In 1937’s GM strike, The Globe’s publisher bet against Big Labour’s big break

This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.

In April, 1937, at the General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ont., workers frantically scrambled to move hundreds of cars off the factory floor, working all night at the command of their managers. The cars were lined up and then driven along a highway leading to Toronto – 75 cars an hour, travelling through the night. These same workers, up to 3,000 of them, were poised to go on strike the next day, forming picket lines around the soon-to-be-empty plant.

The remnants of the Depression lingered: a lagging economy and fast-declining social conditions. Almost a third of the labour force had been out of work, and a fifth had depended on government support merely to survive. Workers were frustrated, and unions capitalized on that anger, leading the charge in demanding higher wages and shorter work hours.

The GM strike of 1937 helped give birth to the modern labour movement in Canada, cementing the power of unions and paving the way for improved working conditions. The Globe and Mail was in the thick of this momentous chapter in labour history, taking a strong anti-union stand in editorials, many of which ran on the front page.

William Wright, a mining magnate who backed the paper financially, feared the GM strike would encourage workers in his Northern Ontario mines to mobilize. The Globe’s editorials became his instrument for fighting the arrival of Big Labour.

During the strike, Globe publisher George McCullagh frequently visited his friend Ontario premier Mitch Hepburn, the two of them scheming over how to break the strike, Mark Bourrie wrote in his book Big Men Fear Me, an account of McCullagh’s life.

But there were two Globes during the strike: the publisher who editorialized against it, and the reporters who covered the struggle of the men on the line. McCullagh fought in vain to break the strike, but he didn’t interfere with news coverage of what turned out to be a massive win for the labour movement in Canada.

George McCullagh attends the 1937 christening of The Globe's new 'Flying Newsroom,' a De Havilland Dragon Rapide to carry journalists to distant assignments.John H. Boyd/The Globe and Mail

To understand the editorial positioning of The Globe in the 1930s – the interwar years when communism and labour movements started to gain traction in North America – you need to know McCullagh. He was the son of a union activist whose agitation kept costing him his job. McCullagh wanted no part of that misery. Instead, he hustled.

As a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks in London, Ont., McCullagh sold an astonishing number of Globe subscriptions by somehow convincing small-town folk and farmers on the ruler-straight concession roads of Southwestern Ontario to buy a big-city newspaper. The paper noticed, hiring him as a reporter. Before long, McCullagh was forging strategic connections with wealthy Bay Street financiers, some of whom were making a fortune in the 1920s by speculating in mining stocks during the Northern Ontario gold rush.

By the time The Globe’s publisher, William Gladstone Jaffray, fired McCullagh for smoking on the job, he was already established as a smart, 24-year-old operator within Toronto’s financial circles. He especially impressed Wright, an eccentric mining tycoon, and Hepburn, a rising populist and anti-union Liberal politician.

In 1936, a year before the GM strike, McCullagh used Wright’s money to buy both The Globe and The Mail and Empire, merging them into The Globe and Mail. The new publisher promised the newspaper would “not sell itself to politicians, nor would its editorial pages be offered up on the altar of advertising.” But all newspapers have their biases, and under McCullagh, The Globe’s editorials favoured the interests of the business class.

Construction continues in 1937 at The Globe and Mail's new Toronto headquarters, the William H. Wright Building, at King and York Streets.John H. Boyd/The Globe and Mail

Unions were already making a dent in the American labour landscape in the Depression-defined 1930s, in part because U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt made worker rights a core tenet of his New Deal. In 1936, the United Auto Workers (UAW), then a rather small arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), staged three bitter months of sit-down strikes at a GM factory in Flint, Mich., in the wake of hundreds of deaths caused by a combination of summer heat and dangerous working conditions.

Workers typically put in shifts of 10 hours or more, crammed into cramped spaces with little ventilation, which could lead to heat exhaustion and death. And without the protective equipment that we take for granted today, such as hard hats and work boots, accidents could be and often were crippling or fatal.

