Manufacturing Mennonites: Work and Religion in Post-War Manitoba by Janis Thiessen (review)

Janis Thiessen’s detailed social history of three prominent Mennoniteowned manufacturing firms in Manitoba offers a case study of how the theological understandings and ethno-religious sensibilities of Western Canadian Mennonites shaped twentieth-century class consciousness. A labour historian, Thiessen is disappointed with the trajectory of her study as she documents a paternalistic type of capitalism, tracing the legacies of firms established by Mennonite families employing primarily Mennonite workers, in which experiments to introduce unionization ultimately failed. Regrettably, she argues, “Mennonite religious understandings in twentieth-century Manitoba served to reify capitalist economic and social relations” (164). While the outcome of this study is not to the author’s liking, her historical work is nevertheless captivating, as she traces the growth of three successful businesses through a century of rapid change and offers nuanced analyses of often-shared religious beliefs underpinning management’s and workers’ actions.

The three Manitoba-based companies included in this study are Friesen Printers, Loewen Windows, and Palliser Furniture, all leading Canadian firms, with the largest, Winnipeg’s Palliser, employing more than five thousand workers by the early twenty-first century. Thiessen recounts the companies’ narrative arcs, emphasizing their similarities, noting that all three began with local Mennonite labour forces but expanded significantly, with more than a thousand Loewen Windows dealers across the continent by the late 1990s, and Palliser Furniture exporting globally by the same decade. Significant changes in the workforces accompanied product expansion. For example, Palliser Furniture maintained a largely Mennonite employee base until 1979, when thousands of Indochinese refugees immigrated to the province, seeking manufacturing jobs. Despite the Manitoba companies’ increasing pluralism, Thiessen offers compelling evidence that their owners and managers developed distinctive Mennonite corporate mythologies, which functioned powerfully as marketing tools (emphasizing values such as frugality, simplicity, honesty, and quality) but also conditioned employees to emulate the founders’ virtues, ostensibly social conformity and acquiescence to authority.

The volume’s most memorable chapter, “Mennonite Corporate Mythology,” explores these themes as closely connected to the theological foundations of twentieth-century Mennonite identity, including commitments to humility, peacemaking, and social justice. Thiessen rightly notes that North American Mennonites generally, and Manitoba Mennonites as a microcosm, were not unified in their interpretations of church- and community-based notions of Christian humility and nonviolent practice. Throughout the twentieth century, Mennonites across Canada, including those in the Manitoba communities of Altona and Steinbach (home to Friesen Printers and Loewen Windows, respectively), were undergoing significant shifts in connecting their religious ideas to everyday business and labour practices. Longstanding opposition among Mennonites to unions was eroding, and growing numbers of businesspeople were joining organizations such as Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), a North American-based association for proprietors of large and small businesses to address the alleviation of poverty in developing countries. As Thiessen shows in her explication of a Loewen Windows advertising campaign titled “Reflections,” the creation and promotion of a Mennonite corporate mythology helped to sustain a capitalistic framework in which employees identified with the virtue of loyalty to their Mennonite employers; meanwhile, “invocations of religious humility … refie[d] these class relations by giving them a transcendent significance” (83). In short, the Mennonite firms’ use of religious imagery had powerful implications for worker behaviour.

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, shrinking Mennonite populations within the workforces, as well as concerns over low pay and lack of employee autonomy, stimulated unionizing activism at both Friesen Printers and Palliser Furniture. These efforts failed in both instances, as profit-sharing plans and employee ownership of shares took hold at these firms (with profit-sharing also making inroads at Loewen Windows). Under these plans, shop-floor workers could expect recompenses in boom years, but not during times of economic downturn. In the end, Thiessen concludes, struggles between Mennonite business owners and their employees represented lost opportunities for workplace justice and equity.

Meticulously researched, with strong evidence drawn from a body of more...