Railing Against the Company Union: The State, Union Substitution, and the Montréal Tramways Strike of 1943
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At the height of World War II labour unrest, Montreal tramway workers, the majority of whom were French Canadian, struck over recognition of their Canadian Congress of Labour-affiliated union over two entrenched rival unions. The strike, which threatened critical wartime production in Canada’s largest industrial centre, illustrates how multi-union workplaces were a source of wartime industrial disorder. Circumstances related to the strike tested the capacity of the federal government to respond in a way which was compatible with Prime Minister King’s broader goals of industrial stability and national unity. King’s inaction on labour law reform at this time led key cabinet ministers to pursue criminal charges against the parties involved in the tramway strike. However, legal proceedings were obverted after King intervened on a recommendation from Carl Goldenberg, who had successfully conciliated the strike. Concurrent to these events was the announcement of a wide-ranging public inquiry into national labour unrest, which eventually led to the adoption of a new labour code (pc 1003). The new federal labour law adopted provisions similar to those in the us Wagner Act, which severely limited union substitution, subjugating worker free choice and collective self-determination to the goals of capital and the state. Resume Au sommet de la mobilisation ouvriere de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, les travailleurs des tramways a Montreal, qui etaient majoritairement constitues de Canadiens francais, declencherent la greve en faveur de la reconnaissance de leur syndicat affilie au Congres Canadien du Travail. Ils s’opposaient ainsi a deux syndicats existants bien enracines. La greve, qui mettait en peril une production deguerre nevralgique dans le principal centre industriel au Canada, illustre commentles lieux de travail dotes de plusieurs syndicats pouvaient constituer une source de desordre social en temps de guerre. Les circonstances liees a la greve testerent l’attitude du gouvernement federal a reagir d’une maniere adequate aux objectifs destabilite industrielle et d’unite nationale du Premier ministre King. L’inaction de King quant a la reforme de la legislation du travail a ce moment mena des ministres importants du cabinet a porter des accusations criminelles a l’endroit des syndicat simpliques dans la greve. Cependant, les pour suites judiciaires furent abandonnees lorsque King intervint suite a une recommandation de Carl Goldenberg, qui avait reussi a mettre un terme a la greve par la conciliation. Alors que ces evenements sederoulent, le gouvernement federal annonce une grande enquete publique sur l’agitation ouvriere a travers le Canada. Celle-ci menera e ventuellement a l’adoption du nouveau code du travail (PC 1003). Ce nouveau code contenait des dispositions similaires a celles de la loi Wagner aux Etats-Unis, qui limitaient serieusement les transferts d’allegeance syndicale, asservissant ainsi la liberte de choix des travailleurs et leur autodetermination collective aux objectifs du capital et de l’ Etat.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".