This summer, 208 workers in Ingersoll, Ontario took to the picket lines for nine weeks. “We're a team. We're sticking together and we're sticking it out,” said United Steelworkers union member Jill Lilley to CTV News London.
United Steelworkers (USW) staff representative David Doyle told Briarpatch, “The issues are the cost of housing, rent, new vehicles, whatever. After COVID-19, we all saw the cost of living going up and business doing as well as before COVID-19 and in some cases, better.”
These were not just any workers, however. They work for IMT Precision (formerly IMT Defence) making munitions, light armoured vehicle (LAV) parts and tank parts for the Canadian military and its allies. As president Remo Assini told Canadian Defence Review, IMT Precision is one of the most important weapons makers in Canada. “There is no one else that has our capability.”
At work, they are sworn to secrecy and surveilled. Yet, for nine weeks, production was halted. “If they don’t have workers, they’re not producing,” an IMT Precision worker noted to Stratford Today.
“For anti-war union organizers, unionized weapons workers present a paradox,” Simon Black, Brock University labour studies professor tells Briarpatch.
After a 98 per cent strike vote, they secured a nine per cent wage increase over four years, an end to tiered wages, and schedule changes to remove mandatory overtime.
But, in their demands, the nature of the arms trade itself didn’t come up. “How does an individual feel about making a bomb that’s going to go to another country and obviously kill someone? I haven’t had that discussion with any of the members. But I’m sure there are some people who don’t want to be working there,” Doyle said.
How to understand war industry strikes
IMT Precision is not an outlier. With the capitalist polycrisis eroding workers’ wages, benefits, and job security, Canada has seen two years of strikes in multiple sectors – and this has extended to Canada’s defence industry. The companies that make fortunes off of invasions and airstrikes can be, it turns out, halted by their employees.
But these strikes place the labour movement in a contradictory position.
“For anti-war union organizers, unionized weapons workers present a paradox,” Simon Black, Brock University labour studies professor tells Briarpatch. “Serving these members ostensibly means making the weapons industry stable and numerative. But the principles of global solidarity call for dispensing with the imperialist war industry all together.”
Perverse incentives
War is terrible, but it is also terribly profitable. Lobbying group Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries dubs the sector “a vital partner supporting Canada’s economic and national interests.” In 2022, they claimed, the Canadian war industry contributed $9.6 billion to Canada’s GDP and a total of 81,200 jobs – 61,200 directly and 20,000 indirectly.
This deep penetration reflects Canada’s place as one of the world’s leading imperialist powers – a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member with a rising arms budget and a leader in producing oil, minerals, forestry products, and car parts, among other sectors. And like all imperialist powers, its military power and its economic power are interrelated. Canada uses its military force to topple governments and resistance movements around the world to ensure access to markets, resources, and spheres of influence. Added to this, the military provides a useful adjunct to Canada’s industrial development via highly lucrative procurement contracts.
The collapse of the postwar boom in the mid-1970s diminished the power of the labour movement, and it likely made many union leaders all the more desperate to defend union jobs – wherever they were.
“A lot of innovations have initial military applications and then they have broader uses,” says University of Guelph professor emeritus Ralph Martin. “There is a lot of money and science that goes into being better than one’s ‘enemy’ and that trickles down into the rest of society.”
This is why, historically, Canada’s industrial development has been very closely linked to its military endeavours. During the Second World War, for example, Canada’s nickel mines in Sudbury, its auto plants in Oshawa, Regina, and Windsor and its steel mills in Hamilton were commissioned to serve the war effort. The militant workers who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s were soon led by their union leaders to make guns, bombs, and warships for use overseas. After the war, these plants were recommissioned again for civilian production, but the war industry remained key to the industrial expansion.
As organizations, unions are regularly pushed by their members to oppose war. The Canadian Labour Congress called for an arms embargo against Israel in 2021, and co-signed a statement demanding peace in Palestine last autumn. It also opposes Canada’s arms exports to Saudi Arabia and it opposed NATO’s war on Afghanistan.
But since so many jobs are tied, directly and indirectly to the war industry, there is significant pressure for unions to come on side.
Canada’s industrial decay
The collapse of the postwar boom in the mid-1970s diminished the power of the labour movement, and it likely made many union leaders all the more desperate to defend union jobs – wherever they were.
