Labour / Le Travail
Issue 85 (2020)

Article

The New Left at Work: Workers’ Unity, the New Tendency, and Rank-and-File Organizing in Windsor, Ontario, in the 1970s

Sean Antaya

The 1970s tend to be portrayed as a decade of reaction and retreat – a snuffing out of the so-called 1960s youthful idealism, the end of the Keynesian postwar boom, and the beginning of a reactionary neoliberal order.¹ There is no doubt that the end of the 1970s was indeed characterized by a sharp right political turn, the consequences of which are still being felt today. But such narratives overlook and mask the incredibly rich struggle from below waged throughout the decade by men and women who envisioned a very different future, one characterized not by brutal inequality, a withering of workers’ power, and imperialist wars but by higher wages, better working conditions, and ever-improving social services.

These working-class struggles signalled different things to different people. Some were no doubt waged to secure gradual, but materially meaningful, palliative reforms. Others saw in the class conflicts of the 1970s the possibility of proletarian revolution, the radical extension of democracy over all aspects of social and economic life, and the total liberation of human potential from the fetters of the capitalist workplace. Among this latter contingent was a revitalized New Left that turned its focus toward Marxism and turbulent workplace organizing after the decline and dissipation of the student movement and a meandering search for new revolutionary subjects. At the same time, this New Left struggled with the failures of its predecessors, hoping instead to develop a praxis that would transcend earlier errors and take advantage of the window for radical change that appeared to be open.²

Canadian historians have only relatively recently begun to examine the role of the New Left in Canadian workplaces during the 1970s in any great depth. The most prominent of these studies is Ian Milligan’s Rebel Youth, which examines the New Left’s engagement with the labour movement throughout the long sixties and shows how many New Leftists often ended up reconciling their differences with the mainstream labour movement in an attempt to reinvigorate it from within.³ However, as Bryan Palmer notes in a review of the book, while Milligan correctly identifies the New Left turn toward Marxism, the working class, and ultimately the mainstream labour movement during this period, he largely ignores those organizations on the revolutionary left that attempted to engage with the working class outside of, and quite often in opposition to, the official labour movement. As a result, both the successes and, more often, the failures of these endeavours remain largely unexplored.⁴ I likewise believe it is worthwhile to rescue such overlooked organizations from the “enormous condescension of posterity.”⁵

Rank-and-file and oppositional union movements of both a reform and a revolutionary nature emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of the largely youth-driven upsurge in militancy against the poor working conditions and inattentive union bureaucracies that characterized workplaces across North America.⁶ They were also one manifestation of the broader New Left turn to the working class, and many former student activists sought out blue-collar jobs; they did so sometimes out of necessity and sometimes as part of a conscious political strategy to industrialize and embed themselves in working-class experiences and struggles. Once in the workplace, activists could link up with existing oppositional groups or attempt to organize new ones by forming alliances with other militant workers.⁷

While a substantial body of scholarly literature examines the significance of American rank-and-file movements like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, there is little focus on similar movements in Canada.⁸ Though it is important not to overstate the similarities between these incredibly varied rank-and-file organizations, because of their very different contexts and end goals, parallels can indeed be found in their general struggles over union democracy, their use of direct action, and the repression that these groups faced from union bureaucrats during this particular historical moment for the North American labour movement and the left. The diversity of tactics represented by these groups also speaks to the heterogeneity and creativity of the New Left during this period; they illustrate the different ways in which former student activists sought to move forward and engage in working-class struggles during a time when the possibilities for social transformation and revolution appeared limitless to many.

This article will explore the history of Workers’ Unity (wu) and The New Tendency’s Auto Worker Group (awg), two rank-and-file organizations active within the automobile factories of Windsor, Ontario, during the 1970s. Relying primarily on newsletters, leaflets, newspaper coverage, and internal documents, in addition to interviews conducted with some of the most active members, I reconstruct the experiences of these once vibrant shop-floor organizations. wu provided the first working-class organizing experiences for a number of former student organizers in Windsor and directly challenged both management and an ossified labour bureaucracy – often using direct action tactics to secure improved working conditions and entrench a culture of resistance on the shop floor, especially within Chrysler’s Plant 2. The awg sought to build on these earlier experiences but was also linked to a larger New Left project as part of the Labour Centre (tlc), which functioned as the Windsor branch of the Canadian autonomist Marxist organization the New Tendency (tnt). The awg’s history therefore also reveals much about the broader history of the New Left and the ways that revolutionary organizations engaged in workplace organizing during this period. Indeed, the histories of wu, the awg, and tnt is also interwoven with larger theoretical debates that proliferated within the New Left at this time, and this study illustrates the transnational development of New Left ideas and organizations by examining activists’ connections to comparable groups active in Italy and the United States. Ultimately, however, internal theoretical disputes also contributed to the dissolution of both tnt and the awg, as erstwhile comradely debate often hardened into rigid sectarianism.

While this history has obvious relevance to labour, the left, and the 1970s, it is worthwhile to examine these particular struggles in Windsor for a number of reasons. First, Windsor was – and remains, however precariously – an essential hub of the Canadian automotive industry. The auto industry and its workers played a central role in the development of 20th-century capitalism and class conflict in North America, as evidenced by the very concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism that tend to dominate political economy literature. Additionally, as Antonio Gramsci observed, auto factories in many ways represent capitalism’s most highly organized and advanced productive capabilities.⁹ Though one should be careful not to overemphasize the importance of factory workers among the working class, it is hard to deny that there is something about the mechanized factory setting, with its automation, high division of labour, and utter dehumanization, that seems to simultaneously evoke both the innovative potential and the sheer brutality of capitalist social relations. Reiterating an older Marxist argument, Mike Davis notes in a 2017 article for Catalyst that it is precisely these conditions within the industrial factory system that organize “the workforce as a synchronized collectivity that through struggle and conscious organization can become a community of solidarity.”¹⁰ While much of this production has now moved elsewhere, it follows that if one seeks to understand the inner workings of capitalism and class conflict in Canada, investigating the auto industry and the experiences of auto workers over the course of the 20th century will produce valuable insights.

Likewise, as A. C. Jones has argued, the United Auto Workers (uaw) represents the “vanguard” of the labour movement in some respects, as “its successes marked the progress of the movement, its failures, its retreats.”¹¹ Though Jones was referring to the American labour movement, the quotation applies just as easily to Canada. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian labour movement over time, the once mighty uaw (later the Canadian Auto Workers [caw] and now Unifor), the workplaces within which it operated, and the union’s relationship with the rank-and-file all ought to be important areas of research. At the same time, investigating both the organizations and the spontaneous revolts that challenged the uaw’s legitimacy as the sole arbiter of workers’ struggles on the shop floor extends understandings of working-class resistance and the consciousness of the rank-and-file, complementing conventional studies of union history. If Detroit’s auto industry and the conditions of workplace resistance in the 1960s and 1970s have been the subject of numerous studies, little has been published on Windsor’s working-class self-activity during the same period.¹²

Indeed, in Canada, the literature on the uaw and its successors tends to focus on the broader factional conflicts within the uaw between the Canadian and American sections of the union and the historic battles between the left and right union caucuses. When 1970s rank-and-file militancy and the New Left are explored at all, they tend to be filtered through the lenses of these larger battles and the degree to which leadership factions were able to integrate demands from below.¹³ There is no doubt that these conflicts had significant ramifications for both auto workers and the Canadian working class more broadly, and I certainly do not mean to downplay them here. However, for the most part, this research has not explored independent rank-and-file groups and their experiences on the shop floor in particular locales in any sustained way.¹⁴ Similarly, with the important exception of the Waffle, the varied New Left politics embraced by auto worker militants is not addressed in any great depth in such studies.¹⁵ A study of wu and The New Tendency’s awg thus takes us into largely uncharted territory.

