Revealing The Buried Truth About The 1937 Oshawa GM Strike

This week, I sat down with union activist Tony Leah to talk about his new book, The Truth About the ’37 Oshawa GM Strike. Tony was a maintenance and construction welder at General Motors in Oshawa for nearly 40 years and held many positions within the Auto Workers Union (UAW/CAW) at both Oshawa Local 222 and on the Canadian national level. Tony also completed an MA in Labour Studies at McMaster University.

The book is available on November 1 from Baraka Books, but those in the Toronto area may want to attend the book launch on October 30 at 7 p.m. at A Different Booklist (779 Bathurst St.).

Adam King: Can you tell readers what motivated you to write this remarkable book?

Tony Leah: Initially, I was writing a master’s thesis on [Canadian Auto Workers/Unifor] Local 222, my home union local in Oshawa. I’ve been a member since 1980.

But as I was doing the research, I was quite astounded at some of the details that I found out about the 1937 General Motors strike in Oshawa, things that I had been completely unaware of, and I think most people are unaware of. So, I ended up really focusing on that strike, because I think it's been misrepresented terribly. It’s important for the labour movement today to go back and uncover what actually happened, and to learn from how workers carried out that strike.

AK: The 1937 GM strike is an important piece of Canadian labour history. How would you characterize the accepted narrative about the strike and how does your take on it differ?

TL: The accepted narrative was almost entirely created by the labour historian Irving Abella. He wrote his PhD thesis on the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in Canada, which became the book Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour, 1935-1956. What he wrote there and elsewhere on the '37 strike circulated widely and I don’t think anyone ever really went back to see if he was missing things or had parts of the story wrong.

His book fit the tenor of the time. In the 1970s, there was a nationalist push in some Canadian unions and it fit with that. The overarching argument he made is that there was a lack of support from the American United Auto Workers (UAW) and the CIO. He even went on to say the Americans were harmful to the Canadians. The implication was that the Oshawa workers might have fared better if they weren’t connected to the CIO. I think this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Another thing that astounded me as a long-term labour activist was the organizing effort among workers during the strike. Before it started, there were 300 stewards organized for a workforce of 3,700. Anyone who’s been active in a union will know that’s completely unprecedented. These were active stewards as well, taking up issues and fighting on behalf of workers on the shop floor. Again, Abella never mentions any of this.

He also never wrote anything about women workers or women representatives in the plant, yet there were female stewards and even a woman on the bargaining committee. This was significant at the time.

Of course, he’s also very dismissive of the role of Communists and leftists more generally. But they built the foundation of the union, and set the stage for the strike.

AK: That’s an excellent point. It’s quite widely recognized now that Communists and other leftists were critical to the early organizing efforts in mass production industries.

TL: There was a previous strike in 1928 that is not as well known and was important, but it fell apart because of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor (ALF), the skilled crafts union federation. Left-wingers and Communists were organizing from at least that point on.

They spent a lot of their time underground because they faced repression. But they started a union that was affiliated to the Workers Unity League, the Auto Workers Industrial Union. They distributed papers and organized people all through that period and connected workers in the plant with organizing going [on] in the community. They engaged in fights against evictions and unemployment and quite a range of other issues.

All of this laid the groundwork for what became a later successful organizing effort at GM. It meant that there was a developed leadership with experience that could take advantage of the situation in 1937. These people had a political outlook. Because many of them were socialists or Communists, this influenced how they went about organizing and how they viewed the company and the government.

AK: Can you tell readers more about the strike itself and its outcome? What was at stake and how did the strike shape union organizing in Oshawa going forward?

TL: At the start of the strike, there were some initial indications that workers would be able to negotiate a first collective agreement because this was happening almost immediately after the famous 1936 “sit-down strike” in Flint, Michigan. So it wasn’t unreasonable for them to think that they could sort things out with the company in Oshawa along the same lines as the agreement in the States.

But there was incredible opposition from Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn to any sort of agreement with the union. This was a political roadblock that the workers couldn’t get around without striking. There were many meetings with much member participation and they voted to strike for union recognition and to achieve their basic demands.

When they walked out after clocking in at 7 a.m. on April 8, 1937, it was huge news, in Oshawa of course, but also in Toronto and beyond. It was covered in The New York Times and was followed in Britain. The strike became emblematic of the battle between premier Hepburn and corporations with ties to him and the emerging industrial unions who were trying to get into Canada.

Although the strike was only 16 days long, it really involved rank-and-file workers. Stewards’ meetings, membership meetings. There were letters of support flooding in and people coming to visit the strikers.

Meanwhile, Hepburn was calling for the RCMP to be sent in and railing against the federal Liberals for not cooperating with his attempts to portray the strike as a Communist insurrection. He did the remarkable thing of creating his own militia of people he rounded up to police the situation — but probably to provoke violence. But this failed too.

It must have been remarkable to be there at the time. The whole city was backing the union and people were showing support with mass rallies and parades. Even before the strike was over, other auto supply workers were joining the union and getting agreements. It was the beginning of a broader organizing effort that expanded after the strike.

