Winnipeg General Strike Essay

The Winnipeg General strike started on May 1st, 1919 due to metal and building workers who wanted a higher wages. Two weeks later the Labour Councils and the Winnipeg trades also decided to join the strike to support metal and building workers. Despite the fact that the Winnipeg General strike was a fail it was still one of the biggest strikes in Canada. It involved about 25,000 to 30,000 Canadian workers. The strike ended on June 26th, 1919 and left a lot of people disappointed. During the strike many jobs were taken over by immigrants, also when the war ended the workers were still left upset and the strike did not bring any peace to families in Canada. The Winnipeg General strike impacted Canada’s labour history in a negative way, the strike …show more content…
Seeing that the government was really concerned because they were in need of workers. In result of that, many immigrants took it as an advantage and started to take over the veterans and strikers jobs. The immigrants were thankful for the job they got and didn’t mind the wages and salary payments they were receiving by the government. Due to that, immigrants decided to remain doing the jobs they were doing and not join the strike. After the war many veterans returned and were shocked because many factories were shut down due to the low employment rate. Many veterans also noticed that their jobs were taken over by immigrants. The veterans were not happy with what was happening and most of them were left unemployed. The veterans were really worried about themselves and their families so they just decided to join the strike. The strike left a lot of people unemployed and that was a huge loss in Canada’s labour …show more content…
The strike left people in Winnipeg shocked and the government stressed. In the beginning of the strike the government did not really care because they were still receiving money. When the government started to notice that the income was decreasing they started to get really concerned about all these workers on strike. Strikers were also getting very tensed because they had to feed their families and that was difficult because they were on strike. Since mostly everyone was anxious during the whole strike the government thought it was finally time to take a stand. On June 10 Mayor Charles Frederick Gray decided to arrest the eight strike leaders and that caused a lot of trouble. This action taken by the mayor caused The Bloody Saturday to happen which was the day two strikers were shot and many other strikes injured because of the Royal Mountain Police attacking them due to the mayor orders. The government had a meeting after the bloody saturday and decided to end everything for good. After a lot of arguments the government finally decided on doing something that would make them and also raise Canada’s economy back to normal. The mayor decided that the metal workers will receive a reduction from their working week of five hour but the workers still did not get an increase in their salary. After the war most workers lost their pension rights and also were compelled to sign an