Chevrolet Masters

Last year the Globe and Mail commemorated its sesquicentennial with a series of lengthy essays on the paper’s often cringeworthy coverage of key national issues. The fine labour reporter Vanmala Subramaniam opted to focus hers on a single event, the sixteen-day strike in 1937 at the large General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ontario. It was a good choice. The battle highlighted the Globe’s unsparing antagonism toward unions for much of its history. Front-page editorials denounced the action, purportedly led by Communist-inspired “foreign agitators,” while the publisher, George McCullagh, campaigned feverishly behind the scenes to buttress Premier Mitch Hepburn’s resolve to crush the United Auto Workers, affiliated with the Committee for Industrial Organization.

The strike itself stands as a landmark in Canadian labour history. Despite the powerful forces arrayed against them — a press that, with the honourable exception of the Toronto Daily Star, was overwhelmingly hostile, the corporate might of GM, and a high-handed premier — the 3,700 plant workers held firm and won a stirring victory.

They had walked out in early April, shortly after GM imposed a production speed-up on workers already toiling long hours, with no job security, for wages that had been repeatedly slashed during the Depression. The company, meanwhile, was reporting record profits. The workers were inspired by the recent forty-four-day sit-down strike at GM’s plant in Flint, Michigan, where their peers fought off all attempts by police to evict them and won recognition of the UAW. The Oshawa contingent demanded similar acknowledgement, plus major improvements in working conditions. They had been organized into the UAW by Hugh Thompson, a battle-hardened veteran of the Irish Republican Army, who’d been dispatched by the international union. He managed the feat in a single month. After several days of talks, the two sides appeared close to an agreement. When Hepburn got wind of the union’s imminent success, he charged back from his Florida vacation and pressured GM to refuse any further negotiations. The strike was on.

A lot has been written over the years about the ensuing struggle, but only now do we have a full-length narrative. The union activist Tony Leah, a long-time shop steward and maintenance and construction welder with GM, has expanded his 2023 master’s thesis into The Truth about the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike. When an author trumpets his book as “the truth” about a singular event, it usually means that other accounts, in his opinion, are untrue. So it is with Leah. In this case, the main purveyor of alleged inaccuracies is the late historian Irving Abella, who is castigated for a chapter in On Strike: Six Key Labour Struggles in Canada, 1919–1949. No matter that Abella hailed the Oshawa episode as a triumph and the most significant labour event since the Winnipeg General Strike eighteen years earlier.

Leah criticizes Abella for paying insufficient attention to the role of the rank and file and too much to leaders of the strike — fair enough. His debunking of Abella’s claim that the strike was close to falling apart in its final days is also persuasive. But others among his myriad complaints fall short. Some just seem trivial. Indeed, one wonders why Leah pays so much attention to this thirty-two-page account written half a century ago and likely unfamiliar to most contemporary readers. His attacks on Abella, even those well founded, become increasingly tiresome. At times I found myself muttering, “Who cares?” He even accuses Abella of being anti-Communist, a strange claim considering how often he quoted approvingly from the Daily Clarion. These broadsides seem to serve little purpose other than to showcase Leah’s shop-floor activism. The dramatic events of the strike itself are so much more significant.

Here Leah is on firmer ground. Yes, he spends too much time on a confusing chronology of prior organizing as well as on the ins and outs of the role played by the Communist Party (he’s an unabashed fan). But once he finally gets down to business, some 120 pages into his book, he does a good job detailing the events of each of the strike’s extraordinary sixteen days. The major players are well documented. Besides Thompson, he portrays the UAW president Homer Martin, the bespectacled former Baptist preacher whose visit to Oshawa resulted in the largest rally the city had ever seen; and the Local 222 president Charles Millard, who headed the bargaining team, at times uncertainly, at other times with steely resolve. The Globe’s McCullagh is described, as is Hepburn, whose unhinged behaviour included the deployment of special police squads to combat non-existent violence (“Hepburn’s Hussars”), the banning of newsreels about the strike, and the sabotaging of negotiations every time a settlement neared. A minor role there was played by the politician David Croll. After the premier booted him from cabinet for insufficient loyalty, the future Liberal senator declared, “My place is marching with the workers rather than riding with General Motors.”

It would be hard to mess up a tale with such a cast, but Leah goes deeper to emphasize the heart and soul of the walkout: a large group of committed shop stewards and the workers themselves. At a meeting well into the strike, Millard and Thompson brought forward a proposed settlement that seemed acceptable at first blush. But when the workers heard that the deal meant returning to the job before the agreement was signed, they turned it down with a thunderous no. The plant stayed shut. Leah also highlights the significant participation of women, both on the picket line and on the union’s negotiating committee.

In addition to compiling an impressive bibliography, Leah has combed through the minutes of key UAW international executive meetings and, best of all, dug up on-the-spot stories filed by reporters. After yet another kiboshing of talks by Hepburn, increasing the likelihood of a long shutdown, the Toronto Daily Star’s Frederick Griffin interviewed scores of workers. He found them “unshaken in their will to win” and “neither bewildered nor disturbed.” These reports are invaluable and a reminder of what future historians are losing with the steady, sad decline of newspapers. Numerous photos and reproduced banner headlines further enhance the flavour of daily developments.

Hepburn’s bluster finally petered out, and GM wanted to start making cars again. Meeting on their own, without the meddlesome premier, the company and the union reached an agreement in a few hours. As might be expected, Hepburn proclaimed triumph, since the contract contained no mention of the UAW or the CIO. Few were fooled. The union signatory Charles Millard was a hired UAW employee. He dismissed Hepburn’s assertion as “child’s play,” which it was. The Oshawa action opened the floodgates to industrial organizing by U.S.‑based CIO unions in Canada. Within a decade, they represented workers in every major industry in the country. Despite a few too many discursions, there is much in Tony Leah’s thorough account to savour.