The Winnipeg General Strike happened from May 15-June 25, 1919. This strike is Canada’s best known strike in its history. Massive unemployment and inflation, the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and rising Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, all were contributions to the postwar labor unrest that put the strike in motion.
In March 1919 western labour leaders met in Calgary to discuss the creation of OBU (One Big Union). In Winnipeg on May 15, when negotiations broke down between management and labour in the building and metal trades, the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council (WTLC) called a general strike. They were fighting for the principles of collective bargaining, and better wages and working conditions. Shortly afterwards, almost 30,000 workers left their jobs. The almost unanimous response by working men and women closed the city's factories, shattered Winnipeg’s retail trade and stopped trains. Public-sector employees, including policemen, firemen, postal workers, telephone operators and waterworks employees joined the workers of private industry in a form of solidarity.
The strike was coordinated by the Central Strike Committee, made up of delegates elected from each of the unions associated with the WTLC. The committee bargained with employers on behalf of the workers and coordinated the provision of essential services.
Opposition to the strike was organized by the Citizens' Committee of 1,000, created shortly after the strike began. The committee was made up of Winnipeg's most influential manufacturers, bankers and politicians. Rather than giving the strikers' demands any serious thought, the Citizens' Committee, with the support of Winnipeg's leading newspapers, declared the strike a revolutionary conspiracy.
Though evidence failed to support its charges that the strike was initiated by European workers and Bolsheviks, the Citizens' Committee used these charges to block all conciliation efforts.
Afraid the strike would start confrontations in other cities, the federal government decided to step in. Soon after the strike began, Senator Gideon Robertson, minister of labour, and Arthur Meighen, acting minister of justice, went to Winnipeg to meet with the Citizens' Committee. They refused requests from the Central Strike Committee for a similar hearing. On Citizens’ Committee’s advice, the federal government supported the employers. Federal workers were ordered to return to work immediately or be dismissed. The Immigration Act was already in place so British-born immigrants could be deported.
On June 17, the government arrested 10 leaders of the Central Strike Committee and 2 promoters from the newly formed One Big Union. Four days later, a charge by Royal North-West Mounted Police into a crowd of strikers resulted in 30 casualties, including two deaths, this became known as “Bloody Saturday". It ended with federal troops filling the city's streets. Six of the labour leaders were released, but Fred Dixon and J.S. Woodsworth were arrested. Faced with the forces of the government and the employers, the strikers decided to return to work on June 25.
The General Strike left a trail of bitterness and controversy amongst organized labour groups all across Canada. It enforced unionism, and strikes erupted in places from Amherst, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia.
Seven Winnipeg strike leaders were eventually convicted of a conspiracy to overthrow the government and sentenced to jail terms ranging from six months to two years. The charges against Woodsworth were dropped. It took another 30 years before Canadian workers secured union recognition and collective bargaining rights.
We remember the strike as interesting and important because in the labour movement our understanding of the strike is shaped by organizations who remembered it for us. The strike lives on today mostly because every working-class person in Winnipeg claimed the strike as its own. People believe that the strike led to the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) and NDP (New Democratic Party). And, although it died out in the decades after the strike, the OBU has a strong claim for a connection being that it was a product of 1919.
The effect in Winnipeg, after the general strike was large, diverse, and fascinating; they drew many different conclusions about the strike. The socialist leadership of the strike ended up in the OBU and in the ILP (Independent Labour Party). It was the latter that made important electoral breakthrough as several of them were elected, from jail, to the Manitoba Legislature. The fact that the ILP was an electoral party and that it eventually joined the CCF when it emerged in the 1930s, does not mean that they should simply be dismissed as social democrats. They still talked about revolutionary change. They ran in elections, but, for a time in the 1930s, disconnected from the CCF because of what they considered its non-working-class composition. The OBU played an important role politically and culturally. A Women’s Labour organization formed and debated the role of women and women’s activism in many fields. All of this was not simply the product of the general strike. Winnipeg had a healthy labour and socialist culture going into it, but this culture was stronger, and more came out of it.
In the aftermath of the strike, those who were arrested and tried were not in fact tried for any activities during the strike. They were tried for their ideas. The Canadians put socialism on trial. They were charged for possessing the communism ideas. Essentially, the Canadian state tried to criminalize their ideas, and it blew up in their faces.