Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  But the problems had only started there. The Wives now had a modest treasury of their own, and their ambivalent, informal relationship with the Local 6500 Executive would become an issue. The right-wingers surrounding Jordan Nelson had never approved of the Wives. Now, here they were, going to plant gates on their own hook and raising funds in the name of the striking members of Local 6500. But who had control of the money, and where did it actually go? The conservative old guard demanded Nelson take action, which he did by indicating to the Wives that a meeting of the minds was necessary. It would have been easier for the young strike leader to delegate someone else to meet with the Wives, but that was not his way. Instead, Nelson himself ventured into the lion’s den. Molly had quietly apprised him about what he was walking into: the Wives, who had raised the money through their own initiative, were in no mood to brook interference from the male-dominated Executive Board, much less to be told how to spend it, less still to share the proceeds with the Steelworkers.

  Knowing the Wives were unaware of the hostility felt toward them by the old guard on his Executive, Nelson struggled manfully to express the feelings of the older, more patriarchal majority on his Executive —views he did not share—without revealing the split within his own leadership the Wives had engendered. It was wheels within wheels, and the results were predictable.

  “No, Jordan! I just don’t accept that we, as a group of women, should have to have our actions approved by a bunch of men!” The speaker was Arianna Murdoch, one of the more outspoken of the younger women. With her almost mannish ways and edgy assertiveness she often put off many of the older women, too.

  Nelson took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and tried to remain calm. The bargaining committee had been urgently summoned to return to Toronto by the mediators, and it was vital that he put this fire out before his departure. In his absence there was no telling what could happen should the likes of Murdoch ever wind up addressing the Executive in person. Why union leaders get grey.

  Jordan tried to size up the group, but other than the fact that they had listened to Murdoch with avidity and that all eyes were now turned to him, he couldn’t tell what they were thinking. They awaited his response in expectant silence. “Okay, okay I get that, and we want you to know we appreciate how much the Wives have done to support the strike,” Nelson began. “All we’re asking is to be informed what it is you’re planning to do next before it happens. No one wants to have control over your group, or its money, just some consultation, is all.”

  “And you promise there’ll be no interference from the Local Union?”

  “Yes, absolutely. We pretty much have our hands full as it is.” Nelson hoped this wry understatement might draw a laugh, which it did, helping to break the ice. He began to breathe easier.

  Alice McCool watched Jordan Nelson’s appearance in appreciative silence, which had become her métier in the Wives’ meetings of late. It wasn’t that she didn’t have opinions about the split opening in the organization. She did. As the group’s matriarch—she was half a generation older than most of the women in the older generation side of the divide—she was pained by the looming split. But she had private worries of her own, namely the health of her daughter-in-law Jo Ann. Her pregnancy had now entered its third trimester, and Alice was concerned. Jo Ann’s colour was unusually high, and her cheeks were often flushed in a way that seemed unhealthy to Alice. There were dark circles around her eyes, which gave them a hollow, haunted aspect uncharacteristic of the normally charismatic, ebullient Jo Ann.

  She had sailed through the early months of the pregnancy, carrying the baby high on her slender frame, which had begun to show only later in the game. Since then the baby had dropped precipitously, causing the usual strain—and the usual pain—on her daughter-in-law’s back. Jo Ann had borne all this with fortitude, rarely complaining to her mother-in-law, or as far as Alice could tell, to her son. But now it felt to Alice that everything was coming apart at the seams—the Wives, the strike dragging into yet another season—and she worried for her beautiful daughter-in-law and for the new life she carried within her. Was she getting enough sleep? Alice well remembered how uncomfortable the late stages of a pregnancy could be, especially in bed at night, with your partner fast asleep beside you, and all the natural anxieties for the future closing in, tossing and turning in fruitless, frustrating attempts to find a position comfortable enough to admit the onset of deep sleep.

  She really must insist, Alice resolved, that Jo Ann go to her doctor for a routine check-up.

  22

  The Mad Bomber

  He’d stayed now much longer than he’d intended. But the results were not what he’d hoped. Oh, the fallout from the first attack, and the blackout it triggered, had got the town buzzing, all right, and the assumption seemed to be that it was somehow related to the strike. But, apart from stretching already frazzled nerves even tighter, the hoped-for turn of public opinion against the union hadn’t happened. What he hadn’t reckoned for was how closely just about everyone in Sudbury was interwoven with the union. In a community of 160,000, after all, almost everyone had a neighbour or a friend or a business customer or relative among the 11,700 strikers. Conversely, the ties with the company were much more tenuous. Spook’s own ties were, ironically, much closer. Langley, the Pentagon, the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, the former CIA head Allan Dulles, the Inco board. Not so many degrees of separation. Much of this was well above his pay grade, of course, but ours is not to reason why and Spook was nothing if not a good soldier, following each and every order with absolute, unquestioning obedience. Which was why he still lingered in this Godforsaken hellhole of a place: he’d been ordered to drive a wedge between the union and the community, and his efforts ’til now had been unavailing. And they were efforts, plural. Since blowing that first power transformer that night out on the highway, he’d done two more, each more audacious than the last. Daytime jobs in more populated areas, each closer to downtown and to the Company’s operations, just in case anyone was missing the point. The most recent was a power transformer just outside the Copper Refinery building in Copper Cliff, literally just a short stone’s throw away from the Refinery building itself.

