The International Woodworkers of America (IWA) organizing drive in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1956-1959

Duff Sutherland

In 1956, the IWA began an organizing drive among loggers who worked for the province’s two pulp and paper mills, the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company with a mill in Grand Falls, and Bowater’s Newfoundland Pulp and Paper Mills with a mill in Corner Brook. Relying on experienced organizers in the camps, an aggressive newspaper and radio campaign, and the leadership of H. Landon Ladd, an activist originally from British Columbia, the IWA successfully organized two locals.

The IWA effectively employed the rhetoric of the modernization of wages and conditions to supplant the existing logger’s union, the Newfoundland Lumberman’s Association (NLA). The IWA portrayed the local NLA as a backward, company union. At the same time, loggers, with expectations raised by the economic and social change in Newfoundland since the 1940s, gravitated to the IWA. The provincial Liberal government of Joseph R. Smallwood, which also focused on modernization and industrialization throughout the 1950s, came to strongly oppose the IWA as economic growth and development, especially in the fishery, stalled. The IWA’s emphasis on a higher wage, industrial workforce in the woods threatened Smallwood’s plans to attract resource investment and to maintain seasonal employment for outport fishers. A neocolonial pattern of economic development also gave the paper companies considerable influence over politics and the state.

The paper explores the social and economic context for the IWA organizing drive which culminated in a bitter and violent strike in 1959. It explains the immediate success of the IWA in Newfoundland and Labrador, while pointing to the patterns of capitalist development that make successful organizing both inspiring and challenging.

Work and Network: The Labour of Canadian and American Telegraph Operators, 1870

Michael Feagan

Despite many histories on the technology and business of the telegraph, the work of  telegraph operators often falls out of view. Telegraph communication has been imagined, then  and now, as an instantaneous, frictionless, or disembodied technology. Communication historian  John Durham Peters said the telegraph meant “acuity of vision and hearing were no longer the  limit to instantaneous remote contact; the only limits were the extent of the telegraph lines.” But  human acuity in vision and hearing were still the limits of the telegraph. This “disembodied”  medium required humans to translate and transmit messages through trained senses. Operators  needed to have keen hearing to receive Morse code coming through the clicking on their  sounders. The telegraph was not just physically limited through its wires; it was always  physically mediated through human operators. I argue that telegraph work was real, physical  work, in a way that has too often been elided by the rhetoric of the telegraph network and that it  is important to see operators as part of the working class. Ultimately, this presentation demonstrates the ways in which human bodies and human labour can be erased within large  technological networks. I explore the historical significance of that erasure and its relevance for  understanding the precarity of labour in high-tech industries today.

The past, present and future of police unions in Canada

Jonathan Weier

One of the most significant recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions relating to the right to unionize was the 2015 decision in favour of the Mounted Police Association of Ontario. This decision found that legislation prohibiting uniformed members of the RCMP from unionizing was unconstitutional. Supported in court by the Canadian Labour Congress this decision resulted in the passage of legislation, with NDP backing, in 2017. This led to the creation of the National Police Federation and the unionization, under its banner, of almost 20,000 RCMP officers.

In fact, as the reach of the security state has increased in the 21st century and as security and carceral workforces have continued to grow; many unions, police unions and broad public sector unions both, have looked to these workers as a growing source of new members.

This paper will examine the unionization of RCMP officers in this context. I will situate this moment within the broader discussion of police and carceral worker unionization in Canada. I will then consider how his trend has exacerbated conflicts within police workforces over what this unionization will look like, as well as within broad public sector unions which have large numbers of police or prison guard members. Finally, this paper will argue that this trend in unionization transforms and diminishes solidarity within unions themselves and within the labour movement more universally.