Wildcat Strikes Research Articles

Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt

Reviewed by: Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972 by Benjamin Isitt Ian Milligan Isitt, Benjamin — Militant Minority: British Columbia Workers and the Rise of a New Left, 1948-1972. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. 458. The New Left was not as new as it might have seemed; it instead needs to be understood as having deeper roots than the more traditional narrative of rupture might suggest. This is one of the key take-homes of Benjamin Isitt’s expansive Militant Minority: that the New Lefts of the sixties, which would provide a crucial support to the path-breaking 1972 victory of Dave Barrett’s New Democratic Party in British Columbia, owed much to those who came before. The Old Left, epitomized by institutions such as the Communist Party of Canada, may have waned through persecution, prosecution, and the revelation of Stalin’s crimes against the Russian people; yet it, and fellow institutions such as the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union, helped sustain an oppositional culture in the province. While the CCF/NDP experienced electoral and organizational nadirs in the 1950s and 1960s, other left organizations – from Trotskyists, student movements, and the women’s movement – helped carry the torch. All of this helps make what happens in the late 1960s and early 1970s all the more significant. Indeed, a reframing of the period is one of the best contributions this monograph makes to the field. Questions of how to periodize the “sixties” have intrigued several scholars; Isitt instead frames his period as that of the “long boom.” This is a compelling approach that helps expand sixties studies. Alongside this social and political narrative, Isitt also reclaims political economy as a fruitful field of study. The interplay between British Columbia’s resource economy, politics, and class dynamics is well fleshed out. For the “Militant Minority” functioned in a context of a political “Tug of War,” waged between labour and capital. The traditional account of post-Second World War [End Page 561] labour relations holds that unions gained legal recognition at the expense of being encumbered in a framework of legal restrictions and regulations. Ben Isitt rejects this “postwar compromise” narrative in his local study of British Columbia. Rather, the compromise for him seems far from settled: wildcat strikes, breakaway unions, and growing nationalism characterized the British Columbian experience as the militant minority interacted with these legal structures. Militant Minority makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian labour, society, and the 1960s. Indeed, Isitt’s work is an exemplar of the new current of political history growing in Canada today. This book balances the political sphere, social movements, and everyday life well. Militant Minority is generally well written and engaging. The arguments that Isitt builds are steeped in an almost exhaustive amount of primary and secondary source material. He draws on oral interviews, police records, archival documents, and a near-encyclopedia array of secondary sources. The chapters are all well crafted. His chapter on BC’s peace movement was especially engaging; his contention that the anti-war movement was a combination of Old Leftists, unionists, and a new layer of activists helps reinforce the importance of that social movement. There are some problems with this work, however. Isitt’s use of several terms is a bit troubling. At times, perhaps due to rhetorical flourishes, the “militant minority” framework can come off as a bit homogenizing. This is sometimes unavoidable given the scope of the term (which ranges from middle-class professionals in the NDP to militant communist fishermen), but one wonders if “militant minorities” might have been a more apt descriptor. The New Left is also a bit awkwardly defined. Isitt seeks to expand the definition of the New Left, but fails to fully justify this expansion. He rightfully includes groups such as the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA), but also (questionably) Trotskyists, and others who would not have self-identified under this mantle. At times, the book is also a bit stylistically clumsy. Isitt’s voice is drowned out by far too many block quotations. Vexingly, the 458-page book contains only 203 pages of...

Revolution at the Point of Production: An Interview with Mike Hamlin of DRUM and The League of Revolutionary Black Workers

Mike Hamlin was a central figure of the Black Power Movement that manifested in Detroit. He believed Black workers needed to be organized at the point of production for a successful revolution to occur. As such, Hamlin and other radicals formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) and helped organize a wildcat strike at Dodge Main on May 2, 1968. As a result of the strike and increased organization and agitation, other revolutionary union movements, for example the Ford Revolutionary Union Movement (FRUM), began to emerge and struggle for economic and racial justice. The successful formation of revolutionary union movements at different workplaces led to the formation of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The League was inspired by Third World anticolonial struggles and the theoretical work of Marx, Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Frantz Fanon, and Fidel Castro. The following interview took place outside of Mike Hamlin’s apartment in the summer of 2010 when we discussed the history and theory leading to the

Her Fight is Your Fight: “Guest Worker” Labor Activism in the Early 1970s West Germany