Workers’ Unity

Workers’ Unity first emerged as a rank-and-file group based out of Windsor Chrysler’s Plant 2 as part of a grassroots opposition to uaw Local 444 president Charlie Brooks and the system of patronage that he established within the local. Brooks had previously gained notoriety for splitting Local 444 from the more conservative uaw Local 195 in 1956. Early on, Brooks was a member of the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) and he remained on the left wing of the uaw bureaucracy for his entire life, often coming into conflict with the more moderate labour bureaucrats such as George Burt and others aligned to the social-democratic faction in the union.¹⁶ Brooks, a firm proponent of social unionism, was well liked in the community for his support of various social justice issues and his ostensible continuation of the uaw’s pre–World War II militancy and the legacy of the famous 1945 Windsor Ford strike.¹⁷ Brooks was not unattached to the Canadian New Left and, in particular, the left-nationalist currents within it. Indeed, left nationalism was already one of the tools used by Communists and left wingers such as Brooks to retain support in Canada against the dominance of American Reutherites in the International Union who sought to purge them.¹⁸ Most notably, he, along with other Windsor labour leaders on the uaw’s left (often other cpcers or ex-cpcers), supported the ndp’s Waffle faction before it was defeated by the right wing of the Canadian labour movement’s bureaucracy.¹⁹ Furthermore, Brooks opposed the Vietnam War, supported nuclear disarmament, and helped establish a firm antiwar position within the Canadian uaw.²⁰

In the workplace and in the local itself, however, workers’ perception of Brooks was more complex. While still enjoying a great deal of support because of his outwardly radical rhetoric, Brooks came into conflict with younger workers’ resurgent militancy. For many young and radical Chrysler workers, Brooks became the symbol of the increasingly detached and repressive labour bureaucracy that too often held workers back in the post–World War II era.²¹ Brooks’ commitment to radicalism was indeed predicated on his own ability to hang on to power, and he was by many accounts extremely adept and efficient at co-opting and outmanoeuvring any opposition that emerged within the local.²² Further, his objective place in the Fordist system of industrial relations meant that he was legally compelled to quell most workplace disruptions within the life of a contract regardless of his personal beliefs or convictions, and thus this system of industrial legality placed him in opposition to young wildcatters and dissidents who sought to take direct action on the shop floor.²³

It was in this climate that Workers’ Unity emerged in 1970. Formed by militant Chrysler workers John Horne and Al Dumouchelle, alongside Dumouchelle’s wife, Lucy, a New Left tenant organizer connected to the student movement, wu attempted to challenge the Fordist system of unionism. In the plants, Horne had a reputation as something of a wild man and remained a divisive figure throughout the 1970s. As Ron Baxter recalled, Horne had worked at the Heinz tomato-processing factory in Leamington, Ontario, before getting a job at Chrysler. While working at Heinz, Horne had gained notoriety for pelting a hated foreman with tomatoes, and he carried over this cavalier attitude to his job on the assembly line and in his union politics in the uaw.²⁴

In the beginning, wu was primarily formed to take on the Brooks administration within Local 444. The organization retained its anti-Brooks orientation over the course of its short lifespan, but soon after its founding, members began to see wu as a vehicle to empower the rank-and-file and challenge the ossified union structure altogether. Unconcerned with the obligations of industrial legality that constrained Brooks and other labour bureaucrats, wu endorsed direct action on the shop floor, such as wildcat and sit-down strikes, and focused primarily on improving everyday working conditions and health and safety standards. When the organization first emerged in the 1970 Local 444 elections for union president, wu made it clear the group was running a candidate only to gain a platform and some recognition in the plants. Though Horne lost the election to Brooks, wu did gain 22 per cent of the votes, suggesting that it was tapping into real discontent among a segment of the Chrysler workers. Following the election, wu continued to leaflet workers on issues related to working conditions and further critiques of Brooks.²⁵

While wu continued to build up popularity in the Chrysler plants, it also began to attract supporters from elsewhere in the community. In particular, former student activists Mike Longmoore and Joe Longmoore, and Mike’s wife, Margaret, began to associate with the emerging group.²⁶ Mike, who got a job working in one of Windsor’s Ford plants after graduating university, had deep roots in Windsor’s working-class community and left-wing culture. His father had likewise worked at Ford, and as a child Mike was inadvertently involved in the 1945 strike when he and his mother got stuck in the now famous blockade. The Longmoores grew up on Drouillard Road in the working-class neighbourhood outside of the Ford factory on Windsor’s East Side, and Mike continued to live there throughout this time.²⁷ In this climate, the Longmoores became well acquainted with many of Windsor’s old radicals, such as Nels Dearing, Cliff Gunther, and Mansfield Matthias. These older radicals had memories of building the uaw and recalled the cpc’s former strength, although many such veterans of the class struggle had either left the party by this point or otherwise loathed Stalinism’s historical record.²⁸ While Matthias and Gunther were onetime cpcers, others had always remained independent despite their close relationships with Communists within the uaw’s left-wing caucuses. These independent radicals included Victor White and the anarchist Spanish Civil War veteran Federico Arcos, whose antipathy to the Communist Party was rooted in his understanding of its role in the Spanish Republic’s loss to Franco’s Fascists. All of these figures were associated with the dissident cpc milieu at Ford Windsor.²⁹ The Longmoores were similarly sympathetic to the old cpc and tended to adhere to its theoretical perspective, but Mike was not particularly dogmatic in this sense and was very much involved in the younger generation of New Leftists, taking part in the rank-and-file revolts from below. Further complicating the situation, some of the older radicals on the executive of the Windsor and District Labour Council with whom Mike Longmoore associated were still quite close to Brooks owing to his old connections to the Communist Party and the left-wing caucuses within the uaw.³⁰

The wu’s New Left–inflected working-class politics also attracted young activists elsewhere in the province who were also turning toward workplace organizing. Most prominently, Ron Baxter and Bronwen Wallace, two student activists who later played essential roles in tnt, moved from Kingston to Windsor mainly because they were captivated by wu’s organizing efforts at Chrysler and saw it as an important experiment in building working-class power outside of the traditional Marxist and social-democratic parties and organizations. They also believed that, because of Horne’s and Dumouchelle’s professed commitment to reflecting the direct will of the rank-and-file, the wu project had the potential to be somewhat different from the “boring from within” tactics of trying to take over a union executive and implement a radical program from above.³¹

Both Baxter and Wallace attended Queen’s University and were heavily involved in New Left activism and organizing on campus. Wallace had been a member of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Student Union for Peace Action and was also heavily involved with the women’s movement.³² Baxter was similarly involved with New Left groups at Queen’s, where he and his comrades faced significant repression from the rcmp, who raided radical students’ apartments and collaborated with the university administration to expel Chuck Edwards, one of Baxter’s closest friends, who served as president of the radical Canadian Union of Students–affiliated student council prior to his expulsion.³³

Because of both rcmp repression and the changing theoretical trends within the student movement, Baxter and Wallace decided to leave campus politics behind. Baxter’s turn toward the working class was largely catalyzed by reading Andre Gorz’s influential tract, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, in which Gorz calls for the New Left to reinvigorate and democratize the labour movement and to organize around “non-reformist reforms” in the advanced capitalist countries.³⁴ Baxter was also increasingly interested in the emerging autonomist Marxist movement in Italy following the “Hot Autumn” of 1969, wherein students and workers fomented a near revolution by launching massive wildcat strikes across the country, organized independently of the traditional labour unions and the Communist Party.³⁵

