Raising the Workers’ Flag: The Workers’ Unity League of Canada, 1930–1936 by Stephen L. Endicott (review)

Stephen L. Endicott, professor emeritus at York University, researched and wrote this thoroughly documented and well-written study in his retirement. He used new material from police records that were previously closed. This is a sympathetic history by a social activist who brings the leading communist figures to life, partly because he knew most of them.

In the first half of the 1930s, the Workers’ Unity League (WUL) was the trade union arm of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). When the CPC was outlawed, the WUL became its main instrument. The Great Depression in the 1930s was the heyday of the Communist Party, for despite the difficult economic conditions, communists saw it as an opportunity to work for the downfall of capitalism, organize workers into unions, assist the unemployed, and in the process win converts to their world view. Membership in both the CPC and the WUL temporarily increased. The WUL sought to organize industrial unions, particularly in the resource and manufacturing sectors, and it also organized the unemployed to fight for relief and not take away striking workers’ jobs, which was an impressive display of unity among people who were down and out.

As Endicott’s study covers these events, it understates the WUL’s connection to the Communist International (CI), while then discussing all the Canadians who went to Moscow to learn and be trained. Despite the WUL’s considerable success in organizing, in 1935 the CI basically shut it down because with the rise of fascism in Europe it changed tactics from supporting independent revolutionary unionism to promoting unity with “reformist unions.” Thereafter the Communists caused considerable disruption in unions affiliated with the Trades and Labour Congress, the All Canadian Congress of Labour, and later the Canadian Congress of Labour as they worked within them but pursued CPC policies.

Endicott talks about the relationship between socialists (social democrats) and communists as though it was a little spat. In reality the two groups fought hard and sometimes viciously to gain the adherence of workers to their unions. The communists were masters of personal invective and gained the undying hatred of many social democrats, the objects of their verbal abuse. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the CPC had no compunction about changing its tactics to gain more adherents and destroy the socialists, who in the Depression years created the CCF as their national party. The two groups had different conceptions of trade unions. For communists the union was a vehicle to organize workers and gain their support for the CPC. For social democrats, the union was a way for workers to gain democratic rights on the job, and while they supported the CCF, politically they insisted that the unions remain autonomous from the party and sometimes differed with it.

This detailed study is nostalgic about the communists’ political culture. But Endicott’s claim that the WUL’s practice of internal union democracy “represents the most significant and enduring contribution of the Workers’ Unity League to the Canadian labour movement” is astonishing as the internal democracy had been practised in unions for years before the WUL and would be enhanced in the industrial unions as a result of the practices and beliefs of the American Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Despite its activism and its organizing of 35,000 workers, the WUL was always a minority movement within the labour movement. Most workers, before, during, and after the Depression, did not join the CPC or support communist unions. Although communist trade unionists were an activist minority, we have come to know a great deal about them. Since the 1960s, when Canadian working-class history became a field of social history and engaged many young historians, the predominance of communist admirers in the Canadian labour history community has skewed working-class history in this country. We know much less about the equally hardworking and idealistic non-communist organizers who succeeded in completing what...