Navigating Contending Interests: Conflict and Cooperation in Writing the History of the CSU

Benjamin Anderson

Jim Green’s (1986) Against the Tide: The Story of the Canadian Seamen’s Union is one of the most celebrated union histories in the Canadian context. The book adorns the shelves of many that work in Canadian labour studies, and is still being cited with some frequency – a feat for a book written for trade unionists and about a relatively short-lived union. In fact, to commemorate the fourth anniversary of Green’s death, in 2016 Canadian writer Charles Demers, working with the Jim Green Foundation, wrote and produced a dramatic reading of the book at Simon Fraser University’s historic Woodward’s building.

Depicting the union’s meteoric rise, its militant disposition, and its eventual fall to the forces set against it, Green tells the story of the Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) as one of triumph and defeat, an example of working-class solidarity and the power of its opponents. Green’s history of the CSU is a tale of conflicting interests, dramatic showdowns, and precipitous and consequential decisions. But what of the history of this history? As it turns out,had circumstances differed, Green’s book might never have been the definitive history of the CSU. This paper reports on the background of the writing CSU’s history, paying particular attention to the work, procedures, and decisions of the Canadian Seamen’s Union History Project Committee, a group of Communist Party of Canada (CPC) members and former CSU members who spent decades attempting to get the union’s history written.

Drawing upon archival materials accessed through Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Canada, ILWU Local 400, and Library, and Archives Canada (LAC), the paper attempts to reconstruct the process in which this history (and it’s virtually unknown predecessors) was written, particularly in terms of the internal conflicts and debates, the contending interests, that led to the narrative history we eventually got. It considers this institutional history against the content of Green’s book as well as unpublished manuscripts by former CSU members Dewar Ferguson and Charles MacDonald, critically examining how political decisions influence the production of historical texts and responding to Craig Heron’s (1989) inquiry as to why, up to that point, a more historically nuanced history of the CSU had not been written (which remains true to this day).

Whither Atlantic Canadian Labour History? A View from New Brunswick

Fred Burrill

Like most labour historians interested in the histories of working-class people in Atlantic Canada, a generous section of my bookshelf is dominated by the efforts of scholars at the University of New Brunswick. From Linda and Greg Kealey to David Frank and the many brilliant contributors to Acadiensis, it is an institution that has long loomed large in Canadian labour historiography. And yet, I now find myself in the curious (and personally very lucky) position of being the only full-time faculty in UNB’s Department of Historical Studies dedicated to the study of the working class. Does working-class history still matter? In my paper, I want to try to attempt some broader evaluation of the last 50 years of Atlantic Canadian labour history, arguing not from a perspective of loss but instead thinking critically about the ways that this scholarship has emerged from, and in turn informed, politics and social movements in the region, in addition to tracing its profound impact on regional scholarship on a variety of other areas of interest. If there are fewer labour historians, I do think the ethics of labour history is everywhere in the historiography of Atlantic Canada.

How the fornicate are we goin’ to get our excrement together unless we understand how we got here?’: Labour/Le travail, the Practice of Working-Class History, and the Problem of Class Consciousness in the 1970s

David Tough

Some of the humour in Michael Cross’s contribution to the first issue of Labour/Le travail, a sardonic review of recently published work on class and culture in Canada, ostensibly in the form of a transcript of two workers arguing in a tavern, has aged poorly. In the absence of an editorial, though, Cross’s piece makes important methodological and theoretical claims, arguing for example, that “a different set of rules” than that of standard professional historical practice governs working-class history. “You can’t prove nothing about something as hard to pin down as class consciousness,” Cross claims, so the critical question becomes: “Does it feel right, does it convince your gut, not your head?”  While it flirts with essentialism, this is ultimately a very freeing doctrine, where, beyond the necessary work of engaging with documents and historiography, what matters is the effect of the narrative account, its impact on and resonance with the reader’s own consciousness. This was a novel position for historians to take, but it made sense both as the extension of New Left ideas of experience as authority, and as a way of meeting the moment in the 1970s, when the working class was recombining itself under attack. The paper will discuss this methodological imperative and trace its impact in the articles in the first few issues of Labour/Le travail.

Activism and Scholarship: The New Left’s ‘Long March’ in Canadian Labour Studies since the 1970s

David Blocker

Many young activists of the Canadian New Left supported the Waffle movement in the New Democratic Party (NDP) during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The “Waffle Manifesto” boldly proclaimed, “our aim as democratic socialists is to build an independent socialist Canada,” and claimed that the NDP “must be seen as the parliamentary wing of a movement dedicated to fundamental social change.” The Waffle clashed with the NDP leadership over issues of gender parity within the party, support for Quebec’s right to self-determination and autonomy for Canadian sections of international unions. The Waffle movement faded after the group’s departure from the NDP in the early 1970s.

Despite the Waffle’s short-lived existence in Canadian politics, its legacy has been significant. In addition to the group’s sizeable impact on Canadian left nationalism, second-wave feminism, the labour movement, the radical left, and the NDP, former Wafflers and New Leftists contributed to the development of the burgeoning academic fields of labour studies and a new Canadian political economy during the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. This paper examines the scholarship of former Wafflers in academia since the Waffle’s demise using the concept of a New Leftist “long march through the institutions” to assess their collective impact and influence on the fields of labour studies and political economy in Canada.