AbstractWhen the postwar economic boom came to a crashing halt in early 1970s West Germany, foreign “guest workers,” often the first to be laid off, bore the brunt of high inflation, rising prices, declining growth rates, widespread unemployment, and social discontent. Following the economic downturn and the ensuing crisis of stagflation, workers' uprisings became increasingly common in West Germany. The summer of 1973 saw a sharp increase in workers' activism broadly, including a wave of “women's strikes.” However, historical attention to the role of foreign workers, especially of foreign female workers, within these strikes has been limited. This article presents a case study of wildcat strikes spearheaded by foreign, female workers in the early 1970s, focusing specifically on the strikes at the Pierburg Autoparts Factory in Neuss, West Germany. For these foreign women, activism in the early 1970s had a larger significance than just securing better working conditions. Indeed, striking foreign workers were no longer negotiating temporary problems; they were signaling that they were there to stay. Foreign workers' sustained and successful activism challenged the imposed category of “guest worker,” switching the emphasis from guest to worker. Ultimately, the Pierburg strikes' outcomes benefited all workers—foreign and German, male and female—and had grave implications for wage discrimination across West Germany as well.

Jean Anil Louis-Juste, Prezan!

On January 12, 2010, several hours before a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, gunmen shot and killed Sociology Professor Jean Anil Louis-Juste as he was leaving the grounds of his department at the State University of Haiti. A tireless revolutionary and engaged academic, Louis-Juste had recently received multiple death threats for his role in organizing a series of university student demonstrations that sparked wildcat strikes at one of Port-au-Prince's largest textile assembly plants. By reflecting on Louis-Juste's political and intellectual development, this article seeks to draw attention to the ways in which those on the Haitian left have sought to contend with the political repression and economic marginalization that have hindered the promise of the 1986 popular uprising against Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

La Casa de Esclavos Modernos

F or California state employees concerned with agricultural production, the solution to one crisis at the outset of World War II meant having to confront another one.1 The first crisis was a fear, as the war heated up, of a serious labor shortage and thus a collapse of California’s highly intensive, specialized industrialized system of agriculture that many understood to be essential to the war effort.2 While there was ample evidence that such a labor shortage did not exist, there was no doubt that a certain hysteria did—a hysteria that California agriculturalists were determined to exploit as a means of gaining access to the large pool of labor that lived just across the border in Mexico.3 And they did. Fairly significant opposition to labor importation voiced in 1941 by members of the New Deal Farm Security Administration and the California State Division of Immigration and Housing, which was the primary state agency devoted to questions of agricultural labor, and which in Culbert Olson’s so-called Little New Deal government was headed by the redoubtable Carey McWilliams, quickly melted away after Pearl Harbor. By August 1942 an agreement had been signed with Mexico providing for the recruitment and importation of tens of thousands of men for temporary agricultural work in the United States (Figure 1).4 While workers were sent to the cotton fields of Texas and the south, the beet fields of Colorado and Nebraska, the mixed farms of the upper Midwest, and the orchards of the Pacific Northwest, California quickly became the largest importer of Mexican workers. First deployed to the beet fields of the Sacramento and Salinas Valleys in September 1942, imported workers— braceros , as they were called—soon came to dominate harvests up and down the state: from the early lettuce and carrot harvests …

