Goodwin emigrated from England to the coal mines of British Columbia, bringing with him a firsthand understanding of the exploitation that powered industrial capitalism. The conditions in British Columbia's mines were brutal: long hours underground, inadequate safety, wages that barely covered subsistence, and companies that treated any attempt at organization as an act of war. Goodwin threw himself into the labor movement with an intensity that alarmed both employers and government officials. He participated in and led multiple strikes, fighting for higher wages and safer conditions, and served as an organizer for the Socialist Party of Canada. In the 1916 provincial election, he ran as the party's candidate in Trail, a smelting town in the Kootenays.

When military conscription was imposed during World War I, Goodwin was initially exempted after a medical examination found him unfit for service. But as his political activity intensified, his draft classification was mysteriously revised, making him eligible for conscription. Whether this reclassification was a deliberate attempt to silence a troublesome labor organizer or a routine administrative review remains debated by historians. Goodwin refused to report. He fled into the bush near Cumberland on Vancouver Island, where sympathizers supplied him with food and information. On July 27, 1918, Dominion Police officer Dan Campbell tracked Goodwin down and shot him. Campbell claimed self-defense. Others believed he was acting under special military orders to eliminate an agitator.

Goodwin's death ignited a fury that swept far beyond the coal towns of Vancouver Island. On August 2, 1918, workers in Vancouver walked off their jobs in what is widely considered Canada's first general strike, a one-day action that shut down the city and signaled the depth of anger over conscription, labor repression, and the circumstances of Goodwin's killing. The strike was brief but its symbolic weight was enormous, demonstrating that the labor movement could mobilize across industries and regions in response to an injustice perpetrated against one of its own. Goodwin, who had spent his life arguing that workers must "organize as a class and fight them as class against class," had become in death the catalyst for exactly the kind of collective action he had advocated.

Ginger Goodwin's legacy has been contested ever since his death. In 1996, a section of Highway 19 passing through Cumberland was named Ginger Goodwin Way, but the province's Liberal government removed the signs in 2001. The NDP government reinstalled them in 2018. That same year, on the centennial of his death, the BC government proclaimed July 27 as Ginger Goodwin Day. Every year during Miners' Memorial weekend, people gather at his grave in the Cumberland cemetery to lay flowers and remember. In 2016, filmmaker Neil Vokey released Goodwin's Way, a documentary following the town of Cumberland as it resisted the opening of a new mine while resurrecting the legacy of the man who had fought the mine owners a century earlier. The red-haired miner from England is still stirring things up.