In 1923, my great grandfather Kenneth Morrison started working at the steel mill in Sydney, then called Dominion Iron and Steel Company (DISCO). That was the year of the first major strike at the mill, and an accompanying sympathy strike at Cape Breton's coal mines. The strike is still infamous for the brutal repression visited upon the workers and their communities by the bosses and politicians who wielded first the RCMP, and then the military, like a punishing truncheon. Law enforcement was conducted like an occupation, resulting in some literal truncheons coming down upon the heads of workers' families as they left church on July 1, 1923 — Cape Breton's very own Bloody Sunday. The repression, including a series of arrests of prominent labour leaders, eventually brought about the defeat of the strike.
What were the steel workers asking for? They were demanding the right to form a union in their workplace. It would not be until 1938 that the workers at Sydney Steel officially formed Local 1064 of the United Steelworkers of America, after intense grassroots organizing through the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC) contributed to the passage of the provincial Trade Union Act. That legislation was the first of its kind in Canada, and codified the workers' right to collective bargaining into law.
The repression of workers at Sydney Steel — many of whom were recent immigrants and people of colour arriving in Cape Breton from all corners of the world — never again reached the violent extremes of 1923, once workers had the support of their brothers and sisters in steel throughout the continent. The strike in 1923 illustrates both the lengths workers were willing to go to win rights we now take for granted, and the degree of violence the bosses and their political allies will inflict when workers are not joined together in solidarity.
The lessons from this story for the contemporary moment are twofold: the effectiveness of media propaganda that has convinced many workers that unions do not serve their interests; and the need to organize in the face of mounting repression from the state and corporations, especially through new regimes of technology and austerity. I have witnessed these trends in my own lifetime — in conversations with family and community about their frustrations with unions, and in watching growing inequality produce political backsliding from the progressive ideals of earlier generations.
I feel I owe my existence to unions. Collective bargaining gave my great grandfather the stability to raise a family. He did not have his first child until 1938, a year into the collective agreement. I cannot say for certain that the agreement shaped his decision to start a family at that moment, but my grandmother tells me this story:
“One thing I remember of dad is in our kitchen by the back door, there was a shelf just by the back door and every day there was a nickel there for me to go and buy something… they called me nickel Agnes. Because I would get a nickel every day. And what would it buy you — probably a bag of chips plus an ice cream?”
Though it seems like a small thing, Agnes’s father Kenneth was born in rural poverty. His great-grandparents had fled economic and ecological collapse in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland for the isolated south-east corner of Cape Breton. The life Kenneth was born into was a constant struggle to subsist on the land amid mounting costs and temperamental wool and wood markets. The wages earned at the factory — won through the union’s struggles, and resulting in that daily nickel — represented a level of material certainty that would have been unthinkable to Kenneth’s parents, whose fortunes were entirely tied to land and season.
Unfortunately, the victories of the labour movement are fading from living memory, replaced by decades of concessions that have reversed much of workers’ progress in society. These concessions are the result of events like the Taft-Hartley Act, the “boardroom Jacobins” of the 1970s, and the neoliberal political movement exemplified by Brian Mulroney in Canada and by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the USA and UK. The many defeats of the past 75 years, and especially labour’s compromises with management, have left people with an image of unions as bureaucratic dinosaurs, unfit for the pace of contemporary capitalism. I see these attitudes reflected in my family and community — in complaints about the division labour disputes bring to communities, or the feeling that paying dues leads to no real improvement.
This past year I began my Master of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in Halifax. My work focuses on the history and health of the community my great-grandparents lived in, and the union is central to that story. As part of my program, I joined CUPE 3912 as a teaching assistant, and in March of 2026 we went on strike when our initial collective bargaining sessions with the employer broke down.
Our primary demand was a wage increase — TAs had not seen a raise since 1984. The strike coincided with the provincial government’s announcement of massive budget cuts to post-secondary education. It became clear that the two struggles were one and the same: a contest between culture workers and those in power whose interests are served not only by keeping wages low, but by defunding our capacity to express ourselves through culture in radical ways. We eventually settled on favourable terms, but the budget cuts remain an ongoing disaster. The episode taught me that, despite the cynicism born of decades of setbacks, the labour movement is crucial right now — both to build a better world and to stop this one from getting any worse. It is the same struggle my great grandfather was part of. In that sense, the labour movement also creates a thread of continuity with the past and with history more broadly — and in this moment, the less we forget history, the better our chances of escaping its repetition, before it arrives again in a worse form.