Romeo Mathieu, (1917 – April, 1989) was a Canadian trade unionist, progressive political activist, and leading solidarity builder for the Quebec labour movement.
Mathieu is best associated with his leading role in expanding the efforts of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) into Quebec during the 1940s and 50s, and assisting with the merger between the UPWA and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America in 1968.
He also made a significant contribution to the creation of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union in 1979. In addition to his outstanding contributions to the labour movement, Mathieu was a standing member of the Quebec intelligentsia during the 1950s and 60s, and served as a formidable presence in advancing many of the province's social movements, including the Quiet Revolution.
Early life
Mathieu was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1917 and displayed a hunger for politics at an early age. Unlike most other boys in Quebec during this period, Mathieu demonstrated little to no interest in hockey or sports in general. Instead, he became a political animal and strove to be his uncle's protege, who was a professional organizer for the Liberal Party of Canada.
He was educated at the Technical Institute of Montreal, where he learned mechanics and technical drawing, and graduated on the eve of the Great Depression. The experiences of the Great Depression had a profound impact on Mathieu, resulting in a paradigm shift for his worldview, political beliefs and associations. Soon thereafter, he abandoned his childhood affiliation to the Liberal Party, and, instead, embraced the emerging, and more radical, views of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
Packinghouse worker organizing
One day in 1938, while taking a lunch break from his job in the credit department of a Montreal store, a curious, young Romeo Mathieu dropped into a union meeting, and listened to an organizer from the garment workers. From then on his life was with the labour movement. His first project was organizing workers at the Dominion Engineering Works in Longueuil, Quebec for the International Association of Machinists. The organizing drive was successful, and the new local union elected Mathieu as its full-time president.Mathieu soon made a name for himself in Quebec's labour circles, and rapidly gained a reputation for being a highly effective and, indeed, fierce union mobilizer. Before long, he became active in the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC), eventually serving on the federation's executive during the mid-1940s. TLC president Percy Bengough took special notice of Mathieu and recommended him to lead the federation's nascent organizing strategy, and corresponding campaign, for packinghouse workers. Mathieu excelled at the challenge and helped create Montreal's first packinghouse workers' union, the Packinghouse Butchers and Allied Workers Union, which was chartered with the TLC. Mathieu served as the new union's first leader.
Master bargaining in meat sector
Mathieu was a staunch supporter of the "One Industry, One Union" movement and in 1946 he led the Packinghouse Butchers and Allied Workers Union toward a merger with the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA).
Always keen to put the full might of the UPWA to the cause, Mathieu led the negotiating committee that struck the "big three" of Canada's meat-packing industry: Canada Packers, Burns, and Swift in 1947. The action further secured the master bargaining model that was achieved for packinghouse workers during the Second World War.
The model won through Mathieu's negotiating prowess and the leadership of UPWA Canadian Director Fred Dowling became the standard across Canada, and ushered in a new era of higher living standards for generations of packinghouse workers. The system survived until the mid-1980s when Burns triggered a decade long period of brinkmanship and excessively hard bargaining that resulted in some of the largest and most violent strikes in Canadian history, and ultimately led to the end of pattern bargaining in the country's meat sector.
Beyond the meat sector, Mathieu was often called upon by other unions or central labour federations to get the parties beyond impasse, including the nationwide postal strike in 1968, which was ultimately resolved by him after the Canadian Union of Postal Workers invited Romeo to act as their chief negotiator.
Building solidarity in Quebec
Through the 1940s, dual federations and unions competed for affiliates and sectors, which thereby allowed employers to pit one union against another.