“No Meat, No Work”, The Great Meat Strike of 1947
Published: November 3, 2025
Authors: Natasha Fairweather
Patrick Burns opened his first slaughterhouse in Calgary in 1890. In 1907 Burns & Co built “a large and modern packing plant” in Vancouver, at the foot of Woodland Drive. By the 1940s, the meatpacking industry was dominated by three large firms: Swift’s, Canada Packers, and Burns. Together, they controlled 75% of Canada’s meat processing. As the war economy surged, so did the need for a large and reliable labour force. Laws favouring union recognition and bargaining rights opened the door to a wave of union organizing in the 1940s, and the United Packinghouse Workers of America soon counted over 10,000 members across the three companies.
These gains were short-lived. In 1947, the BC government introduced Bill 39, which made strikes effectively illegal until a conciliation board hearing had occurred, and which weaponized the court system against unions. It used to be that police on horseback with billy-clubs kept labour in its place, but now they could just use injunctions as a tool of suppression. Conflict after conflict broke out around the province.
P. Burns & Co. Ltd plant at foot of Woodlands Drive, Vancouver, 1920. City of Vancouver Archives PAN-N238A.
It was in this climate that packinghouse workers went on strike on a national scale. At the Burns plant, women were earning 73 cents an hour and men 94 cents. The union was asking for an increase of 17.5 cents (less for women). The company vied for public support with full-page ads in The Province calling these demands exorbitant and warning consumers they’d foot the bill. Headlines stoked public anxiety, announcing “Meatless Days Threatened” and “Housewives Besieging Butchers.”
The strike was illegal under Bill 39, but the packinghouse workers were part of a broader movement. Steelworkers and IWA furniture makers were already on strike themselves, and soon more unions joined the fray. The Railway Engineers refused to move cars for striking packinghouses. Mine-Mill and the IWA both warned they’d stop operations if their camp kitchens ran out of supplies. “No meat, no work” was the slogan. Meanwhile, the union warned the public: ‘if reputable plants were shut down, any meat that was available might not be safe.‘
Pacific Tribune, Sep 19, 1947, 3
After several tense weeks, the strike ended with a 10 cent raise. It wasn’t everything they wanted, but it was a hard-won victory. The government made some concessions to the hated Conciliation Act, but it remained a thorn in labour’s side for decades to come.
As for the Burns plant, it was demolished in 1969. The company shifted its manufacturing to the Prairies, where labour was cheaper. It sold all meatpacking operations to Maple Leaf in 1996.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) Meat Cutters Union made attempts to organize workers in meat processing in the early 20th century, but they remained largely unorganized by the beginning of the Depression. In the mid-thirties, some local independent unions were formed, and the Meat Cutters made another, unsuccessful attempt. In 1937 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) formed the Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC) which absorbed many of the local independent organizations.
Early on the PWOC began to style itself the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), but it was not until 1943 that the CIO issued a charter in that name. By the end of WWII the UPWA had become established in the major meat processors in the US and in Canada. After the war, the UPWA began to lose ground to the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America (AMCBW).
It changed its name in 1960 to United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, and in 1968, after long negotiations that had started with the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, the Packinghouse Workers finally merged into the AMCBW which in turn was a founding partner of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in 1979.
Courtesy David Yorke.
David Yorke Labour History Collection, SFU Library
Learn about Fred Dowling the union organizer who engineered the dramatic nation-wide packinghouse strike in 1947 that secured the master agreement system, turning the young union into one of the most militant in Canadian labour history.