CONTENTdm
British Columbia Historical Books Collection
Bennett, William
"Traces the position of the working class and the development of unionism. The author was a member of the Communist Party of Canada."-- Lowther, B. J., & Laing, M. (1968). A bibliography of British Columbia: Laying the foundations, 1849-1899. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, p. 192.
159, [1] pages : fronstispiece, illustration, photographs, advertisements ; 20 cm
application/pdf
BUILDERS OF BRITISH COLUMBIA *]> WILLIAM BENNETT with a 1 FOREWORD hy MALCOLM BRUCE Abbreviations Used A. F, of L. American Federation of Labor. A. C. C. L. All Canadian Congress of Labor. A. S. E. Amalgamated Society of Engineers. A. S. C. J. Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. H R. U. American Railway Union. A. L. U. American Labor Union. A. S. C. Amalgamated Civil Servants of Canada. C. P. of C. Communist Party of Canada. C. L. P. Canadian Labor Party. C C. F. Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. C. C. Y. M. Cooperative Commonwealth Youth Movement. F. L. P. Federated Labor Party. F. S. U. Federated Seafarers Union. I. T. U. International Typographical Union. I. L. A. International Longshoremen's. Association. I. W. W. Industrial Workers of the World. I. L. P. Independent Labor Party. K. of L. Knights of Labor. L. W. I. U. Lumber Workers Industrial Union. M. & M. L. P. A. Miners and Mine Laborers Protective Association. M. W. I. U. Mine Workers Industrial Union. O. R. U. One Big Union. R. I. L. U. Bed International of Labor Unions. S. L. P. Socialist Labor Party. S. P. of C. Socialist Party of Canada. S. D. P. of C. Social Democratic Party of Canada. T. & L. C. Trades and Labor Council. U. B. C. J. United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. U. B. R. E. United Brotherhood of Railway Employees. U. M. W. of A. United Mine Workers of America. U. S. L. P. United Socialist Labor Party. W. F. M. Western Federation of Miners. W. U. L. Workers' Unity League. Y! C. L. Young Communist League. Y. S. L. Young Socialist League. I wish to thank the following old-timers for valuable information in the writing of this book. Ben Hughes, member of the K.of L., the Stevedores' Union, the I.LjA., and the United Socialist Labor Party; delegate to the first Vancouver T.&L.C. Jim Boult, member of the S.L.P., the Socialist Trades & Labor Alliance, the I.W.W. and the S.P.of C. Jack Shepherd, of the Fishermen's Union of 1900-1, the I.LA. and the S.P.of C. Jim Hodgkinson, Nanaimo Teamsters Union, delegate to first Nanaimo T.&L.C., S.P.ofC. and S.D.P. Arthur Jordan, U.M.W.ofA„ District 28; S.P.of C. and S.D.P. Also to Len Tonning, Victoria, for assistance in collection of the material for cut of the press and to tiie Nanaimo "Free Press" for access to their files for data regarding the "Bawnmore Case"; to the Vancouver "Province" and the Provincial Library at Victoria for the same service. I wish to thank also the "Daily Clarion," the "People's Advocate" (B.C. Workers' News), the "B.C. Lumber Worker," the Japanese "Daily People" and the "Working Woman" of Winnipeg for the loan of cuts, and Bert Monk for technical COVER DESIGN BY MICKEY SEIVEWRIGHT Page Four Foreword IN THE recording of the struggles of labor the historians of the ruling class have had almost a free hand. And in their telling of the story, almost invariably the workers are portrayed as lawless, unreasonable, violent and greedy, or as the unfortunate, stupid victims of'"agitators," most of whom are "foreigners." The employers, on the other hand, have been presented as the "builders of the country," as unselfish patriots, who gave of their talents and risked their money in industry to furnish jobs for the workers and benefit the community generally; and when the workers became dissatisfied with their miserable wages, wretched conditions and the inhuman speed-up, and organized and struck to bring about improvements, it was at once evidence of their "ingratitude" to their employers and a plot against the community and the state, against "law and order," which brought down upon their heads the malediction of the kept press and the clubs of the forces of the ruling class State. Research by more or less independent investigators, however, has revealed that the Canadian employers were not the altruistic men the people had been led to believe. It has been shown that. the great "captains of industry" in Canada who piled up great fortunes and acquired titles were as ruthless a crew of financial and industrial pirates as ever cursed a country or exploited a people, and that in the attainment of their ends they employed corruption, chicanery, force and violence, and downright thievery. British Columbia, a special preserve of the fifty.or so Canadian multi-millionaires and foreign bond-holders, has had many bitter experiences of the methods of these exploiters in extracting wealth from the labor of the workers and destroying the trade union organization which alone can protect and safeguard the interests of the workers. British Columbia for the last,half Page Five century has been noted for the great labor struggles that have been carried on within its boundaries. The story of these struggles, of the heroism of the workers and the brutality of the exploiters and the State which is their agency has never been truthfully told until the appearance of this book, "Builders of British Columbia" by William Bennett. Nor could or would the story be told accurately and fairly by the bourgeois historian; it can be told adequately only by an historian such as the author of this volume, himself a member of the working class. Nor is there anyone in British Columbia better qualified to Write such a history. During his thirty years residence in Canada, almost all of which time has been spent in British Columbia, Bennett has been in the very front ranks of the hosts of labor fighting against capitalist oppression. A keen student, a tireless investigator, and, although he disclaims such a distinction, possessed of a literary style as lucid as it is pungent, he is eminently fitted to write the history of labor in British Columbia. Not only is Labor learning to unite and engage in militant -mass struggles, it is also producing its own historians. And in this period when the forces of reaction are uniting and becoming bolder than ever in their attempts to destroy genuine trades unionism and introduce the pernicious company union, the appearance of this book will be welcomed by the workers and other progressive people in British Columbia and throughout Canada. The organized labor movement of British Columbia has a proud tradition, one that inspires the workers to greater organization and resistance to capitalism in these days of capitalist disintegration, a tradition that must be cherished and lived up to. A copy of this book should be in the hands of everyone who plays a part in the struggle to preserve and build the labor movement. It should be one of the weapons in the arsenal of labor in the class struggle which will not cease, despite the howlings and ravings of capitalist exploiters and their hirelings, apologists, and beneficiaries, until labor shall have shaken off the gyves of wage bondage and put an end forever to all forms of exploitation and class oppression. Malcolm Bruce* Vancouver, B.C., March 18, 1937. Page Six Introduction In the Jubilation and side-show celebrations, which were organized and carried through for the most part, by salesmen who are interested in the first place in getting people with money to visit our fair city and leave their money behind, while saddling the.workers, and. storekeepers.with a burden of. debt, but little mention has been, made of that section, of the people who are responsible for tine miracle of Vancouver—the change in the face of nature whereby a part of the Coast jungle of British Columbia has been converted into a highly industrialized, imperialist city with a quarter of a million population in half a century—the working class, without whom there would have been no Vancouver, no celebration, no jubilee. If only real estate sharks, timber barons, mine speculators, fishery pirates, oil brokers, stock gamblers and political heelers had come to this Last Best West, the firs, the hemlocks -and the cedars would still spread their cathedral calm over the busy centers of industry, trade and commerce that lie between Burrard Inlet and the Eraser River. They did come, of course, these argonauts, not, however, as builders, but as birds of prey scenting the feast from afar, to batten like leeches on the workers who were gathering to hew down the forests, to rape the earth of its mineral treasures and to garner the harvests of the rivers and seas. They came to take part in. a game of "put and take," in which the workers, "put" and they "took." Yet those argonauts are written of in the annals of lecturers on the "history" of British Columbia, as "builders of Empire." Had all these parasite builders of Empire received their desserts they would have landed in Kingston Penitentiary with Aemilius Jervis who organized the first cannery trust on the Page Seven Fraser about the beginning of the century, or alongside of Whit- taker Wright, owner through the London and Globe Corporation of the Le Roi Mining properties at Rossland, the most consummate scoundrel of his time, who, when found guilty by an English jury of the worst and most fraudulent practices known even in the skingame of company promoting, dropped dead in the dock. While exploiting the miners of the Boundary Country, while robbing the small investors of their hard-earned savings, his heart never missed a beat; but when his crookedness was exposed and he was dealt with according to the laws of his fellow capitalist thieves, it stopped entirely. These two instances could be multiplied, for most of those who have acquired wealth and fortune in the development and growth of Vancouver and B.C. in the last fifty years, are, in a more or less degree, of the same type, and they it is who are credited with the marvel that has made Vancouver the third city in Canada in that short period of time. The Workers' Contribution, The greed of these builders of Empire knew no bounds. Since 1870, the B.C. miners have donated to their slave-driving overlords, alien capitalists mostly, the tidy hand-out of one and a half billion dollars, practically all, with the exception of the gold from the placer deposits of the Eraser and the Cariboo, in the period we are now celebrating. In 30 years, from 1901, the year when the Lumbermen's and Loggers' Associations were organized, the Coast loggers, without the help of Paul Bunyan or the Big Swede, cut 42% billion feet of logs which the mills and factories converted into 1348 million dollars worth of forest products. These are the figures Of the B.C. Dept. of Mines and the Boss Loggers. Aladdin's magic lamp is a plaything compared to the sturdy backs, the brawny