  While these increasingly high-risk efforts had done little to shake loose the tightly knit community of this shithole burg, they had earned him a sobriquet in the newsrooms of the city, whose reporters and assignment editors stood to attention after each and every blast. They had begun calling him “the Mad Bomber.” They operated on the assumption that the series of weird events, while clearly related to each other, were linked to the strike, the rising tensions of which had become almost unbearable. Someone, doubtless a Steelworker, was ratcheting up the pressure. But so what? The police appeared to have few, if any, leads on the matter, and until charges were laid and the identity of the Mad Bomber was revealed, the bombings were strictly a sidebar story, subsumed to the main, which was the strike itself, now dragging in to its third season and two hundred fiftieth day, for those who were, like the lugubrious Jordan Nelson, counting.

  23

  Pit Stop

  For most of the latter half of the twentieth century there was a place, just north of Parry Sound, Ontario, where Sudbury-bound Toronto travellers almost invariably stopped to break their journey, frequently encountering travellers heading the other way.

  This pit stop has since been bypassed by a new, four-lane highway, and is now doubtless crumbling into a half-forgotten place of dust, rust, ghosts and scale, but on that afternoon in the spring of 1979 when Jordan Nelson and the bargaining committee pulled in on their way back up north with the ink still drying on a new, Collective Bargaining Agreement they hoped would spell an end to the ruinous, ten-month-old strike over which they were presiding, the old familiar pit stop was still a happening place.

  Here they met a southbound traveller, fresh out of Sudbury.

  “Hey, I know you! Ain’t you Jordan N
elson?”

  “Uh, yeah, that’s right.”

  “Well, boy, I sure hope you got one helluva agreement in that there briefcase ’cause if not, the guys back home are ready to hang you right off the third floor ’a the Steel Hall!”

  24

  Parsing a CBA

  In truth, the Agreement they brought home was a good—good enough to have averted the strike altogether back in September, perhaps even good enough to have averted the post-Thompson debacle of February—if not great, tentative Collective Bargaining Agreement. It was a standard three-year pact containing the usual wage gains. Especially important were the terms regarding the Cost of Living Adjustments, or COLA. Inflation, which could run into the double digits annually, was then a global macro-economic issue that could more than offset the annual pay increases in a new agreement. Terms of the COLA clause in the new agreement were, therefore, scrutinized more closely than the actual wage increases. Would the COLA gains of the first and second year be automatically “rolled in” to the following years, thus counting towards the overall hourly wage increase? This compounding mattered greatly to the members of Local 6500, and to the overall economy of the Sudbury community, not least because the Steelworkers at Inco had, uniquely in Canada, been able to shrewdly maintain 1961 as the base year for their COLA calculation, which skewed the calculated inflation rate very strongly in their favour. The COLA roll-in did apply in the new, tentative agreement, which the bargaining committee knew would be a strong selling point to a livid membership. The Cassandra-like pit-stop warning that had greeted Nelson only enhanced their sense of dread.

  The tentative agreement was the source of much sweat and tears among the bargaining committee, whose individual members had undergone extensive solo soul-searching before voting yea or nay on whether to recommend acceptance of the deal to the membership. Each man knew what awaited him upon the group’s return to Sudbury: a series of packed membership meetings in the Vimy Room, explosive tempers, and they would be facing the music on display high up on the stage above the furious, densely milling throng, not all of whose participants would necessarily be sober, or even in his right mind after ten months without cash in his pockets.

  Again and again Nelson had polled them individually, one at a time, seeking unanimity as to whether the whole group would unanimously recommend acceptance of the deal. It was an agonizing, ticklish business, with each man determining his own calculus, which could—and often did—change almost overnight. Often the latest determination was announced at the end of lengthy, windy speeches that burned up the hours and left everyone feeling exhausted and drawn. Comic relief was provided by one committee member, an older Frood miner who was a popular vote-getter and holdover from Mine Mill days, much enamoured by the stentorian tones of his own perorations. In a classic on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand speech he had, over the course of a single morning, managed to declare himself both in favour of and opposed to the newly signed Memorandum of Agreement, thus earning him the everlasting private nickname “Two-Way Tom.”

