Corporate Restructuring and Labour’s Decline

While Niagara’s labour movement was able to demonstrate a degree of social, economic, and political power in the community throughout the 1970s, toward the end of the decade anti-union employers and their allies in government set out to reverse organized labour’s gains in an unprecedented way. A combination of high unemployment and the rise of neoliberalism created an increasingly hostile climate for unions. The greatest test of labour’s strength came during deep recessionary periods in the early 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1980, GM initiated a major layoff that had a significant impact on the Niagara region. With unemployment hovering just under 20 percent in the St. Catharines-Niagara area in 1981, the St. Catharines and District Labour Council asked government to fund work projects in order to assist laid-off workers in obtaining the number of weeks of employment needed to requalify for unemployment insurance benefits, which were set to expire at the end of January 1982.¹ Around the same time, several autoworkers from St. Catharines joined a “marathon of despair” to protest high interest rates, which were crippling homeowners and precipitating plant closures and layoffs. St. Catharines and District Labour Council President Len Harrison, who helped organize the marathon of runners who took turns jogging from St. Catharines to the Scarborough home of Minister of Housing Paul Cosgrove, dropped off a telegram to the minister demanding his resignation.² The prime minister later removed Cosgrove from responsibility for the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation and ultimately, in 1983, shuffled him out of the cabinet altogether.

The cabinet shuffle did little to help autoworkers in Niagara, who took another hit with GM’s announcement that it was planning to close its Welland Avenue plant in St. Catharines. In June 1982, an estimated twelve hundred UAW members and supporters participated in a march from the UAW hall on Bunting Road in St. Catharines to the Welland Avenue plant.³ Protesting autoworkers continued to blame the Trudeau government’s failure to address high interest rates for the plant closing. Many union members waved placards that read, “Export Trudeau, not our jobs!”⁴

By December 1982, the unemployment rate in St. Catharines-Niagara had risen to just over 20 percent. According to Statistics Canada, the Niagara region ranked second of thirty-two areas across Canada in terms of unemployment.⁵ The consistently high levels of joblessness prompted the St. Catharines and District Labour Council to organize a union of the unemployed in order to pressure government to initiate a number of anti-poverty measures, which included extending unemployment insurance benefits, eliminating regressive sales taxes on Canadian-made products, and lowering interest rates. Nearly one hundred unemployed workers packed the UAW hall for the inaugural meeting of the new group. Within the next few months, the Labour Council managed to launch the Unemployed Help Centre with the assistance of progressive church organizations and government.⁶ The drop-in centre for unemployed workers provided job listings, counselling, and a soup kitchen.

St. Catharines workers protesting Trudeau’s economic policies, June 1982. Courtesy of the St. Catharines Museum (St. Catharines Standard Collection).

Although the economic recession was over by the mid-1980s, the election of Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government in 1984 signaled that the war against working families was not about to abate. The Mulroney government led an unprecedented attack on Canada’s social safety net and embarked on the most ambitious privatization spree in Canadian history.⁷ In 1987, the government negotiated a free trade agreement with the United States. Serving to benefit corporate interests in both Canada and the United States, the negotiation of a free trade deal guaranteed corporate Canada unrestricted access to the American economy while also providing corporate interests in the United States greater access to Canada’s vast resources. The Canadian labour movement joined progressive community groups and political organizations to fight the free trade deal, proposing instead that Canada achieve a “fair trade” deal that would protect Canadian sovereignty and Canadian workers.⁸ The labour movement in Niagara organized vigorously against the free trade agreement, holding a number of town hall meetings to raise awareness about the impact of free trade on the local economy. NDP candidates won a record high share of the popular vote in the 1988 federal election, which was considered a referendum on free trade. However, the anti–free trade forces split between the NDP and the Liberals, thus allowing the Conservatives to form a second majority government despite winning only 43 percent of the popular vote. The labour movement’s all-out war against the Canada-us free trade agreement in the late 1980s, although ultimately unsuccessful, demonstrated the labour movement’s strength as an independent, progressive coalition builder. As for the trade deal, it precipitated massive layoffs in Ontario’s manufacturing sector, while failing to liberalize trade in key areas, such as softwood lumber. Union membership in Niagara dropped dramatically as a result of the trade deal, as the manufacturing sector began to shrink at an alarming rate. In the face of deindustrialization, unions increasingly looked toward the growing service sector as an area of potential growth.