arms and the generous hearts of the workers of Vancouver and its outlying territories. Into the maw of these "entrepreneurs," capitalist adventurers, today goes 300 million dollars annually, created by B.C. workers, less the scanty wages that are given back to them to keep them from dying of starvation. In the past year the Coast loggers cut 2% billion feet of logs, 1000 feet per man per day, which when milled and manufactured into lumber, sashes, doors, furniture, Page Eight shingles and plywood, realized 56 million dollars for the members of the Lumber and Millmen's Associations, the same who find it impossible to pay the minimum wage and have to employ 25% of their workers at wages below the limit of the Act. Of course, we must remember that Eric Hamber has to be well* heeled financially for his job as Lieutenant-Governor of the Province!. In 1935 also, B.C. miners and quarrymen dug out of the bowels of the earth $47,807,157 worth of precious and base metals; gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper and industrial raw materials; coal, asbestos, cement and clay, providing the mine-owners with 10 million dollars dividend. Austin Taylor needed the price to buy Indian Broom for his racing stable, and nobody is so generous as the Bridge River miners! Before going on the breadline last winter, the 17,000 B.C. fishermen and cannery workers, whites, Indians and Orientals, had made their quota to help out the hard-pressed cannery-owners by contributing $15,786,172 worth of salmon, halibut, cod, pilchards, herrings, crabs, shrimps and clams. The Bell Irvings must shine socially! And undoubtedly, if the longshoremen had not been engaged in a long and bloody struggle with the Shipping Federation they would have handled more than 6,339,636 tons of cargo on the Vancouver docks during the year. Eighteen hundred B.O. factories produced 180 million dollars worth of wealth, nearly half in. Vancouver, in 1935, and the grand total could easily have been much larger if almost 100,000 of the population had not been shut out of industry and compelled to exist on relief, from six to eight thousand of them imprisoned in slave compounds, working at forced, back-breaking, useless labor for twenty cents a day. These are the real builders of Vancouver and of B.C.; the loggers.and sawmill workers; the miners, — prospectors, colliers, and hard-rock men; the fishermen on the Eraser and the halibut banks of the North Pacific; the surveyors and laborers who laid out and graded the streets and the building trades workers who erected the buildings; the transportation workers^ railroaders, sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, streetcarmen; the machinists, boilermakers, engineers and the other. workers who contributed to their comfort while they were so engaged. fkvfukr" Page Nine How the Workers Paid. , ■.-.■ . In travail and sweat and blood were these millions of wealth made that represent Vancouver and B.C. in the statistics of the Boards of Trade. The lumberworker, the mirier, the fisherman, worked at all times in the shadow of death,. The mines in which they toiled are the tombs of hundreds of B.C. coal miners, killed1 by gas explosions because the mine-owners were too greedy to.instal the ventilation equipment called for by law; brattice cloth costs money, even though it is the cheapest junk, on earth; numberless quartz miners have been buried by rock slides because tim.ber was too expensive and the purchase of it would interfere with the dividends. Unknown numbers of loggers have been slaughterecl.to the greed that always calls for more logs, more logs; the "high-bail" system that gets logs out at no matter what cost—in men. Fishermen have been drowned, hundreds of them, on the River, in the Gulf and on the lonely storm-tossed waters of Queen Charlotte Sound out of every kind of craft from Norwegian dories to steam whalers. In all these far-away places where they were risking their lives, these workers were building Vancouver. Out on the Pacific after whales for Gen. McRae or halibut for Al. Hagerj or on the Skeena during the salmon run; in the upper reaches of the Portland Canal, the frozen diggings of Atlin or the foothills of the Cascades making profits for Vancouver mining companies; falling and bucking, yarding and booming, on Vancouver Island or the inlets "north-by-west," bringing grist to the mill of the Vancouver lumbermen; herded like beasts and driven worse in raiload construction camps; all those workers were helping to build Vancouver. The hinterland of B.C. is a part of Vancouver. As somebody said when the miners' whiskers were being exploited during the Jubilee, "The men and mines of the Cariboo helped to build Vancouver too." The workers who toil in the camps and construction gangs are as much "of Vancouver" as the motormen who drive the streetcars, or the civic employees who keep the streets clean, or the department store girls who peddle the shoddy goods on "95- cent Day," and their blood is on every pennyworth of wealth that is flaunted before the hungry children of the Vancouver tfneift- ployed today. Page Ten "A Terrible Price." Twenty years ago the Workmen's Compensation Board was set upvby a Conservative government. That is to say that it is not administering a Compensation Act that is wholly in the interests of the injured and murdered workers and their dependents as an act of a Socialist government, such as exists in the Soviet Union, would be. Nevertheless, the Compensation Board provides us with figures and data that prove the claim made above, that Vancouver is built on a foundation of crushed flesh and splintered bone, of working-class blood. During the nineteen years that the Board has issued reports, accidents to. workers in the industries covered by the Act amount to the appalling figure of 464,261, of -10013 jouiui opnpui ^ou seop 9.111% sxqx '\tyBj o.i3i& X82/S tpFp& dents for which no compensation is paid. This latter group is estimated by the Board at 2,000 annually. In the period covered by the reports this means another 40,000, making a total number of workers ground under the industrial Juggernaut of half a million in nineteen years. If we allow an equal number for the other 31 years of our glorious jubilee celebration period, a fairly conservative figure, we have a million accidents, aside from the victims of silicosis, lead-poisoning and T.B.; a million workers of three generations, torn, tortured, maimed and slaughtered in the mad rush for profits; more than four times the casualties of the Canadian army in the Great War; enough to make four cities the size of Vancouver, the possibilities of four more jubilees. A percentage of accidents in industry is unavoidable, but it need not be very large. This monstrous total is due to the greed for profits, that even in the infancy of factory production compelled men to work without safety measures and in the later stages imposes on them a speed-up pace that leaves them no opportunity to look out for their own welfare. B.C. workers have been particularly the victims of the speed-up, in the woods, the mines and on the waterfront. The press boasted not so long ago that Vancouver longshoremen were so efficient that the tonnage of cargo handled per man on the docks here, was greater than at any other port on the Coast. They did not, however, mention that the number of men who bit the dust was also greater than at any other port. "Hit the ball" or "hit the trail" are the alternatives with which the longshoremen are faced, and the same whip-lash sings in every branch of industry.''" ''".-._. ,»S'* Page Eleven "Convincing Comparisons." , m . v In 1934, ^4,354 workers^men and women, paid the penalty of speed-up in B.C. mines, camps and factories. During the same period, in Australia, which; has a population of 6% million®, thirteen times that of B.C^ the total number of industrial acei- (ients was 32,000. There: is a powerful trade union movement in Australia, and probably they are not iblessed with "Safety Firsts' campaigns such as we have in the industries here. :*H& But Australia is a long way off; suppose we look as some places nearer Vancouver. The following table should conclusively prove the, above statement :*■ IftfkA&'l Nova Scotia . ,i... . Quebec; Lv. • .-. m&$ . Ontario . ... ... ... . Jfew.:York.State ...... British Columbia C^. ^Canadian figures from Canada Year Book, 1936, and New York figures rfrom World Almanac, 1936, All data relates to the year 1934). No. of Percent Accidents Population of. Pop 8063 o 512,846 1.5 35436 2,874,255 1.2 54730 ,£,431,683 1.5 384550 12,588,066 3.0 22354 694,263 3.2 Since it is the working class that has paid the price it is the working class that should be celebrating. . Vancouver is a record of achievement worthy of jubilation, worthy to,ho^laoed beside all other accomplishments of labor, mental and physical; the joint work of science and skill, of the engineer^ the chemist, the tradesman, the manual laborer, the surgeon, the school teacher, the store clerk and all those who contribute usefully to the needs of the community, fd U$m pytityi •- i rr ? ;ov/ <M n «»a h From this angle we propose to add, our contribution to the fund of jubilee rejoicing—to outline the growth and development, industrially and politically of the organized labor movement, the representative and spokesman of the class that built and maintains Vancouver and made possible the celebration of this 50th anniversary of the founding of our city—the working class. No attempt will be made here at political analysis; no effort to explain the motive forces behind these struggles and changes ♦"•'Postal Advocate," official organ of the Postal Workers' Union of Australia, June, 1936. • Page Twelve but the fundamental one will be apparent to the reader—profit- making. In a booklet of this size, which is a speech prepared for the 1936 District Convention of the Communist Party of Canada, with a few additions, it is not possible to deal elaborately and in detail with all the struggles of the workers in British Columbia over half a century. Nor does it make any pretentions to poetic diction or literary grace. In places it will appear sketchy. Statements may appear curt, bald and unconvincing without sustaining evidence; this is due largely to the limitations of space and partially to the "schooling" of the author which was of the most meager character. No claim will be made that it is impartial. It will display "partiality," as does every contribution ever made to historical writing. Where the historian's interest and sympthies lie there also lie his "partialities." In this case it is admitted. As between Frank Kogers and the thugs of the C.P.B.; between the Island miners fighting for the enforcement of the Mines Begulations Act and the hirelings of Bowser; between the jailed and murdered Trekkers and the E. B. Bennett-Gerry McGeer-B.C.M.P. gunmen, the writer is "partial" to the working class, first, last, always and forever, as is the Party of which he is proud to be a member—the Communist Party of Canada. <^^S> Page Thirteen CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY CP.R.