This map in the November 13 1948 edition of the Financial Post provides a great visual representation of why anti-Communism was so aggressive and pervasive within organized labour during the opening years of the Cold War. While the CCF was being red-baited in election campaigns, the CCF inside the CIO-affiliated Canadian Congress of Labour, in concert with the non-aligned Trades and Labour Congress, waged a ruthless war on Communist-led unions that dominated resource industries and a lot of critical manufacturing and logistics.
In 1948, the CCF "whites" won control of the International Woodworkers of America in BC. The Communists subsequently isolated themselves with a catastrophic split from the IWA.
The Canadian Seamen's Union was destroyed in a strike in 1949. They faced the murderous mobsters of Hal Banks' SIU and police strikebreaking, all of which was backed up by the shipping companies and federal government.
In the Canadian section of the United Autoworkers, the CCF had been unable to supplant the Communist leadership. It was only after Walter Reuther decisively defeated his left-wing challengers in 1948 that the UAW's Canadian Director George Burt, a Communist, saw the writing on the wall and led the UAW into CCF arms.
The UE, Mine-Mill and UFAWU were expelled from the CCF-controlled Canadian Congress of Labour in 1950 and subjected to intense raiding and isolation.
The UE managed to fend off most of the raids quite well from the Steelworker-financed IUE. Strong shopfloor organization and militant women workers were the reason for UE's victories. But raiding was frequent and intense, especially during the 1950-1953 Korean War. UE was hemmed in and all energies were expended defending their organization. South of the border, the huge UE was absolutely destroyed by anti-Communist raiding.
The Steelworkers fared much better in their raiding of the Mine-Mill union. Victories accumulated but the raiding war lasted into the 1960s, with the big Mine-Mill local at INCO in Sudbury finally falling to the Steelworkers in 1962. Despite defeating ugly Steelworker raids at the smelter in Trail, BC between 1948 and 1952, Mine-Mill Local 480 would merge with the Steelworkers in 1967.
The incredible multiracial United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union UFAWU on the BC coast was able to resist raids from other unions, as well as efforts by the Native Brotherhood to split Indigenous members away to form their own organization. UFAWU would go on to initiate a Maritime organizing drive in the late 1960s, sparking the 1970-71 Nova Scotia fisherman's strike during which the arrest of several strikers sparked a one-day spontaneous general strike by Nova Scotia workers, led by coal miners and steelworkers. The fisherman's strike was broken and the UFAWU was kept off the Atlantic when the Canadian Labour Congress and its affiliate CFAWU cut deals with the companies behind the strikers' backs.
By the early 1970s, a new militant and independent Canadian union movement was scoring victories, especially against the Steelworkers in BC mining and forestry, and Manitoba metal working. Gains were also made in manufacturing and textiles in Ontario. Unions such as PPWC, CAIMAW, CASAW and CTCU were radical left nationalists and opposed the international unions as suffocating union democracy, stealing union dues, and hopelessly conservative. An independent union placed the Steelworkers under siege at the Trail smelter.
The independent union movement was paralleled within the NDP (successor to the CCF) with the formation of the Waffle and its threatening growth in Ontario and Saskatchewan. In this context, the CLC finally readmitted the red unions UE, UFAWU and Mine-Mill in 1973 in an effort to prevent a rival labour centre from gaining wider support.
Between the Ontario NDP's expulsion of the Waffle in 1972 at the request of the Steelworkers and UAW, and the Manitoba NDP and Manitoba Federation of Labour's betrayal of CAIMAW strike at Winnipeg's Griffin Steel in 1976-77, the threat of a rival formation inside the NDP and labour was over.
However, most of the independent and "red" unions found a new home with the Canadian split from the UAW in the mid-1980s. UFAWU, UE, Mine-Mill, CAIMAW and CASAW all joined the CAW by 1994. At the same time, the CAW had grown weary of the NDP's failure to campaign against free trade in the 1988 election and the Ontario NDP's catastrophic betrayal of organized labour with the 1993 Social Contract.
The CAW never fully rejoined the NDP after 1993. The CAW leadership supported the New Politics Initiative in 2001 which aimed to dissolve the NDP and reform it as an explicit anti-capitalist party. Within a few short years after the defeat of the NPI, the CAW leadership had aligned itself with the corporate Liberals of Paul Martin and signing sellout neutrality agreements with auto parts giant Magna.
Today, the labour movement is fragmented along the lines of political-electoral strategy. What all these fragments have in common, however, is the suffocation, defeat and death of a tradition of workplace militancy that drove the big working-class breakthroughs of the 1930s and 1940s, and the 1960s and 1970s.