Italian autonomist Marxism was first developed by dissident theorists in the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties. In particular, a group of thinkers, including Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri, associated with the journals Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and Classe Operaia (Working Class) gave rise to operaismo (workerism) during the early 1960s. Workerism emphasized the importance of working-class struggles at the point of production and challenged the legitimacy of the traditional organizations that claimed to represent working-class interests and were hitherto understood by Marxists to be the vanguard organizations leading the class struggle. As the old working-class organizations proved to be increasingly inadequate at providing revolutionary leadership by quelling growing worker unrest, workerist theorists and organizations continued to gain popularity and further developed their theories of workers’ autonomy. This referred to the need for working-class struggle to be organized completely autonomously from capital and therefore outside the bureaucratic organizations that were subsumed into the management of the capitalist system in the postwar era. This autonomism also stressed the independence of different segments of the working class from one another; thus, women and racialized workers, for example, each had the right to organize and partake in their struggles separately from the rest of the working class. The theoretical development of autonomism informed both the explosion of direct action and mass worker militancy at automotive factories in cities like Turin and the emergence of protest movements on university campuses – not unlike the waves of militancy from below that proliferated throughout North America at the same time, albeit on an even larger scale. This, in turn, led to the emergence of a number of autonomist Marxist organizations that sought to bring together this outburst of worker and student militancy and make the most of an ostensibly revolutionary historical moment.³⁶

At Queen’s, Baxter befriended a member of one of the largest and most influential autonomist Marxist groups, Lotta Continua (lc), and went to Italy to visit her in early 1970. Baxter was able to travel around the country, where he bore witness to the impressive revolutionary upheaval there among students and workers. As he later recalled, “There was this political stuff popping up everywhere – in every town we went, every place I went in Italy, it was just like politics, politics, politics! And it was the labour stuff, it was at Fiat, it was wildcat strikes, and students were organizing demonstrations.” While travelling through Italy, Baxter also spent time living with Gianni Sofri, brother of influential lc leader and theorist Adriano Sofri, where he became further acquainted with lc’s theoretical positions.³⁷

After Baxter returned from Italy, he and Wallace took a trip across Canada. They decided to visit Windsor after getting in touch with Lucy Dumouchelle, whom they had met through a mutual acquaintance active in Kingston’s tenant organizing movement. Though they initially stopped in Windsor only temporarily in the fall of 1970 to investigate wu, Baxter and Wallace soon decided that Windsor and wu offered them the best and most interesting opportunity to get involved in working-class organizing.³⁸

Upon Baxter’s and Wallace’s move to Windsor in January of 1971, the uaw was gearing up for a potential strike. The uaw bargaining team reached an agreement with Chrysler the night before the strike deadline, and the uaw planned to hold the ratification in Windsor Arena so that much of the membership could attend.³⁹ wu brought to the meeting leaflets and signs that criticized the contract as a “sell-out,” although the other workers needed little encouragement from wu to express their discontent. The workers in attendance were already unhappy with the proposed contract because of the lack of input from the union’s Canadian branch during negotiations and the contract’s negligence of local issues.⁴⁰ Additionally, 650 workers were laid off a week before the meeting, and the contract included no provisions to protect jobs at Canadian plants.⁴¹ As a result, the meeting began with a chorus of boos and chants that prevented Brooks from speaking for fifteen minutes. A full-on revolt against Brooks and the uaw executive soon broke out, once Brooks began to lecture the workers on the new contract while dismissing criticism from the audience.⁴²

As Brooks continued to speak, workers continued to heckle and began to throw beer bottles and garbage at the executive. Other workers jumped onto the ice surface to protest in front of the executives at the centre of the arena.⁴³ This contingent of workers included members of wu who had brought anti-contract signs, making for a dramatic photograph that was featured on the front page of the Windsor Star the following morning.⁴⁴ As workers streamed toward the exits, many of the ballot boxes were tipped over or left open near the entrances, with ballots strewn across the floor and blowing out the windy hallways. Despite this massive display of rank-and-file dissent and clear disregard for democratic process regarding the ballot boxes, the contract was, according to the uaw, ratified with 68 per cent approval. Brooks meanwhile denounced wu as an “anti-union group distributing unsigned pink trash.”⁴⁵ The whole experience was eye-opening for the members of wu. For Baxter in particular, the incident and its aftermath perfectly distilled the older labour bureaucrats’ contempt for dissent and critical opinions within the union, simply proving the absence of any organic connection between the labour leadership and the rank-and-file.⁴⁶

After the conflict over the contract, the members of Workers’ Unity built up their base of power in Chrysler’s Plant 2, where Horne, Al Dumouchelle, and others worked building engines. In-plant elections in March 1971 saw wu run a slate of candidates against the incumbent “Brooks men”: Horne for chairman, Dumouchelle for chief steward, and Gerry Pacquette for midnight steward. Their platforms highlighted the necessity of responding to the direct needs of the rank-and-file, and wu members promised their constituents that they would be subject to recall at any time during their term. They criticized the former stewards for spending their time enforcing company rules rather than fighting to improve in-plant working conditions, and they continued their critique of the labour bureaucracy and the current union structure by suggesting that union executives in the international union had stronger ties to the ruling class than to the rank-and-file. As a testament to their New Left–inflected Marxist politics, wu also advocated for the formation of workers’ councils in each department to democratize the workplace and allow workers to further assert control over the labour process.⁴⁷ In the election, wu found a great deal of support, and Horne and Dumouchelle were elected to their positions. This allowed wu to have more or less full control of union matters within Plant 2.⁴⁸

In addition to leaflets, wu soon began to put out an eponymous newspaper – with its tagline proclaiming itself the “Voice of the uaw Rank and File” – and distributed it at the Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors plants in Windsor. Demonstrating the influence of Lotta Continua, Workers’ Unity featured articles that stressed the importance of uniting the struggles of waged factory workers inside the plant with those of the unemployed, women, farmers, and students – essentially linking workers’ particular concerns in the factory to a broader class struggle against capitalism.⁴⁹ Other articles pointed directly to the autonomist struggles in Italy and the conflicts of the uaw and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s as possible models for reinvigorating the labour movement via direct participation and militant action from the rank-and-file.⁵⁰ Furthermore, the wu newspaper encouraged disgruntled workers to write in with their stories and published a section titled “Rumblings from the Lines” that featured quotes from workers expressing discontent with factory life.⁵¹

wu also continued to denounce Brooks and the labour bureaucracy, often pointing out specific instances of Brooks’ abuse of power and hypocrisy. One article referred to the tumultuous January ratification meeting and questioned the legitimacy of the election results, while another criticized Brooks and the international union for telling Local 444 members to cross Canadian Union of Operating Engineers (cuoe) picket lines when the Chrysler powerhouse workers went on strike. After workers in Plants 2 and 3 disobeyed Brooks by refusing to cross, the company soon agreed to a contract with cuoe. Brooks then claimed credit by congratulating Local 444 for helping cuoe obtain a better deal, despite the fact that he had ordered members to cross the picket lines and undermine the strike.⁵² In response to these criticisms, Brooks continued to denounce wu as a group of anti-union wreckers in an attempt to crush their dissenting voices in the local, often resorting to the same sorts of slanderous attacks that the Reutherites had once launched against Communists and radical left-wing unionists.⁵³ As noted in Workers’ Unity, at one membership meeting Brooks claimed to have receipts in his possession that proved wu was in the pay of malevolent – albeit unspecified – outside actors. When the membership demanded that he reveal his evidence, Brooks then claimed that he would have to “subpoena” wu. Meanwhile, wu in fact relied on donations from workers at the auto plants. In response to Brooks’ accusations, wu subsequently published the numbers of donations they received and the corresponding amounts of each donation in their newspaper.⁵⁴

