Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada

Review By Duff Sutherland

October 2, 2024

In Smelter Wars, Ron Verzuh traces the struggles of Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) at Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada’s (CM&S) operation in the city of Trail from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s. In 1938, the communist union organizer Arthur “Slim” Evans established the Mine-Mill local in Trail as part of the Congress of Industrial Organization’s Canadian organizing drive. A small group of Communist Party of Canada members that included activist Harvey Murphy and smelter workers Al King, Gar Belanger, and Harry Drake dominated the Local 480 leadership that organized the smelter workforce of over 5,000. CM&S president Selwyn G. Blaylock, who led the company in defeating the Western Federation of Miners’ 1917 strike in the smelter led by Ginger Goodwyn, fought the establishment of the union through a company union, the Workmen’s Co-operative Committee, and through welfare policies for workers and their families and financial support for the city of Trail.

In 1944, the British Columbia Labour Relations Board recognized Local 480 as the official bargaining agent for Trail’s smelter workers. From the mid-1940s on, Local 480 leaders negotiated agreements that allowed for expanded and continuous production, improved health and safety, and significant wage increases. By 1953, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported that Trail had the highest per capita income in the country. As Verzuh points out, Local 480’s “Red” leaders, “could argue…that they were managing a union in the best interests of a community built not only by the company through its largesse but also by the workers through their toil” (242).

Local 480’s smelter wars continued during the Cold War. CM&S, with the support of local church leaders, the Trail Daily Times, and, at times, the national media, branded Mine-Mill leaders dangerous revolutionaries who threatened operations, worker livelihoods, and even the security of the country. The leadership of the national labour organization, the Canadian Congress of Labour, and of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation also sought to purge the “Reds” from Local 480, viewing them as threats to the expansion of the labour movement and of social democracy. As Al King, a Local 480 president, recalled, “All the preachers were preaching…and the paper [the Times] was flailing away at us and the company was putting out garbage…warning people to beware the evil communists” (14). In the early 1950s, anti-communists within Local 480 supported raids of the United Steelworkers of America to “demolish” the local. Remarkably Local 480 survived the onslaught of the forces set on the local’s “annihilation.”

In the conclusion, Verzuh considers why most smelter workers in Trail remained loyal to their Communist-led local. He argues that the experience of work in the smelter forged a working-class consciousness among workers who supported leaders like Murphy, King, Belanger, and Drake who stood up bravely to the company. Mine-Mill leaders also fostered a radical culture in the 1950s through support for the peace movement and opposition to McCarthyism. Local 480 supported the Peace Arch concerts of the banned American singer Paul Robeson and screened the outlawed film Salt of the Earth, a fictionalized account of a violent strike by workers against the Empire Zinc Company in New Mexico, to a large local audience. Many recent immigrant workers also supported a union that negotiated collective agreements that provided protection from racism and discrimination on the job. Verzuh does note that Local 480’s leaders emphasized the importance of the male breadwinner. The union supported the layoff of women workers at the end of the war. The second-class treatment of the women represented a lost opportunity to build broader-based solidarity in the community. The women of Trail would only benefit from Local 480’s achievements through male workers in their families. The achievements were significant. Verzuh concludes that, “What perhaps mattered most…were wage increases, providing for families and health and safety in a notoriously unsafe industrial workplace run by a company that was as anti-union as it was anti-Communist” (245).

Smelter Wars is an engaging and well-researched political history of Mine-Mill Local 480, one of the province’s great union locals. Readers might want to learn more about the day-to-day experience of the shop floor and of working-class neighborhoods and families that loyally supported the union. Nonetheless, Smelter Wars is a significant work of Canadian labour history.