Labour organizing has never been easy.
Just ask the thousands of Amazon employees who are fighting to unionize workplaces across North America.
Or take a look at the early days of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Trail, British Columbia.
As chronicled in Ron Verzuh’s superb new book Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada, Mine-Mill Local 480 had to battle on many fronts as it sought to unify workers and improve their working and living conditions.
A founding member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935, Mine-Mill had a large number of communists in its ranks. Officials and organizers had to contend, not only with a hostile employer and shambolic company union, but also with a red-baiting press, fear-mongering clergy, antagonistic political rivals, and a growing anti-communist sentiment that eventually gripped the labour movement itself.
Some of Mine-Mill’s wounds were, admittedly, self-inflicted.
The union all but drew a target on its back when, at the outset of the Second World War, it adopted Moscow’s position and opposed the fight against Hitler. Events in Europe eventually caused an abrupt about-face, but few would forget Mine-Mill’s original stance.
“The Communist leaders of Local 480, once anxious to oppose the war, in keeping with the party view that it was an imperialist war, now fully supported the Allied war effort,” Verzuh notes. “The 1939 non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had fuelled their opposition, but it was dissolved in June (1941) when the Russians faced devastating attacks under Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.”
Verzuh is a gifted historian and storyteller who has obviously done plenty of deep and painstaking research for this book.
He notes the price, popularity, and availability of consumer goods at the time. And he describes what people saw in the newspaper, heard on the radio, and watched at local theatres and playhouses.
“Country singing star Hank Snow and his Singing Rangers appeared at the Playmor in nearby South Slocan,” he observes in one passage about early 1948. “Bobby Roberts and his orchestra regularly played at the K.P. Hall, and the Kootenay Boys Orchestra kept couples dancing at the Legion Hall.”
These snapshots of daily activities are greatly appreciated as they help bring Verzuh’s subject matter to life in a more three-dimensional way.
Part of the Canadian Social History Series from University of Toronto Press, Smelter Wars is the definitive account of a radical union and its brave battle for bargaining rights, workplace safety, fair wages, and, ultimately, a better world.
May 21, 2022
Scott Costen 