Review of The Truth about the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike by Tony Leah (Baraka Books, 2024)
Review by Roger Keeran
For sixteen days in April 1937, 3700 workers of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 222 at the General Motors Oshawa, 38 miles east of Toronto, shut down the plant until they obtained union recognition and a contract. Occurring shortly after the great Flint Sit-down strike of 1937, the Oshawa strike had as great an importance for Canadian workers as the Flint strike had for American. It would establish the UAW in Canada and would lead to the successful organization of other industrial workers in Canada.
The significance of this strike, however, transcended these breakthroughs. It also represented the triumph of militant, democratic, rank-and-file unionism and international solidarity that communists and other leftists had championed for years at Oshawa and beyond. Among other things, this rank-and-file unionism meant the creation of a large and active steward system and a prominent place for women in the union. It also meant overcoming anticommunism, anti-unionism and narrow nationalism that were more virulent in Canada than across the Detroit River.
All of this is cogently and clearly explained by Tony Leah, a writer whom I do not know, but who (I note in the spirit of full disclosure) gives much appreciated recognition of my own book on the auto workers. Leah brings to this project a unique combination of skills and background. Leah is a trained, academic historian with an M.A. in Labour Studies from McMaster University, but he was also a maintenance and construction welder at Oshawa for forty years and an activist who served his union in a variety of capacities. He is not only a careful and diligent researcher who has dug deeply into primary sources and extracted their meaning, but he also has a militant’s interest in drawing lessons from this history that are relevant for workers in struggle today. I can think of no other labour historian who combines this combination of scholarly training, union activism and working-class experience. Henry Kraus, who wrote two books on the Flint sit-down, comes close. He was a fine scholar and activist but was not himself a worker.
Leah aptly titles his book the “Truth” about the Oshawa strike because he effectively exposes the weaknesses and distortions of the existing accounts of the strike. The most influential of these were two flawed narratives by Irving Abella, a York University Professor of Canadian labour and Jewish history and one-time president of the Canadian Historical Association. Abella thought that the strikers did not profit from UAW or CIO support, which was “dishonest” and “insufficient,” and that the “CIO connection was as harmful as it was helpful.” He also proposed that the strike ended because the workers were desperate and “ready to sign an agreement on almost any terms,” and that the strike led to the unfortunate result of a Canadian labour movement dominated by “foreigners.” Leah shows that Abella’s account, though widely repeated even by the union itself, was riddled by sloppy scholarship, illogical inferences and judgements influenced by Abella’s narrow nationalism, anti-communism and condescension toward the rank-and-file workers.
Leah’s history of the strike, its background and aftermath, represents a demolition job on Abella’s standard history. Leah makes a multifaceted argument solidly grounded in the evidence and in the national and international context of the times. He submits that “the international leadership of the UAW was positive and important in the success of the strike.” He also argues that the “rank-and-file GM workers and particularly the remarkable stewards’ body” played a “critical” role in the struggle’s outcome. Leah also points out that, far from being an act of desperation, the settlement included gains that surpassed those achieved in the States.
Among the many contributions of Leah’s book is a reminder of how challenging the political environment was in Canada, even compared with the US. Since 1919, Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada made it illegal to belong to an organization that advocated the political overthrow of the government by violence. In the 1920s and 1930s, Canadian authorities interpreted this law as applying to the Communist Party of Canada, in effect outlawing it and leading to the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of many Communists and labour activists and the creation a hostile environment for union organizing. Despite this, such communist-affiliated organizations as the Auto Workers Industrial Union (AWIU) and the Workers’ Unity League of Canada (WUL) continued to agitate and recruit for militant industrial unionism, and this work along with that of less political unionists laid the foundation for the UAW and the Oshawa strike.
Before and during the Oshawa strike, the union had to contend with obstructive and provocative behaviour of Mitch Hepburn, the Premier of Ontario. With the support of the press, Hepburn spoke and acted with open hostility to the CIO and UAW, whom he characterized as “foreign agitators” and to the communists with whom he said he was engaged in “a fight to the finish.” Until the very end of the strike, Hepburn (whose secret mining investments placed him in economic conflict with the CIO organizing) tried to stir up nationalist sentiment against the union and to sabotage a settlement. Hepburn’s behaviour contrasted starkly with that of the Michigan New Deal Democrat, Governor Frank Murphy who, during the GM sit-down, tried to prevent violence and promote negotiations.
Of special interest is the light Leah sheds on the role of UAW organizers and leftists in the struggles of Canadian auto workers. During a strike at Kelsey-Hayes in Windsor in December 1936, Walter Reuther, then the leader of UAW Local 174 in Detroit, undercut the Canadian workers, but his behaviour though typical of him did not typify other UAW leaders. Though occupied with their own struggle in Flint, UAW Vice President Wyndham Mortimer and organizer Bob Travis took time to meet with James Napier of UAW Local 195 at Kelsey-Hayes and assured him that the UAW would not tolerate any attempt by GM to undermine the Canadian strike by shipping parts from the US to Britain. During the Oshawa strike, UAW organizer Hugh Thompson spent much time in Canada, and UAW President Homer Martin visited Oshawa twice to support the union. The UAW General Executive Board also discussed the Oshawa strike and offered “remarkable support,” particularly “considering everything else the UAW leadership was dealing with at the time.”
Leah ends his book with a discussion of the “Lessons and Legacy” of the strike. He notes that after years of retreat the labour movement of Canada and the United States is today showing signs of resurgence. Leah says, “Future progress will depend on transforming unions into organizations that are based on the interests of their members as part of the working class–on class struggle, not class collaboration. The Oshawa strike can serve as a guidepost in this necessary effort to revitalize the labour movement.” Readers who share Leah’s aspiration will benefit from his book and will enjoy the read.
MLToday.com
The Truth about the 1937 Oshawa GM Strike is available through New Labour Press
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