Driving Change

As the guns of war fell silent throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Canada’s workers looked into the face of upheaval. The wartime economy had been running full tilt, with women filling the gaps left when men took up arms. Now that the fighting was over, husbands, fathers and sons were coming home, and despite government plans to retrain veterans, many expected to pick up where they’d left off. With the diminished need for armaments and supplies, unemployment in wartime boom industries was inevitable, although increased demand for new consumer goods created additional employment.

Under the War Measures Act, home-front workers had forgone many of the rights they had achieved before the war: Unions weren’t allowed to negotiate wage increases since wages were frozen, work stoppages were severely curtailed and union membership drives were limited. Despite that, there were still hundreds of strikes during the war and union numbers doubled between 1939 and 1944, largely because labour shortages had led to new-found worker confidence in job security.

After the fighting had ceased, workers expected to be rewarded for their sacrifice, while unions wished to solidify their growing status. Some politicians, including Windsor Liberal MP Paul Martin Sr., believed it was time for a society in which workers shared in the making of decisions in partnership with government and corporations. Martin’s fellow cabinet minister C.D. Howe, on the other hand, pressed for business gains and was known to have sometimes labelled Martin a Communist.

The clash of ideas over unions’ power came to a head 80 years ago during a job action at the Ford Motor Company of Canada in Windsor, Ont. It led to the adoption of the Rand Formula, named for Supreme Court Judge Ivan C. Rand and now recognized as a pillar of labour relations. The Rand Formula set the stage for postwar worker gains that have expanded the middle class and fuelled prosperity.

How did it come about?

On Aug. 31, 1945, Ford of Canada announced that, with lower postwar production needs, it was laying off 800 workers at its Windsor facility. Rumours spread of more to come, and in fact, that number was soon increased by about 1,650. Canada’s autoworkers were represented by George Burt, a former plumber and General Motors line worker at its Oshawa, Ont., plant, who served as Canadian director of the Detroit-based United Auto Workers (UAW) union. Burt knew he had to act, but he also knew that he needed to answer to his boss, Roland Jay Thomas, the UAW president in Detroit.

Thomas and his soon-to-be replacement, Walter Reuther, reflected the growing anti-Soviet and anti-Communist sentiment in the United States. They looked on at the growing labour militancy in Windsor and initially refused to authorize Burt’s call for a strike. Burt later said he believed he was being urged to tread softly because the Americans feared turning public opinion against a union seen by many as too radical.

During the 1930s and ’40s, industrial organizations such as the United Auto Workers of America, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and the Mine Workers Union of Canada often found their demands branded as “radical.” Those demands included calls for shorter hours, safer conditions and protection from dismissal for union-related activities. Labour didn’t plan to take its foot off the gas pedal and it was clear that labour relations would be in for a hard landing.

That landing hit no harder any place than in Windsor, a city that had been known since the First World War as the nation’s automotive capital — Canada’s “motoropolis.”

The year 1945 was an inflection point for Canadian labour. With the war over, labour was turning its attention not just to worker wages but also to the issue of union security — the right to exist and prosper. Unions wanted automatic dues checkoff, which would require employers to collect worker dues and hand the money to the duly chosen unions. That would provide the unions financial stability and let them devote their time to matters beyond regular union housekeeping.

Chief among their priorities was the pursuit of “social justice.” Taking their cue from those such as the American moderate Reuther, union leaders believed they had a role to play in improving society through broad social change, which included advocating for pensions and health-care benefits. No union was more vocal in its desire to demonstrate its social responsibility than the UAW.

But how quickly should they move? How far should they push? With Thomas’s initial refusal to support a strike at Ford Canada, Burt faced a dilemma. Torn between his own conscience and the head of his union, Burt consulted and weighed his options.

Burt knew he enjoyed the ear of left-leaning Liberal politicians, such as Martin and David Croll, a former Windsor mayor who was by then a Toronto MP, both of whom had courted labour’s support. Both had a pipeline to Liberal Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, a fact that added to Burt’s confidence in the decision he was about to make — one destined to resonate through Canadian labour to present day.

