Harnessing Labour Confrontation: Shaping the Postwar Settlement in Canada, 1943-1950 (review)

Like phlogiston and interstellar ether, Canada's postwar settlement is a substance less reliable than relied upon. Peter McInnis's Harnessing Labour Confrontation: Shaping the Postwar Settlement in Canada, 1943-1950 is content to accept the thing as a given to be explained, rather than as an hypothesis to be critically examined. The author erects plenty of warning signs for himself, then proceeds to ignore them: on one introductory page alone the thing is variously called the 'postwar settlement,' a postwar 'social contract,' and the 'postwar compromise' - all in quotation marks - while elsewhere it appears without the punctuation, but sometimes with a pendant 'as it was later called.' The intangible is also intractable: at various places in the book it seems to have consisted in some or all of the welfare state, unemployment insurance and housing policy, plant-level labour-management committees, 'industrial legality,' and the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (IRDIA) of 1948. Whatever it was, it does not seem on the showing of this study to have much explanatory value, let alone a clear empirical referent. There is certainly nothing here to suggest that it settled anything. The ink was hardly dry on the IRDIA policy of state-sanctioned collective bargaining with ultimate recourse to economic sanctions when the government introduced ad hoc legislation to end the 1950 rail strike. McInnis wants to argue that 'the postwar compromise took shape in a complicated series of concessions and trade-offs that gave Canada its particular form of industrial legality,' but it is difficult on this telling to see the 1948 act as the consensual expression of a mutual agreement between capital and labour, or as reflecting underlying compromises that they were willing to make for the sake of settlement. (Whether the same was true of the 1950 act may be left as an exercise for the reader.) The evidence marshalled here suggests the contrary: that in 1948 state actors generally ignored the specific demands of business and labour lobbyists; that the state compromised only with itself, by expressly excluding government employees from the coverage of the act.

McInnis examines the 'debate' among trade union leaders, business spokespersons, and politicians (predominantly federal) about postwar reconstruction, and particularly about collective bargaining policy and the nature and extent of labour movement participation in economic planning at the national and firm levels. I put 'debate' in quotation marks, because on McInnis's own showing the trade unionists seemed often to be shouting into the wind. Much of the evidence is at an abstract pitch, with little to indicate whether this political discourse had much resonance on the shop floor or in corporate boardrooms. The closest we come is McInnis's useful discussion of labour-management production committees (LMPCS), although more detailed case studies would be needed to discover 'how the hard issues of wages or job control melded with the 'soft' advances in workplace cooperation,' or whether in fact they did at all. It would be interesting to know what contemporary evidence McInnis has for the statistical assertion that 'many unionists came to resent deeply the 'obey now - grieve later' policies that tended to relegate their complaints to a process that seemed both mystifying and interminable,' preferring instead the congenial atmosphere and occasional cash prizes of labour-management cooperation.

McInnis tells us in the introduction that he has resisted taking sides, but this claim is disingenuous. He is constantly measuring the decisions made in his period against what he takes to be their later consequences, always finding them wanting. Thus, by joining in the 'settlement,' trade union leaders compromised their movement, traded working-class authenticity for 'industrial legality,' and sacrificed principle for lucre. But these putative outcomes fall outside the period of the study, so are mere unexamined assumptions or borrowed conclusions. For example, and despite McInnis...