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HISTORY OF CAW LOCAL 222
Our Roots: The Formation of Local 222
Oshawa Before The UAW
The establishment of United Automobile Workers Local 222 in Oshawa in 1937 was not the first automobile workers union in Canada nor was it the first attempt at organizing a union at General Motors in Oshawa. The United Automobile, Aircraft and Vehicle Workers of America (UAAVW) was a highly successful industrial union in the United States in the 1910's and 1920's. It developed when the Carriage and Wagon Workers Union came to include automobile workers in 1913 and it grew from the prosperity during and after World War I. In 1917, this union was expelled from the American Federation Of Labor (AFL) as a result of jurisdictional disputes with painters, blacksmiths, sheet metal workers and other craft unions in the plants in which it was organizing. Jurisdictional disputes of this type bedeviled the early history of industrial unions in the United States and Canada until they broke away from the AFL in 1935 to form the Committee For Industrial Organization (CIO). By 1921, the UAAVW was an international union with about 13,000 members organized into 32 locals. A small local of the UAAVW had been set up in Windsor in 1920. However, this union's name does not appear on the federal government's records of unions after 1921. This organization was not a forerunner organization to the later United Automobile Workers, which was chartered by the AFL in 1935.
Another automobile workers' union was organized during the 1920's, which established a local in Oshawa representing the workers at the General Motors plant. A period of acrimony between the company and the workers, which included speed ups on the assembly line, declining wages, espionage and company unionism, was climaxed when General Motors imposed a 40 percent wage cut. The workers went on strike, organizing themselves into a federal labour union and then applied to the AFL for a charter. The organizing drive was rapid. Soon 4,200 automobile workers had signed membership applications and 2,800 of these had paid an initiation fee of $1.00. This union was the largest local labour body ever organized at one time in the Dominion until then.
Success came quickly for the strikers as the strike ended after seven days and no wage cut was imposed. However, AFL headquarters in Washington, D.C. ordered the union to conform to the principles of the AFL, and to reorganize as craft unions and not as an industrial union. The union leaders in Oshawa claimed that, during the initial negotiations with the AFL, the AFL would organize auto workers in other parts of Canada. As a result of this dispute, many of the automobile workers in Oshawa stopped paying dues to the AFL. An amalgamation of several automobile union locals, including Windsor, Walkerville and Oshawa, held a conference on November 4, 1928 in Toronto and formed a national union called the Auto Workers' Industrial Union of Canada, affiliated with the All-Canadian Congress Of Labour. The Trades and Labour Congress then set up a rival union in the Oshawa area. General Motors began providing better wages and working conditions in an effort to take advantage of this inter-union dispute. As these unions disappeared from the GM facilities, the wages and working conditions the company provided also deteriorated.
In 1936 General Motors had earned $200 Million in profits, the largest in its history, when it decided to cut the wages of the Oshawa workers. Conditions on the assembly lines were characterized by speed-ups, no rest periods and fears that complaints would lead to permanent layoff. While the pay was good when people worked, wages were kept down to around $600 per year because of the seasonality of the work. Work lasted six or seven months a year, the last two or three months of which were part-time with work only two or three days a week. Many employees had to apply for City welfare.
GM paid workers according to a bonus efficiency plan, a form of piecework. When the 1937 model year began, the bonus was cut, more work added and the workforce was reduced. Later during the same model year, the workers shut off the line in the body shop and sat down. Sporadic stoppages took place in a number of areas in the plant. Finally, the workers walked out of the body shop and held a meeting in the local CCF hall where they picked a committee to present their grievances to management. The company refused to deal with the workers' complaints.
The CIO had been established in 1935 in order to organize industrial workers into large company-wide and industry-wide unions. The CIO later broke with the AFL because of the AFL's reluctance to organize workers on an industrial basis rather than a craft basis. The recently formed United Auto Workers, which became part of the CIO in 1936, had been engaging in intense organizing efforts in Cleveland, Detroit and in Flint, Michigan.
With the inception of organizing, the UAW sent Hugh Thompson, who was then organizing in Buffalo, to Oshawa to help the organizing drive. He arrived in Oshawa in February 1937 and immediately attended a meeting of the body shop workers. Once the organizing began, it quickly spread into the Skinner Plant, to Duplate and to Ontario Steel Products, all feeder plants to the GM assembly lines. Four thousand workers were signed up within a week.
On March 2, 1937, Local 222 UAW was issued a charter by UAW headquarters.
