Canada’s Essential Workers Fought and Won Against Their Bosses During World War II
In the 1940s, Canadian workers were essential to the nation’s war effort, but the government and employers used the war to justify a clampdown on labor rights. In Windsor, Ontario, workers fought back, securing gains that lasted decades.
United Auto Workers strikers and picketers demonstrate in front of the Ford plant in Windsor, Ontario, 1945. (AFP via Getty Images)
A massive wave of strikes erupted across Canada in the last two years of World War II. Over a million Canadians served in the army during the war and the scarcity of labor strengthened the hand of workers. Fearful that the interwar gains would become the norm, employers fought hard to restore the status quo. In response, between 1943 and 1945, workers forced their bosses to compromise by threatening a Canada-wide strike, and expanded union membership in the following decades.
This history shows that capitalists are always looking to use a crisis to immiserate workers. It is up to the Left to stop them, and to demand better conditions for the working class.
Crisis to Crisis: From Depression to World War
Canada’s labor movement came into its own during the interwar years. The Winnipeg general strike and broader labor revolt of 1919, itself a result of the dislocations and hardships of World War I, inaugurated a broad, militant current in the labor movement. As labor consolidated its position as a force within Canadian society, the movement’s Left pushed official skilled-trades-dominated unions to organize ununionized industrial workers. These efforts were not entirely successful.
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