Standing Up to Big Nickel: The Story of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Strike, 1958, 2025

In the fall of 1958, roughly 14,000 International Nickel Company (Inco) workers represented by the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (MMSW) Sudbury Local 598 downed their tools in what would be one of the largest strikes in Canadian labour history. Having amassed a sizable stockpile of nickel at its Sudbury operations, Inco announced multiple rounds of layoffs followed by 20 percent reduction in hours across the workforce. The reaction on the part of the union membership was a resounding denunciation of the proposal and a majority strike vote. Over the course of the following three months, MMSW workers struck for the first time, testing their own resolve as much as Inco’s. Their actions drew international headlines, especially given the centrality of nickel to the armaments industry within the context of the global Cold War. In Standing Up to Big Nickel, Elizabeth Quinlan aptly traces the contours of this workplace standoff and its impact on both the Sudbury community and the union movement more broadly.

Unionization within the Canadian mining sector can trace its roots to the emergence of the MMSW in the isolated mining camps of the Western United States, from which it made inroads to the British Columbia interior and Northern Ontario. Post-war certification provided these hinterland areas with badly needed workplace representation paving the way for some of the industry’s most tangible gains in benefits and pay. Central to understanding the importance of the strike, Quinlan argues, is the unique composition of the MMSW itself. Espousing an anti-hierarchical/leftist democracy ensured that the union local enjoyed a strong degree of independence from its American parent in conducting negotiations and in distributing their own finances, privileges few other union locals enjoyed at the time.

Furthermore, beyond their role as contract negotiators, Quinlan identifies how MMSW actions were evidence of a social democratic labourism, one keen to refashion the world along its own political inclinations. To this end, the union constructed labour halls in downtown Sudbury and in regional company towns. These provided venues for the social and cultural programming promoted by the union, namely a wide variety of entertainment, courses and political schooling for workers and their families. A lakefront property was acquired as a welcome retreat for vacationing miners complete with a summer camp for their children. Efforts to nurture community members socio-politically reveals the centrality of the MMSW to life in Sudbury during the years prior to the strike.

Inco entered contract negotiations with little to lose financially and much to gain from a short strike. Either the workers accepted their offer, or they could abstain from paying wages whilst offloading their stockpile. As Quinlan notes, the initial rounds of bargaining then were doomed to fail. The union leadership had done its homework, with numbers to show that the company could easily bear the costs of retaining its employees at increased wages while also retaining its reserves. As a result, a strong majority of MMSW workers voted in favour of a strike. Here Quinlan is especially effective at describing both the union’s bargaining tactical strategies as well as the logistics needed to maintain solidarity. The reader gets a strong sense of the lived experience and practicalities of the strike, as well as the growing stakes to the community as the strike continued.

By mid-December, both Inco and the union were prepared to negotiate. Rebounding international nickel prices encouraged Inco to ramp up production again, while the MMSW executive feared whether the union could financially continue the strike especially with the costs associated with Northern Ontario’s frigid winters. A deal was struck giving workers a small pay increase and the promise to rehire all strike participants. This was a victory, although it would prove a hollow one.

Far from being a neutral party here, Quinlan recognizes her own proximity to the strike; her father was a research director with the MMSW, and her mother volunteered with the women’s auxiliary branch of the union. As a result, the story is unsurprisingly largely told from the union’s perspective. Nor am I neutral here either, my grandfather and many other family members took part in this strike. But my grandfather rarely spoke about his own memories of the event and was much more forthcoming about later strikes. This is perhaps due to the demise of the MMSW local in the years following the strike. As the subject of Quinlan’s penultimate chapter, this is perhaps the book’s strongest. Having spent so much on its community projects, the MMSW was caught financially unprepared for a strike, and could not provide strike pay to all its membership. What little savings the union had accrued were quickly drained. Combined with the meagre gains won, many union members questioned the union leadership in accepting both a strike mandate and the offer given.

Waiting in the wings was the powerful United Steelworkers of America (USWA) which successfully lured thousands of miners to sign their union cards, precipitating a need for certification votes. In a stunning rebuke to their founding union Inco workers, in three rounds of voting, produced a majority in favour of the USWA. As Quinlan identifies here, this both produced divided loyalties amongst the union membership while placing stewardship under a more conservative and less democratic American union. Sowing further dissension within the community were paid USWA agitators and anti-communist Catholic representatives that spread rumours claiming MMSW leaders were foreign communist agents. It is within these Cold War confines that Quinlan makes prescient connections between local labour rivalries and a broader international reaction towards militant unions, actions that ultimately served Inco interests.

The decision to switch union representation also cost the Inco workers the institutions created for them by the MMSW. Miners at Inco rival Falconbridge rejected joining the USWA and maintained the MMSW as their legal representative. Following some legal wrangling the Falconbridge miners were recognized as the lawful inheritors of the MMSW mantle, along with the union halls and summer camp, leaving Inco workers without the spaces that had fostered their community. While a new union hall was eventually built, the far more socially-conservative USWA dissolved the politically conscious programming, lessons, and social organizing once conducted by the MMSW.

A clear strength of Standing Up to Big Nickel is Quinlan’s exhaustive research, utilizing archival collections throughout Ontario and across Canada. In addition, Quinlan conducted over 150 interviews, email exchanges and letters with former workers and their family members, local business owners and community members regarding their memories of the strike. Incorporating these personal histories produces a far more comprehensive view of the event than one told simply from either side of the bargaining table. In broadening her scope of analysis, Quinlan rightly depicts the 1958 strike as an important milestone in the history of Canadian labour but also one felt keenly and intimately by the greater Sudbury community.

Using the 1958 strike as a case study, Standing Up to Big Nickel provides an important historiographical intervention into the rise of left-wing labourism in North America and its broad defeat. For union representatives and labour historians, this is a sobering read, evidence of the many pitfalls that can befall a divided worker’s movement. Nonetheless, if history is to serve as an educative tool, Quinlan’s work provides valuable insights into union organizing both at home and on the picket line. Given that unions continue to face uphill battles in their organizing, histories of past failures can provide labour with lessons on par with their successes.