Searching for Workers’ Solidarity: The One Big Union and the Victoria General Strike of 1919
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 23 June 1919, 5000 workers affiliated with Victoria’s Metal Trades Council downed tools in sympathy with Winnipeg workers and as a protest against what they called ‘Star Chamber’ methods of repression against the working class leadership. While much has been written on the Winnipeg General Strike and 1919 Canadian labour revolt, the Victoria General Strike is revealing as a contested expression of working-class solidarity, an illustration of the unresolved tension between craft and industrial unionism and different labour leaderships in the west-coast city. Much of British Columbia labour had embraced the One Big Union and its socialist leadership by the spring of 1919, but Victoria’s organized workers wavered on the question of striking in sympathy with Winnipeg’s working class. While the shipyards were a locus of militancy, influential groups of workers, afl rather than obu in orientation, opposed a general strike and undermined the mood of solidarity. Local conditions in different economic sectors shaped the working-class response to the Winnipeg General Strike. This tension provides fresh insight into the development of class consciousness and industrial militancy at the end World War I, breaking new ground in the historiography of Canada’s postwar labour revolt. Resume Le 23 juin 1919, 5000 travailleurs affilies avec le Conseil des metiers du metal ont declenche la greve pour sympathiser avec les travailleurs de Winnipeg et pour protester contre ce qu’ils appelerent la methode de repression “Star Chamber” qui ciblait les dirigeants des classes ouvrieres. Il y a eu plusieurs ecrits sur la greve generale de Winnipeg et la revolte syndicale de 1919 au Canada. Par contre, la greve generale de Victoria se devoile comme une expression dispute de solidarite ouvriere, une illustration des tensions non resolues entre le syndicalisme industriel et celui des metiers, et le leadership dispute de la ville de la cote ouest. Alors qu’au printemps de 1919 la grande majorite des syndicats de la Colombie-Britannique s’etaient deja ralliees au syndicat One Big Union et a ses dirigeants socialistes, les syndiques de Victoria tergiversaient sur la question de faire la greve pour sympathiser avec classe ouvriere de Winnipeg. Pendant que les chantiers navaux sont le lieu du militantisme, les groupes de travailleurs influents, d’allegeance afl plutot que obu, sont oppose une greve generale et affaiblissent l’ambiance de solidarite. Les conditions locales dans les differents secteurs economiques ont faconne la reponse de la classe ouvriere a la greve generale du Winnipeg. Cette tension fournit une comprehension du developpement de la conscience des classes et du militantisme industriel de la fin de la premiere guerre mondiale, ce qui permet d’avancer la connaissance de l’histographie des revoltes syndicales d’apres-guerre.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".