Strike 1919!
For six weeks in the summer of 1919 the eyes of the world were turned on Winnipeg. What started as a simple conflict between the city’s building trade and metal shop workers and their employers had turned into the biggest strike in Canadian history. At least 30,000 people were off the job; half of them were not even union members. The event is referred to as a general strike because so many of the workers on strike were not involved the direct dispute between the building and metal trades workers and their employers.
Many observers wondered if the city were on the verge of a revolution, such as the one that had taken place in Russia in 1917. It was no secret that many of the strike leaders were associated with the radical Socialist Party and the One Big Union, the ominous sounding name of the union that the socialists hoped to create. Others felt that the strike was simply a conflict between employers and employees that had grown particularly bitter in light of the changes that Canadian society had undergone during the First World War. Prices had risen dramatically, while wages had not always kept pace. During the war there had been a rapid increase in the number of unions and unionized workers in Canada—but Winnipeg employers were particularly reluctant to negotiate with these unions. This unwillingness to even negotiate with unions was what turned a conflict between a few unions and their employers into a national crisis.
No one was prepared for the degree of support that the unions received from workingpeople across the city. It was surprising that only one union voted not to support the strike, but it was an even greater shock to discover that there were thousands of non-union workers prepared to put their jobs at risk in support of other workers. The city ground to a halt; eventually the strike leaders had to become involved in determining which services were to continue and which would be halted for the duration of the strike. If the strike committee had not stopped them, even the police officers would have gone out on strike.
The strike spurred an equally dramatic response from the city’s business community, which formed itself into the Citizen’s Committee of One Thousand. The Committee leaders viewed the strike as a potential revolt and worked with the federal government to crush it. Committee members replaced the police force with volunteers that they had recruited. At their urging amendments to the Criminal Code were rushed through parliament creating new crimes and making it easier to deport labour activists. When the time was right, Committee members oversaw the arrest and eventual prosecution of the strike leaders.
This ensured that the strike would not end with a contract, but with a show of force. In late June North-West Mounted Police officers on horse back charged a crowd protesting the arrest of the strike leaders. Shots were fired and two strikers were left dead. The strike itself was followed by a series of trials – a number of strike leaders were sent to jail, but they retained considerable public support. Several of them were elected to the provincial legislature and parliament, including three who were still in jail on voting day. The general strike was the outcome of 20 years of growing conflict in Winnipeg and Canada. It was the largest and most dramatic of a series of post-war labour conflicts that rocked Canada in 1919. It demonstrated both the bonds of solidarity that many Winnipeg workers felt towards one another, the divisions that had been created by industrialization in Winnipeg, and divisions within the labour movement itself. Its impact on the city’s development would last for decades.
The roots of the strike
The Canadian Pacific Railway did more than bring immigrants and industry to Manitoba, it also brought trade unionism to the province. The huge CPR yards in central Winnipeg employed over 2,000 men by the late 1880s. Many of these skilled trades workers had come from England and Scotland where they been active in a revived British labour movement. Not long after their arrival in Manitoba they formed unions of their own. Soon there were unions for machinists, conductors, brakemen, and engineers. The Canadian National Railway’s decision to build a rail yard in Transcona ensured that that community would have a strong trade-union tradition. A boomtown such as Winnipeg attracted carpenters, plumbers, painters and other construction workers , each of whom soon set up their own unions.
There were no labour laws requiring employers to negotiate with unions – or to prevent an employer from firing someone simply for belonging to a union. Most unions simply posted their rates and working conditions—if an employer refused to meet them, the union would go on strike. In other cases, workers did not form a union until after an employer had cut wages and benefits. Many employers took a very hard line with unions. (Ref1, Ref2) The owners of the Vulcan Iron Works, for example, vowed they would never meet or negotiate with a union committee. In 1906 streetcar employees went on strike when two union officers were fired—a move that sparked a violent and bitter strike.