Workers’ Unity continued to participate in and encourage direct action in the plant, and these methods were often successful in improving working conditions for employees. Working conditions had continued to decline in Windsor auto plants during the 1970s, as production was reorganized along American standards in the wake of the Auto Pact and as companies constantly sought to cut costs through a combination of speed-ups, increased automation, layoffs, and poor health and safety standards.⁵⁵ It was in this context that auto workers’ militancy spread. One article in the wu newspaper chronicled workers’ struggles within the motor test area in Plant 2. The motor test department was known for being particularly unhealthy owing to excessive fumes, smoke, and exhaust. To deal with the issues in the department, the wu-led plant union held mass meetings in the lunchroom so that the rank-and-file could determine a course of action, and they collectively formulated a proposal for the company to clean up the area. When the company claimed these proposals were unworkable, workers from Plant 2 held a large demonstration outside the plant to attract public attention, defying Brooks, who voiced opposition to any demonstration. Local media covered the protest and, as a result, the company cleaned up the area by installing better equipment and ventilation.⁵⁶

In another instance, Horne sanctioned a walkout after an anonymous caller phoned both the union office and a local radio station claiming that a bomb was placed in the engine plant. Horne initially asked Chrysler to stop the line and let the workers out into the parking lot until security could verify whether a bomb was present. When the company denied Horne’s request, he sanctioned a wildcat (though, technically, Horne himself never left the plant). In retaliation, the company fired Horne and three other workers, including one of the plant committeemen. After filing a grievance, Horne felt that Brooks was doing little to help him and the others because “[Brooks] wanted to get rid of us.” Brooks rebuffed the accusation, claiming that “Mr. Horne and I do not see eye to eye on many things, but he is the elected plant chairman and it is our duty to stand by him in a case like this.” Circumventing Brooks, Horne eventually brought his case to Douglas Fraser at the uaw international office. Fraser successfully convinced Chrysler to reinstate Horne and the others to their jobs.⁵⁷

In addition to addressing health and safety issues, wu used direct action to confront unjust discipline and foremen who abused their power. For example, in the same test department in Plant 2 that was previously the focus of health and safety protests, there were persistent problems with foremen and supervisors who harassed workers and denied them emergency relief. After one such incident where workers were denied relief, workers in the department launched a sit-down strike, and one worker was fired as a result. After another mass membership meeting in the plant, which determined that the plant union would offer the company an ultimatum, the in-plant union got the fired worker reinstated and the company agreed to deal with the abusive foremen and supervisors. Moreover, when the company began to use foremen to work on the line rather than bringing in relief men, the Plant 2 union similarly told the company that workers would walk out unless the company stopped this practice; as before, the company complied.⁵⁸ In Plant 3, when a foreman began to work on the line, the other workers in the department stopped working and were disciplined. In response, the Plant 3 workers launched a successful two-day wildcat strike. While Brooks came out against the wildcat at a membership meeting, wu endorsed Plant 3’s actions and again argued that direct action tactics needed to be a normal part of union strategy, by pointing to the various instances in which workers had been able to achieve their goals quickly through such tactics.⁵⁹

wu also established a women’s group during this time, called Workers’ Unity Women (wuw), led primarily by Bronwen Wallace. Though the organization never expanded beyond a core group of wives and partners of wu members, wuw published a regular column in Workers’ Unity that emphasized the need for a women’s movement rooted in the working class. The column regularly advocated for co-op daycare, criticized the deleterious effects of shift work on families, and emphasized the ways that women’s socially reproductive labour was essential to auto companies’ profits.⁶⁰

Furthermore, wu gained popularity in the Ford plants during the summer of 1971 in the aftermath of a controversial wildcat strike that revealed further divisions between young workers and their union, which at Ford Windsor was uaw Local 200. In mid-June, a group of workers from the hot test area led a walkout from Ford Windsor’s Engine Plant 2, halting production as thousands of incoming workers honoured the picket lines.⁶¹ The initial 50 wildcatters, including Mike Longmoore, were concerned with the plant’s extremely poor working conditions, including inadequate ventilation, constant burn hazards, and slippery floors.⁶² Similar to the issues that wu was dealing with in Chrysler’s Plant 2, Ford had reduced the number of workers in its own hot test area and increased the workload for the remaining workers in the department while overlooking other health and safety issues.⁶³ The strikers demanded that the company rehire laid-off workers to reduce the amount of overtime that they were being forced to work and stop using job transfers to discipline workers. Like the struggles against Brooks at Chrysler, Longmoore and others were in conflict with Local 200’s executive and wanted to be able to handle their own grievances in ways they saw fit, though the executive did not publicly criticize the striking workers.⁶⁴

The wildcat shut down production at Ford for three days and attracted significant local media attention. Though Ford eventually addressed some of the workers’ complaints by installing fans and repairing the dangerous flooring in the hot test area, the company came down hard on the walkout’s participants by firing 10 workers, including Longmoore, and suspending 46 others.⁶⁵ The fired workers filed grievances, and the union was able to downgrade some of the firings into suspensions and other firings into resignations.⁶⁶ Near the end of the negotiations, only the employment status of Longmoore, Donal Gebbie, and a Mr. Knighton – one of the initial leaders of the walkout – remained to be decided. While Longmoore and Gebbie had not led the walkout, both of them had successfully agitated for extending the length of the strike past the initial Thursday walkout, served as part of an unofficial strike committee, and helped coordinate pickets for the length of the strike. Ultimately, Ford proposed to drop Knighton’s discharge to a suspension if the union agreed not to move Longmoore’s and Gebbie’s grievances to arbitration. Both the union negotiating committee and the plant committee approved of these terms, in a depressing display of business-unionist “solidarity.”⁶⁷ The union furthermore did little to alleviate other workers’ suspensions.⁶⁸ Despite this setback, Longmoore later felt that the wildcat was important because it represented a continuation of Windsor’s militant legacy: “We were all fired up and taking on the world. And people were getting burned in the foundry. And finally somebody got hurt bad and there was that walkout and that three-day wildcat strike, and that’s how I got fired and everybody went back to work. But we had a history; I’m sure you’re aware of the history of the Ford Strike in ’45.”⁶⁹

In response to the firings and other discipline, Longmoore and other Ford radicals established the Ford Workers’ Defense Committee (fwdc). It was an immediate rank-and-file movement to put pressure on the company and the union to reinstate the fired workers and alleviate suspensions, as well as a means to build rank-and-file power more generally at Ford, establishing a more permanent challenge to the labour bureaucracy, as wu had done at Chrysler. The rest of wu similarly began to direct more energy toward engaging Ford workers by using the walkout as a starting point, and the July and September issues of Workers’ Unity included articles focused on Ford.⁷⁰ Despite generating significant rank-and-file pressure, the Local 200 executive refused to reconsider its stance on the terms of the severe discipline. As one fwdc leaflet reported,

Now that we are back to work, we find that the situation around the firings of Brothers Longmoore and Gebbie has not changed. The Union officials still refuse to negotiate the matter with the Company; furthermore, they still refuse to send the cases to arbitration. Added to this they are still ignoring the unanimous membership directive (June 24th meeting) to hold a special meeting concerning any severe discipline resulting from the Walkout. More incredibly, the Union still ignores the signatures of over 800 members who demanded the meeting. Finally, the Union administration has made absolutely no attempt to help in any way the brothers who received long suspensions.⁷¹

As with Local 444’s January ratification meeting at Windsor Arena, the Local 200 executive’s actions revealed a jarring lack of regard for both the concerns of its membership and the democratic process and exhibited an affinity for class collaboration with the company in the face of genuine discontent and dissent among its membership. Under pressure from Mansfield Matthias and other older militants in the fwdc, Longmoore and Gebbie later brought their case to the Ontario Labour Relations Board (olrb), arguing that the union violated its duty to fair representation in its negotiations with Ford.⁷² However, in internal tnt documents, the fwdc later reported that Longmoore and Gebbie had taken legal action merely to expose to other workers the futility of pursuing workers’ struggles through the courts under capitalism.⁷³