The union’s demands for safer conditions struck a deep chord with workers: UAW membership ballooned fivefold in 1937. Its next target was Oshawa, the site of one of GM’s largest North American factories.

The engine line sits idle at Oshawa's GM plant in 1937. The workers were striking for better wages, an eight-hour day and the right to be represented by the United Auto Workers.John H. Boyd/The Globe and Mail

The Depression had a huge impact on the ability of unions to organize. “It was a time where the legitimacy of capitalism was being challenged – ordinary people had suffered during the Depression, and the rich had largely emerged comfortable,” says Sam Gindin, former research director of the Canadian Auto Workers union. “So there was a progressive reaction to that.”

American unions – particularly the CIO, headed by activist John L. Lewis, and its UAW offshoot – led the charge in Canada, rallying workers in the mines and auto plants. Employees at GM’s Oshawa plant demanded that the UAW be allowed to represent them. Management refused.

On April 8, 1937, the workers went on strike, demanding an eight-hour day, compensation by seniority and recognition of the UAW as their union. Almost immediately, the Toronto District Trades and Labour Council – a key labour body that sought to unify unions across the province – endorsed the strike. At a mass demonstration at Queen’s Park on April 11, C.H. Millard, president of the local auto union, warned that the full weight of Toronto workers would be thrown against the vehemently anti-union Hepburn, who was now premier, and “his attempt to dictate to us.”

Fear that a “communist” uprising in Oshawa could spread to northern minefields bled through The Globe’s front-page editorials, with the newspaper referring to Lewis as a “dictator” hell-bent on ruining the Canadian economy.

“The C.I.O. invasion has struck at the mines, the present mainstay of Canada’s prosperity, an industry which cannot be said to be connected with any in the United States,” one editorial warned. “If the north mines close down, the result would be calamitous.”

Though there was no direct evidence that Wright dictated editorial policy to McCullagh, the publisher knew his backer’s mind and certainly knew his own. He believed organized unions spread socialism and threatened the rights of owners. Unfortunately for McCullagh, the public disagreed.

Police look on and picketers boo as non-striking workers enter the GM plant during the strike. John H. Boyd/The Globe and Mail

The GM strike garnered widespread attention and support, at least according to various polls conducted by the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail over the course of its three weeks. In the Oshawa area, according to the Star, more than 60 per cent of residents were in favour of auto workers forming a union. In the eastern Ontario towns of Belleville and Pickering, a Star reporter noted, stores displayed pro-labour signs supporting the UAW and the CIO.

Undeterred, Hepburn begged prime minister Mackenzie King to bring in the RCMP to break the strike. When King refused, Hepburn resorted to a rather novel tactic of hiring students from the University of Toronto to act as strikebreakers. Dubbed “Sons of Mitches” or “Hepburn’s Hussars,” the youths roamed the streets of Oshawa trying to look menacing, though without accomplishing much.

Everyone knew Hepburn and McCullagh were close. The premier had convinced the publisher to take up a seat on the University of Toronto board of governors. During the strike, McCullagh helped Hepburn behind the scenes, frequently visiting the premier’s office to strategize on how to break it.

On April 23, the Toronto Star ran an editorial describing Hepburn as a “pawn in a larger game,” insinuating that the premier was in fact taking instructions from McCullagh. In an interview that same week with The Windsor Daily Star, Hepburn denied that he was “being used by the Globe and Mail or whatever interests are behind that newspaper.”

For his part, King was convinced that McCullagh was the power behind Hepburn’s throne. “The truth of the matter is he is in the hands of McCullagh of the Globe, and the Globe and McCullagh in the hands of financial mining interests that want to crush the CIO and their organization in Canada,” he wrote in his diary on April 13, 1937.

Mackenzie King and Mitchell Hepburn attend a Liberal party banquet in 1932. King was wary of the populist Ontario premier, whom he saw as a puppet of McCullagh.John H. Boyd/The Globe and Mail

In contrast to its virulent anti-union editorials, The Globe’s reporters covered the strike in detail, writing hundreds of articles documenting the demands of workers, daily responses from GM’s management and Hepburn’s various policy responses.