Some union leaders did not believe women workers could be unionized, but working women in Winnipeg began forming their own unions in the late nineteenth century. Winnipeg’s competitive garment trade was hit with numerous labour disputes. In 1893, 75 male and female tailors, all members of the Journeyman Tailors’ Union, struck to protest a pay cut. The strike was defeated when their employers brought in new workers from Toronto. Winnipeg’s first union solely for working women was created in 1899 when, to protest a 20 per cent pay cut, 50 women working for the Emerson and Hague tent and overall company joined the United Garment Workers. After some initial negotiations, the company sparked a strike by firing the union leaders. The strike was lost but the women found work at a new garment factory, which agreed to the union contract. In the summer of 1902, 40 women working at the Paulin-Chambers bakery struck to protest a wage cut. When the women joined the Bakers’ Union, their employer threatened to fire them and hired replacement workers. Most union women worked at jobs that were extensions of women’s traditional domestic roles—cooking, sewing, and cleaning— but some began to show up in less traditional workplaces such a printshops, where they might be accepted into the union. In other cases the wives of male union members might form a ladies auxiliary. A Women’s Labor League had been founded in 1917 to bring together women who were active in the local labour movement. The league raised funds for women on strike, helped in organizing campaigns, and supported women when they were on strike. The League played a leading role in a strike of clerks at the Winnipeg Woolworth’s store in 1917.
Winnipeg’s unionists met regularly at the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council on James Street. Here R.B. Russell, the fiery Scottish-born champion of the machinists union and the Socialist Party would debate the more moderate carpenter Fred Tipping of the Social Democratic Party and the still more moderate James Winning. Increased economic activity during the war led to a twenty per cent increase in the number of union members in the city, but the unions were having trouble translating those numbers into results. When strikes took place, the courts quickly issued orders that prohibited striking workers from picketing their place of employment. Under these conditions, employers found new workers and strikes were broken. Many unionists began to search for a new strategy. They were opposed to the existing craft union model that dictated that there should be a separate union for each craft. Under this model, machinists belonged to one union, boilermakers to another, and carpenters a third, even if they all worked in the same plant. They would have different contracts and would cross each other’s picket line. According to this model of unionization, it was not possible to organize unskilled workers who had no specific craft. Almost all of these craft unions were based in the United States and belonged to the American Federation of Labor. The Canadian craft unions were also affiliated with the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada, which was founded in 1883. Many unionists in Winnipeg and elsewhere were beginning to conclude that the time had come to organize on what was termed an industrial basis—this meant organizing all the workers in a single industry into a single union, no matter what their job or skill level. This belief would put them in conflict with the leaders of the Trades and Labor Congress and the American Federation of Labor.
A series of lost strike in 1917 also led Winnipeg unions to consider the use of general or sympathetic strikes. These strikes would see workers who were not directly involved in a dispute walk off the job in support of workers in a specific workplace. In 1918 Winnipeg city council voted to strip civic workers of the right to strike: in response 17,000 workers from a wide range of Winnipeg unions walked off the job. This strike forced the city to back down. The labour council nearly called another mass strike that year to support a metal workers strike—but the strike ended, in defeat, before the general strike vote was held. In the spring of 1919 workers in Brandon staged a successful six-hour general strike to back city workers in their demand for the right to negotiate. Manitoba trade unionists were not alone in their search for new approaches to trade unionism—in the spring of 1919 they met with similar-minded radicals in Calgary to lay the groundwork for what would become the One Big Union.
The One Big Union
The One Big Union did not organize or lead the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, yet its history is closely intertwined with that of the General Strike. Both grew out of the growing radicalization of western Canadian workers and reflected their interest in new ways of organizing unions and society. Radical ideas were receiving a warm welcome from many trade unionists during the closing years of the First World War. Workers had turned out in large numbers to hear local union leaders speak glowingly of the 1917 Russian Revolution and to criticize the federal government for its recent decision to ban socialist newspapers and political parties. At one such meeting a speaker predicted a tremendous social conflict once the soldiers returned from overseas: “They will say ‘We have fought for this country, and by God, we are going to own it.’” At a meeting of the Winnipeg labour council one delegate said, “In Winnipeg tonight we are fighting with ideas, but soon we will be fighting with rifles.”