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the olrb found no wrongdoing on the union’s part and, legally speaking, this ruling was rather uncontroversial. Longmoore and Gebbie indeed violated the terms of industrial legality by helping perpetuate an illegal strike.⁷⁴ Of course, this does not excuse the union executive for their deference to bourgeois codes of conduct. Rather, it is simply another example of the ways in which the postwar system of industrial relations had transformed unions like uaw Local 200 from militant working-class institutions capable of organizing mass action to further workers’ interests into bureaucratized organizations too afraid to reject the absurd terms of the walkout negotiations in which Ford leveraged workers’ livelihoods against one another. The fact that the walkout was entirely justified – morally, if not legally – by the dangerous working conditions that Ford allowed to exist within its factories in the first place was, under the terms of industrial legality, irrelevant.⁷⁵

Workers’ Unity was beginning to break apart by the fall of 1971, as differences over politics and personalities began to be overwhelming. According to Baxter and Wallace, Horne had done little work to contribute to the formation of the proposed workers’ councils in each department and was also planning, along with other wu members, to run for city council in December on a slate called the Windsor Political Action Committee (wpac). Believing that wu had veered too far from its original purpose, Baxter and Wallace left the group. It officially disbanded soon after.⁷⁶ The wpac continued its municipal campaign, advocating for improved public services and the need for solidarity action between employed and unemployed workers.⁷⁷ Despite their progressive platform, the wpac candidates managed to obtain only a few thousand votes each.⁷⁸ Although wu ceased to exist as an organization, Horne and Dumouchelle retained their positions in Plant 2 well into the 1970s.

Though wu disbanded fairly quickly, it did give Baxter and Wallace their first experience of working-class organizing, provided them with a basic understanding of shop-floor politics, and helped them establish important connections to other radical organizers in the community. Additionally, the conflicts with the Local 444 and Local 200 executives demonstrated to wu members the outright hostility that established union leaders sometimes exhibited toward challenges to their authority from below and the numerous difficulties and provocations that any organized attempt to confront their authority would face. Both the lessons they learned and the connections they established proved integral to the formation of tlc and tnt in the following years. Most importantly, wu’s actions helped to entrench a degree of democratic participation and a particular culture of collective militancy within the union in Plant 2 that did not necessarily exist in the other plants. Jim Monk recalled when he started working at Chrysler in Plant 2 during the fall of 1973:

Nobody did anything at Plant 2 without a vote, whereas at the other plants, the steward or the committeeman or the plant chair [would make the decisions] – it was very top down. Somebody would call an action and it would be imposed whereas [in Plant 2] we were asked, “We’d like to do this, can we do a work to rule?” So I was really freaked out when I got to Plant 3 where they’re cutting off the overtime and they’re not asking me about it. In Plant 2, the engine plant, it was really radical compared to the other plants, under John Horne back then.⁷⁹

Members of The New Tendency’s awg eventually contested Horne’s own authority and viewed Horne himself as a representative of the labour bureaucracy to a certain extent; nevertheless, wu’s organizing efforts seem to have created a qualitative change for workers at Plant 2 both in their day-to-day work experience and in their relationship with their union – no matter how uneven, incomplete, or temporary this may have been.

The New Tendency and the Auto Worker Group

Following the dissolution of Workers’ Unity, some of the former members of the group linked up with other New Left organizations in the community to form the Labour Centre in February of 1972. tlc brought together members of hitherto disparate organizations: the Women’s Liberation Movement led by the radical former nun Pat Noonan, which merged with former wuw members to form the Socialist Women’s Caucus; the milieu of older radical auto workers like Matthias, Gunther, and White; and former members of the ndp’s Waffle faction.⁸⁰ Another significant part of tlc was the Community Resource Centre (crc), a radical bookstore established by Jim Brophy in 1972. Brophy was an American draft resister and former student movement leader, having served as student council president during his time at the University of Windsor during the late 1960s where he helped organize demonstrations and occupations on campus.⁸¹ Brophy subsequently moved to Toronto, where he helped establish the countercultural magazine Guerilla, and took part in labour organizing through the Militant Co-op, a broad-left rank-and-file group.⁸² Brophy soon moved back to Windsor to establish the crc, believing that a radical bookstore could become a hub of resistance to capitalism and American imperialism and could serve as a common “community centre” of sorts for various left-wing groups and projects.⁸³

tlc acted as a forum where activists organizing in separate working groups could come together and work through both the theoretical and practical problems that they encountered in their organizing, while the crc offered an easy way to produce and distribute leaflets and radical literature within the city and beyond. This base of organizing set the stage for the establishment of The New Tendency once tlc connected with analogous groups in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Kitchener-Waterloo. In all of these places, activists were following similar paths in working-class organizing, developing comparable theoretical positions, and moving toward a unique New Left Marxism grounded in workers’ self-activity at the point of production and a rejection of the Leninist vanguard party.⁸⁴

During the summer of 1972, tlc members also struck up a close relationship with Detroit radical Martin Glaberman, a close collaborator and friend of C. L. R. James and himself a former auto worker. Alongside intellectuals such as James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee (later Grace Lee Boggs, after her marriage to James Boggs), Glaberman had been a member of the dissident Johnson-Forest Tendency (jft) within the Socialist Workers Party (swp).⁸⁵ The jft emphasized the importance of working-class self-activity and the everyday forms of resistance, or “counter-planning,” on the shop floor, which the theorists believed were prefigurative struggles that indicated workers’ desire and ability to exercise control over production. The jft, which argued that workers should organize outside of the existing parties and trade unions, believed the usefulness of both organizational forms was historically specific to earlier stages of capitalism. Instead of getting caught up in bureaucratic trade union politics that the theorists saw as holding back the working class and preventing workers from leading their own struggles, the jft argued that under the right conditions workers’ self-activity would give way to workers’ councils as had occurred in Russia in 1905 and 1917 and in Hungary in 1956.⁸⁶ Therefore, the group maintained, it was the duty of Marxists to document these ostensibly prefigurative shop-floor struggles by compiling workers’ inquiries. These inquiries were a tool for organizing rank-and-file workers that could demonstrate the ways in which the everyday resistance that fell outside the purview of the unions, such as sabotage, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes, were in fact struggles over control of the workplace.⁸⁷

After leaving first the swp (led by James Cannon) and then the Workers Party (led by Max Shachtman), the jft formed the Correspondence Publishing Committee, which later morphed into Facing Reality (fr) after Dunayevskaya and the Boggses split to form their own respective groups.⁸⁸ Though fr had ceased to officially exist by the time tnt was established, the old fr milieu continued to associate with one another and Glaberman continued to publish Facing Reality pamphlets under his Bewick Editions imprint.⁸⁹ Glaberman’s theoretical perspective subsequently enjoyed substantial support in the Windsor New Tendency and he became a close friend to members such as Monk, Baxter, and Wallace. Indeed, after befriending Glaberman, Baxter set up Mile One Publications to function as the Canadian branch of Bewick Editions. Through Mile One and the crc, the Windsor New Tendency was able to play a key role in the circulation of pamphlets from similar organizations including fr, the Sojourner Truth Organization, Big Flame, and Lotta Continua, all of which tnt maintained at least loose contact with throughout its existence.⁹⁰

Despite Glaberman’s popularity, others in the Windsor New Tendency, such as Brophy, remained closer to the Toronto tnt branch, which embraced a theoretical orientation closer to that of Italian autonomist organizations such as Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. For those who adhered to this perspective, the increasingly important theoretical concepts that underlie the principle of workers’ autonomy were those of class composition, the social factory, the mass worker, and the struggle against work – all of which can be traced to Tronti’s major theoretical text, Workers and Capital.⁹¹

Drawing on the jft, the Italian theorists advocated in favour of workers’ inquiries and “co-research” at the point of production. However, they differed by arguing that mass workers’ struggles in the Fordist era were no longer defined by the struggle over control of the workplace, because the labour process had been made so undesirable by Taylorist production methods; rather, class struggle was defined by the struggle against work itself, as workers overwhelmingly demanded “more wages for less work” – a demand expressed both in overt large-scale strikes and in the aforementioned everyday resistance of absenteeism, sabotage, wildcats, and slowdowns that the jft theorists had hitherto interpreted as prefigurative struggles for workers’ control. Tied to this, autonomists believed that wage demands were an explicitly political struggle reflecting the specific nature of capitalist production under Fordism, not an economistic demand as Lenin argued.⁹² For many early workers’ autonomy theorists, it was the mass workers’ struggles that carried the most importance, driving the workers’ movement forward, though this aspect of the theory would change drastically over the course of the 1970s through dialogue with the social reproduction theories of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici.⁹³ Additionally, the Italian theorists were less averse to certain forms of vanguardism and party building than the jft. It was ultimately this Italian-influenced theoretical orientation that became dominant in the Windsor Auto Worker Group.

