Standing Up to Big Nickel

When 14,000 striking workers at the Inco nickel mine and smelter in Sudbury, Ont., put down their tools on Sept. 24, 1958, they unexpectedly ushered in a new era in Canadian labour history. In Standing Up to Big Nickel, author Elizabeth Quinlan demonstrates how this strike marked a shift from traditional working-class struggle to the more cautious approach taken by unions bound by new and restrictive postwar legislation. The latter, says Quinlan, helps explain the declining power of organized labour in recent decades. 

Quinlan, a sociology professor whose father was a union staff member at the time of the strike, is well positioned to describe the multicultural working-class culture of this northern Ontario city in the 1950s. Job conditions were horrific. Nasty foremen abused employees unchecked. Families struggled to grow gardens in an environment poisoned by sulphuric acid pollution. Workers, many of them recent immigrants, had little natural kinship with one another. All of this played out against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Red Scare, in which unions were suspected of being agents of Stalinism.

The International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers — shunned by the Canadian Labour Congress for its socialist ideology — was unapologetic about its roots. It focused on establishing a strong working-class culture through improved wages and benefits, but also through cultural associations, such as union-sponsored dance classes and summer camps for families. Quinlan quotes many who recall the 1950s as a golden era of community cohesion in Sudbury.

When the company, sitting on a surplus of nickel and supported by government, refused to seriously negotiate, a strike was all but inevitable. Unfortunately, three months of hardship led to a paltry settlement, cracks in union solidarity and the demise of the mine, mill and smelter workers’ union.

Standing Up to Big Nickel brings to life a key moment in labour history and reminds us that workers’ struggles are far from over.