craft unions often excluded people based on race, sex, or even politics. In the challenging period of a depression, it became obvious that all of those employed in one industry should be united in one powerful union in order to increase the strength and effectiveness of workers’ collective power.
Scholar and activist Sam Gindin, who served as research director of the Canadian Auto Workers from 1974—2000, describes the significance of this turn:
Craft unionism, which was almost exclusively concerned with skilled workers, had exhausted its role and the mass of workers (the ‘riffraff’ as one craft official referred to the semi-skilled and unskilled) moved to a form of organization that united workers across skills, gender and—especially significant in the United States—race. But no less important, this did not just happen; the union rebirth cannot be understood apart from its intimate link to the role of the radical left, communists in particular.
There had been previous attempts to organize workers on a class basis—the Knights of Labour, the Western Federation of Miners, the Industrial Workers’ of the World (IWW), the One Big Union (OBU), and the “red unions” of the Workers’ Unity league (WUL). All of these labour centrals had storied histories and notable successes. But the emergence of the industrial unions in the 1930s was qualitatively different.
Much of the union organizing in the early 1930s was community-based, grassroots and egalitarian. There were a massive number of strikes, many of them militant, with workers using new forms of organizing and radical tactics. Between 1930 and 1941, there were 27,000 recorded work stoppages in the U.S., while many more went unrecorded. “We are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s, edited by Staughton Lynd, offers a glimpse into the plethora of organizing initiatives.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was formed in 1935 and began aggressively organizing the masses of “unskilled” and “semi-skilled” workers. The emergence of the CIO led to unparalleled growth of unions in mass-production industries in auto, steel, rubber, oil, chemical, textile, transport, and other sectors. Labour historian Eugene Forsey wrote that the emergence of the CIO “lit a flame” for the labour movement.
Industrial unionism proved to be a more effective vehicle of struggling against the boss. The early CIO unions were fearless, militant, and creative. Workers used new tactics. A favourite was the sit-down strike where workers would occupy the plant to stop production and to keep out management and strikebreakers. The Unemployed Councils and the women’s auxiliaries provided picket duty and strike support. Workers frequently defied court injunctions and often battled with the police and company thugs. Workers reached out and built community and international support. Sometimes these struggles escalated to general strikes in places such as Minneapolis, Toledo, San Francisco, Seattle, and Stratford, Ontario.
Leah writes:
Although there were earlier attempts to establish industrial unionism, the work of Communists in the late 1920s and early 1930s made its success possible. Combined with this was a militant approach of organizing workers to exercise their collective power against employers… Militant actions, including strikes, sit-down strikes, and the other ways in which workers organized to demonstrate their power at the point of production were essential to the establishment of the UAW in the U.S., and were important in the success in Oshawa as well.
The 1930s were a period of prominence for communists, leftists, and radicals. They were at the forefront of many of the most dramatic and militant strikes. Communists took the lead in organizing among those who had previously been ignored by established trade unions—the great mass of so-called unskilled industrial workers, the ethnic and minority communities, newcomers, Blacks, women, and the jobless.
‘Reds’ in the U.S. and Canada were recognized as being amongst the best and most effective fighters for the interests of the working class. They were the main advocates pushing for the industrial union strategy. Embedded in the working class, they were often the best organizers. They were motivated and committed enough to do the long-term work of building a core of activists on the shop floor or in the community. The communist parties showed what a relatively small and highly disciplined organization of revolutionaries could accomplish.
There was also an upsurge in anti-capitalist organizations beyond the scope of the communist parties. Former Wobblies and anarchists were still prominent and active in many struggles. There were radicals from many other tendencies in and around the Socialist Party. Trotskyists played a pivotal role in a number of labour struggles, notably the Teamsters’ strike and the general strike in Minneapolis in 1934.
Spurred on by the inability of the state to offer any real solution to the Great Depression, there were fervent debates going on in left-wing and workers’ circles. In both the U.S. and Canada, there were discussions about organizing a workers’ party, forming labour-farmer alliances, carrying out independent political action, and fighting for socialism and against fascism.
