10) THE WORKERS' FLAG: IMPORTANT LESSONS FROM THE PAST
Raising the Workers' Flag: The Workers' Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936, by Stephen L. Endicott, University of Toronto Press, ISBN 978-1-4426-1226-6, 442 pp. paperback (including 104 pages of notes, bibliography and index), plus 48 pages of photos. Review by Kimball Cariou
Thousands of books are published every year in Canada. Perhaps a few hundred focus on Canadian history, and a much smaller fraction examine the struggles and stories of the working class. Even fewer shed valuable new light on the labour movement.
Stephen Endicott's new book, Raising the Workers' Flag, stands out among this handful, both for the significance of its topic, and for the author's vivid depiction of the activists who built the Workers' Unity League during the Dirty Thirties.
The passage of many decades, and the deaths of most of the WUL labour militants, have tended to over-simplify debates and discussions on the left over the role of this unique organization. All too often, these debates revolve around one question: was the Communist Party of Canada correct to push for the WUL's affiliates to re-enter the main bodies of the labour movement, or should the Communists have tried to maintain the WUL as a separate, revolutionary trade union movement?
During those years, the Communist Party was the most important revolutionary force in Canada, especially within the trade union movement. So the author provides a tremendous service by presenting the stories of many key figures in the Communist movement of the 1920s and '30s, the men and women who spearheaded the party's early organizing efforts among the working class.
As Endicott's vast research (including his studies of new archival material) makes crystal clear, reactionary critics are dead wrong to claim that such activities were "dictated" by the Comintern or the Moscow-based Red International of Labour Unions, to which the WUL was affiliated. Both of these bodies exercised overall leadership for the communist parties and the "red" unions, but the relationship was actually far more complex.
Endicott relates how Canadian representatives in Moscow, like Stewart Smith and Leslie Morris, for example, shared the knowledge and views of revolutionary trade unionists in Canada with their counterparts at the RILU, helping to shape communist strategies in a common global direction. Naturally, the views of the Soviet trade unions and larger communist-led labour bodies carried more weight than those of Canada. But it would be a gross over-simplification to argue that the decisions to form "revolutionary" trade union centres (such as the WUL), or later to reintegrate these unions into the wider labour federations in the capitalist countries were "imposed" from above. There were sharp debates over such strategic shifts, but the decisions were carried out mainly because they made sense to labour leaders and activists on the ground in Canada, not because of a signature in Moscow.
From the terrain of the Canadian labour and communist movements in the 1920s, Endicott moves to a series of chapters detailing the organizing campaigns by WUL unions across the country. These ranged from bitterly-fought strikes by coal miners and hard rock miners, to organizing drives among needle trades workers, woodworkers, and other brutally exploited sections of the working class. One of the most significant contributions of the WUL was the fight to organize the unemployed, especially the Relief Camp Workers Union which sparked the On to Ottawa Trek of 1935. Each of these historic struggles is presented in careful detail, giving the reader an understanding of the problems faced by the WUL in its efforts to lift the working class from sporadic acts of rebellion towards coordinated campaigns for progressive reforms, against the domination of big capital.
One of the most interesting chapters deals with women's status in the workplace and in the wider social realm. Many powerful women leaders emerged in the WUL, not just famed figures like Annie Buller and Becky Buhay, but dozens more who led strikes and campaigns in specific industries and cities. Although the post-war era saw a concerted drive to push working women back into the kitchens, the WUL helped to change the thinking of millions of women (and men) about gender roles in capitalist society. This shift was an underlying factor in the organization of women in the public sector which took off in the 1950s, and the emergence of women's liberation movements in subsequent decades.
By 1935 some 40,000 workers were members of WUL-affiliated unions, becoming an important factor in labour and social issues across Canada. But at the same time, the working class on an international scale grasped the need to build wider unity against the threat of fascism. The decision was made at the RILU level to formalize a process which was already taking shape in many capitalist countries, towards integrating the "red" unions into federations mainly led by reformists.
Endicott's conclusion is that "in retrospect, the decision by the Workers' Unity League to merge its unions with the AFL unions at this moment in history was a tactical error, since a new, dramatic, more progressive development was in the offing", referring to what became the Committee of Industrial Organizations in the U.S.
Perhaps, but Tom Ewen and other WUL leaders had to act on the knowledge they possessed, rather than what they could not foresee. What is beyond question is that the WUL did more to change the course of Canadian history in six short years than most labour federations before or since accomplished through decades of "business union" or even "social union" strategies. There is much to learn from this book, not just about our past, but especially about the "class struggle" unionism that workers desperately need today.
(The following articles are from the February 15-28, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)