In the fall of 1918 Western Canadian unionists placed a number of radical resolutions before the delegates at that year’s Trades and Labor Congress Convention. In particular, they wanted the Congress to abandon craft unionism for industrial unionism, but their criticism extended to such difficult questions as conscription, censorship and the war effort. Every one of the westerners’ proposals was defeated. Before returning home, the western delegates agreed to hold a special western Canadian labour conference in 1919 to discuss ways that they could have more impact on the TLC.
By the time the delegates from western Canadian unions arrived in Calgary for this meeting in the spring of 1919 they were no longer interested in fixing the TLC. Instead, they believed the time had come to create a new industrial union that would use the general strike as a central weapon. The new union was to be called the One Big Union — as its name suggested it would attempt to organize all workers into a single labour body. Unlike the TLC it would not divide them up by skills, nor would it concentrate solely on unskilled labour.
Their plan was to hold a vote in the summer of 1919 in which union members could determine whether they would join the OBU or stick with their craft unions. One vote would be held in western Canada and one in the East. If the easterners turned down the idea, the westerners would strike out on their own. The delegates also called on the government to bring in the six-hour workday. They argued the shorter workday would create more jobs for soldiers when they left the army. To back this campaign for a shortened workday, they threatened to launch a nation-wide general strike on June 1.
By moving to create the One Big Union, western Canadian unionists had created many enemies for themselves: business, government and the craft unions all felt threatened by the OBU. Their main source of strength was the growing conviction among western Canadian workers that they had to pursue their common interests through united unions and united political action. The organizers’ plans for the union would become entangled in the Winnipeg General Strike, which started in mid-May 1919. The fledgling OBU would never be able to recover from the defeat of the Winnipeg strike.
The start of the strike
In the spring of 1919 the newly formed Winnipeg Building Trades Council, which represented the city’s building trade unions, opened negotiations with their employer the Winnipeg Builders Exchange. The Building Trades Council was an example of the way in which Winnipeg unions were working to overcome the barriers created by craft unionism by bringing workers from different craft unions together in a single bargaining committee. The workers were looking for a pay increase that would allow them to regain what they had lost to wartime inflation. The builders said that without an increase in construction they could not afford to increase wages. The employers then adopted a take-it-or-leave-it approach, saying that if the unions did not accept their pay offer, negotiations were over. In the face of this ultimatum, the construction workers walked off the job on May 1. It was the first step in a series of developments that would bring the city to a stand still.
A day after the building trades workers went on strike, the city’s metal trade workers walked off the job. They had been defeated in strikes in 1906, 1917 and 1918. In April 19191, the metal trades council, which represented the different unions in the metal trades, presented their contract proposals to the owners of the metal shops. While some of the smaller shops were willing to negotiate, the larger shops never bothered to respond to the unions. The builders and the metal shop owners had taken provocative positions—it was not simply that they were taking a hard line in negotiations—they were refusing to negotiate. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council took this as an affront to the entire labour movement. At its May 6 meeting the council decided to organize a vote on whether or not to hold a civic-wide general strike in support of the construction workers and the metal shop workers.
When they met a week later it was quite clear that unionized workers were prepared to support them. Over 11,000 workers had voted in favour of a general strike, with only 500 in opposition. The strike was set to start at 11 a.m. on May 15.
By noon of that day the city was at a standstill. Ninety-four unions were on strike, and over 20,000 people were off the job. In the end, it is estimated that nearly 30,000 people participated in the strike, half of whom did not even belong to unions. They were also very loyal—again and again employer threats to fire workers who did not return to the job met with limited or no success. The Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council established a General Strike Committee and a smaller Central Strike Committee: while radicals such as R.B. Russell were on the Central Strike Committee, it was dominated by moderates, including J.L. McBride of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, labour council president James Winning, typographer Harry Veitch—whose union had not even endorsed the strike, and labour council secretary Ernest Robinson.
