Walsh, William, 1910-2004 : Moishe Wolofsky (later known as William "Bill" Walsh) was born in 1910 in Montreal. His father, Herschel "Harry" Wolofsky, was the publisher of the "Der Keneder Odler," a Yiddish-language newspaper. Moishe Wolofsky attended and graduated from Montreal primary and high schools. Following three years of work and studies in New York, Moishe Wolofsky and a friend, Moishe Kosawatsky (later known as Dick Steele), travelled to Europe and the Soviet Union in 1931. In the USSR, they worked in metal works factories in Minsk and Moscow, and joined the Young Communist League.
Wolofsky returned to Canada in 1933, and soon adopted the name William Walsh. He became active in the Friends of the Soviet Union in Montreal, and in union organizations in Montreal and Ontario. In 1935, Walsh became an organizer for the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), and for the remainder of the Depression he worked as a party and union organizer; he played an important role in organizing rubber workers in Kitchener and autoworkers in Windsor. Walsh's political activities led to his arrest in December 1940, and he was subsequently jailed and interned in Guelph, Ontario, and Hull (Gatineau), Quebec, under the Defence of Canada Regulations. Following his release in October 1942 and the death of his first wife Anne (Weir) Walsh in 1943, he joined the Canadian Army and served in Europe with the Essex Scottish Regiment. After the war, Walsh was hired by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) as a staff representative based in Hamilton, Ontario. He was a key organizer during the 1946 strike wave in the major industrial plants in Hamilton, one of the key phases in the Canadian labour movement's post-war campaign for union security and wage increases. Also in 1946, Walsh married Esther Steele, whose first husband Dick Steele had been killed in action during the war. Walsh continued to serve as a UE representative until his resignation in 1965; among his chief responsibilities was servicing the large Westinghouse local in Hamilton. While working for the UE, Walsh remained active in the CPC, serving on the City Council of Hamilton during the 1950s. Walsh resigned from the CPC in 1967, and in the early 1970s, he was active in the Labour Caucus of the New Democratic Party's Waffle Movement.
After leaving the UE, Walsh developed a practice as a labour consultant and arbitrator; he provided services to unions in several industries, most notably the health care, white-collar and public sectors. He worked for various unions including the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Letter Carriers Union of Canada, the Sudbury Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, the Draftsmen's Association of Ontario, the Ontario Nurses' Association, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and locals of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and of the Service Employees International Union. Walsh's consulting work included assistance in collective bargaining strategy and negotiations, strike strategy, labour education, and drafting constitutions. Walsh was one of the pioneers of labour arbitration in Canada, and he was the union counsel in the first case reported in "Labour Arbitration Cases" in 1948. Much of Walsh's work as the union appointee to arbitration boards involved public sector workplaces (such as hospitals, nursing homes, nursing, and municipal and provincial employees), although he also worked regularly in cases in private-sector industries.
Because of his experience as a negotiator, in the 1970s and early 1980s the Dene Nation and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (Inuit Tapirisat of Canada) asked Walsh to assist in their negotiations with the Canadian government. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was also active in Veterans Against Nuclear Arms, a peace group composed of ex-military people. Mr. Walsh died in 2004.
More biographical information is available in "A very red life: the story of Bill Walsh" by Cy Gonick (Canadian Committee on Labour History, 2001).
