If employers had no obligation to recognize a union, did this mean that collective bargaining did not happen at all?

No. The willingness of an employer to bargain with a union depended upon either the goodwill of the employer or the pressure that a union could bring to bear by industrial action. For example, a strike by auto workers in Oshawa in 1937 ended with a settlement agreement on certain key issues, as did strikes in the same year by workers in the textile industry in Quebec and Ontario.

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