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The Stratford General Strike of 1933 was a strike by 650 furniture workers and 100 chicken-pluckers in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. [1] The strikes were led by workers from recently unionized factories in the Stratford area with the purpose of securing higher wages. It also represented the final time the Canadian military was called to assist in quelling a strike.
After the Great Depression workers' wages were below subsistence level, and they went on strike demanding that their wages be reviewed. [2] The recently formed Workers' Unity League (WUL) organized unionization and the strike at various companies, as it had just done in Toronto. [3] The individual actions began on September 15, 1933, with strikes in the six of the seven local furniture-making factories that the League had successfully unionized, and spread in subsequent days to the (mainly) women and men at Swift's Meat Packing Plant, a poultry company, who had unionized as the Food Workers' Industrial Union. [3] [4]
Initially the conflict was verbal. Employers denounced the WUL as a communist conspiracy, offered inducements for "loyal" workers who did not strike, and threatened to close the factory. [5] This became a physical conflict when striking furniture workers tried to prevent employers from taking unfinished items, radio cabinets, out of the factory to have them worked on elsewhere. [5] This worsened to mass looting and an all-day siege of local and provincial police at the Swift's strike. [5] When the chicken-pluckers had walked out, 400 ducks and 11,000 live chickens were left in the factory, which the local Humane Society temporarily seized in order to feed them. [4] The strikers and their supporters smashed railcars and trucks that were transporting butter, and released the chickens; whereupon onlookers rushed in to take and eat them. [4] Eggs and butter were highly priced items at the time, as a result of World War One, at 20 cents per dozen for the former and 35 cents per pound for the latter. [4]
In response to the incident at Swift's, the mayor of Stratford requested the support of the Canadian military, and soldiers arrived by train along with machine gun carriers. [3] At its height there were more than 2,000 workers out on strike, including sympathy strikes, and the strikers' response to the calling in of the military was to organize a large rally and parade. [6] The machine gun carriers, from Carden Loyd, were never employed in the end. [3] [7] The strike ended peacefully in November of the same year, with one of its local leaders, Oliver Kerr, actually elected as mayor of Stratford the next year. [6] [3] It was to be the last time that the Canadian military was called out to help with a strike. [8]
The strikers, the chicken pluckers having been paid 2 cents per bird before the strike, were given a 10% pay raise and their work weeks were (variously in the different factories) limited to between 44 and 50 hours. [4]
James Reaney, who had witnessed the strike firsthand as a seven-year-old child, turned it into a play, entitled King Whistle!, in 1979; and is recorded as jokingly claiming in a seminar that "the reason that Tom Patterson started the Stratford Festival" was "to get rid of the shame". [9] The strike was one of several factors, including the rumours of the onset of what was to be World War Two and the end of the steam railway era causing a decline in the town's fortunes, that caused a sense of gloom in Stratford over the next couple of decades that Patterson sought to dispel. [10]
The popular public perception that "baby tanks" had been used was a contributory factor in George Stewart Henry losing the 1934 Ontario general election to Mitchell Hepburn. [5] [7] [11] The four machine gun carriers that arrived with the two companies of the Royal Canadian Regiment were promptly and widely mis-reported in the press as "baby tanks". [7] [12] The contemporary play Eight Men Speak reflects this perception with the dialogue "In Stratford ... troops and tanks were called in to terrorize the strikers and crush their struggle." in Act 4, [13] and accounts of events even half a century later continued this popular description, such as Adelaide Leitch's Floodtides of Fortune account in 1980 saying "Four baby tanks, each with two men and armed with machine guns [...]". [14] The "baby tanks" were not in fact tanks at all, [15] [16] but Carden Loyd tankettes, machine gun carriers with continuous tracks, that the Regiment had only recently acquired. [5] G.S. Henry himself stated:
No tanks were sent to Stratford. Four Carden Loyd machine gun carriers automatically accompanied Headquarters and "C" Company to Stratford. These are part of the equipment, they being the modern method of transporting the machine guns belonging to this unit.
Having used the Stratford strike as a political weapon against Henry and the Tories, Hepburn himself would go on to use similar tactics in the General Motors strike in Oshawa in 1937, where he first sent in 100 Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers and a squad of the Ontario Provincial Police, and then (the police having been sent away) swore in as special constables 400 veterans and university students, immediately dubbed "Hepburn's Hussars". [18]
A tankette is a tracked armoured fighting vehicle that resembles a small tank, roughly the size of a car. It is mainly intended for light infantry support and scouting. Colloquially it may also simply mean a small tank.
The Universal Carrier, also known as the Bren Gun Carrier and sometimes simply the Bren Carrier from the light machine gun armament, is a common name describing a family of light armoured tracked vehicles built by Vickers-Armstrongs and other companies.
The Tank, Cruiser, Ram was a cruiser tank designed and built by Canada in the Second World War, based on the U.S. M3 Medium tank chassis. Due to standardization on the American Sherman tank for frontline units, it was used exclusively for training purposes and was never used in combat as a gun tank. The chassis was used for several other combat roles however, such as a flamethrower tank, observation post and armoured personnel carrier.
