Raising the Workers' Flag
The Workers' Unity League of Canada, 1930-1936
Description
During the Great Depression, the conflicting interests of capital and labour became clearer than ever before. Radical Canadian workers, encouraged by the Red International of Labour Unions, responded by building the Workers' Unity League – an organization that greatly advanced the cause of unions in Canada, and boasted 40,000 members at its height. In Raising the Workers' Flag, the first full-length study of this robust group, Stephen L. Endicott brings its passionate efforts to light in memorable detail.
Raising the Workers' Flag is based on newly available or previously untapped sources, including documents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's Security Service and the Communist Party's archives. Using these impressive finds, Endicott gives an intimate sense of the raging debates of the labour movement of the 1930s. A gripping account of the League's dreams and daring, Raising the Workers' Flag enlivens some of the most dramatic struggles of Canadian labour history.
Reviews
'This is a great book, the product of twenty years of intensive labor in the archives by a historian who has an unmatched sensitivity to the complexities and nuances of communism's history. It achieves that rarest of combinations - immaculate scholarship and gifted story-telling.'
- Ian MacKay
‘Few historians have tackled their subject with more enthusiasm, insider insight, and eye popping detail than Stephen l. Endicott has done in this first book-length treatment of the Worker’s Unity League(WUL).’
- Ron Verzuh
‘Well-written, accurate and vastly interesting, Endicott’s fascinating new book Raising the Workers’ Flag should attract the attention of active trade unionists and friends of labour… This well-pictured book recounts the history of our most militant national labour federation.’
- Garnet Dishaw
‘This is a great book, the product of twenty years of intensive labour in the archives by a historian who had an unmatched sensitivity to the complexities and nuances of communism history. It achieves that rarest of combinations – immaculate scholarship and gifted story-telling.’
- Ian McKay