The organization also had a smaller third faction based around the Longmoores and the older auto worker militants, which maintained a somewhat unusual, though not unproductive, relationship with the rest of the group. This faction retained sympathy for the cpc’s Leninist party structure and trade union–focused perspective. On the face of it, such an orientation was ostensibly antithetical to tnt’s core ethos, but this did not prevent these members from making contributions to the group’s organizing efforts.⁹⁴ In fact, this faction was perhaps the least sectarian. For example, when Monk proposed that each working group ought to be split into three separate groups based on the three ideological perspectives, Mike Longmoore not only pointed out the obvious unworkability of this proposal for such a small organization but also emphasized the need for working-class unity in the face of increasingly concentrated forces of reaction.⁹⁵ Moreover, Brophy recalled that while significant theoretical disagreements existed, the older militants’ expertise was often invaluable.⁹⁶ For example, in the wake of the uaw’s 1973 contract, White and Matthias helped the awg produce leaflets that contained detailed critiques of the contract, still framed in a language that would resonate with other workers. The younger activists had little experience with the legalistic details of collective agreements, but the older militants were able to identify weaknesses in the agreement that the others would have likely overlooked.⁹⁷ The other interviewees similarly spoke of their great respect for these older militants, demonstrating the continuities between the Old and New Left that other research has recognized.⁹⁸

The Windsor New Tendency had a plethora of working groups focused on separate struggles in the workplace and the broader community; these included, but were not limited to, a women’s caucus, a gay liberation organization, a high-school student newspaper with corresponding student working groups at local high schools, and a Palestinian solidarity group.⁹⁹ However, much of tnt’s work took place at the point of production in Windsor’s auto factories. In 1972, Brophy began to work at Chrysler, initially seeking to support the bookstore through his income. In early 1973, he began to organize a new rank-and-file group in Chrysler’s Plant 2 with former Workers’ Unity member Gerry Pacquette called the Rank and File Action Committee (rfac), which also functioned as tnt’s Auto Worker Group. Brophy and Pacquette put out their first leaflet on May Day, 1973, outlining the initial purpose of the group. The leaflet stressed the need for rank-and-file workers to organize to confront poor working conditions within the plant independently of the uaw, whose strategies they derided as “timid” and “bull shit.” Noting that they were not looking to run against the current union leadership, Brophy and Pacquette instead encouraged workers to join the rfac with the goal of organizing workers’ councils so that workers could deal directly and democratically with problems themselves, much like the early wu though without the electoral component.¹⁰⁰

While the rfac began to see some positive, albeit skeptical, support in response to the first leaflet, the union representatives allied to John Horne were less than thrilled. In one incident, Brophy had been working at a dip tank station where spilled oil constantly corroded his thick work boots. Older contracts had made the company responsible for covering the costs of replacement boots, but concessions in this area in the most recent contract meant Brophy was on the hook to pay for his own replacements. After confronting the superintendent, Brophy attempted to get the union to file a grievance for him. Instead, Brophy was pulled into a meeting with Harold Newton, his Horne-aligned union committeeman, who also happened to be a former Canadian Football League linebacker. When Newton began to accuse him of being a “company stooge,” Brophy suggested that Newton’s anger had more to do with the leaflet and pointed out that Newton’s allies Horne and Dumouchelle had made similar demands when they were in Workers’ Unity. Newton then threatened to “kick the shit out of” Brophy.¹⁰¹ A second leaflet detailed the incident to highlight how Horne’s leadership and the uaw more broadly had devolved into using “strong-arm tactics to intimidate and silence rank-and-file members.”¹⁰² While Horne’s initial tactics toward the group involved coercion and threats through Newton, he eventually left the group alone.¹⁰³ By contrast, Charlie Brooks initially attempted to co-opt or form an alliance with the group and offered to help them print their leaflets, perhaps seeing the rfac as potentially helpful in his struggles against Horne in Plant 2. However, seeing Brooks as part of the labour bureaucracy and remembering his repressive actions toward wu, the group declined the alliance.¹⁰⁴

Like wu before it, the awg continued to build support by producing leaflets that spoke to workers’ everyday concerns and realities within the plants; by October 1973 it had grown to seventeen core members.¹⁰⁵ Rather than attempting to impose a particular party line or lecture workers on abstract theoretical concepts, the group made a genuine effort to meet other workers at a concrete level and build a theory based on their everyday experiences on the shop floor. Indeed, almost all awg leaflets contained critiques of the union and its ineffectiveness in the wake of constant speed-ups and layoffs that affected everyone in the plant. In particular, one leaflet noted,

Our union doesn’t seem to have any plans for fighting the layoffs, speed-ups etc that we have seen in Plant 1, 2, 3 and the Spring Plan. We all know the company is cutting out the B-bodies in Plant #3, and you can bet your bottom dollar the company will use the opportunity to cut out a few extra jobs besides. The union leadership in most cases waits until the company moves, guys walk-out, and then the union is forced into the position of fighting company discipline. Even Tricky Dicky knows the best defense is good offense. Once the fight gets out of the plant and into the office, we’ve lost control.¹⁰⁶

As Jeremy Milloy observes, the awg also linked this greater intensification of the labour process and poor working conditions with increased violence in the plant and the community.¹⁰⁷ One leaflet lamented the increase in industrial accidents in Windsor, as three workers had died over the course of two weeks, while another worker had been stabbed at Chrysler. Seeing the incidents as all part of the same phenomenon wherein companies force workers to withstand inhuman conditions, the leaflet argued that “the main responsibility must fall on Chrysler as the direct instigator of this stabbing by its ruthless exploitation of the workforce which pushed its workers to vent their frustrations by turning on each other. The day before this incident, the line where these men worked was sped up by over 10 cars an hour.”¹⁰⁸ As usual, the awg also blamed the uaw’s complicity in the speed-ups, resulting violence, and poor conditions, noting that “our own union president openly brags how in Plant 3 with the same size workforce they produce over 3 times the number of cars [as in comparable factories].”¹⁰⁹

To counter the union’s inaction and the company’s repression, the awg detailed, engaged in, and encouraged workers’ self-organized resistance. For example, one leaflet pointed to two separate instances wherein workers in the chassis department and metal shop, respectively, had conducted sit-down strikes in solidarity with relief workers who were suspended for refusing to fill in for workers who had been laid off. Both sit-downs had shut down the plant for the rest of the day.¹¹⁰ In another instance, workers from one department had occupied the canteen and were soon joined by the rest of the plant to support the department’s concerns. Highlighting the union’s hypocrisy in responding to workers’ self-activity, the awg noted how when workers wildcatted in response to deteriorating working conditions and layoffs, the union labelled them “shit disturbers.”¹¹¹ In contrast, when a union official was fired, the union encouraged a walkout that resulted in the company disciplining over 400 workers. Two weeks prior, the fired union official, Paul Forder, had told two workers that their only option to resolve their issues was to go through the grievance procedure. The awg noted that when 27 workers led a walkout to support a relief worker who had been fired, the union accused them of “gutting the union.” The awg argued that the union should provide all workers with the level of support and solidarity given to Forder, rather than reserving such privileges for union officials.¹¹²

