March 25, 2021

By Shelley Cermak and Laura Sharpe, IAM Local 764 Noreen Olive Schmitt was first a partner, mother, grandmother, a sister – and to many of us in the union family, a mentor! Kind, gentle, caring, empathetic and very sharing of her struggles and she wanted more for us young ones coming up the ranks.  She spent countless hours with her union & community, teaching and passing on her knowledge. She

Union organizer and social activist. Late in life, Madeleine Parent was recognized her indefatigable activism on behalf of workers, women, and minorities. But in her younger years she was marked as a dangerous woman and a “seditious” traitor. In the 1940s, Parent organized workers in the massive textile factories of Quebec. She was convicted — and later acquitted — of seditious conspiracy. From the 1950s to the 1970s, she led