Thus, from 1978 to 1981, the federal government managed to bring the Canadian Labour Congress onside with Canada’s top CEOs to identify potential augmentations to Canada’s industrial base into the new millennium. Defence was top of mind for all parties. New “fighter aircraft and patrol frigate[s]” and more base spending was seen as a way to offset capital spending, cover training costs and boost revenues. Today, this trend continues. Unifor’s aerospace strategy sees an “opportunity” in Canada’s rising defence budget. And former United Steelworkers international president Leo Gerard cautioned the U.S. Senate that “[t]he health of our manufacturing base and our defence industrial base are inextricably linked.”
‘The box workers were in’
By the 1970s, former research director for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Sam Gindin recalls, the CAW’s predecessor, the United Auto Workers, had organized a plant that was part of Litton Industries – a multinational conglomerate that specialized in missiles and related weapons systems. Here, Gindin says, the union faced a split between the needs of international solidarity and the immediate pressures that come with having a local in the arms industry. “You saw the reality of the box workers were in.”
“We were trying to organize and there was a mobilization from the peace movement to shut it down completely. You saw that conflict immediately. We wouldn’t have organized that plant if we said ‘we want to shut it down.’ If we can’t organize these workers, there will not be any way to talk to them and you will lose.”
Eventually, Gindin says, the union decided to focus on peace education within its membership. But this meant that, regardless of the stated anti-war positions of the union’s leaders and wider membership, the warmaking continued and Litton kept running – despite the best efforts of the anti-war movement.
“It’s basically the last big show we’ve got”
Canada’s industrial decline, some would argue, has given the arms industry more power – but that hasn’t meant an end to discontent within the sector.
CAW Local 27 – now Unifor – has a long history in London, Ontario. But, in recent years, the city and the union local have faced challenging times.
According to Black, even if strikes like these may not directly question the nature of the war industry, they offer potential fissures of which the left can take advantage.
As key plants like Caterpillar and Kellogg’s closed, General Dynamics Land Systems expanded into the town. Notably, this meant setting up shop to produce a new batch of LAVs – first for Saudi Arabia and now for Ukraine. As Jim Reid, then-president of Unifor Local 27 told the Canadian Press, General Dynamics is “now the largest employer in the London region […] It’s basically the last big show we’ve got.”
But while General Dynamics has so far avoided strikes at its own plant, the city was rocked by a significant shutdown this summer when 147 Unifor members at the adjacent HCL Logistics took to the picket lines.
HCL has LAVs on its homepage and touts General Dynamics as its “primary customer.” Over the course of the summer of 2024, the workers rejected two tentative agreements over the erosion of their wages. Eventually the company gave in and the union accepted a 17 per cent wage increase, better health and safety procedures, and an increased “boot allowance” (an allotment for safety footwear).
According to Black, even if strikes like these may not directly question the nature of the war industry, they offer potential fissures of which the left can take advantage.
In most cases, even militant union leaders eventually guide their workers back to work. And if those workers make bombs, they guide them back to making bombs.
“These strikes provide a space for workers to see that the production of goods depends on their labour and it provides a space for them to put forward demands around their livelihoods and discuss the future of these plants,” Black says. If one were to go down to the plant gates and ask the workers if they would, for the same wages and benefits, prefer to produce weapons or socially useful goods, how many people would still choose the former? “But under capitalism,” Black says, “workers don’t have that choice.”
Recommissioning
Unfortunately, Canada’s union leaders aren't, in the main, looking to challenge management’s right to rule.
Regarding the rise in strikes, Doyle explains, “It all boils down to the take-home pay at the end of the week. If there is not enough after you pay your rent or food, that’s the issue at the bargaining table.”
This is, of course, the norm for most strikes. In most cases, even militant union leaders eventually guide their workers back to work. And if those workers make bombs, they guide them back to making bombs.
This isn’t because ending war production is impossible. Recommissioning plants from military to civilian use was technically possible at the end of the Second World War, and took just a few months. It would be even easier today, owing to the development of technology and rationalized techniques.
But it is a question of power. Specifically, it means a major fight against the property rights of the country’s war profiteers. As Gindin notes, the labour movement has a long history of trying to change and amend production plans at the bargaining table – and they’ve generally been ignored. “Since the late 1970s, the unions made concessions to companies in exchange for guarantees for jobs,” Gindin tells me. But, when it has mattered, these provisions have granted the union little control. “They’ve been meaningless,” Gindin says.
The Labour Against the Arms Trade coalition of labour and peace activists, Black says, demands that the Canadian government partner with unions to provide them with exactly this power – “to ensure a just transition for those workers.”
This, however, also runs up against the reality that the ruling class needs war. As such, while labour groups can demand that governments support workers and peace, the needs of the capitalist state limit any and all potential openings. This explains, for example, why the Lucas Plan – when workers in Birmingham proposed repurposing an aerospace plant to produce socially useful products – was eventually strangled.