—like L.S.D. to an English capitalist and U.S.A. to a 200% American—magic letters, a symbol to conjure with, even more so on the Coast than on the Prairies, for I did not the CP.R. lay a ribbon of steel, "Steel of Empire" as John Murray Gibbon, the CP.R. publicity historian calls it (it should be "Steal of Empire") to the Pacific, at the end of which Vancouver grew like a mushroom. We are often told that Vancouver and the CP.R. are practically the same thing—for did they not grow together? It is necessary then that we pay or devoirs to this marvellous corporation in our jvbliee contribution since we are expected to bow the knee in adoration to the syndicate of "empire builders," those hardy pioneers and their present day inheritors that the mystic symbol represents, for the part they played in the development of Vancouver. Like Vancouver, the CP.R. is a great achievement for the men who toiled and died in the building of it. But for the lordly host of grafters composing the syndicate, who promoted it, honor can only be accorded by prehensible patriots of their own calibre. Their chief, Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) later admitted "It was the government or the penitentiary"; if the government had not given them unlimited backing their crimes would have landed them behind the bars, where they rightly belonged. W. T. R. Preston, at one time in charge of the Immigration Agencies of the Canadian Government in England, when Strathcona was High Commissioner, gives us a picture of the public- spirited character, of the uprightness and moral integrity, of those thieving progenitors of Sir Edward Beatty and of their contempt for the common people of Canada; a picture that at the same time shows us the kind of venal self-serving politicians who gave them their "letters of marque." He says (the loan was effected), "Though not until certain members of the House Page Fifteen had made their own terms. The Syndicate had to distribute largesse with a bountiful hand. Common stock of the Company was anonymously placed in trust for certain prominent politicians at Ottawa. ... A costly necklace was presented by Donald A. Smith to the wife of the Prime Minister. . . . The construction of the great railway was carried on apace, carried on, it may be noted, not by Canadian labor, for which the Syndicate had promised employment. No, but by the labor of tens of thousands of coolies sent out by shiploads from Hong Kong."* A Lordly Graft They were granted among other things, an initial cash subsidy of 25 million dollars; a grant of 25 million acres of land; existing railways worth 39 million dollars; all-time western exemption from taxation; protection from competition and the right to set their own tariffs. Donald A. Smith, the leading figure in this gang of filibuster- ers, was a poor Scots shepherd lad from the straths of Morayshire, who had come to Canada to make his fortune. His life might have made a chapter for Sam Smile's "Self Help." Determined to "gather gear by every wile," he took service with that other Canadian octopus that has made fortunes for many other Scotsmen, and Englishmen too, the Hudson's Bay Company, a company founded by Prince Rupert, grandson of one English king and cousin of two others, who laid the foundation of his fortune as a pirate on the Spanish Main and the Caribbean Sea, but who gave up his piratical way of life and became a "gentleman" in "The Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, Trading in the Hudson's Bay," when given a monopoly by his cousin, Charles the Second, to prey on the Indians of about five-sixths of Canada and a great part of what is now the United States. The first ten thousand was probably the hardest. It certainly was hard on the poor Nascopie Indians of Labrador. As factor for the Company in the territories of that tribe, in 13 years he had acquired £10,000 for himself besides what he made for the Hudson's Bay Company. During his tenure as uncrowned king over them the tribe was decimated through privation and hunger, *"Lord Strathcona" Page Sixteen -W. T. R. Preston. due to the close-fisted policies of this inhuman moneygrubber, being reduced to eating the bodies of those who died and killing and eating their children.* Beckles Willson in his book, "Lord Strathcona," says that in return for the furs of two years' hunting, they received "a little tobacco and a few strings of beads," but the stockholders of the Hudson's Bay Company flourished and waxed fat. The poor shepherd lad invested his £10,000 in stock of the Bank of Montreal. The bank practically became, in time, his bank. It was linked up with his railroad and was the main agency for unloading CP.R. stock on the public. When the Red River Rebellion, led by Louis Riel, broke out, Smith, who had become Sir Donald by this time, was chief officer of the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada. He was sent by the Dominion Government as Special Commissioner to handle the situation, which was be-- lieved by many to have been fomented by the company. The records of the farcical trial of Riel show that the Hudson's Bay Company had "recognized" Riel's government and were preparing to make the government a loan of several million dollars. "Pro Bellum Cutem" Five years later (1875-6) he was charged in the House of Commons by John Christian Schultz with having permitted the papers of the rebel government to be destroyed by H.B. Company officers. This he could not deny but explained that they were of no value. Schultz openly taunted him and dared him to push the claim for $1,500,000 compensation for losses sustained by the Company during the rebellion. He was accused of being afraid to do so, lest his complicity as an officer of the Company with the rebels should be established. That claim was not settled until the rebellion had become history and the evidence dissipated. Schultz's charges bear all the hall-marks of truth as they are fully in accord with the expressed policies of the H.B. Company to keep settlers out and maintain the West as a vast fur preserve, tacitlv admitted by Strathcona in the introduction he wrote to Beckles Willson's "The Great Company" in 1889, where he ♦Report of British Parliamentary Select Committee on the Hudson's Bay Co., 1857. Page Seventeen says, "Of course, the fur trade and settlement could not go side by side." "Pro Pelle Cutem" is the motto of the H.B. Company. It decorates their property, their tobacco cans and whisky-bottle labels. Translated into classical Oxford English, it means "A skin for a skin," or in the language of the B.C. logging woods and mining camps, "A regular skin-game." David Douglas, the botanist whose name is borne by the Douglas fir, characterized the activities of this profit-seeking plunderbund, tersely and succinctly at Kamloops: "The Hudson's Bay Company is simply a mercenary corporation; there is not an officer in it with a soul above a beaver skin."* It goes without saying that such a pillar of empire as Lord Strathcona, as the reward of a patriotic life, was "laid at rest" in Westminster Abbey among other great buccaneers, pirates, slave-traders, cut-purses and swashbuckling adventurers of an earlier age whose methods of robbery and spoliation were more open and direct though less fruitful of personal returns. As a result of "hard work, frugality and foresight," he left behind him when he died over 23 million dollars that grew out of that early grubstake wrung out of the cannibalism imposed on the peaceful, innocent Labrador Indians. Such was this leader of the Syndicate of wirepullers. His fellows were all of a kind, and the people of Port Moody and Vancouver knew it before the first transcontinental train reached False Creek. British Columbia entered the Confederation on condition that the Government of Canada undertook to have a transcontinental railroad built to the Pacific tidewater. The CP.R. syndicate engineer, John Ross, reported that the most suitable place for a terminus was Vancouver. But Van Home, Strath- cona's man Friday, knew a trick worth two of that. Port Moody, at the head of Burrard Inlet, from which the steel had already been laid by the government, was made the end of the line. It was at timewater and complied with the contract. The land to which the CP.R. had fallen heir in the government grant had to be sold, the Port Moody lots as well as others. Soon the *"The North West Coast" Page Eighteen Lhole townsite was bought and paid for by people who figured on growing up with the new railroad terminal. A Typical CP.R. Manoeuver Then Van Home began dickering with Granville, as Vancouver was then called, and the B.C. Government. What concessions did they propose to make if the railroad was continued Into Vancouver? Much haggling took place. Van Home wanted a grant of all the land still in the hands of the government be- ifween Port Moody and Stanley Park. The outcome was that the CP.R. received nearly all the land on which the City of iVancouver now stands as "a free grant," for continuing their poad to its present terminus. And what of Port Moody? To paraphrase the words of another railroad king, Jay Gould, "Port Moody be damned." The people who had been swindled linto buying lots in Port Moody on the definite understanding phat it was to be the terminus were ruined. The houses and {buildings they had erected were so much useless lumber. They {took out injunction after injunction to prevent the company from iextending its line, but the CP.R. won in every case, for courts were the same then as they are today. To defeat the legitimate ^claims of those who had been swindled, Port Moody was, and lis, legally considered the terminal point and the line from there to Vancouver, a branch line. The CP.R. always had-a battery of slick and unscrupulous corporation lawyers like E. P. Davis and R. B. Bennett on its payroll to consummate just such legal Itrickery. Van Home knew from the beginning that the line would finally go through to Vancouver, but chances of easy money like that were not to be passed up—that was what the CP.R. was in business for. . This is a CP.R. manoeuver not confined to Port Moody. Others with faith in their fellow-men have been gypped in the same manner by this voracious corporation. Hosmer in the Crow's Nest country is one example, where the CP.R. opened a mine, I sub-divided a townsite and sold lumber to the miners who came to work there, so they could build themselves houses. When the sub-division was all sold and the lumber paid for, the company shut down the mine and Hosmer is now one of B.C.'s "ghost towns." So, in the words of the present president of the CP.R.* Page Nineteen 'Property belongs to those who acquire it by industry, by intell - gence or by good fortune."