Stephen L. Endicott, Bienfait: the Saskatchewan Miners' Struggle of '31.

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2002)

CANADA WAS HIT HARDER by the Depression than most industrialized capitalist countries as international prices for agricultural and resource production collapsed. The unemployment rate averaged about 30 per cent in 1933, which was the trough

Most workers entered the cauldron of the Depression virtually defenceless. There was almost no safety net provided by the state. Except for a few pockets, trade unions hardly extended beyond the skilled crafts and not in nearly all of them. And as a percentage of the work force, unions had been in decline since the mid-1920s as the unorganized mass production industries expanded.

By 1930, the One Big Union (OBU), which began with such promise in 1919, was virtually extinct. There were three trade union federations: the international craft unions of the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC), the exclusively national unions of the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL), and the so-called "confessional" unions of the Canadian Catholic Congress of Labour (CCCL). None of these federations had a strategy for dealing with the Depression. They lost members to the ranks of the unemployed and could hardly hold themselves together, let alone mount an effective resistance or attempt much new organizing.

There would be considerable resistance and even some new trade union organizing between 1930 and 1935. Much of it would be led by the Workers' Unity League (WUL), which was founded in 1930 under Communist auspices as an outgrowth of the "class against class" international strategy adopted by the Com-intern. The WUL was intended as a revolutionary alternative to the conventional trade union federation and was affiliated to the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU). It was organized along industrial lines and differed from conventional federations in that unemployed associations, women's associations, and other organizations not meeting the strict definition of trade unions could affiliate. The emphasis was on the unity of all workers within and outside of unions and especially on the common interests of the employed and unemployed.