Striking Fiction

Striking Fiction Jay Shearer (bio) The Dave Store Massacre. Ron Ebest. Academy Chicago Publishers. http://www.academychicago.com/newsite. 225 pages; paper, $17.95. This ought to be the appropriate moment for a strike narrative or union story—what with half the world rising in popular protest—yet stories of labor struggle remain for the most part rare (at least in the U.S.). Given our political climate, this is not surprising. American labor meets vigorous resistance just about everywhere—public and private, schools, megastores, state capitols, NBAs. Thus a strike novel seems especially welcome at the moment—and one starring a wildcat strike at that, the opening salvo of Ron Ebest's first, the sometimes excessive, often engaging The Dave Store Massacre. (In this scenario, the mostly women employees of the Jackson Missouri Dave Store—Ebest's superstore to beat all superstores—are not union members; they simply walk off the job en masse, unionizing, as it were, on the spot). If thrilling to imagine, this really is the last option for Dave Store's real-life counterparts (Walmart, Target, etc.). The underpaid employees of big box retailers—along with their beleaguered managers—face a brutally anti-labor culture where the faintest whiff of unionization is met with the threat of a pink slip. Although a wildcat action seems extreme, it's both a necessary possibility and strong dramatic starting point. This is politically volatile material for satire—arguably the only material worth satirizing—what can also be difficult territory to tread without resorting to sermonizing or ra ra ra. Ebest shows his colors here and there, but any sermonizing is rare. He trains his eye not so much on the strike itself, but rather on the internal lives of characters observing it from opposing angles, none of them actually striking. There is the notable exception of Magda Fuller, a Dave Store clerk and single mother, recently widowed, the one striker given brief (internal) stage time. Magda's husband was killed in the CushionAire factory murder-suicide noted in the novel's first line (the strike occurs precisely two months after this tragedy; her husband, the factory manager, shot by a laid-off employee). Magda's role allows for an extra angle of revenge in the novel's final confrontation, but mostly she—and others of her position and class—remains a backdrop to those outside the strike, those policing, managing, controlling, negotiating: police chiefs, mayors, city attorneys; Dave Store managers, founders and heirs, as well as the lethally armed posse that protects them (a crew of retired cops and servicemen unironically known as the "ColdTalons.") Why we're not given more time with the actual folk on strike seems a good question—even a vital one—though Ebest does display admirable range with the rest of his chosen cast. His characters are, to a one, entangled in myriad small town soap operas, with conflicted spouses and embattled careers. There is Mary Lively, Jackson's mayor, a Democrat who backed into the job after a sex scandal destroyed her opponent. She works closely with—and is falling for (adulterously)—the police chief, Sid Hatfield, an affable stoner and expert marksman. Mary's husband, C. E. Lively, is the city attorney, a desperate lush whose marriage and faculties are both in decay. The novel begins and ends with these three, in fact (C. E. goes to a coffee shop to inform the mayor and police chief about the strike), though you wouldn't necessarily call them the novel's center. Anchors maybe, but not centers. Center, here, is hard to pin. Through Ebest's roaming, arch omniscience, the protagonist emerges as not so much the Strike itself (as it is, for example, in Ousmane's classic strike novel God's Bits of Wood [1960])—but rather the conflict among the managing periphery, the "upper" struggle, as it were, where store managers lose control and Big Guns of all variety are swiftly called in for back up. The manager in question is Lucas McCain Cantor, on whose watch these workers have launched a strike—an unpardonable failing in Dave Store culture (as it is in Walmart's). Lucas comes fit with...

The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement (review)

Reviewed by: The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement George N. Green The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement. By Miriam Pawel. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. Pp. 384. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. ISBN 9781596914605, $28.00 cloth.) This is the story of eight people, mostly from the fields and classrooms, who joined César Chávez's farm worker crusade as organizers and activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Their story highlights Chávez's incredible accomplishments as well as their own, but unlike most books about the farm workers' movement, it also chronicles Chávez's ultimately woeful shortcomings as a leader and administrator. The grape agribusinesses had no intention of ever recognizing a union, even one that had the overwhelming support of the impoverished field hands. After two years of failed strikes, Chávez switched tactics to launch a nationwide boycott of grapes in 1967. At the height of the boycott in 1970 seventeen million Americans stopped eating grapes so that farm workers in California could achieve better wages and working conditions. The selected eight people were among a host of volunteers who initially worked for free and slept on floors, inspired by Chávez's oratory, his commitment to non-violence, his vision of poor people taking command of their lives, and his sacrifices—e.g., Gandhi-like fasting—to propel the movement forward. The well-known union victories are noted, but the author focuses on the problems that abounded. The eight leaders had to cope with chaotic union hiring halls, wildcat strikes, innumerable and complicated lawsuits, and staying in touch with widely dispersed workers from the remote headquarters at La Paz. The author describes [End Page 349] the long ordeal of the UFW crumbling from within, and places the blame squarely on Chávez's inept micromanagement and growing intolerance of dissent. Chief lawyer and frequent negotiator Jerry Cohen, for instance, believed he was close to having the historic grape contracts renewed in 1973, when Chávez suddenly excoriated the growers for allowing prostitutes and gambling in the company camps. The negotiations failed. With the Coachella grape strike faltering in 1974, Chávez denounced illegal immigrants in the fields and urged the federal government to step up deportations. But the union's staunch church supporters never embraced the demand. One divisive issue revolved around the modest salaries that the lawyers and some other staffers received unbeknownst to volunteer staffers. This startling revelation in 1977 was accompanied by Chávez's demand that the union staff abandon salaries and traditional unionism and adopt communal living, modeled after California's Synanon drug rehabilitation cult. Marked by shaved heads and overalls, Synanon members were deeply involved in the "Game," an encounter group exercise in which players hurled insults at one another for alleged bad behavior in a therapeutic effort to enhance communication. The "Game," soon required of all staffers, seemed to promote Chávez's increasing fears that the union was infiltrated with enemies. In the late 1970s and in the 1980s Chávez turned against most of his veteran staffers, some of whom turned on each other, and the grape and vegetable contracts began disappearing. Chávez died in 1993, by which time only one percent of the state's farm hands (5,000) were still under contract. The author, an accomplished reporter, utilizes interviews and archival sources, albeit some of them private. She disrupts individual storylines by switching from one activist to another, but stitches it all together coherently in a well-researched, sorrowful tale of the demise of a potentially transformational union for farm hands. Future UFW researchers will have to deal with this unsettling book, and will find the main body of it very difficult to question. I should disclose that I was marginally involved in la causa and met two of the leaders mentioned several times in the book (but none of the eight principals). Also, I remember that the movement in the Rio Grande Valley was plagued by some of the same internal problems that occurred in California, but the Texas story—including the...

