There will probably never again be a labour struggle quite like the union war that was fought in Sudbury in 1961.
It began as a division among the 17,000 members of the largest union local in Canada and ended by frightening and dividing an entire city. It was a conflict of ideals and loyalties: coworkers, friends, and even families were divided, fighting amongst each other. It was a war of particular passion and bitterness.
On Aug. 26, 1961, the national office of the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers seized Local 598's hall after executive member Tom Taylor publicly charged that meetings held by local President Donald Gillis during the summer of 1961 with the Canadian Labour Congress were actually a plot to secede from Mine Mill and deliver the local over to the United Steelworkers of America.
Ken Smith, the national president of Mine Mill, accused Gillis of secession and as he had the power to do under Mine Mill's constitution, formally ousted Gillis and his executive and sent an administrator and group of supporters to take possession of the union hall.
Jim Hickey, local welfare officer of the union, was in the building at the time. National office trustee, William Kennedy, supported by about 40 members of Local 598 took possession of the hall shortly before noon.
As Kennedy related after the incident, "I gave (Hickey) a copy of the order from our national president. He refused to accept it and I left it on his desk for him. He was later served with a copy of the injunction. He was unaware he was served and tried to refuse it. I wanted to make sure he knew of it and I read it aloud to him. He just held his hands over his ears.”
As tensions mounted, outside the building, rocks, stones, pieces of metal and pop bottles were hurled through windows and doors. "Threats of all descriptions were hurled at the men inside," Kennedy stated. “It was evident there could be a riot. It's difficult to estimate the damage caused by those outside. It's unbelievable the people who are union people would permit such destruction of property belonging to the members and workers of 598.”
As the evening wore on, tempers flared. “Some of the doors were torn right off their hinges and in others the glass was broken (but) the boys piled chairs as a barrier and used fire hoses for defence," he said.
At some point during that Saturday evening, the Soviet flag was raised on the flagpole of the building, an attempt at mocking the alleged communist sympathies of the National Mine Mill executive.
Three hours after it went up, a fireman and a police constable put a ladder up to the roof of the marquee outside the union hall and climbed up to remove the flag. As the crowd shouted threats and jeers, the flag was lowered and, even though some in the crowd tried to get it, was left on the marquee. Later, two men crawled to the roof and set fire to the tattered remains of the flag, then after extinguishing the blaze, the charred remnants were hoisted up the pole.
The crowd, which varied in size throughout the night, averaging anywhere from 50 to 1,500, was temporarily dispersed by a slight rainfall at 11 p.m. When the rain ceased, the crowd returned in hopes of hearing president Don Gillis, whom they were assured was on his way. Gillis and his executive had been on their way to a union banquet in Port Colborne when all of this occurred and they rushed back immediately.
It was not until approximately 3:30 a.m. that Sunday that Gillis appeared, the street outside the union hall was jammed with a mob of their own supporters offering up loud cheers to their president. Gillis climbed to the marquee over the union hall’s front door and told the crowd he was going to the police station to obtain help in ousting those in the hall.
"I knew if I told them to they'd go into the hall," he said several months later, “and there would have been bloodshed for sure.” But, he asked that the crowd remain quiet and orderly while he was away.
Gillis returned to the scene and told the crowd that police had refused his request to take him into the building. For the next two hours, Gillis made repeated but futile attempts to talk Deputy Chief Bert Guillet into entering the building and removing the occupants. (Guillet was in charge, in the absence of Chief Constable J. D. Burger, who was out of the city).
Guillet finally agreed to enter the building and returned with a message from the men inside, who offered to leave the building if the crowd of Gillis supporters left a pathway clear, promised not to harm them on the way out, and did not enter the building. After a time, a small group of five of the occupiers came out and were met with cries of "scab ... communist … Khrushchev.” When no more men offered to leave the premises, part of the crowd rushed at the doorways and again were repulsed by the fire hoses from inside.
A final effort was made by Guillet to have the men leave the building with assurance that the crowd would depart for nearby Queen's Athletic Field. While part of the crowd moved to the field, the majority only moved across the street and waited.
When no one left the building and the crowd again began to move towards it, Guillet had Sheriff Larry Lamoureux read the Riot Act to the assembly, threatening the men with possible life sentences in prison if they did not disperse within 30 minutes. (Under British law, the reading of the Riot Act is generally the final warning given before police could disperse a crowd with force.)