* A Settled Policy Such is one of the policies laid down at the beginning, car ried out since then and maintained today. Having gathered mil- ] lions of acres of free land, mulcted the public treasury of millions of dollars; "$140,000,000 in cash gifts, free, gratis and without] obligation from the Dominion Government, besides what went to their subsidiaries and from Provincial Governments"** . . sold j stock to the tune of millions on what is now useless trackage, presented periodical ultimatums to the government of the day, which was always extremely obliging, a custom still prevailing if we remember the CP.R. lawyer, R. B. Bennett's donation of a $60,000,000 guarantee the year before he was kicked out of office, and that of the first cut at the unemployment relief appropriation of 1930, $2,000,000 was presented to the company by the same gentleman. Their "pioneer" work consisted entirely of feathering their own nests; the advantages that accrued to the people of Canada played no part in their plans except insofar as they could be exploited. Sir Edward Beatty, the present exponent of their brigand policy, was more than excusing when he said, "A handful of active and energetic people, given the resources of a half a continent to exploit, might, not unreasonably, fail to give as much thought to their duties as to their opportunities."*** There is no more free land left; they and others like them have it all. Their profit-squeezing plans are now centered on restricting railway operations to such a level as will enable them to throw between forty and fifty thousand railroad workers from every branch of the industry on the scrap heap. Last year they had a net income of $30,000,000 that went to bondholders and for rent of leased railroads; they lost $4,000,000 made in Canada, in controlled American railroads; they gave about $5,000,000, also made in Canada, to save the Soo Line from bankruptcy. Almost $40,000,000! The men that produced *Sir E. Beatty, Toronto Chamber of Commerce Kiwanis speech, February 5, 1936. **Hansard, 1935, page 2950. ***Regina Board of Trade speech, February 5, 1935, Page Twenty these millions are to be thrown into the ranks of the unemployed to starve, yet this same exponent of "big business," Beatty, told his Chamber of Commerce and Kiwanis friends in Toronto on [February 5, 1936, "I doubt very much whether, for example, ■the president of a privately-owned railway has ever had one- ;tenth of the power to oppress his fellow-workers that is given I to every minor officer of the publicly-owned railways of, for lexample, Soviet Russia." Strikes and Repression Their policies towards the railroad workers have never varied. Strikes have taken place in every branch of the industry on their lines, even in the offices, as a result of low wage scales | and intense exploitation. Their contractors during the building period have been guilty of the cruellest and most merciless treatment of men on construction gangs. In the building of the main line through the mountains, Sir Herbert Holt, Canada's Public Enemy No. 1 today, was head slavedriver, euphemistically called an engineer. For thirteen months the company had paid I no wages although the shareholders received their dividends without fail. The workers on Holt's division at Beavermouth trin the Selkirks struck work demanding what was justly their's. Holt answered them by calling in the Mounties, "the crack shots of the Calgary Division," under the "heroic". Sam Steele, had I the Riot Act read, threatened to shoot them down and would I have done so if their numbers had been smaller. A precedent followed by Mayor G. P. Planta at Nanaimo, 1891, and Gerry McGeer at Vancouver in 1935. In the building of the Crow's Nest Pass line the laborers were treated worse than galley slaves, and if they complained or protested were driven into the wilderness to be frozen to death. I Conditions were so horrible as to warrant a government investiga- I tion. This investigation proved that gross and criminal neglect and cruel methods had been used by the contractors to intimidate I and force men to work for starvation wages, some men who were driven out of the camps being frozen to death.* The Chinese workers, sold by Chinese taipans to the CP.R. contractors, were to all intents and purposes slaves, fed and i *Report of Royal Commission on Crow's Nest Railway, 1898. Page Twenty-one housed worse than dogs, and discarded when their usefulness was over. Onderdonk, contractor in charge of building the line between Yale and Craigellachie, had six thousand working for him as unskilled laborers at one time.* The Evil Genius of B. C. Workers The CP.R. has been the evil genius of British Columbia labor. Frank Rogers, the only working-class leader killed in strike struggle in Vancouver, was murdered by CP.R. thugs and strikebreakers in the U.B.R.E. strike, and "Ginger" Goodwin and Romeo Albo, two other working-class leaders, came to their deaths through the machinations of the management of the Trail Smelter, a subsidiary of the CP.R. As they started so they continue. Their Pacific liners have had no Canadian or other white sailors below officer rank since 1917, when the last four white quartermasters were paid off the Empress of Japan. They are manned, at Hong Kong scales, by Chinese sailors, who cannot be organized by the Seamen's Union in Vancouver, the home port of the liners. They are permitted no contact with the unions here and suffer the severest form of oppression at the hands of British Imperialism in Hong Kong. To defeat the joint efforts of Hong Kong and Canadian imperialists to keep wage scales low requires the joint efforts of Canadian and Chinese seamen and until means are devised to accomplish this there will be little or no change take place. During the last session of the Federal Parliament, the windbag McGeer put up a fight against the proposal to cut off their Dominion subsidy of $175,000, a stand that may be rewarded with the job once held by E. P. Davis, corporation counsel in Vancouver for the CP.R., if that supreme egotist should fail in his more pretentious aims. According to Beatty, during his Jubilee visit when he was presented with the freedom of the city, since there is nothing else tangible left to give him, the CP.R. will put new boats on the Australian and Orient runs if the Dominions are willing to put up the price, that is, if Canada, Australia, the Fiji Islands *Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 1888. Page Twenty-two and Hong Kong are willing to pay for the new ships. They still want to hog the public trough. Vancouver and B. C. owe nothing to. the CP.R. They have already been overpaid. In the development of the industries of this country the only part they played was that of a hold-up man. The task of the labor movement in the future is to organize its forces so well, that among other things, it will be able to make the CP.R. disgorge the stolen wealth on which it has fattened for fifty years. <L-^ei> Page Twenty-three THE LABOR MOVEMENT BEFORE 1900 The Knights of Labor The Labor movement in Vancouver antedates the birth of the city. Before the city charter was granted in 1886, Vancouver workers were already organized in the Knights of Labor. The craft form of organization had not made much headway, at that time, although the first craft union, according to Logan in "Trade Union Organization in Canada," had been formed in Victoria in 1862, the Shipwrights and Caulkers, "the first trade union of any kind west of the Great Lakes." Logan is undoubtedly wrong in this statement, as George Bartley, who was closely associated with everything connected with the printing trades in the early days, is authority for the statement that there was already in Victoria, a local printers' union, of which Bob Holloway, the printer of the Cariboo "Sentinel," was president in 1862.* The Department of Labor, whose records were used by Logan, only came into existence in 1900 and is very scantily supplied with data about the early labor movement in British Columbia. In 1886, the year when the American bosses made the historic onslaught at Haymarket on the American workers fighting for the eight-hour day, two organizations were manoeuvering for leadership of the Labor movement, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. The K.of L. was organized in Philadelphia in 1869 as a secret society, but came out into the open after 1878. It followed the lines of Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Union of half a century earlier in England—embracing all workers, skilled and unskilled, in one union. It was not a purely working-class organization as it admitted to membership anyone over 18 years of age "who worked or had at any time worked for wages," except "individuals who made a living manufacturing, selling or handling intoxicating liquor." Doctors, lawyers and bankers were also barred. It was organized in mixed locals where there were not enough members of one trade to make a local of that trade until *B.C. Federationist, November 9, 1917. Page Twenty-four such time as their number would permit of forming a trade local. Although the leaders were opposed to the strike weapon the general membership passed up their general convention decisions and they led all the great militant strikes of the period except that for the eight-hour day, and even in this they played a • great part. Their militant policies drew the workers into their ranks and their top strength has been estimated at from three-quarters to one and a quarter million. Sam Gompers in "Labor and the Common Welfare" says of the K.of L., "It undertook to wipe out the lines of industry and make one whole organization of all classes of labor." Early Political Activity When Vancouver became a city there were already two assemblies of the K.of L. in the New Westminster district which embraced our infant city, one in Victoria and one in Nanaimo. When the first municipal elections were held, it was undoubtedly the influence of the K.of L. which brought about the defeat of the lumber tsar of that day. Hastings Mill was operating at the time, the manager being R. H. Alexander, from whom Alexander Street takes its name. The lumber supply for the mill came from the timber limits on the shores of False Creek. Logging was tough then as it is today, and the conditions about as rotten as it is possible to imagine. The loggers lived in tents or shacks of split cedar with ventilation above and below, open to wind and water, slept on straw or cedar boughs, werefed mostly on beans and sow-belly and flapjacks. Later, when, through organization, they had won more human standards of living, old man Higgins (W. H.), the genius behind the organization of the B. C. Loggers' Association, expressed himself as wishing "the old days back again when a logger would work from sun-up to sun-down as long as he got plenty of pork and beans and didn't run short of chewing. Them was the real times!" But the fallers and buckers who