I can help with this! My day has come!
Please be kind as I post and edit over the next... however long. I want to make sure I can cite as much as I write about, but of course it takes time to verify information and check which source I’m grabbing it from.
Before I forget/launch into some info, here are some great books and articles to look for. I will add to this list when I run upstairs to the Strike-specific collection I have:
Influenza 1918 by Esyllt W. Jones Winnipeg’s Great War by Jim Blanchard (he also has a new book, the third in the series which will likely speak about the flu - I just haven’t made it to reading that book yet) Prairie Metropolis by editors Esyllt Jones and Gerald Friesen Winning the Second Battle: Canadian veterans and the return to civilian life, 1915-1930 by Desmond Morton and Glenn Wright Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries: The Western Canadian Radical Movement 1899-1919 by Ross A. McCormack Magnificent Fight l: the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike by Dennis Lewycky Pandemic 1918 by Catharine Arnold Winnipeg’s General Strike by Michael Dupuis
To begin with, yes: there was an impact on the Strike’s origins made by the influenza. That said... it’s complicated and there are many facets to consider.
You have returning working-class soldiers who are searching for economic security which has been disrupted by the war both in terms of their departure, but also the emergence of women and children as major contributors to the manufacturing sector in Winnipeg. So throw in a pandemic, becoming widowed or knowing you’re about to potentially leave a widow, and you’ll have thousands of financially insecure men particularly concerned about their family’s economic future.
Pair that with the emergence of social programming such as Diet Kitchens, a variety of Missions, and the Salvation Army’s involvement in caring for influenza patients and the issue that bred: women. This volunteerism in public health was organized and performed by the upper-middle classes who had the luxury of time and knowledge, but conversely they were matched by a great many women allied with the labour reform movement also participating in charitable and public health endeavours. The issue? These two camps of women - who’d ultimately be the two sides of the Strike a few months later - were rubbing elbows where policy and healthcare delivery were concerned.
Many people also don’t realize there was a civic labour strike in the Spring of 1918. The Local Council of Women opposed this pre-cursor to the better-known General Strike, and then later the Labour League withdrew support for the LCW’s initiatives in Winnipeg where women and children’s labour rights were concerned. So we have two groups of women who were trying to achieve the same goal of nursing Winnipeg’s ill, who wouldn’t work together because of a previous labour-related spat, to put it so.
Here is a great passage from Jones’ Influenza 1918 which probably sums up everything in a nice neat bow, an academic TL;DR if you will: *A central goal of this study has been to draw attention to working-class experience during the epidemic and its aftermath, and to situate influenza within the context of post-First World War working-class and ethnic radicalism and class conflict. This focus has accomplished two things. The first is to illustrate that the epidemic was an important factor in the growing momentum toward labour revolt in Winnipeg in 1918/19. Working-class leaders were resolutely determined not to have influenza deter them from their agenda of social change at the workplace and at the ballot box. Given the circumstances, there was a grimness in their success. It is impossible to know that what workers and their representatives were thinking as they campaigned to defeat an anti-labour mayor at the polls, and took a general strike vote, in the midst of death and loss in their neighbourhoods. Certainly, nothing they said publicly betrayed any fear or lack of resolve. In fact, influenza gave fuel to their fire. Both the disease itself and state’s response to it threatened the viability of the working family. The Trades and Labour Council argues that the decision to close public gatherjng places and lay off workers without compensation was a betrayal of British justice and a violation of principles of fairness. Displaying the potency of gendered discourse that privileged the male breadwinner as centre of the family economy, labour criticized the stare for denying working men a living wage with which to support themselves and their families during a time of severe crisis and need. Both women and men fought the price gouging of the funeral industry, and condemned the refusal of the state to prevent it. It was a clear social injustice that family survival was undermined by the cost of a decent burial, even while capitalists profited. Thus, workers viewed the impact of disease as socially constructed, and demanding social and political solutions.
Second, the struggles of families and neighbourhoods to survive the epidemic are linked to the mobilizing success of the workers’ movement in the winter and spring of 1918/19. Evan Stark’s argument than during the trauma of epidemic disease workers reach out, away from the capitalist market, toward a non-capitalist ‘society’ based upon mutualism, is a convincing perspective from which to understand how the epidemic pushed ordinary men and women toward greater class consciousness and solidarity. This analysis gives us insight into how an event such as the influenza epidemic holds within it both devastation and the seeds of emancipation and recreation. The evidence clearly shows that working families had their worlds turned upside down by the disease. But for those who survived, the epidemic suggested both the fragility of social order and the capacity of workers’ communities to sustain life. Coming on the heels of the human losses and hardship of the First World War, the influenza epidemic further ‘politicized the networks of everyday life,’ particularly among working class women.*
That last quote is from an argument by Kaplan in Barcelona from 1910-18. Sorry, I’m on mobile. The reference to Stark is for the article “The Epidemic as Social Event” in International Journal of Health Services from 1977.
Just for information on the number of cases. There was a peak in 1918 (I believe around mid-November but I can’t find where I read that) and I think it was about 500-750 new cases reported, daily. In Jones’ book I believe she reports just over 1200 people from Winnipeg died from the influenza (edit: page 58 of Influenza 1918 has it at 1216 recorded deaths over the course of the 3 waves that hit through 1918 and 1919) and that it did hit a wide variety of ages - including a large amount of returned soldiers.