Hard Lessons

This book emerges from the papers, panels, and discussion of the conference "Where the Past Meets the Future - the Place of Alternative Unions in the Canadian Labour Movement," held to commemorate the first one hundred years of the history of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union. The union, which began in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners and grew to a membership of over one hundred thousand in fifty locals throughout Canada during the 1950s, had shrunk to a single local of sixteen hundred members in Sudbury, Ontario, by the 1990s. This book brings together the voices of contemporary labour leaders, activists, old timers, and academics.