There's always work at the post office: African American postal workers and the fight for jobs, justice, and equality

This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Historian Philip Rubio, a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States.Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.

Seated by the Sea: The Maritime History of Portland, Maine, and its Irish Longshoremen by Michael C. Connolly, and: New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks by William J. Mello (review)

Reviewed by: Seated by the Sea: The Maritime History of Portland, Maine, and its Irish Longshoremen by Michael C. Connolly, and:New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks by William J. Mello Eric Arnesen Seated by the Sea: The Maritime History of Portland, Maine, and its Irish Longshoremen. By Michael C. Connolly. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2010. New York Longshoremen: Class and Power on the Docks. By William J. Mello. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2010. Over the past generation, longshore labor has captured the attention of more than a few labor historians. The worlds of waterfront work—the organization of the labor process, ethnic and racial tensions, the impact of technology, political orientation, and the fortunes of trade unions—have been ably explored by scholars of the United States, as well as Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Case studies of numerous ports, here and abroad, reveal the heterogeneity of dockworkers’ experiences; the lives and labor of waterfront laborers can be reduced to no single formula. That conclusion is reinforced by two new books on maritime workers in Portland, Maine and New York. Michael C. Connolly’s Seated by the Sea reconstructs the history of a group of overwhelmingly Irish dockworkers over the course of more than a century and a half. After replacing a small number of black dock workers in the mid-19th century, Irish immigrants, and later their sons, dominated Portland’s waterfront. A smaller number of Italian immigrants joined them by the early 20th century, and over time ethnic rivalry gave way to interethnic interaction. Like their counterparts in other ports, Portland dockworkers organized in self-defense. The Longshoremen’s Benevolent Society tackled issues of wages, labor conditions, and work rules with mixed success. The failure of several strikes before World War One led the Portland trade unionists to affiliate with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), bringing them into contact with dockers along the east coast and allowing for greater coordination and cooperation. The immediate postwar years represented the local union’s high point, with some 1,366 members in its ranks. Although their work remained “unpredictable, seasonal, and casual” (86), Portland longshoremen achieved a level of security that allowed them to provide their families with a needed “safety net” (184). [End Page 236] The health of Portland’s maritime economy deteriorated by the 1930s. Heavily dependent upon the transshipment of Canadian grain—Portland was known as Montreal’s winter port—the city was economically vulnerable to developments north of the border. Improvements to port infrastructure in St. John and Halifax and belated attention to waterfront modernization in Portland contributed to a precipitous decline. “All of Portland’s eggs had been placed in one basket,” Connolly concludes, “and between 1923 and 1934 the bottom literally fell out” (150). The size of the dock labor force dropped as well, with subsequent technological developments, such as containerization, reducing yet further the need for labor. “The handwriting was on the wall for the longshoremen of Portland” (154). They survived, but never again would they – or waterfront commerce – contribute substantially to the city’s economy. William J. Mello’s New York Longshoremen recounts a story far different than the one that unfolded on Portland’s docks. The size of the New York labor force dwarfed that of Portland; its labor force was ethnically and racially far more heterogeneous; and its trade unionists were considerably more militant than their northern counterparts. New York’s postwar waterfront laborers confronted corrupt union leaders, powerful and determined employers, and hostile city, state, and federal officials usually allied with business. The fundamental issue, Mello argues, was a straightforward one: Who controls the waterfront? Efforts by ILA officers, steamship agents, and government representatives to undermine or eliminate workers’ control generated a significant tradition of rank-and-file resistance that forms the book’s subject. Indeed, the ubiquity of labor discontent on the docks produced waves of wildcat strikes, slowdowns, and large-scale work stoppages that, time and again, brought to a halt the commerce of the nation’s largest port. Over time, employers’ strength and new technologies put workers on the defensive. Ultimately, the advent of automation and containerization...

Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa's Chinese Enclaves

AbstractThis article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow – the pursuit of flexible labour regimes – as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It analyses the respective “politics of casualization” in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania–China Friendship Mill in the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted precipitous “informalization” of employment since the Chinese assumed full or majority ownership in the late 1990s. Wildcat strikes were staged by workers in both cases. Nevertheless, Zambian copper miners, but not Tanzanian textile workers, seem to have successfully halted this tendency of casualization. After several years of struggle, in 2007 they signed new collective agreements with the Chinese management, who agreed gradually to convert all casual and contract jobs into “permanent” pensionable ones. By explaining the divergent outcomes of these two cases of labour resistance, I hope to identify the major factors shaping the encounter between Chinese managers and African workers.

Actors' Interests and Local Contexts in Intrafirm Conflict: The 2004 GM and Opel Crisis

Research on industrial relations in MNCs remains limited to aggregate concepts and dominant actor groups. Focusing on a case study of the 2004 wildcat strike at GM Bochum, Germany, this paper argues for the inclusion of genuinely local, micro-level perspectives and marginalised actors. It makes use of an extended framework of actor embeddedness, which introduces interests and situations as core variables. The case analysis shows how diverging interests of Opel shop stewards, workers and works council members led to a multiplication of conflict lines and the development of competing rationalities within the workforce.

Where People Like Us Live (review)

Reviewed by: Where People Like Us Live Deborah Stevenson Cumbie, Patricia Where People Like Us Live Geringer/HarperCollins, 2008 [224p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-137598-9 $17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-137597-2 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7–10 When Libby’s peripatetic family lands in Racine, Wisconsin, Libby finds a friend in a fellow fourteen-year-old, Angie. Libby’s father is soon out of work at his new factory job as a result of a wildcat strike, Libby’s parents are fighting, and Libby increasingly finds refuge in Angie’s knowledgeable companionship. One day, however, Libby’s feeling that there’s something strange in Angie’s relationship with her stepfather, Kevin, is shockingly confirmed by the sexual abuse she sees through Angie’s window, and Libby knows that she has to help Angie even if it means destroying the friendship. There’s a vignettish flavor to this novel, since Libby’s family seems poised to continue on its troubled and nomadic ways while the encounter changes Angie’s life entirely; that and its unexplained period setting (it would seem to occur about twenty years ago) give it a slightly untethered and inconclusive feel, and Libby is less a character in her own right than simply a responder to the situation. The book is bracingly straightforward about Angie’s experience, though, even allowing her to justifiably miss her abuser (“He was the only grownup who acted as [End Page 421] if he cared about her future”) and painting her as a young girl who deserves better but not a tragic and wounded heroine. Though Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This (BCCB 3/94) is a superior story on this theme, many kids will recognize the strain of a friendship that involves an unkeepable secret, and they’ll relate to Libby’s quandary. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

From Conflict to Shared Development: Social Capital in a Tayloristic Environment

The Danish slaughterhouse industry is known for its Tayloristic organization of work, poor industrial relations with frequent wild cat strikes, and a hazardous work environment. However, a few slaughterhouses show big differences in sickness absenteeism, labour turnover and frequency of strikes. These slaughterhouses were studied in order to understand the latitude for cooperation and improvement of the psychosocial work environment. The results revealed that three out of four slaughterhouses studied have moved from a culture based on conflicts and opposing interests to a culture based on mutual trust and respect, thus developing social capital. Developing trust between production managers and shop stewards was the key to the new situation. This happened without jeopardizing the traditional roles of management representatives and shop stewards. The study indicates that there are possibilities of improvement of working conditions under a Taylorized regime based on collaboration between local management and workers. An important factor explaining the results is the strong position of the workers and their unions in the slaughterhouse sector and the general acceptance of unions in the Danish society.

