cbindependent.com Get StartedReviews

J.B. McLachlan and the Living Legacy of Working-Class Solidarity

James B. McLachlan arrived in Cape Breton in 1902 and spent the next three decades doing what no one else in the small Nova Scotia coal communities had managed: turning a scattering of immigrant miners into a disciplined political force. The soft-spoken Scottish-born organiser helped found what would become District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, and by the 1920s his influence stretched from the island's collieries to Ottawa. More than a union leader, he was a writer, a member of Parliament, and the kind of agitator who believed that a mine shaft was also a classroom.

His relevance has not dimmed. In an era when gig contracts, casualisation, and the steady drumbeat of automation hollow out the bargaining power that previous generations fought to secure, the methods McLachlan used, from bilingual pamphleteering to patient shop-floor education, look less like museum pieces and more like a working blueprint. For readers in Australia, where the Fair Work Act of 2009 governs much of the modern industrial landscape and where mining communities in the Hunter Valley, Kalgoorlie, and around Mount Isa carry their own rich histories of organisation, the parallels are unusually sharp.

A Foreman's Son Who Became a Miner's Voice

McLachlan was born in 1869 in the village of Croy, North Lanarkshire, and emigrated first to Pennsylvania before settling in the steel town of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He learned his politics in the collieries of Sydney Mines and Glace Bay, where Scottish Gaelic, French Acadian, English, and Mi'kmaq mingled in the lamp-lit changing rooms. He edited the district's union newspaper, The Maritime Labour Herald, and used it to translate dense political economy into the plain language of the pit.

What set him apart from the better-known industrial heroes of his era was the breadth of his ambition. He ran for the provincial legislature in 1916 and won a federal seat in 1921 as a Labour MP for Cape Breton South. In Parliament he pressed for old-age pensions, workers' compensation, and an end to company stores, while still running the local union on the side. He wrote two books, The Scotian Washer and No Man Stands Alone, drawing on oral histories from older miners to argue that solidarity was older than any contract and stronger than any boss.

The Coal Wars That Shaped a Region

The story of Cape Breton between 1900 and 1925 is impossible to tell without the smell of low-grade coal and the sound of boot heels on frozen planks. Operators ran the mines on credit, paid in scrip that could only be spent in company stores, and evicted families from company houses the moment a father joined a meeting that displeased management. The 1925 strike, in particular, dragged on for months and was broken only after the RCMP removed children from miners' homes and shipped them to distant relief camps, a scene that later inspired Hugh MacLennan's novel Barometer Rising.

McLachlan did not romanticise these struggles. He understood that a successful strike required food committees, a press bureau, and a steady correspondence with sympathetic politicians as much as it required courage underground. When the operators tried to import scab labour from the United States, McLachlan's network telegraphed every port in advance; when company detectives tried to infiltrate meetings, the Gaelic speakers in the room shifted languages and left the spies behind. The same tactical patience, applied to modern disputes at logistics hubs in western Sydney or construction sites across greater Melbourne, would still unsettle an HR department or two.

Solidarity Beyond Borders

McLachlan's internationalism was practical rather than performative. He corresponded with British syndicalists, kept up with the Industrial Workers of the World, and tracked strike waves in Australia with interest. Cape Breton miners sent solidarity cash to the Broken Hill miners during the 1909 and 1918 disputes, and McLachlan used those connections to argue that workers in different commodity towns faced versions of the same employer playbook. That instinct, that a miner in Kalgoorlie and a miner in Glace Bay were natural allies, remains the simplest test of whether a labour movement is alive or merely commemorative.

The point is worth dwelling on because today's labour debates often drift into a narrow localism. A useful resource for thinking about cross-border worker organising, including examples from Central Asia and the post-Soviet industrial belt, can be found at this labour portal. McLachlan would have been unsurprised that the same companies operating in Cape Breton in 1920 later reappeared in different guises in different countries, and that the response still depends on whether workers treat one another as colleagues or as foreign labour.

Industrial Decline and the Mental Health Toll

The closure of the last Cape Breton colliery in 2001 left behind more than empty pits. Communities that had built churches, credit unions, and brass bands around the rhythm of the mines watched their tax base, their volunteer fire brigades, and their sense of purpose drain away in a single generation. A recent local investigation into the resulting wave of distress can be read in a regional health report, and the patterns it describes, rising overdose deaths, packed rural emergency rooms, and dwindling family doctors, are familiar to anyone who has driven through the post-industrial towns of the Hunter Valley or the Latrobe Valley in Victoria.

The mental health consequences of deindustrialisation are not an accidental side effect. They are the predictable outcome of removing the scaffolding that gave people a reason to leave the house in the morning. McLachlan knew this. In the 1930s, when unemployment in Cape Breton hovered near 50 per cent, he organised community gardens, lending libraries, and public lectures because, as he put it, a man without a job still needed a life worth defending. The same principle travels to a country like Australia, where fly-in fly-out rosters in the Pilbara and the gas fields of western Queensland have produced their own quiet epidemic of fatigue, family breakdown, and substance use, and the lesson of treating mental health as a workplace issue rather than a private one is portable.

The Populist Mood and How Labour Failed to Answer It

A decade of plant closures, opioid addiction, and a sense that distant governments cared more about coastal voters than inland ones created the conditions for movements of grievance. Cape Breton, like much of rural Nova Scotia, has not been immune. A thoughtful local account of how right-wing populism has taken root in former union towns is available through this regional analysis, and the picture it paints, abandoned union halls, podcasts that blame immigrants and Indigenous peoples for hardship, and a quiet drift toward conspiracy thinking, is a near-perfect mirror of what has happened across inland New South Wales, parts of northern Tasmania, and the wheat belt of Western Australia.

McLachlan faced a similar moment in the 1920s, when returning soldiers found no work and conservative newspapers blamed the usual scapegoats. He answered with organisation, not denunciation. He helped returning veterans form credit unions, sat on platforms with Acadian and Mi'kmaq speakers, and refused to let the labour movement drift into a defensive crouch. The same combination of material offers, ethnic pluralism, and unflinching class politics is what is missing from many of today's attempts to push back against populism. Without a working answer to the question of who actually benefits from a region's mineral wealth, every progressive speech is just noise.

A Practical Inheritance for Today's Organisers

The McLachlan inheritance is not nostalgia. It is a set of habits that proved their worth in Cape Breton and that organisers in Brisbane, Adelaide, and the satellite suburbs of Perth would do well to study. Workers in Australia live under the Fair Work Act and the right-of-entry rules administered by the Fair Work Commission, but no statute can replace the slow, face-to-face work of building trust in a workplace. McLachlan's insistence on shop-floor education, multilingual publications, and a press that reported the workers' version of events first remains the foundation of any serious organising drive. His habit of running for office himself, rather than relying on friendly lawyers, is also overdue for revival in a country where union density has slipped below 14 per cent and the lobby groups that claim to speak for labour have grown comfortable with the access they have.

In practical terms, the inheritance translates into a handful of moves that any local branch can make in the next twelve months. The list is not exhaustive, but it captures the spirit.

Habits Worth Reclaiming

The history of Cape Breton is not an exotic foreign tale. It is one of many branches of the same tree that grew in the Hunter Valley, in the lead and zinc fields of Broken Hill, and along the wharves of the Yarra. McLachlan's method, patient, multilingual, stubborn, and unafraid of electoral politics, deserves a fresh reading from anyone who believes that a union card is supposed to be the start of a longer campaign rather than the end of one. Read the work, study the periods of defeat as carefully as the moments of triumph, and then get to work.