This action, taken at approximately 5:30 a.m. had a sobering effect on the crowd, and by the time the 30-minute period has elapsed, two-thirds of them had left.
The remainder of the crowd continued to mill around Guillett and Gillis, who were by now arguing at the corner of Spruce and Regent streets.
Ray Poirier, financial secretary of Local 598, shouted defiantly at the police, encouraging the crowd to remain despite the reading of the Riot Act. “Arrest me!" he shouted at the police, "Go ahead, I want you to arrest me! Come on, I dare you to arrest me!" Taking Poirier at his word, Guillet had four policemen place him into custody, thrown into the paddy wagon and taken to the police station.
This had an immediate effect on the crowd, which began to move away as police formed a line extending along the street and moved through the remaining spectators, forcing them on their way. By 7:30 a.m., very few were left of the all-night vigil. Police remained on the scene all day Sunday, keeping the crowds from milling about in the one-block area.
Sunday night, at a hastily called rally before an estimated 4,000 at Queen’s Athletic Field, Gillis and other Local 598 officers vowed they would regain possession of it solely by legal means. "The members of Local 598 have found themselves in a position no union man ever wants to be in," Gillis told the crowd. “Three years ago, we had a local election and the whole group in before the strike was thrown out by a secret ballot … . Despite this change in leadership the minority group continues to attempt to rule the union, backed by the national office."
A small group remained warily on guard until Monday morning when Gillis obtained a court order to remove the national officers, padlock the hall and place the building under the administration of District Sheriff Larry Lamoureux.
The sheriff accompanied by Sudbury police, immediately started the evacuation. The remaining garrison (nearly 40 men), whiskered and obviously exhausted, trooped from the building in single file, carrying four large boxes of groceries, a sleeping bag and blankets, and were driven off in a waiting fleet of taxis.”
Mike Solski and national secretary William Longridge were the last to leave. They stopped to watch while Deputy Chief Bert Guillet locked the door. They left in Sheriff Lamoureux's car.
Thus ended the three-day encampment of officers and supporters of the national office of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. The quiet and orderly Monday evacuation contrasted with the violence that followed Saturday’s occupation of the premises.
Origins of a riot
Now, what lead a crowd to gather on Regent Street at the end of August 1961?
The city's prosperity rested upon the union men who worked for hourly wages at the International Nickel Company and Falconbridge Nickel Mines, mining the richest ore body in the world. The union representing the workers of both industrial giants was the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
Before Mine Mill arrived, working conditions and compensation at Inco were deemed by most to be appalling. When Mine Mill signed its first contract with Inco in 1944, miners were earning 81 cents an hour (by 1962, they were earning $2.33 an hour).
In 1949, Mine Mill had been expelled from the old Canadian Congress of Labour and its jurisdiction had been awarded to the United Steelworkers Union. A year later, the American half of the union was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations for following "policies consistently directed to achieving the program and purposes of the communist party."
For 13 years, the two unions battled each other across Northern Ontario and Western Canada. But as long as Mine Mill held the loyalty of its 17,000 members in Sudbury (being more than half the union's Canadian membership), Mine Mill’s power could not be usurped.
In Sudbury, the twin Mine Mill expulsions went almost unnoticed. The members of local 598 felt they were strong enough to stand alone even against the Inco behemoth. In the fall of 1958, their complacency was shattered.
On Sept. 24 of that year, the workers at Inco went on strike. By the time the strike was settled, three days before Christmas, the union was humiliated and almost broke. They had won a six-per-cent wage increase but as one disillusioned miner said "all it meant more in my cheque every week was $2."
In the 1959 elections for officers of the local, President Mike Solski and all except three of his officers were defeated by a reform slate headed by Donald Gillis, a timber repairman from the Falconbridge mine. Gillis and the 14 members of his executive had pledged to bring Mine Mill into the Canadian Labour Congress, the federation of trade unions that had been formed in 1956.
On the night Gillis was sworn in by the national president of the union, Mike Solski rose from the floor to challenge the chair. Gillis had to hand over his first meeting to his vice-president in order to debate an obscure point of parliamentary procedure with the man he had just defeated for office. "I won that one," Gillis later recalled, "but I knew right then that it was going to be open war."
And, by 1961, Mine Mill faced a showdown with the United Steelworkers of America for labour power in Sudbury. Talk of a raid (or fear of it, depending on one’s point of view) was circling amongst union insiders and rank-and-file members alike.
