Immigrants

While emerging technologies helped to undermine worker power and autonomy, a wave of immigrant labour that entered Canada during the early part of this century served to glut the market with unskilled workers desperate for employment. The Canadian government wanted agriculturalists to settle and work the plains of western Canada, but received instead thousands of nonagricultural, unskilled immigrants from eastern and northern Europe. Even those immigrants who were farm workers found that their labour was needed only for the annual one or two months associated with crop sowing and harvesting. As such, many of these immigrants migrated to industrialized urban centers like Windsor, alongside their non-agricultural counterparts. The government often gave industrialists a "free hand" in the recruitment of immigrants for national economic development, and it was estimated that by 1914, despite the protests of Labour, over three million people had entered the country in less than twenty years. Many found work in the auto industry, where they were often used unknowingly as scab labour. Isolated, they inspired no small amount of suspicion and resentment in many co-workers who initially viewed them as job usurpers unentitled to equal wages.

Immigrant workers countered their isolation by forming their own ethnic clubs that celebrated and preserved their culture through dancing, theatre, sports, and music. Several of these clubs were Socialist or Communist organizations that transformed individual grievances into collective immigrant protest. Although the barriers of language and culture served to divide auto workers, many of the new immigrants working in auto came from lands where collective action in the face of economic exploitation was a fact of life. Poles, Yugoslavians and Hungarians all had leftist clubs in the Windsor area. Finns and Ukrainians were especially important in establishing the Communist party in this area, comprising 80 percent of its national membership in the 1920s.

Individual ethnicities were not themselves completely unified; many immigrant groups were divided by ideological and political differences born in the old country that survived and flourished in the new. The local chapter of the Serbian National Federation established in Windsor in 1927 later disbanded because of such Socialist/Conservative confrontation. In time, however, common occupational and residential experiences helped to erode the differences among immigrants and between foreigners and "native" auto workers leading to the more effective unionization efforts of the 1930s and 1940s. The Hungarian Hall functioned as the strike kitchen during the Auto Specialties action of 1934, Windsor's Italian Club was the site of "pep-talks" given to Kelsey Wheel workers during their strike of 1936 and auto workers and union organizers secretly met at night in the basement of the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple. The temple later served as the first headquarters of Local 200.