While Canadians have decidedly divided views on the benefits of organized labour, there’s no doubt that the paucity of books on the movement’s struggles makes it easy to forget that paid maternity leave and work-free weekends are legacies of trade-union trench fights. Two new works focusing on two of the most influential Canadian labour organizers of the 20th century go some way to correcting this lack of historical perspective.

Legendary organizer and human rights activist Madeleine Parent, whose tireless work organizing textile workers, among others, is the focus of a collection of essays edited by Andrée Levesque. My Union, My Life is a memoir by Jean-Claude Parrot, who served time in prison after he and his postal workers union refused to be bullied by the Trudeau government. Parrot played key roles in radicalizing a complacent union movement and expanding labour’s vision beyond agitating for a fatter paycheque. Though both shy individuals, their names nonetheless inspired fear behind the shutters of corporate and government boardrooms.

Interestingly, each book could have benefitted from more of what the other offers. In Parrot’s case, the focus is almost all union, no Jean-Claude, while reading the Parent book feels like attending a tribute banquet, where the speeches are heartfelt but one is left intellectually peckish by evening’s end.

Parrot weighs down the first third of his tale with an endless chronology of union negotiations, convention resolutions, and prosaic strike details – all of which are no doubt interesting to archivists, but fail to strike an emotional connection. This life story only comes alive when the shy Parrot actually includes himself in the telling, both in his memories of being jailed in the late 1970s and in his occasional bouts of soapboxing, which demonstrate a passion and level of analysis unique among labour leaders. While readers come away with a strong sense of union business, we never really get to the heart of what fuels the militancy of the postal workers union: the day-to-day life and challenges of working on the sorting-room floor, at the mail counter, on the delivery route.

The tribute to Parent has more passion, but fewer details of the kind provided in Parrot’s book. The snapshots here, originally compiled for a 2001 conference on Parent’s life, explore her experiences as a university student in the 1930s, her role in organizing textile workers under the repressive Duplessis government in Quebec, and her work with a broad range of people not necessarily connected to the union cause, from the women’s movement to immigrant communities and native people. While the tribute is fitting, it still feels like reading an excellent outline for a future book.

Both Parrot and Parent broke new ground in their efforts to democratize union bureaucracies and to redefine the role of the labour movement on a global stage. Hopefully, these two works will inspire historians to present more fully realized portraits of their respective roles in Canadian history