Vancouver Longshoremen, Resilient Solidarity and the 1935 Interruption: Company Unionism 1923-1945.

This thesis challenges the historiography that asserts the waterfront strike in Vancouver in 1935 was a failed militant surge by a new radical leadership in an otherwise twenty-year period of dormancy among the city's longshoremen. Using union documents, employer records, and interviews with workers, the thesis presents the entire company era, between 1923 and 1944, as a period of developing solidarity and resistance. In this context the 1935 strike and the union's leadership were a product of, not a radical departure from that continuity. The thesis shows that despite two lost strikes in 1923 and again in 1935, the administrative structures the employers established produced a resilient culture of solidarity that was in place before Partiament acted in 1944 to provide longshorement with the legal framework for union representation.