The Changing Character of Strikes in Vietnam

Vietnam introduced mechanisms for the resolution of collective disputes under the 1994 Labour Code, which provided for the use of the strike weapon as a last resort. Since then, Vietnam has seen around 100 reported strikes a year, not one of which has been called in accordance with the legal procedure, with a sharp increase in strike activity at the beginning of 2006. The character of strikes is also changing and the government is anxious to address the problem. Vietnamese discussion has focused on legislative reforms, but this is to ignore the fundamental substantive issue underlying the prevalence of wildcat strikes, which is the failure to develop a system of industrial relations within which the Vietnamese trade unions can effectively represent their members. This issue is coming to a head as a tight labour market encourages workers to press their interests beyond the rights embodied in the law.

Alexander C. Pathy,Waterfront Blues: Labour Strife at the Port of Montreal, 1960–1978. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. ix + 328 pp. $53.00 cloth.

In this autobiographical account of labor relations on the Montreal waterfront, Alexander C. Pathy gives an insider account of the volatile relationship between shippers and longshoremen. Pathy worked as a lawyer and then official of the influential Maritime Employers Association (MEA). The MEA was in the forefront in changing employment relations to better fit the introduction of technological changes brought on by containerization. As in most ports around the world, the introduction of containerization was riven with challenge and controversy. The Port of Montreal, and the lesser ports of Quebec City and Trois-Rivieres, shared this common experience. According to Pathy up to 1960 the respective ports had seen little strife. Indeed, it would seem that the relations between the two sides had been relatively amicable. This would change once ship owners and stevedores embarked on a rationalization scheme to make the loading and unloading of cargo that much more efficient and speedier. Beginning in 1960, negotiations became increasingly heated and hostile. Not least was the problem of language. In what could be best described as mutual ignorance the employers negotiated in English, while the union representatives, reflecting the membership, spoke in French. It was no wonder that misunderstandings could occur because of poor translation. But according to Pathy more than language, the principal point of conflict was perception. Each side brought to the table mutual suspicion and hostility. The problem Pathy contends was, “Each party did not see its glass half full but half empty.”(40) Therefore, negotiations over gang size, technological improvements, hiring methods, and union jurisdiction all became major issues of contention. Adding to the complexity of the situation was the role of Canadian government. Canadian industrial relations law gave the government a vital stake in the negotiations. Just as important, as both official and wildcat strikes broke out, the government scrambled to stabilize the situation as ships were diverted to US ports. The loss of trade and thereby revenue was seen as a critical impairment to the maritime economy.

Workers' Control and Militancy in An Iowa Labor Movement: the Use of Wildcat Strikes at the Des Moines Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 1950-1959

Workers' Control and Militancy in An Iowa Labor Movement: the Use of Wildcat Strikes at the Des Moines Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 1950-1959

The Impact of Unanticipated Output and Consumer Prices on Wilcat Strikes

An empirical investigation of the impact of unanticipated changes in output and consumer prices, as well as other economic and sociological variables, on midcontract or wildcat strikes, with particular reference to British Columbia's copper industry.

Determinants of Wildcat Strikes in Canada Manufacturing Industries

This paper attempts to identify and to test the effects of a number offactors on the occurrence of wildcat strikes in Canada.

Doug Fraser's 1978 Resignation Letter from the Labor‐Management Group and the Limits of Trade Union Liberalism

Jefferson Cowie's interpretation of the 1978 letter of resignation of Doug Fraser, the then‐President of the United Auto Workers (UAW), from the Labor‐Management Group is quite insightful in arguin...

“Imagine That—A Wildcat at Biomed!” Organizational Justice and the Anatomy of a Wildcat Strike at a Nonunion Medical Electronics Factory

Although the occurrences of wildcat strikes are inextricably linked to violations of organizational justice, only a minimal amount has been written with respect to the relationship between the occurrence of organizational injustice and the presence of employee collective action. And while research on wildcat strikes in unionized settings is fairly extensive, there has virtually been no treatment of nonunion wildcat strikes in the scholarly literature. This paper presents an industrial ethnographic account of a nonunion wildcat strike in terms of analyzing the conditions and process under which a breakdown in organizational justice leads to employee collective action. In analyzing this nonunion wildcat strike, Sheppard, Lewicki, and Minton's seven propositions are utilized to understand the conditions under which a breakdown of organizational justice increases the likelihood of the occurrence of employee collective action (Sheppard, B. H., Lewicki, R. J., & Minton, J. W. Organizational Justice: The Search for Fairness in the Workplace. New York: Lexington Books, 1992). The paper concludes with a discussion of an inexpensive human resource management practice that can be implemented for achieving some type of organizational justice in order to minimize the occurrence of nonunion wildcat strikes.