The Central Strike Committee soon found itself having to determine which services were going to be offered to the public. As it did not wish to be accused of attempting to starve the city, the Committee continued delivery of milk and bread. When the bakeries and dairies worried that people might attack their delivery wagons if they thought they were being operated in opposition to the strike, the strikers, after meeting with representatives of city hall and the dairies, agreed to issue signs that read “Permitted by Authority of Strike Committee,” which were to be displayed on delivery wagons. The measure made sure that the milk and bread got through, but also raised questions about who was in charge. The strikers always maintained that they were not trying to take over the government of the city, but by its very nature a general strike challenges a community’s existing power relations.
The Toronto Globe estimated that 2,000 of the strikers were women. Indeed, the strike got off to an early start on May 15, 1919, when 500 female telephone operators walked off the job. Before they left work they pulled the switches, leaving much of the city without phone service. Aside from the telephone operators, retail clerk, garment workers, waitresses, bookbinders, and confectionery workers, almost all of whom were women, voted in favour of the strike. In fact, the bakery and confectionery workers went on strike the day before the strike began to protest the fact that their employer would not negotiate with their union.
Women also played an important role in making sure that businesses that were struck stayed closed. They showed up at the rail yards to stop people from going to work, and on occasion they attacked trucks that were making deliveries for businesses that were being struck. Under the leadership of Helen Armstrong, the Women’s Labor League played a central role in organizing women’s activities throughout the strike. Armstrong established a dining hall where meals were free for women strikers, while men were expected to pay or make a donation. During the strike Armstrong continued to organize working women into unions and was arrested several times.
Throughout the strike, one of the strike committee’s main concerns was ensuring that the strikers did not provide the government with an excuse (Ref1, Ref2) to use force to end the strike. For the most part, they urged people to stay off the streets or attend the large open air meetings that were held at Victoria Park near the Red River. There, speakers from the unions and the Labor Church, which had been established by William Ivens when he lost his position with the Methodist Church, spoke to the strikers on issues of the day. While the strike leaders kept their troops in line, the business community took the initiative.
The Committee of One Thousand
Shortly after the start of the General Strike, the leaders of the Winnipeg business community established the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand. (Ref1, Ref2) It had far fewer than a thousand members, but it had access to the corridors of power both in Manitoba and Ottawa. Among its leading figures were such prominent businessmen and lawyers as A.J. Andrews, J.C. Coyne, Travis Sweatman, and Isaac Pitblado. It organized volunteers to replace strikers (Ref1, Ref2) and worked to ensure that the strike ended in a defeat for the unions. In its own newspaper, The Citizen, it attacked the strikers and their supporters as Bolshevik revolutionaries and implied that the strike was largely the work of Eastern European immigrants. (Ref1, Ref2) These charges were echoed by the leaders of Catholic Church in St. Boniface.
Shortly after the strike started, two leading members of the Committee met with federal cabinet ministers and told them the strike was a revolution in the making. The government was convinced, and A.J. Andrews, a lawyer and Committee member, was appointed as the government’s special agent in Winnipeg. Worried that an attempt to end the strike by force could end disastrously, Andrews believed the government had to proceed cautiously. He was, however, intent on crushing the strike: to that end he advised the government to pass a series of laws that would make it possible to quickly arrest and deport the strike leaders without trial. One of the Committee’s first moves was to force the city council to fire the entire Winnipeg police force for refusing to take an oath promising not to participate in general strikes. The dismissed officers were replaced by 1,800 special police officers recruited by the Committee. On the next day, June 10, the Specials, as they were called, clashed with strikers at the corner of Portage and Main in the first major violent confrontation (Ref1, Ref2) of the strike.
Andrews supported the employers’ decision not to negotiate, but he realized that he had to bring the strike to speedy end since workers in other cities across the country were showing support for the Winnipeg strikes. General strikes in support of the Winnipeg strike broke out in Brandon, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Vancouver and Victoria, and in towns as small as Dauphin and Minnedosa. The big fear was that the rail workers would join the strike, bringing the country to a standstill.
