Sudbury’s labour movement had its official birth on March 10, 1944, with the certification of Mine Mill Local 598, after a tumultuous gestation that was not without bloodshed. According to local labour lore, the triumph of union organizers after decades of failure stemmed directly from an equally historic and bitter defeat only a few years earlier: the crushing of the Mine Mill certification strike in the Kirkland Lake gold camp during the winter of 1941-42.

Several of the union’s key organizers headed south to Sudbury following the failure of the four month strike at the fabled Golden Mile in the hopes of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, and, in the event, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The 11,000 hardrock miners, mill, smelter and refinery workers who became trade unionists that March were the newest members of a union with a long and storied history in the hardrock mining camps of North America. Founded originally as the Western Federation of miners in 1893, the union was renamed the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) in 1916, but it was known to friend and foe alike as simply “The Mine Mill”.

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 This article orginally appeared in the Christmas 2004 edition of Highgrader Magazine - a Northern Ontario publication that brings the issues, concerns and culture of Ontario’s vast forestry and mineral rich north to the world.

In the latter half of 2003, in the wake of yet another failed marriage, I was forced to indulge in one of the most dreaded of all male pastimes, an activity ranking somewhere between visiting the dentist and plumbing: I had to go shopping.  In the act of replacing the myriad of consumer goods that are forfeited when a household is split asunder, I made several discoveries.  Ever the nosy parker, (and hoping to support Canadian industry) I made a point of determining the country of origin of almost every purchase: from patio furniture to kitchen utensils, from an inexpensive stereo to a weed-whacker. 

The results were astonishing: virtually everything had come from, or at least been assembled in, the People’s Republic of China.  Also amazing was how cheap most things were, and that the quality nevertheless appeared relatively high.  The world was awash in cheap electronics.  It appeared that, at a conservative estimate, 90 per cent of the merchandise in the local Dollarama store was from China.  Multiplying the inventory in all the dollar stores in Sudbury times all the dollar stores in Canada conjured up a mental image of a chain of container ships crossing the Pacific from west to east, disgorging an unending stream of consumer goods produced by a nearly infinite supply of cheap labour in a nation of 1.3 billion souls.

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Mick Lowe was born in 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska.  He is a 1965 graduate of Lincoln Southeast High School.He emigrated to Canada in 1970, after attending the University of Nebraska- Lincoln for four years,majoring in history, English literature, and philosophy.  He also attended the University of Calgary from 1973 to 1974, before moving to Sudbury in 1974 where he became News Editor of Northern Life, Sudbury’s community news weekly.       

From 1975 to 1988 he worked as a freelance journalist, becoming a frequent contributor to the Globe and   Mail. In1977 he became a staff reporter for CBC Radio News. when he helped to open the network’s Northeastern OntarioNews Bureau

In 1978 Mick was the Founding Producer of the CBC’s first radio morning show from Sudbury, Morning North. Shortly afterward he moved to Lisbon, Portugal where he resumed his freelance career for the Globe and Mail from Madrid and Lisbon. 

After publishing his first book, Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder and the Law Lowe became a Professor in the Print Journalism program at Cambrian College in Sudbury.  Mick published his second book One Woman Army: The Life and Times of Claire Culhane in 1992.

Three years later he became a regujar columnist for Northern Life, a time during which he published his third book, Premature Bonanza: Stand- off at Voisey’s Bay, and he would continue making weekly contributions until 2002, when he became a communications consultant for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. His column, On the Rock, won awards for “Best Column” in Ontario and North America. A father of two, he resides on the banks of the Vermilion River north of Sudbury.

Over the next few months, Republic of Mining.com will be posting many of Mick Lowe’s previous columns due to their historical relevancy to Sudbury’s mining history.