The level of repression by the state and police forces was brutal during the 1930s. The threat of violence always hung in the air. In his 1972 book, Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO, Art Preis wrote:
Almost all picket lines were crushed with bloody violence by police, deputies, troops and armed professional strike breakers.
The Memorial Day Massacre, May, 1937, where police attacked strikers outside Republic Steel in Chicago. (Photo: Chicago History Museum.)
In 1937, steelworkers in Chicago—Black, Latino and white—were on strike against Republic Steel. Union members, their families, and supporters gathered peacefully for a Memorial Day picnic and then planned to march to the steel mill. Chicago police blocked their path, threw tear gas canisters, and fired bullets into the crowd. About 100 people were shot, most of them in the back. Ten were killed. A coroners’ inquest later ruled that the police action was “justifiable homicide.” This type of state violence with impunity was common throughout the 1930s.
In their 1969 study, “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and Outcome,” Philip Ross and Philip Taft stated that the U.S. had the bloodiest and most violent labour history of any industrialized nation in the world.
On numerous occasions, the Canadian state also demonstrated its willingness to rely upon its armed wing to serve the interest of capital and repress workers’ struggles, as in the case of the On-to-Ottawa trek mentioned earlier. Both countries routinely harassed and imprisoned labour leaders and deported those who were “foreign born.”
Barbara Roberts, in her book Whence They Came: Deportations from Canada 1900-1935, documents how many municipalities asked the federal government to deport immigrant workers simply because they had lost their jobs. Up to 18,000 people were deported on the grounds that they had become “public charges.”
Section 98 was enacted by the Canadian government in 1919 in response to the period of labour unrest which culminated in the Winnipeg General Strike. This law, which allowed strike leaders to be charged with sedition, remained in force until 1936. In 1931, eight members of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) were tried, convicted and sentenced to five years imprisonment. The CPC was declared unlawful and was banned from 1931-1936. Hundreds of immigrant party members were deported.
The 1937 Flint and Oshawa strikes against GM
On December 30, 1936, a group of auto workers defiantly took over GM’s Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan. This was the beginning of the dramatic Flint Sit-Down Strike, which lasted for 44 days, and spread to 150,000 auto workers in other cities.
The UAW was in a relatively weak position before the strike and the odds seemed to be stacked against them. Leah quotes media coverage in Life magazine before the Flint strike, which characterized the UAW as “puny” and “one of the least influential labor unions.”
The tactical decision to engage in a sit-down strike in Flint was brilliant. A small number of workers stopped production, occupied the plant, and kept out management and strikebreakers. In a classic picket line, they would have been more vulnerable. By utilizing a plant occupation they were more in control.
Leah references a fascinating account of the Flint Sit-Down Strike written by union organizer Walter Linder:
Once inside they set about organizing one of the most effective strike apparatuses ever seen in the United States. Immediately after securing the plant, they held a mass meeting and elected a committee of stewards and a strike strategy committee of five to govern the strike… Then committees were organized: food, police, information, sanitation and health, safety, ‘kangaroo court,’ entertainment, education, and athletics… The supreme body remained the 1,200 who stayed to hold the plant, the rest being sent outside to perform other tasks. Two meetings of the entire plant were held daily at which any change could be made to the administration.
On January 11, 1937, heat was turned off to the occupied plant and the Flint police, armed with guns and tear gas, attacked in full riot gear. They tried to force their way in and tried to stop the delivery of food and supplies. The strikers were able to repel attacks by the police, but 14 workers were shot and wounded. After the police were forced to retreat, more than 4,000 National Guard troops then surrounded the plant and set up machine guns. The workers were defiant. They ignored two court injunctions and seized yet another GM plant.
The Flint strikers relied heavily on outside support. The Women’s Emergency Brigade, who armed themselves with clubs, played a pivotal role of providing picket duty and support activities during the sit-down strike. A women’s auxiliary helped with overall organizing.