dropped the trees and cut them into logs and the bullpunchers who hauled them to tidewater with their ox teams, back in 1886, don't appear to have had the same high estimate of this idyllic state, for they struck work for a raise in wages. Alexander refused to listen to them Page Twenty-five and told them he would hire Chinese, and that "Canadians are only North American Chinese anyway." They didn't get the raise. When Alexander's friends, all the lawyers and chisellers of the day, nominated him for mayor, the loggers decided they would keep him out. They approached a real estate agent named Malcolm McLean, asked him to be their candidate, and ort McLean hedging because he had no money to spend on elections, they guaranteed the money. McLean was elected—by the loggers' vote. It was thus the workers played their part in the opening chapter of the history of Vancouver. The Test of Fire Two months later the workers of Vancouver again had an opportunity to show the calibre of men they were. The great fire that wiped out the town was started from land-clearing fires on the CP.R. property to the west of the homes and busineas premises of the citizens. The numbers of those who lost their lives is unknown, but many charred bodies were recovered from the ashes. Nor are the financial losses possible to estimate. Twenty-five hundred people were rendered homeless and penniless. The fire started at two o'clock in the afternoon. In three- quarters of an hour everything was gutted. At six o'clock on the evening of the same day the first wagon-load of relief supplies, food, blankets, etc., was despatched from New Westminster, sent by the Westminster Assembly of the K.of L., to be followed a couple of days later by another. The generous spirit of the race, that is kept alive by the working-class prompted them to act immediately in a concrete way, while those who had money were still thinking of writing checks. Later the C.P.R., responsible for all the damage through neglect, carelessness and greed, for no bush-fire should have been burning in such weather, generously donated $3,000 to the relief fund. This works out somewhere in the neighborhood of $ 1.20 per person and is all the CP.R. paid to the victims of their hunger for profit who had lost all their worldly possessions. Some years ago when the sparks from a logging donkey of the Comox Logging Company set fire to the country and burned out the homes and farms of the ex-soldiers settled at Merville, the logging Page Twenty-six company was mulcted of one hundred thousand dollars damages. So the CP.R., as fully responsible for the Vancouver fire as the Comox Logging Company was for the Merville fire, soaked the Vancouver people some more, leaving the relief of the stricken citizens to be assumed by the public-spirited people of Canada and the United States, the citizens of Montreal alone subscribing a thousand dollars more than the CP.R. Such is the greed of this corporate incubus! Generous Spirit of B. C Workers It may as well be said here, as it will have to be said before we finish, that this demonstration of the humanity of the K.of L., is not a singular event of its kind in the history of B.C. Labor. In 1898 the streetcar men of London, Ontario, carried on a long and bitter struggle with the streetcar corporation of that town who had the militia out to help them. The Dominion Trades Congress appealed for financial help for the strikers. More than half the money contributed came from British Columbia. Vancouver Labor sent its contributions to help the steel workers of Homestead, Pa., in 1892, in their battles against the Carnegie Steel Corporation and the Pinkerton thugs, and again in 1907 they went into their jeans to save Bill Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone from the garroters of the Anaconda Copper Company, who tried to frame them. In defense of the Winnipeg strike leaders again British Columbia led the way; $20,000 worth of the Defense Committee's Liberty Bonds wrere sold in a few weeks and almost as much again raised before and after the sale of these bonds. British Columbia, according to Mr. J. S. Woodsworth, who was on the Defense Committee, had done better than any other province. Tag davs were held for the Vancouver Island miners' children in 1913 (the first Labor tag day) and the Nova Scotia miners in 1923. The strikes of the loggers in 1934 and the relief camp workers in 1935 are fresh in everybody's mind when tag days realized four and five thousand dollar collections, a total of about $22,000 being raised to furnish the relief camp boys with the sinews of war. And the $50,000, most of which was raised in B.C., for the locked-out longshoremen last year, is Page Twenty-seven y d ^ Page Twenty-eight quite a little bit more than the $79.25 the Trades and Labor Council raised by a raffle in 1890 to help the locked-out Wellington miners. Nor did the workers of British Columbia confine their expressions of solidarity to North America. In 1897, when the A.S.E. in Britain was in the throes of a struggle that almost smashed their organization, B. C. workers were donating a share of their meager wages to help their Old Country brothers to win their struggle. During the famine in the Soviet Union in 1921, $1,000 was collected at one meeting on a Sunday afternoon, and $500 at another in the evening of the same day, at both of which meetings the writer was chairman. Thousands of dollars besides this were forwarded by the local relief committee, one check alone having one thousand dollars written on the face of it. The books of the Canadian Labor Defense League could prove that a continual stream of B. C. workers' pennies finds its way all over Canada to defend working-class leaders, persecuted and gaoled by the minions of our capitalist masters. Seeking for Independence in Politics The story of the first formative years of the organized Labor movement in Vancouver is the story of the K.of L. They did not confine their activities to the fight for increased wages, shorter hours and better conditions, though they kept these issues to the front, but branched into the stormy seas of municipal, provincial and federal politics. As early as 1886 a move was made to elect some one other than an old-line politician to the House of Commons by a party calling itself the Reform Party in New Westminster, which at the time included Vancouver, but nothing developed out of it. The K.of L. was identified with this proposal. In Victoria and Nanaimo, however, they ran their own candidates under the name and platform of "The Workingmen's Party." In Victoria, J..M. Duval and A. J. Smith, both woodturners, were the standard-bearers. In Nanaimo, two candidates also ran, James Lewis of Gabriola Island and S. H. Myers of Nanaimo. Duval was editor of the "Industrial News" of Victoria and Myers was the agent of the paper in Nanaimo. These were the first labor candidates in the west. The honor of being actually the first goes to Nanaimo, accordkg to the Industrial Page Twenty-nine News of June 5, 1886, "Nanaimo can claim the honor of putting the first workingmen's ticket in the field." They also supported a candidate in Esquimalt, named Helgeson. Unfortunately, none of them were elected. (The first labor candidate in the East was elected in Ottawa in 1873 ). Among the planks on their platform, which was lengthy and profuse, were: 1) Against land jobbery (an attack on Dunsmuir and his plundering associates—the Central Pacific Railroad of California—for landgrabbing on the Island) ; demands that all public lands be reserved for actual settlers and speculators be taxed out of existence. 2) Against fostering of monopolies (E.& N. Railroad and CP.R.). 3) Expulsion of Chinese. 4) Protection for miners (condemnation of Dunsmuir for having a law taken off the statute books that called for competent firemen in the mines). 5) Reduction of hours of labor (the eight-hour day was the centre of agitation in the States, the nine-hour day in Canada). 6) Government aid to farmers for the settlement of the country.* If the workers were not organized and awake their enemies were, for the same paper on June 9th of that year reports that, "The Workingmen's Party, since the workingmen have selected their candidates, has come in for its fair share of attack on all sides." Later in the year the two existing assemblies of the K.of L. in Vancouver issued a joint manifesto for the coming municipal elections in 1887. This manifesto was largely directed against Chinese labor. And from that time on we may note that the trade union movement of the province has been decidedly anti- Oriental, a condition that lasted until the disruption of the Canadian Labor Party in 1926, not from any feeling of race hatred, but directed against the low wage scales which the CP.R., the lumber barons, mine-owners and cannerymen used as a weapon in their attempts to degrade the standard of life of the white workers to a coolie level. The workers of B. C were slow to learn that their enemy is not another worker with a different colored skin; that their emancipation is not to be accomplished by differentiating be- *"Industrial News," July 3, 1886. Page Thirty ?^v/t tween white, red, black and yellow workers. In the words of Marx: "White labor cannot be free while labor in a black skin is enslaved." They are now learning the mistake of their early attitude and the anti-Chinese poison is now confined almost entirely to the Citizens' Leaguers and the Dogberrys who run the city and make by-laws that prohibit Chinese restaurant owners from employing white waitresses, though they do not tell the white waitresses where to find jobs. In the manifesto, the K.of L. called upon every citizen not to vote for any candidate until he had first expressed himself on the question of Chinese expulsion. At a meeting of the Shaftesbury Assembly, K.of L., a resolution was passed that was the beginning of a battle that resulted in the suspension of the city charter by the provincial government. The Chinese were to be driven out of the city. A boycott was instituted against all who employed Chinese labor or sold them food or patronized them in any way. When a business man committed any of these offences he found a long black "X" painted on the sidewalk in front of his place of business in the morning. Beginning of the Anti-Oriental Movement In Vancouver Such was the strength of the K.of L. that the store-keepers were afraid to deal with Chinese. If a Chinese went into a store to buy a pair of overalls the price was $30.00. Everybody seeking votes for any public office endorsed the program of the Knights, even those who were the most outstanding local employers of Chinese labor, like R. H. Alexander. The city was compelled to open a Labor Bureau to bring in female help from the East to take the places of the Chinese driven out of the hotels. Some Chinese laborers clearing land for the CP.R. were the object of particular attack. At a meeting