"We No Longer Respect the Law": The Tilco Strike, Labour Injunctions, And the State‪.‬

THE 1960'S ARE OFTEN PORTRAYED in popular reconstruction as a time of student unrest and feminist uprising. It is an image which obscures persisting strains of gender conservatism and ignores other rebellious activity during this tumultuous decade, including that of young and rank-and-file workers in the trade union movement. Wildcat strikes were the most visible sign of this sixties rebellion, but there were other indications--such as the development of independent Canadian unions, the demands for public sector union rights, and the increased unionization of women--that indicated there were fissures in the so-called Fordist "accommodation" of the post-war years. Indeed, our current concerns with the loss of this Fordist accord and the decline of high-waged industrial jobs has sometimes led us to forget that Fordism was always sundered by sharp instances ofclass conflict. Moreover, it was a limited bargain extended primarily to white, unionized male workers. The most oppressed of the workforce--women and workers of colour--could only glance, with a certain envy, at the security, ability to consume, and protections offered to the first tier of workers in the Fordist hierarchy of workplaces and jobs. (1) These were the second tier of Fordism's celebrated accord, a stratum of workers whose jobs were unorganized and insecure, whose wages were low, whose conditions were poor, and whose "rights" were limited. The Tilco affair is the story of this second tier of women workers whose desperate struggle to unionize a factory of just less than 60 employees in a small-town Ontario city sparked a malestrom of wider labour protest, led to the state's successful criminal court cases against 26 other workers after their support picket, and eventually spawned a Royal Commission on labour disputes, itself a storm of controversy, chaired by Justice Ivan Rand, one of the initial legal architects of the Fordist compromise. This "woman's" strike, ultimately defeated by a small-town cowboy capitalist employer, provides a fascinating, intricate narrative well worth telling for its own sake. The wider battle over injunctions which emerged from the strike, including the state's royal commission, serve as a useful prism through which to view labour-capital relations in this period.