Michigan National Guardsmen set up a machine gun on the road leading to the Fisher Body Plant, Flint, Michigan, 1937. (Photo: Walter P. Reuther Library)
Even though the UAW represented only a small number of auto workers before the Flint strike, they relied upon the discontent, militancy, and solidarity of the rank-and-file across the industry and beyond. The impact of the Flint strike was huge and it quickly expanded to other plants and other cities in the U.S. and Canada. Within a few weeks, there were 87 sit-down strikes in Detroit alone. There were a remarkable 477 recorded sit-down strikes across the U.S. in 1937 involving over 500,000 workers.
On February 11, GM agreed to recognize the UAW as the sole bargaining agent for its workers. The union movement now had a renewed confidence. The following month, auto workers at Chrysler used a sit-down strike to win a union contract. Within a few years, union agreements had been signed with GM, Ford, Chrysler, and the rubber companies, followed by the packinghouse, textile and electrical industries. The UAW had grown from 30,000 to 500,000 members in a matter of months.
Leah writes:
After forty-four days, the sit-downers achieved the seemingly impossible—an agreement by GM to recognize the UAW and bargain a contract with them. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the victory and its impact on workers in the United States, Canada and internationally.
The Ford Company was the last holdout and it used brute force and thugs to try to keep the union out. In the infamous “Battle of the Overpass,” on May 26, 1937, Ford’s “security service” and Dearborn police brutally attacked UAW members who were peacefully handing out leaflets. This assault was extensively covered by the press and Ford was eventually pressured into signing a union contract.
On April 8, 1937, less than two months after the end of the Flint strike, almost 4,000 workers went on strike against GM in Oshawa. As Leah relates, this strike, which lasted for 10 days, and won recognition for the union, is also regarded as a landmark struggle that helped pave the way for the expansion of the UAW and other CIO unions in Canada.
As in Flint, the odds initially seemed to be against the workers. They were organized into the newly charted Local 222 of the UAW, up against the wealthiest corporation in the world. GM dominated Oshawa, just as it did in Flint.
There was no dues check-off in the 1930s, so unions had few resources. Sam Gindin argues that this “force[d] the union to find more creative ways to gain members—the GM Oshawa local, not confident in its ability to take on GM, attracted workers through bowling leagues and hunting clubs—but when the opportunity to have a steady income came, workers and their unions generally opted to lock that in.” He continues:
The postwar struggle for unionization in Canada led at Ford to a dramatic shutdown in 1945 and an arbitrated ruling (the Rand Formula) that offered unions the dues check-off (“union security,” as it was dubbed). This was generally hailed as a victory by unionists, soon became a pattern in major industries, and was subsequently enshrined in law. But in exchange, workers were to give up the right to strike during the life of the agreement and the union was to take responsibility for policing that ban.
In addition to facing a hostile press, the Oshawa workers were confronting Ontario Premier Mitch Hepburn, who was determined to crush the union. Hepburn had mobilized 100 RCMP officers, an OPP squad, and 400 “special constables” dubbed “Hepburn’s Hussars” to be sent to Oshawa. He claimed that it was necessary to do so because he had a secret report that the CIO was working “hand-in glove with international communism.”
Leah’s analysis of the Oshawa strike reveals “a battle where rank and file workers and shop floor militants were in charge.” He examines in detail the role of women, something largely ignored in other accounts of this strike. He looks at the particular historical conjuncture, a period of intense class conflict, when workers’ class consciousness and levels of resistance were high, and when workers were prepared to take militant action. He gives credit to communists and leftists for laying the ground work for the growth and expansion of industrial unionism.
Leah contributes not only extensive research but also his perspective as a rank-and-file union activist who is intimately aware of the demands of militant class struggle. The Oshawa UAW workers had 300 shop stewards in a workforce of 3,700, with a high level of shop-floor activism. Leah highlights the importance of the steward system: “The stewards built enough shop-floor power that they forced management to resolve workers’ grievances—even before the strike, and thus before there was a collective agreement.”