of the Knights and their supporters held in the City Hall the following resolution was passed: "That a committee wait on all Chinese located here and on any who may arrive in future and induce them to leave the city immediately, the Chinese to be offered their fare and just compensation for necessary expenses." Page Thirty-one Next day the exodus began. There were only 19 Chinese involved and they were "waited on" by a committee of 75 with 250 supporters. Naturally the Chinese were willing to go. The town was full of idle men, construction workers from the CP.R. camps and fresh immigrants drawn to the new country by the ballyhoo. From their numbers pickets were set at all points into the town to see that no more Chinese came to take the place of those driven out. But the CP.R. contractors persised; another Chinese camp was set up at Coal Harbor. The labor movement by now had become an anti-Chinese movement; the main enemy was forgotten in the efforts to oust the poor Chinese laborers. Their camp at Coal Harbor was made the centre of a concerted drive. The shacks in which they lived were torn down, their belongings smashed and the whole given to the flames. Since the beginning of the anti-Chinese troubles the provincial government had suspended the city charter and shipped in 40 special police from Victoria to take charge. These rounded up the Chinese and ordered them back to camp. Three of the attackers were arrested. They were defended by the K.of L. and the case against them dismissed. A radical paper called the "Chestnut" which was issued two or three times a week, supporting the K.of L., had to be printed in Victoria during the struggle, because of the police raids made on the shop where it was printed. The Knights of Labor fought for immediate class legislation, such as the mechanics lien to prevent the workers being robbed by unscrupulous bosses, against the "truck" system in the mills, mines and canneries, and for fair wage clauses in all public contracts, for prohibition of child labor and free compulsory education. And since their perspective embraced political as well as union activity, they urged every worker to get on the voters' roll. During this period the average wage was 17 to 20 cents an hour and the working dav was 11 hours long, but in the mills men worked for from $25 to $40 a month, and sometimes had to work two months before the first paycheck came due. Page Thirty-two The Passing of the Knights In the meantime the craft unions were finding their feet. The American Federation of Labor, launched in 1881 by Strasser and Gompers, was making great inroads in the territory of the K.of L., and before many years was to put it out of business. For 20 years after the founding of the Printers' Union and the Shipwrights and Caulkers in Victoria, the craft unions were slow in growth, but with the influx of tradesmen and mechanics a change took place. Logan in "Trade Union Organization in Canada" says: "The West seems to have taken to the trade union idea almost from the beginning." A Dominion government census of trade unions made in 1900 (not very reliable, however, as many unions were formed and died out before that time), shows that in 1884 an A.F.of L. charter was granted to a printers' union in Victoria to be followed the next year by a metal trades charter. In 1886-7-8 five railroad unions came into existence. In 1888 the first charter was issued to a Vancouver union, the printers (I.T.U.), one that had been applied for in 1887, being lost in the mail. Building trades and tailors' union charters were granted the same year in British Columbia, and in 1889 the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, and the Miners' & Mine-laborers' Protective Association, of Nanaimo, were organized. Not enumerated in this census were the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in Victoria, who were on strike in 1885 for the nine-hour day, and the Vancouver Longshoremen, who were organized into the K.of L. as a Stevedores' Local, about two months after the printers' charter was issued, being the second union in Vancouver. Three of the original members of that union are still in the trades union movement and came through last year's strike with the Vancouver and District Waterfront Workers' Association, Ben Hughes, John Williamson and Bill Elliot. That there were other unions in B. C not listed in this census may be seen from the list of those who formed the first Trades and Labor Council in Vancouver. Organizing the Trades and Labor Council The year 1889 was an auspicious one for Vancouver labor, for in that year the Trades and Labor Council was organized. Page Thirty-three The year opened with a strike of carpenters, the men who had built the bridges and depots on the new railway, and were now no longer useful to the CP.R., gravitated to Vancouver. The ten-hour day had been general during construction. Gathered together now, these men began to discuss their grievances. They decided to form a union, and 200 members joined immediately. They put forward a demand for "a nine-hour day and $3.00 a day." Though the CP.R. and local contractors refused, they won these demands after a couple of months. After the strike the local union split and two unions grew out of it. The Old Country men formed a branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, of which old Captain Jones, who used to fire the 9 o'clock gun, was the first president. It was followed a couple of months later by the organization of a local of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. The K.of L. was slipping fast. They were being snowed under by the craft unions. A move from their centre to establish industrial unions came too late, the craft unions had got too far ahead of them. The U.B.C.J, took the initiative in the step that resulted in the setting up of the Trades and Labor Council. They sent out invitations to a meeting to be held in the Sullivan Hall for the purpose of uniting the forces of labor in the forthcoming city elections, particularly in connection with the nine-hour day, and if possible put candidates in the field in the interests of the workers generally. At this meeting representatives were present from the U.B.C.J., Plasterers, Typos, Painters & Decorators, A.S.C.J. and the K.of L. After an informal discussion a resolution was moved by George Bartley (Typos) and seconded by George Irvine (Plasterers) that "Whereas the representatives of the different labor societies in meeting now assembled believe it to be in the best interest of all classes of labor that nine hours should constitute the working day, and are of opinion that the best means to accomplish the same would be to organize thoroughly during the coming winter. Resolved that all labor societies of this city be requested to elect delegates to a meeting Page Thirty-four to be held on December 5th, 1889, to form a Trades and Labor Council for the City of Vancouver." So on December 5th the first meeting of the T.& L.C wa; held, at which Joe Dickson, of the U.B.C.J., was elected president; George Irvine of the Plasterers vice-president, and D. Jamieson of the International Typographical Union, secretary. The struggle of the carpenters for the nine-hour day had borne fruit, for during 1890 that became the general rule in the city, though ten hours was still in effect in other parts of the [ province. The organization of the workers was forcing wages up; plasterers, 100 per cent organized, had $5.00 for an eight- hour day. Others working nine hours: carpenters, $3.00; printers, $3.50 in job shops, and 35 cents and 40 cents per thousand ems in newspaper work; longshoremen, 35 cents for day work and 40 cents at night; lathers, $2.25 a thousand. Where there was no organization the old hours and wages still obtained. In the CP.R. shops, for instance, the standard rate was $1.70 for ten hours with a 55-hour week. In the Main Stream of the Labor Movement From this on Vancouver and British Columbia were in the main stream of the Canadian labor movement. The first delegates went to the Dominion Trades Congress in 1890, two from Vancouver and one from Nanaimo. The election of George Bartley, first Vancouver Trades Council delegate, was a most democratic event. A public meeting of all unionists in the town was held in the old city hall, and George Bartley polled more votes than the only other nominee, W. Towler. The other two delegates, Harry Cowan and T. Salmon, represented the International Typographical Union and the Nanaimo Miners' Union. These delegates were not only delegates to the Congress but a deputation to approach Sir John A. MacDonald's government for legislation excluding Chinese from the country. The anti-Oriental bugbear took a long time to die and cropped up many times in the years that followed, but is practically dead now as far as the working-class is concerned, particularly since the affiliation of the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers' Union Page Thirty-five to the T.&L.C. in 1927, and lately through Chinese workers joining some of the unions and the unemployed movement. Bitter Struggle of Miners for Eight-Hour Day The everyday struggles over wages and conditions were very bitterly fought at times. Besides the outstanding strikes described in another part of this pamphlet, the labor movement had to overcome organized opposition to every attempt to improve the lot of the workers, particularly so among the miners. The forcing of the eight-hour day law for metal miners from the legislature in 1899, for instance, was only a partial victory. It had to be won on the job. To defeat the law the mine-owners in the Slocan formed an association to keep the mines closed till the act was repealed. Every mine-owner in the district put up a $2,500 forfeit not to recognize any union or labor organization and not to pay more than $3.00 for eight hours or $3.50 for ten hours. The miners demanded the ten-hour pay for the eight- hour day. Led by the Western Federation of Miners, they won after several months. Several attempts of the mine-owners to operate with strikebreakers were defeated by most effective picketing and a magnificent display of solidarity by the other B. C workers. This struggle of the Slocan miners is one of the historic landmarks of B. C labor and an unanswerable demonstration that the mere placing of a law on the statute books is not sufficient to defeat the bosses, that the workers will only get what they can take. The shorter day had to be fought for. Again, the Rossland miners during a strike, were sued by one of the mining companies, the "Centre Star," for interfering with their business. A compliant judge awarded the company $12,500 damages, finding the union guilty of conspiracy. The union hall was seized and the property of individual members of the W.F.M. and the UB.of C.J. as well. This was about the same time as the Taff Vale decision in England. The following year a bill was forced