  It was a good agreement, yes, they could all agree on that, but was it a great agreement that could even come close to approaching justification for a ten-month loss of earnings? The whole world of the Canadian labour movement was now watching the epic struggle in Sudbury. Whatever, the committee convinced itself, this was the best deal to be had at the time. They now completed the two-hour journey from the pit stop feeling no less apprehensive as to whether the membership would agree.

  25

  Doctor’s Appointment

  It happened during what was to have been a routine check-up for Jo Ann as her pregnancy entered the middle of its final trimester: the doctor fixed her with a keen, appraising look which failed to mask a measure of concern as he removed the blood pressure cuff from her arm.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “I’m sure not. Just a little high, is all.”

  She frowned, felt the first little flutter of concern. “How high?”

  “160 over 90. 120 over 80 would be more like it.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Oh, I’m sure not.” He fixed her with a kindly smile, meant to reassure. But in his steel gray eyes over slipping bifocals she saw something else. “I suspect it’s related to the fact there’s so much stress out there.” By which, she knew, he meant the strike.

  “Your husband’s out, isn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  He was wrapping up the thick black fabric of the BP cuff as he spoke.

  “I’m sure everything’s fine, but …” he paused, almost distractedly, mid-sentence.

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to refer you to an OB-gyn friend of mine, just to be on the safe side, if you don’t mind …”

  “No, sure, of course, whatever you think is best,” she replied with a breezy, almost off-handed confidence she did not feel.

  26

  Selling the CBA

  The bargaining committee arrived back in town, and so began something that is, for all the civics class palaver, a rarity in our society: a true exercise in democracy. Like all such exercises it was a sweaty, sometimes dangerous affair, wildly roiling and unpredictable, despite a well-concerted attempt to contain it and to control the outcome through a five-day, time-honoured, well known dance—the selling of a new CBA. Its contents were not to be revealed publicly out of deference to the membership, who would, after all, determine its ultimate fate. The 11,700 strikers would be afforded the first glimpse of the tentative agreement’s contents in a series of meetings that would be strictly private—insofar that gatherings of thousands could be private—closed door affairs off limits to the news media, where the bargaining committee would address the membership to justify their support of an agreement that might, or might not, find favour with the membership.

  To that end the Steelworker brass sprang for a glossy, professionally printed, two-colour booklet, complete with charts and bar graphs, highlighting the wondrous gains made in the new agreement. But the raging thousands of hard rock miners who had been ten months without a paycheque were not about to be so easily swayed by such transparent Pittsburgh propaganda. They were inured to the union’s familiar old hard-sell approach. No, this was a decision, as everyone knew, that would be hashed out in hotly-contested discussions around town over kitchen tables, in barber shops, and around taproom tables groaning with the weight of dozens of beer glasses, brimming with the foam of draft beer.

  And there were staunchly vocal opponents of the new agreement who dismissed it as a “peremptory offer”—a transparent attempt by the Company to end the strike with a relatively cheap offer that featured none of the real breakthroughs that might have been expected in a strike of this duration, prominence and muscle. These naysayers tended to be the hard-core union militants, Nelson supporters mainly, skewing somewhat to the younger end of the membership. Exceptions to this demographic model were, interestingly, a handful of old school Mine Millers, still keeping the faith after all these years, for whom Jordan Nelson represented the embodiment—perhaps even the re-incarnation—of the scrappy old Local 598. The collective wisdom among these groups was, somewhat counter-intuitively, that the offer touted so robustly by the young Local Union President must be defeated to save Nelson’s future in the union. Many of Nelson’s closest friends and political allies in the big Local, including Molly Carruth, Jake McCool and Foley Gilpin shared this opinion. It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. Acceptance of the pre-emptive offer would be a mistake of historical proportions, a repeat of the four-month 1969 strike at the height of the Vietnam War when nickel prices were soaring and the membership had voted to accept a mediocre offer, letting the Company wriggle off the hook. Foley was so convinced of this that he quietly began to play a clandestine role against his friend Nelson, secretly penning a one-page broadside against the offer. The propaganda piece was furtively passed to
Jake on the steps of the Main Branch of the Sudbury Public Library on Mackenzie Street, just a block away from the Steel Hall. Jake proceeded to secretly commandeer the Local’s own photocopy machine to make thousands of copies, which served to further stoke the “No” sentiments in the impending vote.

  Besides the dark foreshadowing at the pit stop, the bargaining committee experienced further auguries that they were in for a rough ride. One bargaining committee member, shortly after the group’s return from Toronto, had gone out for the evening with his wife. After they arrived back home he checked his phone messages and found a stark message from an anonymous male caller who warned he’d be attending the first meeting called to discuss the contract proposal, he’d be sitting in the front row, he’d be carrying a gun, and that he intended to kill as many of the sell-out members of the bargaining committee who recommended acceptance as he could. The Steel activist, one of Jordan Nelson’s coterie of loyalists on the Committee, called Nelson to alert him to the threat. What else could he do?