Leah writes:
Solidarity was enhanced by ensuring that women workers were represented on the GM bargaining committee and that women, whether workers or relatives of workers, were engaged in providing support for the strike through the establishment of a Ladies’ Auxiliary (an organization for women partners or relatives of workers that engaged in strike support activities).
A particular aim of Leah’s book is to counter the conventional narrative of the Oshawa strike established by historian Irving Abella and others. Leah shows how Abella downplayed or ignored the very factors which made the 1937 strike a success—the organizing by Reds, the extensive rank-and-file involvement, the role of women strikers, the high level of community support, and the tangible support from the International UAW. Abella disparaged the role played by the international UAW in an article published in Canadian Dimension in March-April 1972, titled “The CIO: Reluctant Invaders.” While promoting a Canadian nationalist agenda, Abella often erased or glossed over the radical origins of the labour movement.
Reclaiming workers’ history
In keeping with the subtitle of his book, “They Made Cars and They Made Plans: Reds, the Rank and File, and International Solidarity Unionized GM,” Leah affirms:
The achievements of the workers in Oshawa were the result of the incredible solidarity and mobilization of the rank and file members, the establishment of radically democratic structures of decision-making, the broad support from workers and community, and the significant benefits of being part of the radically disruptive international UAW.
Leah highlights the factors which made the early CIO industrial unions so unique and so successful, including the power of the “one-plant-one-union” approach as well as the emphasis on organizing workers as a class, and not separating them based on skill or trade. He emphasizes the way that the new industrial unions conducted their affairs in a democratic and accountable manner with a system of shop stewards, plant committees, and shop-steward councils, all democratically elected. And he documents how the unions consciously strived to accommodate and welcome all, regardless of race, ethnic background, gender or political persuasion. Leah highlights the emphasis on rank-and-file involvement and engagement, the openness to radical, left-wing perspectives and leadership, the centrality of direct action and mass struggle, and the importance of building solidarity, locally and globally.
It is refreshing to read an account of working class history where the role of Reds and leftists is acknowledged as a central one.
The gains of those dramatic struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Oshawa strike, include many of the things that working class people now take for granted: union recognition, collective bargaining rights, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, social assistance for those in need, labour standards, health and safety regulations, and pensions.
GM Oshawa Strike 1937. (Photo: City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1266, Item 44146)
Radical repression
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, communists and radicals became the targets of orchestrated purges from the labour movement. These purges involved collaboration between corporations, the state, the police, and right-wing forces within labour. Radicals were effectively excised from nearly all of the CIO industrial unions, while unions which still had left-wing leaderships were forced out of labour federations. In the U.S., the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 prohibited many of the tactics used successfully by CIO unions and forced union officials to sign anti-communist pledges.
In Canada, social democrats in the CCF played a very significant role in ousting radicals. In a remarkably candid and exhaustive manner, Irving Abella documented these purges of the left in his 1973 book Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour 1935-1956.
John Stanton’s 1979 book Life and Death of the Canadian Seamen’s Union illustrates the underhanded tactics adopted in the purging of radicals from the labour movement. The Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) was organized in 1936 by a few dozen communist and militant seamen. Within three years, the CSU represented 9,000 workers, 90 percent of the merchant seamen working the Great Lakes and ocean ports. The CSU was a highly effective and militant union and a thorn in the side of the half-dozen companies which controlled Great Lakes navigation. In the late 1940s, the Canadian and U.S. governments, in conjunction with the shipping bosses, collaborated with American Federation of Labour (AFL) leadership in a campaign to crush the CSU. They brought in the Seafarers International Union (SIU), an affiliate of the AFL, headed by known gangster Hal Banks. In 1949, a gang of armed SIU thugs travelled by train from Montréal and attacked a CSU picket line in Halifax, beating many with axe handles and shooting eight workers. Barely 15 years after it was first formed, the CSU was crushed and many of its members were blacklisted, never to work in the industry again. According to Stanton’s account, both the Canadian government and the RCMP collaborated with and protected the criminals of the SIU. Just as during the ignominious Cold War period in the U.S., some top labour bureaucrats collaborated with the State Department and the CIA in suppressing popular movements and trade unions around the world.
