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During the Second World War, the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Canada grew from a handful of members to more than a quarter-million and from political insignificance to a position of influence in the emergence of the welfare state. What was it about the "good war" that brought about this phenomenal growth? And how did this coming of age during the war affect the emerging CIO? Labour Goes to War analyzes the organizing strategies of the CIO during the war to show that both economic and cultural forces were behind its explosive growth. Labour shortages gave workers greater power in the workplace and increased their militancy. But workers’ patriotism, their ties to those on active service, memories of the First World War, and allegiance to the "people’s war" also contributed to the CIO’s growth - and to what it claimed for workers. At the same time, union organizers and workers influenced one another as the war changed lives, opinions, expectations - and notions of women’s rights. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material, Wendy Cuthbertson illuminates this complex wartime context. Her analysis shows how the war changed lives, opinions, and expectations. She also shows how the complex, often contradictory, motives of workers during this period left the Canadian labour movement with an ambivalent progressive/conservative legacy. --Publisher's description
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The CIO related this narrative to working-class Canadians through new, union channels of communication and through a myriad of union-minded social interactions. Together - the CIO's narrative of victory and its subaltern public sphere that communicated this narrative - helped the CIO overcome formidable obstacles to organizing. The Canadian CIO's 1930s momentum had stalled by 1939, but by 1944 it was the country's largest labour organization and was influencing Canadian politics. Using union newspapers, organizing literature, minutes, correspondence, oral interviews, government and corporate records, and the daily press, this dissertation describes and analyzes how the CIO organized thousands of wartime workers into unions in spite of significant obstacles. This study then examines the institutions the CIO developed to create a union "mini-public sphere," where workers debated and developed union positions on issues facing them as workers, family members, citizens and military veterans. The CIO was successful in turning private, workplace issues such as union recognition and bargaining rights into public issues that government was forced to deal with, and its organizing successes and its entry into politics witnessed burgeoning support for the social democratic CCF, a phenomenon that encouraged mainstream political parties to adopt more progressive platforms. The CIO's breakthrough was based not just on worker-empowering wartime labour shortages. Its skill in using modern communications was also a factor in its wartime success, as well as its use of the war as a central character in these communications efforts. CIO communications used a narrative that elided workers with warriors as partners in a "people's war" to defeat the nation's enemies and build a new social order. The CIO told workers that if they organized into unions, they would have the power to shape a peace that, unlike after the Great War, would benefit this worker-warrior partnership. Victory was thus defined not merely as defeating the Axis but creating a modern, new Canada, where workers would have citizenship rights in the workplace and where citizenship entailed a fairer, more egalitarian society. The CIO's talk about rights extended to women workers, and its arguments for equal pay and women's seniority were increasingly based on women's human rights.
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