Stickin’ with the Union

Sometimes old age can make one cranky and radical in a positive way. That may be the explanation for Lynn Williams’s recent pre–Occupy Wall Street pronouncements about the competition in the world between “greed” and “common sense” before a Las Vegas convention of the United Steelworkers of America, where he served two terms as the first Canadian-born international president between 1983 and 1994.

But in One Day Longer: A Memoir, Williams is the establishment guy clamping down upon grassroots insurgencies in his union and the CCF/NDP—of which he has been a member since the age of 16. He participated in the decision by the Ontario New Democrats in 1972 to expel the Waffle, a group of younger party activists keen on greater control by Canadians of their natural resources and more women in leadership positions. “It was a tough meeting. Larry [Sefton, a top Steelworker official] made it clear where the Steelworkers stood and that there would be...