Under the guidance of Mr. & Mrs. Hugh Thompson, an organization was set in place at the GM plants. Every department in GM had a Chief Steward. Departments were subdivided into groups, each with an elected steward. A bargaining committee was chosen to approach the company. The membership delegated authority to the body of elected stewards who could determine when and if a strike should be called.
The GM Strike of 1937
Negotiations took place in Queen's Park where the Honourable D. Croll, Minister of Welfare in the Hepburn government, attempted to bring General Motors officials and both local and international union representatives together to negotiate a settlement. However, negotiations broke down when General Motors refused to sign an agreement recognizing UAW Local 222 as the bargaining agent for the Oshawa automobile workers.
The union stewards met on April 7 to hear the report of the bargaining committee and voted to strike the next morning. At 7:05 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, April 8, 1937, the strike began when employees punched in as usual and then walked out. However after the stewards' meeting, Hugh Thompson called Detroit and informed Homer Martin, the UAW president. Martin did not believe that GM could sufficiently be organized in six weeks to warrant a strike. Thompson then asked Charles Millard and Art Shultz, two of the local leaders, to contact the stewards' body in order to delay a strike. Later that evening, April 8, Thompson called Detroit again…the strike was on.
Premier Mitch Hepburn took an active involvement in the strike because of his intense opposition to industrial unions. This opposition may have been due to his close connection with the mining industry, which feared industrial organizing in the automobile industry might spread to mining.
Premier Hepburn sent a detachment of between 60 and 100 RCMP officers to Oshawa. He asked Ottawa for an additional 100 RCMP officers. When the request was denied, he proceeded to organize a special 400 men force of militia made up mostly war veterans and university students. This militia became known as "Hepburn's Hussars" and the "Sons of Mitches". The men were billeted in the Armories on University Avenue, not far from the Legislative building. Preparations for action included: riot training; going to Oshawa in plain clothes and being instructed where to set up machine guns; and the distribution of live ammunition with instructions to shoot strikers at the knees if ordered to fire.
At the same time, the union organized its own membership, setting up a form of police instructed to ensure that no trouble occurred. The Oshawa mayor, Alex Hall, closed the liquor store and the beverage rooms in the city for the duration of the strike.
Political events began to take on a belligerent tone. Premier Hepburn made statements that his special militia would march on Oshawa. But the people of Oshawa, through their Mayor, objected to this. Thereupon, Hepburn again called on the Dominion Government to send in the RCMP. This time the government agreed and a detachment was dispatched to the city. The mayor of Oshawa refused to take the legal action necessary to enable the RCMP to enter the city - that is, to read the riot act. The people of Oshawa objected to RCMP involvement because the strike was entirely peaceful.
In the meantime, 25,000 people demonstrated in support of the strike at Queen's Park in Toronto. A conflict developed within the cabinet over the government's handling of the strike. Two cabinet ministers, the Honourable A. Roebuck, Attorney General and Minister of Labour, and the Honourable D. Croll, Minister of Welfare, submitted their resignations from the Hepburn cabinet. Croll is quoted as having said at this time, "I'd rather walk with the workers than ride with General Motors." Premier Hepburn then took on both the Labour and the Welfare portfolios himself.
One of the major stumbling blocks to a settlement remained the presence of the International UAW in the negotiations. Hepburn denounced the "remote control" of the bargaining by the union, and he refused to proceed with a meeting of GM officials and local representatives, which was to be held in his office, when he found out that the local representatives were communicating with UAW headquarters in Detroit.
Our First Contract
A contract, which represented a compromise on the issue of recognizing the International UAW, was finally negotiated with the Premier's support. The contract was signed between the company and the local union with no signature or mention of the international director of the UAW, although a number of other of the union's demands had been met.
The strike had lasted 18 days and resulted in the formation of the largest UAW local in Canada, and represented the CIO's first major success in Canada. The contract was unusual as it deliberately did not recognize the International UAW but, at the same time, it ran concurrently with agreements in the United States between GM and the UAW there.
General Motors workers ratified the first contract on Friday, April 23, 1937, at the Oshawa Armories. The secret ballot was completed by about noon; 2,205 voted in favour and 39 opposed. The agreement was signed in Premier Hepburn's office at Queen's Park the next day.
Company resistance to the union persisted even after the signing of the first contract. UAW Local 222 was not officially recognized by GM, as a party to the agreement, until 1942.
© CAW Local 222
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