The post-war era was in many ways a golden age for the UAW. The UAW had grown to become the largest union in Canada by the conclusion of W.W.II, with Chrysler workers splitting from Local 195 to form Local 444 in 1956. Although strikes of this period were especially long and bitter, bargaining strategies reached new levels of complexity and effectiveness. Fordism, the regime of accumulation associated with high wages, mass production and increased leisure time introduced during the 1920s came to full fruition in the economic boom of the late 1940s and 1950s. Workers who endured all manner of material scarcity during the war, and saw their wages practically frozen for five years, were now swept-up in a national wave of post-war consumerism. The desire for wage gains was compounded by a drastic rise in the cost of living after 1946 when the government began to lift many of its war-time controls on the economy.

The post-war years saw numerous gains made by unions on the issues of wages and income security. Wage increases and paid holidays were won first by Chrysler in a 126-day strike that began only six months after the massive Ford strike of 1945. A Cost of Living Allowance followed in 1948, giving workers a yearly raise to offset the erosion of wages by post-war inflation. In 1950 Ford agreed, without a strike, to a five dollar per month company-paid pension plan and an increase in hospitalization coverage. In 1952, General Motors offered its workers a five cent an hour increase - and more importantly - a master contract that would cover all of its factories in Canada (except those in Oshawa whose members rejected it). After a 109-day strike in 1954, Ford offered its workers a master contract, as did Chrysler soon thereafter.

A highly structured and intricate system was established that was characterized by rigid benefit and wage formulas, but the auto industry remained plagued by cyclical downturns and layoffs caused by retooling. As such the UAW pushed for the adoption of the Guaranteed Annual Wage program whereby companies would top-off unemployment benefits and eliminate income fluctuations for laid-off workers. General Motors, the strike target, was less than enthusiastic, but after a 148-day strike by seventeen thousand workers, the company complied with the demand. Pattern bargaining ensured that other companies would follow. The Guaranteed Annual Wage program, known later as Supplementary Unemployment Benefits was an important gain for the UAW, because it pressured auto companies to correct the problems of "boom or bust" production schedules themselves, while it also curbed company use of the lay-off as a disciplinary measure.

Successes such as these heralded the emergence of a strong and vital labour culture. Social interaction, the basis of class organization, should have been undercut during this period by a mass culture that drove workers toward the confines of the unit of consumption - the nuclear family. Rather, the collective experience of the war-years' struggles and those that continued throughout the post-war period forged a bond between auto workers - and especially within locals - that superseded the divisive elements of Fordism. Union baseball teams, bowling leagues, choirs and picnics reflected and maintained worker unity, while union halls became prime areas for the socialization of workers' children, who matured in the midst of a labour culture.