Under Ontario labour law, the mechanics of a raid were quite simple. The raider needed to sign up and collect a dollar each from 45 per cent of the current union's members. Then, during the last two months of the current union's contract with the company, the raider would apply for "bargaining rights" for those covered by that contract. The Ontario Labour Relations Board would then order a vote to determine what the workers want.
In November, three months after the union hall occupation, the Steelworkers applied for bargaining rights for the Inco workers. At the beginning of February 1962, the Lavbour Board ordered that a vote be held at Inco on the last two days of February and the first day of March.
From that point forward, the city was bristling with the signs of a union war. On walls, restaurant tables and cars small stickers could be found touting such slogans as “Mine Mill is My Union” and “Only Inco Wants Mine Mill — Nickel Workers Want Steel”.
The crowds downtown were evenly divided with men, women and even some children either wearing yellow and black Steel buttons or red, white and blue Mine Mill buttons. The local news was filled with full-page ads from both sides and on television both sides made nightly reports and propaganda pitches.
In the end, what divided most of the men was simple economics: which union could win them the highest wages, the most efficient grievance procedure and the best pension plan. They were haunted by memories of the only time they had gone on strike and its results.
A week after the union hall occupation, Don Gillis announced that William Mahoney, the Steelworkers national director, Larry Sefton, the Steelworkers’ District 6 delegate, and Claude Jodoin, the president of the Canadian Labour Congress, would address a meeting of local 598 members at the Sudbury Arena. Gillis also announced that Ken Smith, Mike Solski and other national officers would be barred from the meeting.
On the evening the meeting was to take place, a crowd of Mine Mill supporters gathered around the downtown cenotaph where Mike Solski spoke to them. They then marched to the arena. However, when Smith tried to walk in the door with them, fighting broke out. The police were unable to clear the jammed doorway and lobbed a tear gas bomb into the crowd.
The men scattered. When they came back, a large number were able to get into the arena without Smith and Solski. They sat in a solid block, chanting "We want Smith" and so disrupted the meeting that when the invited guests, who had entered the arena with a police escort, tried to speak they were drowned out. An hour after it began, Gillis was forced to adjourn the meeting.
The next day the Steelworkers opened an office in Sudbury and began signing up members. Ontario "Terry" Mancini, a burly union organizer from Sault Ste. Marie, was put in charge of the raid.
Ken Smith took a room in the Coulson Hotel and took charge of Mine Mill's defenses. They made ample use of radio, television, newspaper ads and leaflets distributed at plant gates to spread their propaganda. But the real war was waged by the men on the job.
By early 1962, 1,000 men had volunteered to become Mine Mill "captains" and 800 workers had signed up as "volunteer organizers" for the Steelworkers. Men who volunteered to organize for the Steelworkers faced a rough time.
One of them, Henri Corcoran, the boss of a blasting gang at Inco's Creighton mine, had signed up with the Steelworkers the day after the arena riot.
"Some people started calling me names like traitor and union buster,” he recalled later. “One day a gang of Mine Millers stood around in the lunch room and spat all over my lunch pail. The next day I covered my pail with Steel stickers and they came by and covered it up with Mine Mill stickers.
“I just put on more Steel stickers and I got more stickers than they do and after a while they stopped,” Corcoran said. “Some guys tell me they want to fight me at the plant gates, but I tell them I'm just a little fellow and I don't fight. But they don't scare me. I keep right on doing what I have to do."
When it was all said and done, the workers of Sudbury (and their families) could be divided according to where they stood "on the night they seized the hall,” or where they sat during "the arena riot." And no matter which of the two unions would win the long and vicious war (the Steelworkers would eventually win out), everybody involved knew who was the primary loser — the lost ideal of the tight-knit community of workers and their families. But perhaps the best prediction of its longterm effect came from Mike Solski, who said, "Nobody is going to win this thing. It will take a miracle to overcome the hatred in Sudbury."
Well dear readers, it’s time for you to steel yourselves and raid your memory banks to share those memories milling about in your mind. Tell us about your best union recollections (whether as a member or family of a member). Or, maybe you (or someone you loved) was there that night at the hall or the arena. Were you inspired to work for the union based on stories from our past?
Share your memories and/or photos by emailing them to Jason Marcon at [email protected] or the editor at [email protected].
Jason Marcon is a writer and history enthusiast in Greater Sudbury. He runs the Coniston Historical Group and the Sudbury Then and Now Facebook page. Memory Lane is made possible by our Community Leaders Program.