AK: Much attention is understandably centred on the Ford Windsor Strike, out of which we got the Rand Formula of automatic union dues ‘check-off’ or union security. But perhaps we overlook the full significance of 1937 in Oshawa.

TL: I think that’s true.

AK: Could you talk more about the outcome of the strike? What did the workers achieve? It’s notable, for example, that it was another eight years before Canadian workers won a labour law reform based on the Wagner Act model from 1935 in the United States.

TL: I think what came out of both the Flint sit-down strike and the Oshawa strike was a model of unionism that depended less on the legislative framework and more on the strength of the union on the shopfloor.

When the Rand decision came down after the Ford Windsor strike, for example, there was some radical resistance to it. There were people in Oshawa who were against it. As they saw it, there was a danger in losing strength on the shop floor and weakening the connection between the union and ordinary workers.

The strike in Oshawa would have been settled much sooner without the intervention of premier Hepburn. It ended up being settled on the basis of the agreement in the U.S. The same basic collective agreement was achieved. There were actually some improvements, but the basic structure was there. GM had agreed to it in Detroit.

The Canadian plant was a small branch plant of 3,700 workers. There were over 100,000 workers in the States at GM. There the union had a contract that provided agreement, structure, representation and seniority, the real building blocks of union recognition. When things hit a roadblock in Oshawa because of Hepburn, the UAW leadership negotiated with GM headquarters in Detroit and established that Oshawa would follow the same basic outline of a collective agreement.

Hepburn kept sticking spokes in the wheels and derailing it every time they were on the verge of getting an agreement. But eventually, GM was fed up with him and he had to give up and accept it.

AK: Canadian elites and their politicians were holding out and maintaining that they could prevent industrial unionism in Canada.

TL: Yes, Hepburn had friends in the mining industry. He was motivated to prevent unionization at the mines in Sudbury and Timmins, where mining elites and he had financial interests. It was a huge battle to unionize mining in Ontario, but it eventually succeeded as well, and Oshawa was a step towards this.

There was a cartoon from the Toronto Star at the time that I reproduced in the book, with Hepburn as the boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back the inevitable CIO union tide. Thankfully, he failed.

AK: What would you say is the contemporary legacy of the strike? What does the strike teach people who are interested in union organizing today?

TL: For many years, the legacy of the strike could be seen throughout the Oshawa community. There was a strong union, the Oshawa Labour Council, the Auto Workers’ Credit Union. There was a broad community movement with the union at the centre, and there was strength on the shop floor of GM.

With economic ebbs and flows, there were membership fluctuations, but because of the structure built through the union, workers were able to maintain the union and expand. There was a fight to maintain the extensive steward system and that was connected with the left-wing leadership in the local and in the Canadian section of the UAW. Eventually, Walter Reuther [International President of the UAW in the U.S.], through his supporters, worked to get rid of the left-wingers in the Canadian section and that had a really negative impact, I would say.

Part of the legacy for younger workers is learning about the role of the rank-and-file in the strike. Workers were very mobilized and in many ways were calling the shots in those days. I think there are lessons to be drawn about the role of member mobilization and worker involvement in strikes and in their unions.

AK: How do you think the history you recount in the book has influenced the local activism in Oshawa in more recent years — the resistance to plant closures, for example?

TL: After the Auto Pact was found to be in violation of the WTO [World Trade Organization] rules, the Canadian auto industry became much more precarious. A wave of plant closures followed. When I started, there were nine GM assembly plants in Canada, but this eventually declined to two or three. It was very challenging for the union to respond to this.

Unfortunately, the approach the union took was to make accommodations with the corporation. This was happening with the UAW in the United States as well, even earlier. Two-tier contracts were negotiated with newly hired workers earning less and with defined-benefit pensions eliminated. There was a general weakening of the union’s ability to fight for members. Concessions were accepted as a way to keep jobs. But this didn’t work and it ended up identifying workers’ interests with those of the company.

In 2018, when GM announced it was shutting down Oshawa, there was a debate about how to respond. The union’s campaign was about public relations and was not based on mobilizing the membership to fight back at all. They made a big deal about purchasing an ad during the Super Bowl to coincide with a campaign calling on people to boycott vehicles assembled in Mexico. This ended up portraying Mexican workers as the problem instead of building ties with them.

The union had a “tree of hope” in Memorial Park where people could hang little decorations with “save the plant” on them. In my mind, not very inspiring.

So, some people argued instead that we should be mobilizing the membership and challenging GM more directly. We were saying, if they’re going to leave the plant, then it should be taken over, nationalized. We said that the way to maintain jobs was to repurpose the plant and convert it for the production of things we need to confront climate change. We proposed building battery electric vehicles for government fleets, like Canada Post. This would have not only saved jobs but given people a clearer vision of producing for social benefit rather than for corporate profit.

We made our best effort to mobilize people around Green Jobs Oshawa. We received a lot of attention in the community and across the country. The idea excited people. But without the backing of the union leadership, it fell short.

I think these ideas are still very much alive.

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