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In 1937’s Oshawa GM strike, The Globe’s publisher backed the losing side – but didn’t interfere with a newsroom whose labour coverage would change radically in the decades to follow
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.
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