Andrews’ opportunity came when the owners of the metal shops made a small concession, announcing that they would negotiate with individual craft unions, but not the metal trades council as whole. This was a proposal that the workers would not accept, since they had gone out on strike to asset their right to choose who would represent them. When the unions turned the proposal down the Mounted Police took action. On the night of June 16, ten strike leaders were arrested in their homes and taken to Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Union offices across the city were raided and their contents seized. Andrews acted quickly, and on his own: federal officials in Ottawa were surprised to hear him announce that the strikers were to be prosecuted for sedition.
Returned soldiers had held parades both in opposition (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) to, and in support (Ref1, Ref2) of, the strike. On June 21 the veterans who backed the strike gathered in downtown Winnipeg to protest the arrests. When the mayor banned their demonstration, the Mounted Police were called out. Charging into the crowd on horseback, the police fired on the strikers—one man died instantly, another a few days later from gunshot wounds. The special police that had been recruited by the Committee of One Thousand then moved in on the demonstrators: by the end of the day at least thirty of demonstrators were seriously injured. (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3, Ref4)
The arrests and the attack on the parade, which the unions referred to as Bloody Saturday, marked the defeat of the strike. The workers returned to work without contracts. Hundreds, possibly thousands of workers were fired for their participation in the strike. Others only got their jobs back if they signed agreements promising not to join unions in the future.
The General Strike as an historical controversy
The Winnipeg General Strike is a good example of how our ideas of the past keep changing. During the strike the workers argued that they were simply striking for a living wage and the right to negotiate. The Citizens’ Committee and the federal government said the strike was a revolution in the making. For this reason they arrested the strike leaders and broke the strike. A Manitoba government commission of inquiry concluded that the General Strike was essentially a labour dispute, not a revolution. The federal government and the Citizens’ Committee refused to accept this conclusion. In 1920, they put the strike leaders on trial for criminal sedition and conspiracy. Sedition is the crime of attempting to overthrow the government. A number of strike leaders were acquitted, but most of them were convicted and sentenced to prison.
Many aspects of the trials have since come into question. The Mounted Police interviewed the jurors in advance: Anyone who was likely to acquit the strikers was not allowed onto the juries. The judge stretched the definition of conspiracy beyond its usual meaning. A ‘conspiracy’ means that people have to plan an action together before they can be charged with conspiracy. There was no evidence that the strike leaders who were charged with conspiracy ever planned to overthrow the government. The judge, however, instructed jurors that if the actions of the accused might overthrow the government, even if that was not part of a stated plan, they could convict them.
As early as 1920 it was apparent that not all Manitobans agreed with the judge or the jury. In that year’s provincial election a number of the jailed strike leaders ran for office. Even though they could not leave their prison cells during the campaign, three of them won election to the legislature. Voters in Winnipeg’s North End believed that the strike had been legitimate and they were prepared to stand behind the strike leaders. In later years, John Queen, one of the men who had been sent to jail, was elected mayor of Winnipeg. In 1921 J.S. Woodsworth, who had been arrested but never tried for his support of the strike, was elected to the House of Commons. Winnipeg workers also voted to join the One Big Union. With many of its leaders in jail or fired from their jobs and facing the opposition of employers, government, the Catholic Church, (Ref1, Ref2, Ref3) and the craft unions, the OBU remained a small regional union that was led by R.B. Russell until 1956.
Historians have continued to disagree over the strike’s meaning. Today’s debate is between historians who believe the strike was simply a local conflict and those who believe that the strike was a part of an international response on the part of working people to the social crisis created by industrialism and the First World War. Those who say it was a local conflict over simple collective bargaining issues are critical of the strike leaders, saying that they failed to recognize that a general strike would bring them into conflict with the government and lead to likely defeat. To these historians, the strike sapped the vitality of the movement.
Those historians who see it as part of a larger national and even international movement agree there was no revolutionary conspiracy afoot in 1919. Workers had however, they say, come to see themselves as belonging to a class that stood in opposition to employers. To them, the strike was not simply about the right to negotiate, but workers’ right to have a greater say in the way the post-war world would run. The fact that they lost the strike just underlined just how strong the forces were that they were up against. These historians suggest that the strike and the trials served to inspire unionists during the coming years of political and economic hardship.
