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Accounts of the 1959 International Woodworkers of America strike in Newfoundland have portrayed the Newfoundland Lumbermen's Association, the local union which held jurisdiction over many of the island's loggers, as a "company union" and its president, Joseph Thompson, as a co-opted unionist. This essay examines the NLA'S origins during the 1930s and shows that Thompson built an autonomous union to improve logger's lives. The paper also brings to the fore the loggers' own experience of the Great Depression to show they did not passively accept economic hardship and exploitation and took an active role in the making of their union. At times, the loggers' militancy dictated the NLA's bargaining positions and prompted some social change in the woods. The paper concludes that while Thompson and the NLA did not view class and class conflict in explicitly political terms, it does not diminish their importance in the loggers' working lives during the 1930s.
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A poor but independent Dominion in the British Empire until 1949, Newfoundland and Labrador is now Canada's poorest province. This thesis argues that capital's uneven development of Newfoundland helps to explain its economic, social, and political troubles in this century. The uneven course of development left Newfoundland with an archaic fishery, enclaves of modern industry dependent on outport labour and external forces, and a state which lacked sufficient resources to save itself or its people during the Great Depression. The uneven pattern of development also impeded the full development of a proletariat which might have challenged the island's dominant interests and created a more equal and prosperous society. The outcome of these "developments" was confederation with Canada and enduring economic and social problems. Focusing on the period 1929-1959, the thesis develops this argument through a study of the pulp and paper industry, one of Newfoundland's major land-based enterprises in this century. It reveals that forest capital's reliance on seasonal outport labour in its woods operations propped up merchant operations in the inshore fishery. Merchant capital profited from fishers' work in the woods as wages paid debts and purchased fishing and consumption supplies. Throughout the period, the Newfoundland state defended forest capital's interests, and not incidentally the course of uneven development. It did so because the industry's mills and company towns were among the few successes of a national policy to diversify an economy dependent on the export of a single staple. Forest capital exploited fabled interior resources and employed thousands in its mills and woodlands which reduced pressure on an unproductive fishery and on a state often burdened with heavy relief bills. Although Newfoundland loggers confronted the combined power of capital and the state, they struggled to resist their exploitation and to improve the lives of their households and communities. In this way, they challenged the course of development in Newfoundland. During the 1930s, loggers staged strikes and joined Newfoundland's first loggers' union. In 1940, disruptive class conflict ended when forest capital and the state spearheaded the creation of the Woods Labour Board. The Board, which included representatives of capital, labour, and the state, inaugurated a conservative period of class collaboration, and continuous production until the tumultuous 1959 International Woodworkers of America strike. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Board helped forest capital accumulate profits in an industry dominated by Fordist-like production forces in the mills and primitive production forces in the woods. The Board's downward pressure on wages and conditions, union representatives separated from their members, and a work force dominated by outport fishers who continued to require seasonal wages, explains the 1959 conflagration. The dissertation concludes that the loggers' 1959 defeat by the combined forces of capital and state followed an historical pattern determined by the uneven pattern of development. This pattern, therefore, helps to explain enduring poverty in outport Newfoundland and the difficulties workers faced to challenge the conditions of their existence.
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