Critiques of the union bureaucracy based on the awg’s experiences were further elaborated in tnt’s Newsletter. For example, one article about the 1973 Chrysler “non-strike” shows how the uaw actively stifled rank-and-file opposition to a massively unpopular contract. The article explains the union’s repressive actions leading up to negotiations, such as mobilizing a uaw flying squad to reopen a plant in Detroit that had been occupied by workers protesting the firing of one of their colleagues.¹¹³ Similarly, in Windsor, when workers wildcatted to protest the in-plant conditions during a heat wave, the union simply ordered them back to work while uaw leaders Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser assured Chrysler that they would keep the Windsor workers under control.¹¹⁴ The article also notes that when the uaw came to an agreement with the company after a three-day strike, the union disallowed any dissent at ratification meetings. When a steward complained that he had too little information about the contract to answer workers’ questions, Canadian uaw leader Dennis McDermott replied “that the steward’s job was to ‘police the contract’ not to explain it,” thus further revealing labour leaders’ attitudes toward the rank-and-file and the constraints that even well-meaning stewards faced in their work.¹¹⁵

The awg also used leaflets to highlight divisions within the working class and demonstrate the ways that such divisions held workers back in their struggles against the company. For example, when a wallet and watch were stolen from a worker in the factory, Brophy discussed the incident with other workers in the department, who encouraged him to put out a leaflet on the incident. This early awg leaflet simply highlighted the importance of working-class unity and urged workers to help find the wallet and, more generally, to discourage one another from stealing. In response to the leaflet, workers in the department raised $90 for the worker whose wallet and watch were stolen. In his “Organizing Notes” column in the Newsletter, Brophy emphasized that it was important not to read too deeply into the workers’ efforts to raise money, but he believed the process indicated that workers were taking the leaflets seriously and that the leaflets had the potential to directly help workers on the shop floor.¹¹⁶

Similar leaflets addressed racism against immigrant workers and other forms of discrimination that workers experienced in the factory. One leaflet noted that when the V-8 engine department had refused to work unscheduled overtime, the company brought in scab workers from a separate department. The leaflet countered the belief – widely held in the factory – that only immigrants scabbed in these situations, demonstrating instead that it was indeed “good Canadians” who scabbed on the V-8 workers and that the union did nothing to prevent their actions.¹¹⁷ Another leaflet described the difficult position that immigrant workers found themselves in at the plant. An immigrant worker, the leaflet explained, was

in a foreign, hostile, repressive environment. In this situation he is penniless, scared shitless by the blue and white gestapo, and unable or severely handicapped in communicating his situation to anyone. He has already sensed the racist tension that exists and is very aware that if he is not a “good little worker” he will be fired and deported. … How many times have you seen management put the immigrant on the most repressive job in the dept.? How often have you seen immigrants used for speed-up? And how often have you criticized the worker and not the boss? … Discrimination and looking out solely for no. 1 divide our interests so far apart that the company could run us over with a herd of boy scouts. If you don’t believe me look at the 6 line; up to 100 jobs a day and not a squawk heard.¹¹⁸

Leaflets like this one not only encouraged workers to empathize with immigrant workers, and humanized their predicament, but also demonstrated to Canadian workers why it was also in their own interest to fight racism on the shop floor and in the community. Indeed, the ability to link workers’ particular lived experiences to the interests of the broader working class without moralizing or imposing abstract concepts was one of the awg’s main strengths, and it potentially allowed the group to attract a larger audience of workers than other active far-left groups. Brophy recalled that workers, at least in Plant 2 where the culture of shop-floor resistance was strongest, afforded the awg a level of respect and support that other revolutionary groups, such as the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), did not necessarily obtain.¹¹⁹ This is admittedly difficult to prove without any sort of statistical data; however, according to tlc and awg internal documents, workers tended to take the leaflets home with them to read and often expressed positive reactions and feedback when the group handed them out.¹²⁰ Regarding the leaflets that criticized the 1973 contract, for example, the awg reported to tlc that workers “lined up to get copies of the leaflet,” with some even coming back to take multiple copies to give to friends and other workers in their respective departments.¹²¹ Internally, the group constantly evaluated the effectiveness of particular leaflets, attempted to gauge why a given leaflet was or was not liked by other workers, and incorporated these lessons into future work to ensure their message would resonate in the plant.¹²²

Early on, the awg had no distinct theoretical position, so when Monk began working at Chrysler in September of 1973, he too was involved in the group for a time, as was Mike Longmoore, who was also hired at Chrysler during this period. However, it did not take long for their respective theoretical differences with the rest of the awg to become apparent, and Monk and Longmoore each split off from the awg to do their own organizing work in the factory based on their respective orientations.¹²³ Despite the group’s close connection to the rest of the rank-and-file, Monk felt the awg was still too heavily focused on “nagging” the workers and assuming a vanguardist position in relation to workers’ self-organization.¹²⁴ Monk sought instead to continue documenting the widespread resistance that already existed on the shop floor, not only in sit-downs, walkouts, and occupations but also in more subtle practices such as absenteeism and “doubling up” – a technique where a worker would do both his job and his partner’s for four hours of an eight-hour shift, and then the partner would work both jobs for the other four, effectively halving the workday for both. In doing so, Monk wrote jft-style workers’ inquiries on resistance in his department, attempting to identify the prefigurative nature of these struggles.¹²⁵

Despite his focus on investigating rather than organizing, Monk nevertheless participated in, and sometimes led, rank-and-file resistance at the point of production. For example, he organized slowdowns and sit-downs with the workers in his section of the Chrysler truck plant to improve safety conditions and lighten workloads.¹²⁶ These workers also psychologically “tormented” their hated foreman to get him moved to the night shift.¹²⁷ Furthermore, when other issues arose in the plant, Monk refused to use the grievance procedure and successfully employed various other types of direct action to resolve disputes.¹²⁸ While Monk was similarly opposed to working inside the union structure, he did have a more cordial relationship with the former members of wu than Brophy. At one point, Monk helped Al Dumouchelle research the dealings related to uaw’s co-op housing project, Solidarity Towers, believing Brooks might have been involved in a corruption scandal, though they never found any evidence of wrongdoing.¹²⁹

Splits in the New Tendency

Theoretical differences were also hardening in the Windsor New Tendency more broadly, ultimately leading to the organization’s dissolution in 1975. The first split was from women who turned toward the Wages for Housework (wfh) perspective developed by the Italian theorists Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici, which argued that because the socially reproductive labour performed overwhelmingly by women produces value, women ought to demand wages in compensation and to engage in their own struggles against work.¹³⁰ The split mirrored developments in the Toronto branch of tnt, where women similarly left the organization.¹³¹ Others, including the Longmoores, left to join the cpc, believing that a party was necessary to unite working-class struggles and that radical workers ought to organize within the unions rather than remain completely autonomous.¹³² The final split was between the Glaberman supporters who now referred to themselves as Out of the Driver’s Seat (ods) and the awg. The former argued that the awg was wrong to interpret workers’ self-activity as a struggle against work rather than a struggle for control of production and that, furthermore, the rank-and-file group was becoming far too vanguardist in its relationship to shop-floor struggles. The awg, meanwhile, continued to embrace the struggle-against-work perspective and believed it was necessary to take a greater leadership role in workplace struggles, arguing that ods made a false distinction between activists in tlc and the broader working class.¹³³ As Brophy later said of the spontaneism inherent in the ods perspective,