One story detailed how Oshawa mayor Alex Hall received a “barrage of booing” from workers on the picket line when he warned them that their actions would damage the local economy, noting that the raucous response left him “flushed, grim, and perspiring before the strikers.”

Another report presented allegations by GM’s management that the UAW used “coercion of the most persistent nature” to enlist new members, which the union denied.

Lorne McIntyre, the lead Globe reporter covering the strike, met with striking workers in Oshawa as they waited for the CIO to present an offer that would lead to a ratification vote. “Gathering there, many of them expressed themselves forcefully that if the agreement did not include recognition of the international union, UAW, and thus recognition of the CIO they would vote it down,” McIntyre wrote. “But if the advantages of the agreement and the importance of a Canadian labour organization are explained, it will hold.”

It held. Workers voted 2,205 to 36 in ratifying the settlement reached between GM and the UAW. The deal increased hourly wages, limited shifts to eight hours a day and authorized overtime pay. And despite Hepburn’s frantic efforts to prevent it, in mid-May, GM agreed to recognize the UAW as an official bargaining agent. The workers had won.

“In a few minutes after the ratification vote,” McIntyre wrote, “the stewards were wiping out the visible signs of the strike. The tents that had sheltered men who took the cold watches of the night on the picket lines were struck. Stoves and equipment where pickets had made lunches, were dismantled. The strike was over.”

In one of its final editorials on the strike, The Globe described Hepburn in glowing terms, as a premier who “must be given credit for fighting on behalf of Canadian labour as well as Canadian people.” But the truth is, McCullagh had placed The Globe firmly against the side of labour and on the losing side of his backers. Hepburn’s loss was McCullagh’s loss as well.

Striking workers at McKinnon Industries – a GM affiliate in St. Catharines, Ont. – read early editions of The Globe for updates on the negotations in 1955. The Globe's labour coverage had greatly expanded in the years since the Oshawa strike.Jimmy Simpson/The Globe and Mail

Wilfred List, The Globe's long-serving labour reporter, saw unions grow stronger through the middle 20th century and retired just as the Reagan era began to weaken them again.Harold Robinson/The Globe and Mail

Over the course of the next five decades, The Globe’s attitude toward labour issues shifted. While it still tended to side in editorials with owners over workers, it devoted increasing coverage to labour issues. In fact, the paper hired one of the most prolific labour reporters in the country, Wilfred List, who was on the labour beat for roughly four decades until he retired in 1984.

In his coverage, List frequently wrote about the perks of unionization and praised large employers, such as the auto giants, who created superior work conditions for employees. He also highlighted how unions played a crucial role in forcing the hand of government and employers to introduce supports such as maternity leave, unemployment insurance and other benefits for workers.

“Paid maternity leave is becoming more important in union negotiations,” List wrote in a 1981 report, detailing how the Canadian Union of Postal Workers won 17 weeks of paid maternity leave in negotiations with the federal government. “Once it becomes pervasive in the public sector, the pressure will begin to develop in the private sector for similar benefits.”

But 1980s Reaganism coincided with, and helped cause, a sharp decline in the power of the labour movement in the United States. Unions on both sides of the border weakened, the result of free-trade policies and the loss of industrial jobs to cheaper markets. Unionization rates, especially in the U.S., have hovered at the 10-per-cent mark for years now. Labour activists believe that media coverage of their movement is more sporadic and less sympathetic than in pre-Reagan days.

“Newspapers have responded to labour only when labour was disruptive enough to get attention,” Gindin notes. “If the labour movement became militant again in challenging things, newspapers would have no choice but to cover these issues.”

The COVID-19 pandemic – and the employer-employee chasm it sparked – brought labour coverage back to the forefront in The Globe. But long gone are the days when a publisher actively attempted to influence the outcome of a labour strike. Readers look for fairness and balance in The Globe, and it strives to deliver: covering the picket line, without crossing it.

Vanmala Subramaniam is future of work reporter at The Globe and Mail.