“There is no social democratic solution,” Black says.
Mobilizing discontent
Ultimately, however, war profiteers live off of the labour of the working class – and they grow their profits to the degree that they can cut wages and benefits and speed up work. This makes discontent and strikes inevitable. Strikes and the labour movement generally exist to give workers decision-making power – and to take it away from bosses. Potentially, every labour dispute raises questions of ownership, operations, and purposes. And, if the left is suitably organized, it may be able to turn workers against the war industry generally and build a campaign to struggle for peace.
In the end, the CLC called for a boycott of all Indonesian goods and a “hot cargo” edict – one that would effectively see its member unions refuse to handle goods moving to and from Indonesia.
“The minimum unions need to do is educate their members around the wider politics,” Gindin says. “You have to start with getting them to understand the situation and work out what could be done with the plant. You get them onside and you have a chance and have a plan to move forward.”
So far, Black, who is part of Labour Against the Arms Trade has not yet made direct contact with workers in the defence sector. At the moment, Labour Against the Arms Trade is working to pressure union leaders into signing onto anti-war and anti-militarist resolutions with the hope of educating the movement at large.
For now, Black points out that particular international flashpoints can and do serve to clarify the issue of war and imperialism for sections of the movement. Black points to how the CLC responded to Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor in 1999.
At the time, the CLC was led by Ken Georgetti. And, Canada had previously backed the Indonesian dictatorship with diplomatic coverage and weapons exports. Yet, Black notes, “a concerted effort by affiliates and the peace movement pushed the CLC leadership.” In the end, the CLC called for a boycott of all Indonesian goods and a “hot cargo” edict – one that would effectively see its member unions refuse to handle goods moving to and from Indonesia.
In effect, that would be an unlawful strike.
This was not a result of the CLC’s overnight conversion to radicalism, but rather of pressure from below. The CLC’s membership and the wider movement forced the CLC onside and pushed the Congress to use its resources and influence within the working class to oppose an ally of Western imperialism – whatever Georgetti’s own views. That tradition is one that should be used and revived to advance struggles against war and militarism elsewhere.
Internationally, we’ve seen this during key freedom struggles too.
In all cases, these have been connected to broader struggles against oppression and imperialism. However, crucial education work took place on shop floors and in union meetings.
In the 1970s, workers at Glasgow’s Rolls Royce factory downed their tools rather than work on plane engines that were prepared for export to Chile where they would assist Augusto Pinochet’s death squads. As the workers involved recalled subsequently, it began with a solidarity resolution at their union meeting. These resolutions, the workers recounted, condemned the torture and murder of trade union activists by the U.S.-backed dictatorship and highlighted how much they had in common with Chile’s prisoners. It connected the abstract to the concrete.
In other famous cases, dock workers have refused to move weapons that were being sent to aid the South African apartheid regime and, more recently, Israel.
Dock and port worker militancy has a tradition of its own in Canada, too.
In July 1979, Saint John port workers of International Longshoremen’s Association Local 273 refused to move a shipment of heavy water bound for Argentina, during the U.S.-backed “dirty war.” The picket was organized by Argentine activists in exile, the New Brunswick Federation of Labour, and the Saint John and District Labour Council. They were soon joined by much of the existing labour movement.
On the day, it was all down to the longshore workers themselves, organized into the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), who made common cause with the protesters outside the gate and their “picket.” Soon, the plant was shut down and no nuclear equipment moved. They used signs reading “HOT CARGO” and demanded the release of a number left-wing political prisoners in Argentina, most of whom were trade unionists, securing the release of 11 political prisoners within days.
Recounting the events later to NB Media Co-op, local representative Pat Riley says, “The story of the 1979 No CANDU for Argentina picket line was a story of immense courage, ingenuity, and resolve.”
It was subsequently marked as “the single most dramatic example of Canadian trade union solidarity with workers in the Third World.”
In all cases, these have been connected to broader struggles against oppression and imperialism. However, crucial education work took place on shop floors and in union meetings.
Ultimately, unions are bound to serve their members in day-to-day struggles. People do not join unions to go backward. But there is a connection between the struggle against inflation, job loss, and war: capitalism. Winning the majority of the working class to that perspective will be difficult work. It will take education and a revival of the militant traditions of the past to break our chains and break the war machine.
“People might say it comes too late. That’s true. All of this comes too late,” Black says. “But if we don’t start building now, we won’t win much.”
