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?
That sort of outcome might have been averted by a chance encounter outside the Union Hall minutes before the meeting. Molly Carruth just happened to run into a worried-looking Jordan Nelson as he was heading into the Hall for the meeting. She was appalled at his attire.
”Whoah there, Jordy! Whaddaya think you’re doing there, Brother?”
She eyed him up and down, taking in the business suit and tie, freshly creased pants, shiny black shoes, briefcase in hand. It was a sweltering, sunny May day. Could he really be this tone deaf?
“Jesus, Jordy, you can’t go in there lookin’ like a million bucks in front of a membership that ain’t been paid in almost eleven months! They’ll eat ya alive for sure! Better get outta that monkey suit, my friend!”
“What?” was the startled Nelson’s only reaction. In working class Sudbury men donned their “monkey suits” for only two occasions: a wedding or a funeral. Only bosses dressed up in a suit and tie. Carruth’s warning to Nelson may have averted his own funeral, as he quickly realized, double-timing up the stairs to his second floor office, where he hastily changed into a pair of blue jeans and casual short-sleeved shirt.
Even just hurrying across the foyer outside the Vimy Room’s heavily guarded entrance doors Nelson could sense the mood of tense anticipation. The space was thronged with latecomers who couldn’t be squeezed into the standing room at the back of the big room. Reporters and television news crews milled among them. The air was charged with expectancy, as if awaiting a heavy weight prize fight. There was a strong, palpable, sense of rancour in the building. There would be blood.
But there were a few sweet dissidents among the naysayers—those exceptions who would vote “no” to the contract offer—simply because they didn’t want to go back to work. The time off agreed with them. They were sleeping better. Their bodies had healed from the ongoing, unnatural straining of daily labour to produce a commodity used primarily to wreak havoc and destruction. Now, at last, the sun was shining! The birds were singing! Sure, they missed the money, but they felt better than they had in years. Money, the ten-month strike had taught them, wasn’t everything. It was time to go a-fishing.
These placid few were, at best, only a tiny minority, as Jordan Nelson was about to discover as he stepped into the roiling maelstrom of the Vimy Room. The smell, the fetid odour of too many bodies too tightly packed in the now summer-like heat, hit him immediately. He swallowed once, then walked impassively through the throng to the stage. His passage, while not unnoticed, was not obstructed. Never in his life had he been so acutely aware of so many eyes watching his every move. The workers in the immediate area around him fell silent as he walked across the vast wooden floor of the Vimy Room. The hush was expectant, as if the silent observers anticipated that at any moment one of their number might step forward and take a poke at him, but no one did. At last he reached the short, narrow hallway to the right of the stage where, during the happier events hosted so often in this huge hall—wedding receptions, political rallies—beer was sold through a chest-high window that was shuttered now. He climbed the steps to the stage and paused again, just offstage in the wings, thinking of the anonymous death threat that had been recorded only hours before on the answering machine of one of his colleagues. He weighed the possibilities the threat was real, took another deep breath of the sweaty, stale air in the room, accentuated now because of the elevation of the stage, felt as if everything was closing in on him, decided that, on balance, there was every possibility one of the onlookers in the front row was packing a gun, squared his shoulders, and stepped out on to the stage.