Our Union: UAW/CAW Local 27 from 1950 to 1990 by Jason Russell (review)

Jason Russell's case study of a local union from the perspective of the activists who organized it and kept it relevant for almost half a century offers an unusual and insightful view of working-class life. As a chronicle of fifty years of a militant, socially progressive local union that represented a diversity of industrial workers, the book provides a rare inside view of working people's relationship to their union through the most dynamic period in modern labour history. Much of the scholarship on this period examines the broad trends that transformed unions from agents of social change into managers of workers' discontent, more concerned with policing collective agreements and containing shop-floor militancy than with social transformation. Examinations of what membership meant to the rank-and-file workers who are the union's actual strength are rare. Drawing on interviews with former union activists as well as archival sources, Russell explores and interrogates the role of UAW/CAW Local 27 in the lives of the men and women who were its members and thus contributes to a better understanding of the way being in a union shaped their lives, and of how they, in turn, influenced the union. He uncovers the broad social agendas as well as the narrow workplace concerns that determined local union members' organizing and negotiating priorities and over which they struggled among themselves and with the national and international union. In the process, he nuances, and sometimes challenges, the overarching narratives of labour history by using evidence from the local and particular to interrogate what has long been taken for granted.

One of the book's most interesting insights is the extent to which members' lives revolved around the union. This was particularly the case for union activists, who socialized over drinks in the union's lounge, participated in union-sponsored sports, and brought their children to family skating parties. But by plotting the physical geography of members' lives, Russell demonstrates that the union was also important to ordinary members and their families, who overwhelmingly lived, socialized, attended school, and shopped in the working-class neighbourhoods adjacent to their workplaces and the union hall. By tracking generations of local activists, Russell shows how they used the local to nurture progressive ideas, encourage rank-and-file workers to become activists, and foster the development of union culture. Local activists worked to acquire a union hall - with no assistance from the parent union - developed activities designed to attract members, and consciously built what they hoped would be a vibrant and attractive union culture, and in the process, created a union that for many felt "like a family" but was also a form of social unionism.

Union life at the ground level, Russell shows, also challenges the grand narrative of quiescent workers. Local 27 members struggled not only as workers, leveraging their job security as union members to challenge their employers, but also within the union, where, inspired in part by a few articulate and energetic leftists in the local, they defied the national and the international union, refusing to be silenced even when local delegates were sanctioned by the national leadership. Nor, he argues, did the local's bargaining suggest complacency. On the contrary, militant bargaining advanced the local's social agenda, achieving better-than-average wages for women workers (although still lower than wages for men) and challenged the prerogative of management rights. As Russell acknowledges, there is no evidence that the local made noticeable headway in the latter, but its willingness to try nuances labour scholarship's narrative of labour's concessionary role in forging the Fordist postwar compromise.

By an odd coincidence, I have a personal relationship to this study. I grew up in Local 27's city of London, Ontario, and I worked for a few weeks at the 3M plant organized by Local 27. Had I been interviewed, I would have told a different story. In contrast to the union activists...