Over the summer, I read Mick Lowe’s The Raids, his 295-page fictionalized work centred on the epic battle in Sudbury in the late 1950s and early 1960s in relation to the Cold War, international politics, McCarthyism, Communism, and the inter-union rivalry between the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) and the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers Local 598. The paperback was published by Robin Philpot of Baraka Books in Montreal in February and launched May 25 at the Local 6500 Steelworkers’ Hall in Sudbury.
Philpot asked me three days later in an e-mail May 28 if I’d like a review copy, as “Thompson, Manitoba lived through similar raids and union battles,” and I happily accepted. Here in Thompson there is a still partially untold story of that same inter-union rivalry between the Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers and United Steelworkers of America between 1960 and 1962. Mine-Mill was the first bargaining agent here in Thompson when Inco workers unionized and had negotiated a contract with Inco that ran through 1964. United Steelworkers of America Local 6166 received its charter of affiliation from the international on Jan. 3, 1962 and the USWA was certified by the Manitoba Labour Board as the bargaining agent for Inco employees in Thompson on May 31, 1962.
Because the million-member United Steel Workers of America, under the leadership of international president Iorwith Wilbur (I.W.) Abel, itself, after 18 years of inter-union fighting for the right to represent nonferrous workers, dating back to 1949, went onto merge five years later with the 37,000 members of United States section of the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers in Tucson, Arizona in January 1967, led by Mine-Mill international president Albert C. Skinner, a lot of that nastiness has been papered over, at least publicly. The merger was effective in the United States on June 30, 1967 and 13,000 Mine-Mill workers in Canada joined the merger the following day on July 1, 1967 – Centennial Day.
The International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers started out as the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), established in Butte, Montana on May 15, 1893, organizing workers who mined copper, bauxite, nickel, uranium, lead, zinc, gold, and silver as well as those who smelted and refined copper. “Earning a reputation as one of the leading radical institutions in the American West, the union won some important organizing drives in its early years, including a key victory at Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1894,” the Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. History notes. It was renamed as the International Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers, often popularly shortened simply to Mine-Mill, in 1916.
Lowe worked at the Lincoln Daily Star and Daily Nebraskan before moving to Canada in 1970. He has lived in Sudbury since 1974. His 1988 non-fiction book, Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Murder, Bikers and the Law, about motorcycle gangs in small town Ontario in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly Satan’s Choice, which has since been absorbed into Hells Angels, won the Arthur B. Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book that year from the Crime Writers of Canada. Lowe is 67 now. He suffered a stroke in 2008, restricting his mobility, which is why he was limited to writing a fictionalized account of events.
While his fictional characters – such as 19-year-old rookie hard rock nickel miner Jake McCool, his girlfriend, Jo Ann Winters, whose father is a member of senior management at Inco, his own dad, Big Bill McCool, Mine-Mill Local 598 president Spike Sworksi, veteran newspaperman and Mine-Mill union sympathizer Foley Gilpin and Steelworker-supporting Mine-Mill turncoat local president Bobby McAdoo – are fairly well drawn, their dialogue does leave something to be desired at times, shading off into the sort of caricature their characters’ names might well evoke. Still, Lowe, who makes no secret of his sympathies that would have left him as a Mine-Mill supporter on the loosing side of history in that era, is a worthy chronicler of a year in the life of Sudbury in a world on the cusp of change in the early Sixties.
soundingsjohnbarker 