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Letter from Thomas Murray
to Richard A. Rigg
1918
In May 1918, municipal teamsters, electrical workers,
water works employees, telephone operators, and street
railwaymen in the City of Winnipeg went on strike over
the question of wage increases. When it became apparent
that a general strike vote might be called and the city's
firemen were considering going off the job, a settlement
was reached. As this letter from one well-known Winnipeg
labour leader to another reveals, a labour confrontation
was brewing in Winnipeg long before the famous strike
of 1919.
[more]
By the end of the First World War, Canadian workers
were fed up with wartime profiteering, rising inflation
without a comparable increase in wages, and the federal
government's outlawing of strikes and lockouts in
1918. Indeed, Canadian labour had a long list of grievances
about wages and working conditions in Canada's war
industries. Fair wage clauses had not been part of
the war contracts and thus, the wages of war workers
had not been protected. While wages did rise, inflation
almost doubled between 1915 and 1919, the cost of
living shot up over 50 percent, and the cost of food
alone rose nearly 75 percent. Many workers called
for reform while other labour radicals called for
a general strike and even revolution.
By 1917-1918, rising union membership and increased
labour discontent set the stage for a series of national
strikes. Some 50,000 shopcraft workers on the major
railways, who repaired and maintained the trains,
went on strike in 1918, as did 5,000 West Coast shipyard
workers, along with national letter carriers. Strikes
spread across Canadian cities, including Winnipeg,
where the civic workers' strike spread to near general-strike
proportions. In the end, Winnipeg's city workers won
most of their demands, including recognition of the
right of most civic workers to strike. Most of the
strikes were caused by workers wanting union recognition
and increased wages to keep up with the cost of living
in the post-First World War period.
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