The Loyd Carrier was one of a number of small tracked vehicles used by the British and Commonwealth forces in the Second World War to transport equipment and men about the battlefield. Alongside the Bren, Scout and Machine Gun Carriers, they also moved infantry support weapons.
The Light Tank Mark I to Mark V were a series of related designs of light tank produced by Vickers for the British Army during the interwar period.
The T-27 was a tankette produced in the 1930s by the Soviet Union. It was based on the design of the Carden Loyd tankette, bought under license from the United Kingdom in 1930.
The Carden Loyd tankettes were a series of British tankettes of the period between the World Wars, the most successful of which was the Mark VI, the only version built in significant numbers. It became a classic tankette design worldwide, was licence-built by several countries and became the basis of several designs produced in various countries.
The T-37A was a Soviet amphibious light tank. The tank is often referred to as the T-37, although that designation was used by a different tank which never left the prototype stage. The T-37A was the first series of mass-produced fully amphibious tanks in the world.
The Workers' Unity League (WUL) was established in January 1930 as a militant industrial union labour central closely related to the Communist Party of Canada on the instructions of the Communist International.
Sir John Valentine Carden, 6th Baronet MBE was an English tank and vehicle designer. He was the sixth baronet of Templemore, County Tipperary, from 1931.
The Belgian Army had approximately 200 combat vehicles at the time of the German invasion in May 1940. The vehicles were distributed among infantry and cavalry divisions for use as support weapons. The Belgian Army viewed their combat vehicles as defensive weapons. The practice of spreading out combat vehicles in so called "penny packets" left them at a disadvantage against the German invaders, who concentrated their armour into organic units that could act on their own and that outnumbered the opposing vehicles even if units of the same type met.
The 99-day Ford strike of 1945 took place in Windsor, Ontario, Canada from September 12, 1945, to December 19, 1945. Although several union demands were contentious issues, the two main demands of the UAW Local 200 were "union shop and checkoff," which became a rallying cry for the strikers. Negotiations for a new contract had spanned 18 months and officially ended with the exodus of Ford workers at 10 a.m. on the morning of September 12. The Strike included picketing and eventually led to a two-day blockade of vehicles surrounding the Ford plant on November 5.
The LT vz. 34, formally designated as Lehký tank vzor 34 was a Czechoslovak-designed light tank used mainly by Slovakia during World War II. Its suspension was based on that of the Carden-Loyd tankette, of which the Czechs had purchased three, plus a manufacturing license, in 1930. Dissatisfied with the prototypes of the Tančík vz. 33 tankette, the Czech Army decided that it would be easier to design a light tank from scratch rather than modify a tankette's chassis to carry a fully rotating armored turret. 50 were built, the last of which was delivered during 1936, of which the Germans captured 22 - including the prototype, when they occupied Bohemia-Moravia in March 1939, but they promptly scrapped them. The Slovaks seized the remaining 27 when they declared independence from Czechoslovakia at the same time. In Slovak service it only saw combat during the Slovak National Uprising.
The Tančík vz. 33 was a Czechoslovak-designed tankette used mainly by Slovakia during World War II. Seventy-four were built. The Germans seized forty when they occupied Bohemia-Moravia in March 1939; there is no record of their use. The Slovak Republic inherited thirty at the same time when it declared independence from Czechoslovakia. In Slovak service it only saw combat during the Slovak National Uprising.
Hershey, Pennsylvania witnessed a six-day sit-down strike of workers at the Hershey Chocolate Corporation in 1937. The strike ended in violence, as dairy workers and loyal Hershey employees stormed the factory to force out strikers. Eventually, the company signed an agreement with the American Federation of Labor through the Bakery and Confectionery International Union, becoming one of the first American candy companies to unionize.
Ontario Malleable Iron Company (OMIC) was an iron foundry established in Oshawa, Ontario by brothers John Cowan and William Cowan. The factory was in operation from 1872 until closure in 1977. Ontario Malleable, along with many other industrial firms in Oshawa, enabled comparisons between Oshawa and Manchester, England such that Oshawa was, in the 1920s, referred to as the "Manchester of Canada".
Captain Vivian Graham Loyd MC was an English soldier and engineer who designed armoured vehicles including the Carden Loyd tankette and Loyd Carrier.
Stratford City Hall is the city hall of Stratford, Ontario, and a National Historic Site of Canada. It sits amidst the city's business district, on a triangular town square.
The Vickers Light Dragon was a fully-tracked British field artillery tractor made by Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd from 1929 to 1935. Designed to tow small-calibre field guns, it complemented Vickers' Medium Dragon tractor, which pulled medium to heavy artillery.
Notable strikes and other labour disputes in Canada | |
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| 1918–1925 Labour Revolt | |
| Great Depression era | |
| Postwar era | |
| Late 20th century | |
| 21st century |
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