through the Legislative Assembly by the Labor member for Nanaimo, J. H. Hawthornthwaite, that protected the property of the unions from any further attacks in this matter, the first legislation in the Empire for this purpose previous to 1907. Page Thirty-six Vancouver's First Labor Temple, 1898. Page Thirty-seven 1 THE NEW CENTURY An Era of Strikes With the beginning of the century trades unionism had become a power in the province, with about 160 locals, being second only in number to Ontario. In Vancouver, particularly, the unions were all practically 100 per cent organized. They had become an accepted part of the life of the city, acquiring their own Labor Temple, an old Methodist church at the corner of Dunsmuir and Homer, in 1899. The dedication ceremony was performed by Eugene V. Debt, socialist and industrialist, on his second visit to Vancouver in that year. When they staged a Labor Day parade, the first of which was in 1891, the mayor proclaimed a public holiday, and the city council on several occasions donated $500 towards the expenses. This was the beginning of an era of strikes. In 1901 the CP.R. trackmen were working for scandalously low wages. They struck for $1.50 a day. From Montreal to the Coast they sang a song that became very popular—"Ninety cents a day," which tells the whole story. The CP.R. succeeded m getting a few scabs but the store-keepers refused to sell them supplies and boarding-house masters at North Bend and Revel- stoke refused to feed them. After three months the tracks became so dilapidated that it was dangerous for trains to run over them, and the threat of a strike by the engineers and firemen made the CP.R. give in. Almost every union had its fights for wage increases or to prevent wage cuts; for shorter hours; for the closed shop; for recognition—to deal with which one by one would require a book as large as Marx's Capital. The outstanding ones are dealt with later on. The conditions on the job were bettered gradually but never without a fight and sometimes through legislation as well, for the early B. C. workers voted mostly for candidates who agreed to their demands and passed laws that the unions were able to enforce, such as boiler inspection, safety measures in mines and the eight-hour day, bank to bank, in the coal mines (1904). Page Thirty-eight Left Leadership ^p The leadership of the labor movement at that time was about equally divided between the Western Federation of Miners and the Vancouver T.& L.C. The W.F.M. was an avowed socialist organization, the whole program of the Socialist Party of America having been adopted at their Denver Convention in 1902 by a vote of 230 to 73. In B. C, naturally, it was plastered by the bosses and their hirelings as an "alien" organization, though alien thieves like Whittaker Wright were accepted without question. During the period the Vancouver T.& L.C was antagonistic to the policies of the Dominion Trades Congress and the A.F.of L. and kept demanding that the Congress launch themselves into the sea of independent political action. As early as 1894 the first industrial union seeds were sown in Vancouver and Revelstoke with the organization of two branches of the American Railway Union, at the head of which was Gene Debs. The organization of District 6 of the W.F.M., which took in coal miners as well as hardrock men, was followed by the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees and the activities of all of them directed by the American Labor Union, a central body at once industrialist and socialist. In 1899, the Socialist Labor Party appeared on the scene and immediately set up its "economic arm," the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, whose objective was to reconstruct the trade union movement, to give it an industrial base that would support the political program of the Socialist Labor Party. During 1902-3, the West was decidedly at variance with the Dominion Congress. The Vancouver T.& L.C. protested the failure of the Congress to organize in its own name, a feeling being prevalent that the A.F.of L. was getting too much leeway in Canada. The Phoenix T.& L.C. wrote a scathing letter to Draper in which they stated, "The Phoenix Council did not desire affiliation to the Congress because it believed that as at present constituted, Congress was rather an appendage of a capitalist party than a body devoted to the advancement of the interests of the working people of Canada. This, they also believed, applied largely to accredited delegates, but more especi- Page Thirty-nine ally to the executive officers and leading spirits of the organization."* This characterization was denounced as "ridiculous and palpably untrue" by a committee of the Convention, the Western member of which was J. D. MacNiven of Victoria T.& L.C, later Fair Wage Officer for B.C., a Liberal appointee, the same who, as a member of the Legislative Assembly voted against the eight-hour day for coal miners and a bill to reduce the election deposits introduced by the socialist members. A Split Both of the attacks on the Congress were the outcome of the desire of the workers of B.C. for industrial unionism and political independence from the capitalist parties. The Vancouver T.& L.C. was affected by the industrial union sentiment. In April, 1903, during the U.B.R.E. strike they endorsed the principle of industrial unionism and filed the per capita tax notice of the Trades Congress. They also instructed the organizational committee to affiliate any new unions organized, for which there was no craft union, to the American Labor Union. This split with the Congress was followed by twelve unions in the Province and was not healed until 1905 when they reaffiliated so as to be able to send delegates to the Victoria Convention, the first time the Congress met on the Coast. While the sentiment for industrial unionism was growing inside the trade union movement, efforts were being made to construct an industrial organization on the outside. With the coming of the Socialist Labor Party in 1898, came also its "economic arm," the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance. This was a small sectarian organization, purely propagandist, but with large perspectives,—a class union of the workers to lock the boss out in support of the ballot box victory of the S.L.P. The T.& L.C. refused to seat their delegates when they applied for affiliation in 1899 and they made no progress worth speaking of until they became merged in the I.W.W. in 1905. * Secretary Draper's Report, 1902 Convention, Dominion Trades Congress. Page Forty A Change in the Set-up This new organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, the I.W.W., did, however, make a change in the labor set-up in the Province. All the affiliates of the A.L.U. including the W.F.M. went into it. Although socialist in its beginning, it split at the second convention. What remained to become the I.W.W. of history was captured by the anarcho-syndicalists and became a menace rather than a power in the labor movement. A branch of the new organization was established in Vancouver in 1906, between the first and second Conventions at Chicago. The history of the I.W.W. in the Western States, from San Diego to Everett, from Butte to San Pedro, has been one of brave and heroic struggles; of pages written into the history of the American Labor movement that will never be erased; of victories gained for the workers in many industries; of martyrdom suffered by I.W.W. members like Frank Little, Joe Hill and Wesley Everest and many others and of thousands thrown into the capitalist bastilles. They found McKees Rocks, Lawrence, Patterson and the Mesaba Iron Range merely names on the map and made them famous. In B.C. during the railroad building boom of 1911-14, strikes broke out under "wobbly" leadership, on the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Canadian Northern, the Kettle Valley Line and the P.G.E. In the unemployed struggles of 1912-15, they did their share, several of their members going to jail as a result of the free speech fight that arose out of the Powell Street demonstrations of 1912. The only other free speech struggles in which the "wobblies" were involved in Vancouver were in 1908, when a member of the S.P.of C and a "wobbly" were jailed, and in 1926 when Sam Scarlett was arrested for speaking at the historic corner of Cordova and Carrall Streets. A wobbly-led strike of road-graders at Prince Rupert brought out the State forces when the cruiser Rainbow was sent there in 191 1. They also took part in the work of the Miners' Liberation League in 1913. During the last year of the war, several organizations were banned, amongst which was the I.W.W. Two of the best known members, Dick Higgins and Ernest Lindberg, were arrested, for Page Forty-one the crime of being members of an illegal organization. Lindberg, arrested in the North, was kept in jail for some time, but Hig- gins, tried in Vancouver, was defended by the S.P.of C and saved from a like fate. Aside from these minor skirmishes, the I.W.W. in B.C. never rose above the level of a propaganda body, in spite of its fighting record across the line. The I.W.W. suffered disaster through the contradictory nature of its program—attempting to be at the same time, a revolutionary organization aiming at the overthrow of capitalism (a political objective), and a simple "job union," fighting for the immediate everyday demands of wages and conditions. The antagonism of these two conceptions of unionism came to a head in the organization in the years immediately following the war. Signs of this internal struggle developed in Leavenworth among the 93 leaders jailed for belonging to the I.W.W., two of whom were well known B.C. trade unionists in the prewar days, "Jerry" Soper, one of the leaders in the U.B.R.E. strike, and George Hardy of the Victoria Civic Employees' Union, now secretary of the English-speaking section of the International of Seamen and Harbor-workers (I.S.H.) with headquarters in Pans. This question split the I.W.W. into two warring factions in 1924, the Doyle-Fisher group and the "job unionists" led by Rowan and Bowerman. Communists in the organization attempted to prevent the split and get the I.W.W. to co-operate with the revolutionary unions of the world in the Red International of Labor Unions, but without success. That year saw the disgraceful spectacle of a once militant union carrying internal squabbles into the United States Courts, in spite of their oft- proclaimed slogan, "The State is a shadow," with both factions locked out of their headquarters at 1001 West Madison Street, Chicago, by a court order. In the attitude the I.W.W. took to the Soviet Union they showed that they were utterly bankrupt of any revolutionary tendencies. The theoretician and intellectual of the organization in its decline, John Sandgren, who wrote the reply to the appeal of Lozovsky to the rank and file, proved