For me it was this main idea that the function of activists was to record what the working class was doing like you were a visitor or someone in the stands looking at the sport was ridiculous. And I just couldn’t see that. And the other thing was that I was sharing in the exploitation. I was working on the plantation. So I had no real vested interest in just recording their exploitation, I was being exploited. So I just saw it as ridiculous.¹³⁴

The awg continued for some time even after tnt imploded. Through 1975, the awg gravitated toward the wfh perspective despite some initial bitterness as a result of the splits that marked the previous year. Having split from ods, the awg made links with radical auto workers in Detroit who similarly adopted a worker’s autonomy perspective.¹³⁵ While still upholding the struggle against work, the awg declared that the perspective was insufficient on its own and that the wfh perspective was the legitimate “class perspective.” The wfh perspective led to further complications, however, as the group became increasingly focused on the “hierarchies of oppression” within the working class itself, reinforcing the need for organizational autonomy and total rejection of the possibility of uniting men and women, white and racialized workers, employed and unemployed workers, and so on within any sort of unified organization. Instead, the awg argued that they, as predominantly white, male auto workers, would have to attempt to understand the specificity of their class location and formulate some course of action to confront capitalism and dismantle oppression on their own.¹³⁶ There is indeed much to appreciate in the awg’s commitment to overcoming the hierarchies within the working class, yet adopting this separatist perspective did little to advance the level of class struggle in the workplace or improve the material well-being of the workers, racialized or otherwise, and instead likely exasperated the group’s increasing isolation.

The limitations of the struggle-against-work perspective were further evidenced in Brophy’s involvement with Zerowork, a journal project organized by former Toronto New Tendency members, among them Peter Taylor and Bruno Ramirez, and academics such as Peter Linebaugh, that grew out of the global autonomist Marxist network with which tnt had been associated.¹³⁷ The organizers hoped that the journal would help further develop and clarify the struggle-against-work and wfh perspectives. While the journal produced some worthwhile discussions on workers’ self-activity and resistance, including an early article on the auto industry by Linebaugh and Ramirez that was largely based on the experiences of the Windsor auto workers, the Zerowork perspectives ultimately suffered from the same theoretical imprecision that characterized other struggle-against-work theories.¹³⁸ In a letter to Zerowork, for example, Glaberman highlighted the “theoretical confusion” of the journal’s conceptual tools and understanding of class. Furthermore, he forcefully criticized the strategic conclusions drawn by Zerowork theorists by noting the utter banality of collapsing all working-class resistance and demands (whether revolutionary or reformist) into the simple maxim of “more money for less work”:

Much of it boils down to rhetoric, rather than substance, because there is no sense of a revolutionary working-class struggle for power, to destroy this society and to create a new one. … In any case, if the significance of working-class struggle is more money and, hopefully, an end to work, how does the working class establish its control over society and the means of production? That is, what does the revolution consist of?¹³⁹

Indeed, Zerowork’s call for a “total wage,” characterized by a guaranteed income and increases to programs such as unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, social security, and welfare, hardly constituted much more than a very heterodox presentation of essentially reformist demands, or perhaps as Lotta Continua once said of Potere Operaio’s program, a call for “capitalism without labour.”¹⁴⁰

Brophy, too, again became disillusioned with the wfh perspective, which by this point now argued that waged workers’ struggles ought to be not only separate from but entirely subordinate to women’s struggles. Brophy noted that if Zerowork embraced such a perspective, it would never have any chance of relating to regular workers, because “they’ve heard that guilt and liberal shit before and just don’t need it.”¹⁴¹ Having experienced the numerous divisions in tlc, he also warned that the group was likely to split over the matter; indeed, Zerowork dissolved while preparing a third issue of the journal in 1977.¹⁴²

Conclusion

After tnt’s demise, former members of the ods faction, including Monk, Baxter, and Mark Buckner, continued to collaborate with Glaberman. Most notably, Monk helped Glaberman revive Facing Reality’s old leaflet Speak Out as Speaking Out in the early 1980s. Through Speaking Out, Monk and Glaberman continued to document workers’ self-activity and resistance, and the leaflet was distributed at the auto plants in Windsor and Detroit. Monk, a lifelong auto worker, helped to print the leaflets and contributed to articles about auto workers’ resistance and the uaw and caw.¹⁴³ Clearly tnt had an impact on Glaberman, as he continued to refer to New Tendency documents and Monk’s shop-floor experiences in Windsor in his own work.¹⁴⁴ Former tnt members also helped organize and participate in a series of “Blue Collar Work” conferences, conceptualized in part by former fr member Seymour Faber, which facilitated large discussions between rank-and-file workers, union representatives, labour historians, and activists concerned with worker’s self-activity.¹⁴⁵ Indeed, through the 1980s, academic labour scholars continued to engage with the questions around workers’ control, everyday resistance, and the labour process that were so central to the militants involved in wu and tnt.¹⁴⁶

Brophy was similarly influenced by his shop-floor experiences. After the dissolution of Zerowork and the awg, he became an important figure in the burgeoning health and safety movement during the late 1970s, realizing that many of the awg’s concerns were in fact health and safety issues. In addition to the immediate physical hazards that the awg identified as a result of speed-ups and layoffs, Brophy soon became aware of the scale of the toxic chemical emissions that he and other auto workers were exposed to on the job. Along with his wife, Margaret Keith, Brophy founded the influential Windsor Occupational Health Information Service in 1979 as part of a grassroots project to help workers exposed to asbestos at the Windsor Bendix factory; it soon exploded into a much larger health and safety project. Brophy built upon his experiences with workers’ inquiries conducted by tnt – research that entailed detailed investigation of workplaces and a deep understanding of everyday routines, derived from interviews and discussions with workers to understand the problems they face. In his more recent work, Brophy has similarly retained an appreciation for the principle of workers’ autonomy, believing that his projects and clinics ought to stay independent of the trade union bureaucracy while still remaining open to collaboration with unions, provided they allow him to work and research autonomously.¹⁴⁷

In addition to the direct impact on members’ lives and future work, these experiences represent an important moment for the revolutionary left in Canada, as New Leftists and militant workers sought to come to terms with the widespread factory militancy of the early 1970s in concert with their comrades abroad in other manufacturing cities. Experiencing and understanding repression on the job from not only management but also union officials led to a firm rejection of the bureaucratic politics that had plagued the Old Left and the mainstream labour movement, and this led these activists to imagine a number of creative alternatives to the old methods and avenues of organization. In contrast to other scholarship, here we can see that not all New Leftists moved into the mainstream of the labour movement, and, at its best, this independent organizing work led to improved working conditions, even if such gains were often short lived. Although wu and tnt were but two of many organizations that emerged in this period, their history sheds some light on an overlooked part of the trajectory of Canada’s New Left.

We can, of course, find much to criticize in some of the New Left politics explored here. The New Tendency’s sectarianism, hostility to party building, and ultra-left orientation toward unions, for example, have not aged well – even if its important critiques of the labour bureaucracy and the structural limitations of overly leadership-centric politics remain prescient. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that rebuilding unions and creating effective political organizations that can take seriously the question of state power will be crucial to any socialist political project going forward. But one does not need to completely accept the autonomist Marxist positions on the role of organization, leadership, unions, or parties to appreciate how these groups genuinely sought to develop a praxis that reflected the will and interests of rank-and-file workers. Such concerns will no doubt be essential to forging reinvigorated socialist and labour movements in the present and the future.

I would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and Trent University for providing funding for this research and Gary Kinsman, Jeremy Milloy, Dimitry Anastakis, Sam Gindin, Joan Sangster, and Bryan Palmer for their help at various stages of this project. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments.

How to cite:

Sean Antaya, “The New Left at Work: Workers’ Unity, the New Tendency, and Rank-and-File Organizing in Windsor, Ontario, in the 1970s,” Labour/Le Travail 85 (Spring 2020): 53–89, https://doi.org/10.1353/llt.2020.0003.

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