Workers of Quebec, secede! Quebec's labor unions and Canadian national unity, 1960--1976

Although scholars recognize the crucial role that voluntary organizations play in facilitating ethnic mobilization, there has so far been little empirical work specifying exactly how this process works. In Quebec, labor unions became an important source of voters and activists for the ethnonationalist Parti Québécois (PQ). By investigating the turnaround of Quebec's three union centrals from the federalism that they espoused during the early 1960s to the more nationalist orientation on the eve of the 1976 Quebec elections, we are able to specify the dynamics of ideological change for this pivotal set of voluntary organizations. Since they anticipated staffing the government of a newly autonomous Quebec, workers in Quebec's largely francophone public sector provided the PQ with its core of support. This was true for both unionized and nonunionized public sector workers. More surprisingly, survey data from 1973 and 1974 reveal that unionized blue collar workers generally supported the PQ while their nonunion counterparts tended to oppose the party. We attribute this to the key role that blue collar unions played in driving the multiethnic A.F.L.-C.I.O.-affiliated central, the Federation des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ), in a separatist direction. We argue that the radicalization of these unions had its origins in the struggle for power and resources that had previously taken place between the FTQ and the Canadian administrative levels of the A.F.L-C.I.O. Since these disputes involved issues of bilingualism and French language rights, as well as autonomy for Quebec's unions, FTQ unions had a chance to fight out these issues before they surfaced in Quebec politics more generally. The dissertation concludes with a set of hypotheses about factors promoting the formation of ethnic voluntary associations and the transformation of interethnic organizations into ethnic ones.