On this day in 1978, United Steelworkers union workers in Sudbury, Ontario voted to go on strike to fight proposed layoffs and pay cuts. The strike was the longest in Canadian history until the record was broken by Sudbury workers in 2009.
The layoffs and cuts to pay and benefits were at the multi-national company Inco, which cited low nickel prices as a justification.
According to filmmaker Martin Duckworth, workers voted to strike against the advice of the United Steelworkers hierarchy, and the strike enjoyed national support because Inco was a known polluter and one of the biggest multi-nationals in Canada.
Around 11,600 workers were involved in the strike, which affected the wages sustaining 43,000 people, or about 26% of the population of metropolitan Sudbury. By the end of the strike, nine months later, the company had been deprived of over twenty-two million hours of labor.
The workers won small wage increase and a pension package, however thousands of workers lost their homes and cars because of the length of the strike. According to journalist Amy Miller, since 1979, INCO has fired 20,000 employees from their staff and now have more people receiving payments from the pension roll than pay roll.
The role of women in the community during the strike was profiled in the 1980 documentary film A Wives' Tale (Une histoire de femmes).
All Out to Support Striking Vale Inco Workers!
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have all of you a good day/night 
Its so sad to see other poor people badmouthing AES and/or enemies of the imperial core. I was at a barbers in my hometown, talking to someone who ran off to london and then moved back, both of us complaining about how much hate a place like this gets. The entire country thinks awfully about us and so the people born and raised here are desperate to leave, its depressing. She and I were united in being pissed about that, because there's nothing wrong with being lower class or from a lower class area.
"Yeah, exactly! We're a working class town, not fucking North Korea!"
Always feels better to have something to look and punch down