Standing Up to Big Nickel

The Story of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Strike, 1958

Elizabeth Quinlan

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780228024941
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations

All miners and smelter workers know the folly of going on strike when their employer holds a stockpile. In 1958 the International Nickel Company had enough nickel on hand to guarantee sales for at least six months. Despite this, fourteen thousand miners and smeltermen in Sudbury, Ontario, downed their tools and struck against the corporate titan of the mining industry.
Standing Up to Big Nickel is a comprehensive portrait of a pivotal strike by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union that has inspired exceptional levels of solidarity among its members. The Cold War and the resulting instabilities in the Canadian labour movement form the backdrop to Elizabeth Quinlan’s engrossing analysis. The union straddled the line, she shows, between its historical commitment to working-class struggle and the newly restrictive legal landscape of the postwar era. Retrospective accounts by surviving union members, leaders, family, and community members bring to life the history of a distinctive group of workers who sweated over smelter furnaces and toiled underground in perilous conditions.
Quinlan traces the events before, during, and after one of Canada’s greatest strikes in both magnitude and duration. Featuring biographical sketches and scenes based on archival and documentary data, Standing Up to Big Nickel captures an intensely dramatic juncture in Canadian labour history.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Half-Title Page
• 1 A Mining Industry on the Rise
• 2 Union Advances in the Mining Camps of Northern Ontario
• 3 Building a Working-Class Culture and Establishing a Canadian Identity
• 4 Inco and Mine Mill Come to the Bargaining Table
• 5 Bargaining Breaks Down
• 6 On Strike – Respect Our Picket Line
• 7 “Any Goddamn Fool Can Call a Strike; the Secret Is to Get a Settlement”
• 8 The “Damn Devil’s Brew”
• 9 The Significance of the Inco Strike
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index