All kinds of skilled workers and many more unskilled labourers were needed to maintain the rail system, run the trains, and handle the huge volume of freight and passengers that passed through Winnipeg. The Weston Shops, one of several worksites operated by the railways in the city, hired hundreds of machinists, moulders, plumbers, pipefitters, and other skilled workers. Large numbers of semi-skilled workers and labourers also found work here. The men working in these shops repaired the companies’ steam engines, and freight and passenger cars. They forged steel for the rails, and did the many other jobs essential to the successful operation of the railway. Only a few original buildings remain from this era.

Long hours of labour, dirty and noisy working conditions, and low wages in these industries prompted the skilled workers to organize into 19 different craft unions before the First World War. During the war, these unions <--caption--> organized a Metal Trades Council to improve their bargaining power with the CPR. The craft exclusiveness of these unions, however, meant semi-skilled and unskilled workers in the shops were not unionized. RB Russell, Dick Johns, and their supporters argued against this rigid structure. They proposed replacing the craft unions with one big industrial union that would represent all the workers in the railway shops. In 1919, they were busy transforming the Metal Trades Council into just such an industrial union.

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In spring 1919, Russell and Johns were also working, along with other socialist leaders across Canada, to create the One Big Union (OBU). An extension of the industrial union model emerging in the railway shops, the OBU was to include all Canadian workers – regardless of their skill, gender, race or ethnicity – in a <--caption--> single industrial union. Russell, Johns and others challenged the exclusion of Black workers by the International Association of Machinists in the pre-war years. This may explain why, as the Western Labor News reported on May 16, Winnipeg’s newly formed, all-Black union of Sleeping Car Porters voted 67 – 2 in favour of joining the Winnipeg General Strike.