Woodworkers and Legitimacy: The IWA in Canada, 1937-1957

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, as a part of broad North American phenomenon of industrial militancy and labour law reform, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA) became recognized as the legitimate bargaining agency for most woodworkers throughout the Pacific coast. In British Columbia, as a basis for consolidating trade unionism and furthering the class struggle within the important forest industry, a well-organized cadre of communist trade union militants channelled the syndicalist and revolutionary traditions of earlier twentieth century woodworkers organization into District One of the IWA, and into compliance with state institutions governing industrial relations that emerged during World War Two. By 1948, though, the quest for legitimacy had entrammelled the communist leaders of District One in a restrictive web of institutional, bureaucratic and political relationships from which they sought escape by serving ties with the union they had struggled hard to establish. Their fledgling Woodworkers' Industrial Union of Canada, considered illegitimate by both the state and the mainstream labour movement, attracted only a small minority of woodworkers and enjoyed a very short, unremarkable history. Through a detailed examination of union, industry and state records of industrial relations activity, this thesis provides both narrative and analysis of a complex course of events leading from the era of the open shop, through the attainment or union recognition and a period of consolidation, to a final confrontation in 1947-48 within the Canadian IWA between two distinct visions of trade union practice. Ultimately, the early, militant woodworker traditions, subsumed within communist industrial unionism, proved to be in contradiction with the institutional structures governing relations between labour and capital in postwar Canada. The post-1948 leaders of IWA District One more closely reflected the emerging North American reality in their approach to trade unionism and industrial relations than did their predecessors. Out of the intense struggles of the 1930s and 40s, a full-blown business unionism emerged by the latter 1950s as the governing programme of the modern Canadian IWA, albeit a programme not universally accepted by rank-and-file woodworkers....