In 1944, the AFL created the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) designed to create divisions within labour. By 1949, the FTUC was working with and receiving funding from the CIA to try to split the European labour movement into rival ideological camps. This anti-communist work of the AFL expanded into Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Several authors have documented the collusion of top labour bureaucrats with U.S. foreign policy objectives. The latest is Jeff Schuhrke, author of Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of U.S. Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. Schuhrke writes:
The same twentieth-century labor movement that brought a measure of economic security and personal dignity to millions of working people also participated in some of the most shameful and destructive episodes in the history of U.S. imperialism. For decades, trade unionists in the United States have struggled to make sense of this, reluctant to discuss or even think about it… It is long past time for a thorough reckoning.
This marginalization and silencing of radical voices within the labour movement had a devastating impact. It was the beginning of a steady decline for organized labour. It led to a more docile labour movement, accommodating of bosses and the state. Unions became much more reliant upon full-time paid staff and a growing labour bureaucracy, and far less on the rank-and-file. Unions began promoting a very narrow concept of political action centred mainly on the parliamentary arena and voting, every few years, for the NDP in Canada or the Democratic Party in the U.S.
As Leah writes:
The commitment to democratic and militant unionism… was eventually undermined and largely destroyed by the adoption of anti-communism by most of the union leadership during the Cold War years. The destruction of left leadership in much of the labour movement was followed by the era of concessions, team concept, and subservience to the corporate capitalist class, as the gains of workers came under increasing attack by corporations and government.
The Great Depression only came to an end with the advent of a vast military conflict and the development of a war economy. During the Second World War, 40 percent of manufacturing capacity in North America was war related. In Canada, a surprising number of state-owned corporations were established to ramp up production in shipbuilding, aircraft, automotive, guns, heavy ammunition and a myriad of other industries and sectors. One of those government-owned entities was “Wartime Housing Limited,” set up in 1941 to rapidly build 46,000 houses for workers and later returning veterans. An obvious question is why this massive industrial capacity could not have been used at the height of the Depression, or in peace time.
Today we are seeing eerie echoes of the 1930s as the world descends into a period of instability punctuated by economic crises, military conflicts and rising global inequality. Right-wing populism, militarism, and fascism are on the rise once again. We’re witnessing increasing nationalism, protectionism, the scapegoating of migrants and newcomers, and mass deportations.
The 2025 Global Rights Index states:
We are witnessing a coup against democracy, a concerted, sustained assault by state authorities and the corporate underminers of democracy on the rights and welfare of workers… This attack is orchestrated by far-right demagogues backed by billionaires who are determined to reshape the world in their own interests at the expense of ordinary working people.
There is an urgent and pressing need to revitalize the labour movement. An effective fightback strategy would be muted without the central role of a militant workers’ movement. Such a movement is needed to defend all of those under attack—immigrants, refugees, precarious workers, trans and queer people, racialized people, and the Palestinian people, as well as workers—and to articulate a different vision of how the world could be.
There are occasional stirrings that show the potential and possibility of renewal. In the U.S., during the May Day Strong demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of workers and allies in 1,600 cities reclaimed the historic significance of the day to protest against Trump’s reactionary agenda. But much more needs to be done to revitalize the labour movement. In this context it is helpful to learn more about the history of the workers’ movement and the dramatic struggles of the 1930s. We need to reclaim that history, just as Leah’s book does, and draw inspiration from the radical dimensions of the labour movement.
As Tony Leah reminds us:
Radical industrial unionism requires radicals—people who understand that capitalism is a system designed to rob us and needs to be replaced. The successes of 1937 would not have been possible without the contribution of this outlook, and it is the ‘missing ingredient’ that we need in the labour movement today.
https://mronline.org/2025/08/22/class-s ... the-1930s/
