White emigrated to Canada from Northern Ireland as a boy, along with his family. He left school at the age of 15 and took employment in a UAW-organized Woodstock, Ontario furniture factory. Beginning in 1952, when he was not yet 18, White was elected to a series of union positions in the plant. By 1960, he was working full time as a union “staffer.” Tellingly, White notes in his memoir that the first, and one of the most valuable, lessons he learned from his chief mentor in the UAW bureaucracy was that “any dumb sonovabitch” can take workers out on strike, “The test is: can you put them back?”