by Susie Fisher
University of Winnipeg
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Janis Thiessen, Not Talking Union: An Oral History of North American Mennonites and Labour. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016, 234 pages. ISBN 978-0-7735-4752-0, $37.95 (paperback)
Janis Thiessen’s Not Talking Union is a well written, methodologically rich, and wonderfully interdisciplinary study that draws new and important attention to the range of ways labour, vocation, identity, religion, and ethnicity have (and have not) intersected in the lives of Mennonite men and women in cities across North America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. More particularly, Not Talking Union is a transnational work of religious and labour history that seeks to uncover some of the reasons why the majority of North American Mennonites are less likely than those in the general population to be union members. Yet, Thiessen’s efforts to prioritize individual narratives of life, work, and religion by way of oral history, also open up space for understanding why some Mennonites have at certain points in recent history disputed “the traditional and prevailing opinion” and engaged in union support. In this way, Thiessen’s work is an effort to record “unofficial” histories—the reflections and experiences of people who were involved in a particular historical moment, and those do not generally get recorded in “official” documents, like newspapers or the minutes of institutional meetings.
Not Talking Union spins out of Thiessen’s first book, Manufacturing Mennonites, wherein she discovered that some Manitoba Mennonites in the 1970s challenged the Manitoba Labour Board to make room for those whose religious beliefs negated union membership. Intrigued by this fact, Thiessen’s new research focussed on locating other instances of Mennonite labour activism in North America.
Thiessen’s oral history research stands at the centre of this study’s efforts to locate and understand Mennonite attitudes about labour unions. Over the course of several years, Thiessen employed oral historian Alexander Von Plato’s four-stage life history method to conduct 115 interviews in six North American urban locales for this study. In particular, this method prioritizes the life story of the participant as she or he chooses to construct and interpret it, rather than on the researcher’s specific interests. Thiessen also held fast to oral historian Alessandro Portelli’s suggestion that the researcher “accept the informant,” by underscoring “what she or he wishes to tell, rather than what the researcher wants to hear” (p. 8).
In keeping with methods and theories recommended by Portelli and Von Plato, participants in Thiessen’s study were invited to direct the conversation by telling their own stories, rather than responding at the outset to specific inquiries related to employment, religion, and identity. Yet, in following these methodologies, Thiessen’s work did unfold in unanticipated directions. Thiessen admittedly “set out to find stories of collective action,” but what she heard instead “were stories of individual negotiation” (p.8). While Thiessen’s methodological approach may have made the work more difficult and time consuming, I believe it also made her findings richer, and her analyses more accurate and complex.
Chapter 1, “Narratives of Religious Belief,” sets the stage for understanding the ways Mennonite religious identity in North America has been “(re)constructed” and individualized over the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Based on extensive analyses of several oral history interviews, Thiessen demonstrates that the religious identities of many Mennonite men and women in North America are formed by life experiences, rather than by institutional practice or theological education. Thiessen argues that the individualization of religious belief and identity is a major contributing factor to North American Mennonites’ “fragmented” approach to unions and labour activism. In Chapter 2, “Attitudes toward Unions,” Thiessen traces the history of North American Mennonite institutional responses to unions, and compares them to the efforts of Mennonite individuals to describe their experiences of labour issues and unions. Thiessen argues that a disconnect exists between belief and practice surrounding labour issues among Mennonite individuals. That is, personal life experience, more than religious conviction, seems to shape Mennonite men and women’s decisions about unions.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 are case studies that explore individual Mennonite memories of, and responses to unions in the United States and Canada. These case studies all well demonstrate Thiessen’s hypothesis that there exists no cohesive approach among North American Mennonites to labour issues. Thiessen’s discussion of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers strikes in California during the 1960s illuminates the class-centered nature of Mennonites’ immediate responses to, and individual memories of this historical moment. Another case study looks at Mennonite conscientious objections to unions in Manitoba. Such objections were in conjunction with a four-year amendment to the Labour Relations Act in the 1970s that permitted exemption from union membership on the basis of individual religious beliefs surrounding nonviolence and nonresistance. Thiessen’s research again demonstrates a mixed response to labour issues among Mennonites. What she finds is that very few individuals took advantage of this clause, despite the efforts of some church leaders to clarify a Mennonite theological stance against unions. Finally, Thiessen’s analysis of the faith-based workplace reveals that, even in settings tailored to assist individuals with integrating their religious and vocational perspectives, moments of tension and conflict exist surrounding the way Mennonites approach and experience faith in the workplace.
By conducting oral history interviews and engaging in extensive archival research, Thiessen finds that while Mennonite religion traditionally rejects unionization, there exists no cohesive approach to union membership and labour activism among Mennonites in North America—just as there exists no unified narrative of Mennonite faith and identity. Rather, people’s vocational lives and religious identities are individualized. Religion, vocation, and identity are informed by a diversity of life experiences related to gender, class, race, locale, and parental influences. Perhaps most importantly, Thiessen’s work reminds readers of the complexity of individual religious identities, despite any sense of belonging to a particular ethno-religious group or participation in a particular vocation or workplace. Thiessen’s research demonstrates the richness of the stories people tell about their lives, and the ways that these stories can lead to a fuller understanding of religious life and work experiences.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 31 March 2021