In November, however, as winter’s chill began to set in, frustrations rose. Ford feared the shuttering of its on-site power plant by strikers would lead to cold-weather damage.

On Nov. 2, Ontario commanded that Windsor police escort maintenance workers into the power plant. Pickets held steady and police, outnumbered by strikers, withdrew. While confrontation had been averted for the moment, Ontario Attorney General Leslie Blackwell then dispatched 125 provincial policemen, with the Mounties sending an equal number to stand by in Windsor.

Support for the Ford strike at other Windsor workplaces appeared to surge on Nov. 5, when 20,000 workers, representing three-quarters of the city’s industrial workforce, failed to show up to work.

Burt, drawing inspiration from a similar action that had once taken place in Michigan, called for a vehicular blockade to bar police from entering the Ford complex. It proved to be one of the most dramatic moments in Canada’s labour history.

The blockade began slowly — initially with just employees’ vehicles — but soon, others joined. City buses entered the jam, and strikers began commandeering the vehicles of passersby. In its Nov. 5 final edition, the Windsor Daily Star reported: “Violence broke loose in Windsor this morning, when private citizens were the victims of strikers at the Ford Motor Company of Canada, Limited.… If any driver protested the seizure of his car, he was threatened with violence.”

The blockade made headlines across Canada and the United States. According to the Windsor Daily Star, city police reported 150 vehicles stolen by strikers. An insurance company representative told the newspaper that car owners wouldn’t be indemnified against damage. It was estimated that as many as 2,000 vehicles were involved in the blockade. A Detroit newspaper said the strikers demonstrated a “carnival spirit,” with a band and bagpiper, while union members and their families sang and danced in the streets.

At Queen’s Park in Toronto, Premier Drew kept in close telephone and telegraph contact with acting prime minister J.L. Ilsley, while Mackenzie King attended a Commonwealth conference in London. Drew said he feared a force of 2,000 “Communist” strikers was coming from Detroit.

If workers continued to be a threat to Ford’s property, Drew told Ilsley, “a highly trained force” of Canadian military should be sent. Ilsley said that while he wouldn’t support using the military at the moment, it remained an option. The Ontario and federal justice ministers also conferred on potential military intervention. Then, as onlookers’ vehicles were seized and 14 city blocks were shut down, Drew expressed his concern to Ilsley about the “anarchy.”

Drew saw two issues at play: the strike, and maintaining law and order. He would not advocate police or the military to settle a strike, only to maintain the law.

In the coming decades, the strike at Ford of Canada would take its place in the pages of worker history alongside the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and the 1949 Asbestos Strike in Quebec. The Ford action has been labelled “Canada’s most underrated rebellion” by Vancouver-based labour economist Jim Stanford. It’s further endorsement of labour historian David Moulton’s contention that the historical view of Canada as “the peaceable kingdom” is a myth, one that disregards the bitter struggles workers endured to achieve the employment rights they enjoy today.

“Rand gave unions security to become permanent actors,” says Charles Smith, a labour expert at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan. “It’s hard to imagine some of the big collective bargaining gains without Rand.”

But are those rights sacrosanct? Could modern-day governments strip away protections that workers fought to gain?

National labour leaders, including Canadian Labour Congress president Bea Bruske, have warned that workers aren’t safe from politicians who favour business over employees. “For years, we have faced governments weakening labour laws, making it harder to organize, and we’ve seen that it means a widening wealth gap in this country,” Bruske said last year.

As for the Rand Formula itself, Charles Smith says: “If a government felt threatened by the labour movement, I could definitely see a push for American-style rightto- work laws, for example. And that would destroy the legacy of Rand.”

Social Justice

Women in the Workplace

The Second World War was a watershed for workers’ rights in Canada. During that time, the National War Labour Board sided with unions in their fight for equal pay for women, although many employers resisted. When Ford of Canada was told that it had to pay women the same as male workers on the factory floor, the company refused to hire women for those jobs for many years. 

The Rand Formula