Abstract
The authors of Union Power: Solidarity and Struggle in Niagara have produced a rich and compelling book that highlights the important role unions played in Canada’s Niagara region in both historical and contemporary periods.
While the content of Union Power focuses on the Niagara region, the substance of the book will interest a much broader audience of labor historians and labor educators who seek to understand how the union movement’s past struggles and setbacks can help shape its strategic orientation in the future.
Structured chronologically, each chapter of the book presents a different vignette, highlighting the union struggles and examples of worker solidarity in distinct historical periods. The authors track the history of Niagara’s labor movement beginning in the nineteenth century with the digging of the region’s canal system and the construction of hydroelectric power infrastructure—massive public works projects that brought an influx of immigrant laborers and a corresponding increase in exploitation. Subsequent chapters cover the rise of craft unions in Niagara, the influence of the Knights of Labor, the birth of industrial unionism, internal political struggles that pitted communists against social democrats, the growing economic strength of Niagara’s labor movement during the Golden Age of capitalism, and its uneven decline since the rise of neoliberalism in the mid-1970s.
The book details workers’ struggles in both the public and the private sectors and across many different industries, with autoworkers, department store clerks, casino workers, university professors, and migrant agricultural workers all highlighted in different chapters. The quality and quantity of original archival and oral history research, particularly in the chapters on the Plymouth Cordage Company and the 1936–37 Empire Cotton Mill strike, is impressive. Most of the communities that make up the Niagara region are covered, although predictably, the region’s largest municipalities—St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, and Welland—receive the most attention.
One of the book’s strengths is its focus on the intersection of class, race, and gender. Clearly in evidence throughout the book, this dynamic is particularly highlighted in the chapters covering the Monarch Knitting Co. strike of 1938, the St. Catharines & District Labour Council’s fight against housing discrimination in the late 1950s, and the Eaton’s department store strike in the mid-1980s. To their credit, the authors are careful not to gloss over unions’ own internal divisions around issues of race and gender. Instead they demonstrate how class struggle and labor solidarity were weakened by such divisions.
Patrias and Savage do an excellent job conveying local union struggles by weaving into the text the voices of workers themselves. For example, in the chapter on hotel worker organizing in Niagara Falls, the authors reproduce a powerful speech from a room attendant who was fired for union activity. This use of long quotes to describe events gives color to the analysis and allows the workers to speak in their own voices.
Union Power is a well-written and cohesive book, with photos accompanying each vignette. Labor and social historians will find in this book original research about one of Canada’s most ethnically diverse immigrant workforces. Labor educators will appreciate the highly accessible writing style and the way in which local struggles are carefully embedded within much broader geographic and political contexts.
The authors contend, “Union stories of solidarity and struggle in Niagara stand as an example for many other places in Canada” (p. 184). While this is true, books documenting local labor history, especially outside the large urban areas, are too few and far between. Hopefully, the publication of Union Power will spur researchers to pursue labor history projects in their own communities and in the process, equip a new generation of workers with stories of struggle and solidarity to educate, challenge, and inspire.