Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada

Following in his father's and brother's footsteps, Ron Verzuh worked as a laborer at Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (Cominco) in Trail, British Columbia (BC), for two years after high school and then returned for a second stint in the early 1970s after completing his undergraduate degree. His experience of this hazardous workplace and the camaraderie with his fellow workers encouraged Verzuh to write the history of workers’ struggles in Trail and in particular the history of Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill), from its drive to unionize smelter workers in 1938 to its merger with the United Steelworkers in 1967. Contrary to the subtitle of the book, Verzuh's focus is on the “red” trade union's fight for its life during World War II and especially during the Cold War.Verzuh provides an excellent portrait of the Trail workers and their often diverging views of how best to defend their needs as workers. Although his focus is on the major Communist leaders within Mine-Mill, he is clear that first Arthur “Slim” Evans and then more prominently Harvey Murphy and Al King could never claim to represent all the workers at Cominco or to have persuaded more than handfuls of their union supporters to share their pro-Soviet Stalinist Weltenschauung. In Trail as elsewhere in Canada, Communists rose to the top in various unions because a majority of activist union workers regarded those individuals as the best people to act as their spokespersons when dealing with the bosses. The Communist unionists, while always under the direction of party leadership, won workers over by encouraging union democracy, including widespread participation in union activities. The small number of smelter workers who joined the Communist Party and the negligible number who voted for Communists made it clear that Communists in union leadership positions would have to focus on delivering the goods in negotiations and during strikes, since their positions on political issues were at best a subject of indifference to most members and a major hindrance to their credibility for an important minority of members. With different degrees of transparency, they always defended Soviet domestic and foreign policy positions. That provided their opponents, sometimes genuinely and sometimes opportunistically, strength in efforts to marginalize them and remove them from leadership positions.Communists’ opponents were plentiful. S. G. Blaylock, the longtime general manager and eventually president of Cominco, opposed all forms of independent unionism and nurtured a company union, which offered social insurance and entertainment for its members and special bribes for its leaders. Both he and the company union held back Mine-Mill's late Depression and early wartime era efforts to unionize by focusing on its leaders’ Communist affiliations. But organizer Evans, before he was discredited by a drunk driving conviction, challenged the company union by pointing out to workers its failure to challenge either the extraordinary profits of the bosses or the lack of management concern about workplace safety. The cause of Blaylock and the company union was aided by the Mine-Mill leadership embracing an antiwar position from the time of the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact in August 1939 until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But the generally favorable attitude of workers to the Soviet Union during the period when Canada and the Soviets were wartime allies and BC provincial labor legislation that denied recognition to company unions aided Local 480 organizational efforts in 1943. That did not prevent a successor to the company union from narrowly defeating Local 480 in the first government-supervised vote that year to determine the legal bargaining agent for the Trail smelter workers. But Murphy's organizing efforts won a second vote in 1944 that vindicated Mine-Mill. The union won over previously reluctant immigrant workers and others who had earlier bought into the “independent” union's claims that the Mine-Mill local was subservient to outsiders, particularly in Moscow. Murphy successfully argued that in fact the membership would control the local and that, unlike the “independent” union, Local 480 would provide militant worker representation rather than subordination to a paternalistic company.Local 480 was true to its promise, but for the next eleven years Communists within the local leadership faced both internal and external challenges from old company union forces within the union, from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation social democrats, from the company, and from the local newspaper. The Communists’ clear support for the Soviet Union in foreign policy discussions during a period when no middle ground appeared to exist aided their opponents. At times their opponents held important positions in the union, and when Communists were able, democratically and with hard work, to reverse such challenges, their opponents united behind Steelworkers’ effort to replace Mine-Mill as the workers’ representative.Throughout, Verzuh painstakingly traces the efforts of Local 480’s “reds” to persuade the smelter workers of their superiority as the workers’ representatives. He is also careful to fairly present the positions of the Communists’ opponents and to gauge membership sentiments as well as the evidence allows. He examines closely the efforts of the Communists to have a socialist impact on local culture through their well-attended cross-border Paul Robeson concerts (the Canadian government would not allow Robeson to perform in Canada, so his concerts for Canadians were performed at border crossings) and somewhat more controversial showings of the now-classic pro-Communist labor film Salt of the Earth. While sympathetic to the efforts of the reds, Verzuh is clear that they were Stalinists who were impervious to all evidence of Stalin's violations of human rights. He also points out that while the Communist leaders of the local claimed in principle to believe in equal rights for women and men, they made a strategic decision to negate such beliefs in practice. They went along with the company's position that the many “temporary” women smelter workers hired during the war would not only have no claims to retain their positions when the men whom they replaced returned but also would be considered less eligible to hold blue-collar jobs than the men who were hired for temporary positions.Verzuh does an excellent job not only of outlining the history of Local 480 but also of depicting the private lives of its members and the entertainments, commercial and otherwise, that were important in their lives. My one disappointment with the book is that, after closely examining why Local 480 and its Communist leaders survived overwhelming odds to maintain their union at the height of the Cold War, he fails to provide any real explanation as to why the union delivered itself up to the Steelworkers in a merger in 1967. Was this a party decision? Was it a sellout by a jaundiced Communist leadership who wanted the porkchopper benefits that leaders of larger, non-Communist unions of the time enjoyed? Was there a change in the thinking of the membership regarding holding out against massive public opinion against Communist-controlled institutions? If this book gets a second printing, it would be helpful to have a chapter that explains why all those efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to maintain a militant union for Trail smelter workers simply collapsed by 1967.

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