‘The moment of awakening’

May 22, 2019 8:04 AM

On May 15th, 1919, the country — and the world — watched in astonishment as tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in Winnipeg. They demanded higher pay, better working conditions and the right to bargain collectively. Some 35,000 workers took over the running of Canada's third-largest city for six weeks. The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the most important labour events in Canadian history. “Men who had just returned from a horrific war in Europe could not find employment; factories were shutting down and bankruptcies were a common occurrence. Tens of thousands of people in Winnipeg, Manitoba alone lived in substandard housing, where disease was a deadly reality. Working-class immigrants faced deep divisions along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines.” Lessons From The Winnipeg General Strike
posted by The Whelk (10 comments total)

CBC Ideas also has an excellent hour-long radio documentary about the Winnipeg General Strike that features archival interviews with strike organizers.
posted by JamesBay at 8:19 AM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]

It's also interesting to consider how the CBC of today would report on the Winnipeg General Strike.
posted by JamesBay at 8:24 AM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

My attitude towards CBC's (And organized labour's) present-day relationship to the strike is mixed at best, but the CBC also has a swack of supplementals about the strike.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 8:34 AM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

good to see this being taken on like this by the CBC etc.

I doubt my high school Canadian History did more than mention the strike in passing. If I didn't have a friend whose family took it seriously, I'd probably know absolutely nothing about it.
posted by philip-random at 9:41 AM on May 22, 2019

The strike makes an appearance in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and I guess there's a new film coming out about the strike called Stand! (a critical discussion of the strike's depiction in film here).

CBC did a decent job on this bit of our history which for the most part isn't really taught in schools. I guess most of our labour history isn't taught in schools... However, I do hope this might be a continuing trend - we're coming up to the 40th anniversary of the end of what was one of the longest worker's rights strikes in Canadian history, the 1978 Sudbury strike, and I'd like to see a bit about that done. Especially since there's still many people around to tell the story. This year is also the 70th anniversary year of the 1949 Asbestos Strike in Quebec which was very much a turning point for Quebec politics and society - it'd be nice to see something on that (at least in English).
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:49 AM on May 22, 2019 [7 favorites]

David Lester - who has been inspiring me as an artist and musician for something like 25 years - recently published 1919: A Graphic History of the Winnipeg General Strike.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:06 PM on May 22, 2019 [2 favorites]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that this was the first general (as opposed to industry-specific) strike in North American history.
posted by clawsoon at 12:08 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Canada really out performed in the First World War. It lost more soldiers killed than the US, despite having less than one tenth the population of the US. So the letdown of coming home to a depression economy and the post traumatic stress must have been tremendous. The 1% of the day must have been scared shitless of the Bolshevik contagion. This is the Howard Zinn type stuff that needs to be taught in public schools.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:45 PM on May 22, 2019 [6 favorites]

The Canada Hall in the former Canadian Museum of Civilization had an large permanent exhibit on the Winnipeg National Strike. I have always had a sneaking suspicion that one of the main reasons the Harper Regime ordered the old Canada Hall exhibit demolished and replaced with the current bland version when they renamed the museum the Canadian Museum of History was to get rid of that exhibit.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:18 PM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

I doubt my high school Canadian History did more than mention the strike in passing.

Yeah, I can specifically recall that in the early 90s my high school Canadian history class used a textbook that had one picture (this one, IIRC) and a couple of scant paragraphs on it.

I guess most of our labour history isn't taught in schools...

I hear you. They also generally don't mention the 1945 Ford strike in Windsor (and ensuing blockade of the Ford plant). The strike lasted 90 days, and resulted in the Rand Formula (which enshrined union dues checkoff).

But I do have to extend kudos to my high school economics teacher who made us watch Final Offer, the documentary about the 1984 GM negotiations that resulted in the Canadian wing of the UAW under Bob White breaking away to become the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor).
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 3:38 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]