this bankruptcy when Page Forty-two he wrote, "The Bolshevik revolution merely gave the Russian people the vote." Their delegate to the R.LL.U. Congress in 1922, George Williams, opened a barrage of slander and denunciation against the Revolution in Russia that hastened their passage into the forgotten past. On the basis of the historic I.W.W. resolution: "The I.W.W. refuses all alliances, direct and indirect, with existing political parties or anti-political sects," the R.LL.U. was proclaimed to be a part of a political organization with which the I.W.W. could have no truck. This, however, did not prevent Williams advocating affiliation to an anarchistic congress he attended in Germany on his way back from Soviet Russia. This anarchist congress, by the way, has never met since. The I.W.W. was the first labor organization in America to expel Communist members for their political opinion (George Hardy, Mike Novak, etc., 1922). Rapid disintegration practically wiped out the organization. The mass of the workers deserted it; the best revolutionary elements went into the Communist Party, and a few of the reactionary members held onto the name and are to be found linked up with every anti-Communist movement today. In spite of the fighting spirit of the rank and file members, to whom the I.W.W. was almost a religion, its role was disruptive and played into the hands of the bosses. In B.C. it emasculated the early trade union movement by drawing away most of its militants. It took the backbone out of the W.F.M. leaving an empty shell that was easily handled by the mining and smelting companies. From then on until the war, conditions dampened down the strikes. Capitalist expansion left little opportunity, though plenty of need, for strikes. A few of a minor nature broke out but only three on the Coast that made front page stuff for the capitalist press, that of the Building Trades in Vancouver in 1911 (5500 men), which was unsuccessful, the strike of the construction workers on the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk (6000 men) ; the wobblies' biggest strike in B.C. It lasted in some places for a month, in others almost three months and was defeated with the help of the government, Page Forty-three which sent in Provincial and special police to exercise every form of repression and terror against the strikers. The militants were driven out of the camps and the strike collapsed without making any appreciable improvement in the conditions of the men on the construction gangs, which were almost a repetition of the horrors of the Crow's Nest Pass branch. Foley, Welch & Stewart, the G.T.P. contractors, were popularly known as "Fleecem, Workem & Skinnem." The other major struggle was the Vancouver Island war— no other word describes it—in 1913. Since the beginning of the century the story of the Crow's Nest Pass coalfield has been a monotonous repetition of struggles on the part of the miners—a monotony frequently broken by explosions or other mine calamities and terrors that have taken a fearful toll of miners' lives, a sacrifice on the altar of capitalist greed and capitalist indifference to the safety of the men from whom the coal barons' profit is wrung. Originally in the W.F.M. the Crows Nest Pass miners played a big part in the struggles of that organization. Later every struggle of Dist. 18 of the U.M.W.A. brought the miners of Fernie, Coal Creek, Michel, Morrissey and Natal into the conflict. Several were long and bitter, an eight-months strike in 191 1 winning a 10 per cent increase and an agreement that stipulated that May Day should be a holiday in the mines, which shows the high political development of the British Columbia miners. Towards Industrial Unionism Inside of the organized trade union movement, however, the tendency to industrial unionism was still fostered, not by breaking away but by natural growth. Since 1890 efforts to establish a Provincial Federation had been made. Tentative meetings and discussions took place with representatives of Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo, both in that year and in 1893. But it was 1910 before the B.C. Federation of labor came into existence. In comparison with the Trades Congress this body was extremely "left" as the following quotation shows: "We . . . pledge ourselves to unceasingly demand a universal workday of eight hours or less, so long as labor-power is sold as a commodity. Page Forty-four We believe that there is more efficacy in electing working-class representatives to write the laws than by supplicatory methods and our efforts will move in that direction in the future. We are firmly convinced that the future belongs to the only useful people in human society—the working-class."* At the first convention, representing 14,000 workers, and at every convention following till it was dissolved in 1919, a resolution was passed tying the Federation to the endorsement of industrial unionism. At the Calgary Convention of the Dominion Trades Congress the following year the delegate of the Vancouver T.& L.C introduced a resolution that read in part, "Whereas, craft unions have proved inadequate to successfully combat the present-day aggregations of capital; and whereas, the activities of the craft unions are almost entirely absorbed by jurisdictional disputes causing an internal warfare that prevents any continued successful co-operating among crafts in a given industry; therefore, be it resolved, that this convention endorse the principle of industrial unionism."** In spite of opposition and amendments this resolution was carried. A year later again, the Painters' Union submitted a resolution in favor of industrial unionism to the Vancouver T.& L.C. which was not only endorsed, but the secretary instructed to forward a copy to all Central Labor bodies in Canada and the U.S. asking them to take similar action. Partial returns from this showed 25 Councils voting in favor and two against, these latter being Montreal and Moncton, N.B. All the B.C. Councils voted in favor. The War Then came the war—like a thunderclap, finding the workers absolutely unprepared for such a calamity. The trades union movement made no protest, no threats of strike; they accepted it without demur. They did not become patriotic; did not indulge in the flag-waving orgies that marked the movement in other parts but they made no efforts to resist the blood-bath that threatened to engulf their whole movement. Real leadership to meet such a calamity was lacking. But when conscription *Declaration of Principles of the B. C. Federation of Labor. **Thirty-ninth Congress Report, T.&L. Congress of Canada. Page. Forty-five Ill was put in force in 1917 the B.C. Federation and the Vancouver T.& L.C. tried to instil the unions with spirit enough to call a general strike on the arrest of the first unwilling conscripted worker—but without success. The first victim was arrested and sent to jail for two years, but no strike took place. The Council also at one time seriously considered withdrawal from the Congress on account of the patriotic stand of that body. The victory of the Russian workers, however, did become an inspiration. The world-shaking events of three years of slaughter and carnage had produced the October Revolution in 1917, and the name of Lenin was injected into the deliberations of the B. C workers. The Vancouver T.& L.C. printed a couple of Lenin's pamphlets, "Soviets at Work" and "Bolsheviks and Soviets" and thousands of workers were proudly calling themselves Bolsheviks. Support for the Soviet Government When the Imperialist wolves had settled their fight among themselves and began to attack the Soviet Government the T.& L.C unanimously passed a resolution demanding the evacuation of Russian territory, against intervention in Siberia or interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Government. The B. C Federation took similar action but to our shame, no organized move was made to prevent the export of war material from the port to Siberia, although a few individuals did refuse to handle war cargo and some sabotage was practiced by longshoremen, parts of guns being dropped overboard so that they were made useless, but nothing more. With enthusiasm, the workers hailed the results of Lenin's work but of his teachings they had not yet learned much, for the years of industrial union agitation worked up to another unfortunate split. Again the militants pulled out and tried to build from the outside. The O.B.U. In 1919 the One Big Union, the O.B.U., was born, the joint product of the B.C. Federation of Labor and the most progressive elements in the A.F.of L. It was launched at the Western Conference held in Calgary and the resolutions passed Page Forty-six at that conference showed that the spirit of the men and women in the Western labor movement was with the revolution but that their understanding of tactics was not yet very well developed. Along with the setting up of the long-dreamed-of Industrial Union embracing all workers, the O.B.U., the conference sent revolutionary greetings to the Soviet Government and the Party of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacans, as well as fully accepting the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These revolutionary declarations laid the O.B.U. open to the widest attack. To the bosses, who stood to lose by the coming into existence of a powerful industrial union, they provided the argument that this was a revolution. The Winnipeg strike and the sympathetic strikes in Vancouver and other Western Canadian cities were denounced as attempts to set up Soviets in our democratic country. The O.B.U. was doomed before it was born. With the help of all the reactionaries, particularly those in the labor movement, it was utterly defeated and the militants were again on the outside. The O.B.U. debacle was due to the same fundamental error that wrecked the I.W.W., trying to combine a revolutionary program with the tasks of an ordinary trade union, the maintenance of wage scales and working conditions. It was a political party and a trade union in one. A trade union cannot be a revolutionary party, though it may be a weapon of revolutionary struggle. After its tragic collapse, the die-hards who stayed in its central body gave lip-service to the revolutionary movement but catered to the bosses by attacking the organized trade union movement by disruptive activity among the miners, and slandering the Communist Party. They discredited themselves by using their paper, The O.B.U. Bulletin as the medium of a shameful racket, a football guessing competition, the sole purpose of which was to feather their own nests. A New Trades and Labor Council The old Vancouver T.& L.C. went over to the O.B.U. and it died with the O.B.U. after a few years. A new T.& L.C. was set up by the Congress, that was kept strictly within the limits of the policies of the A.F.of L. This was accomplished Page Forty-seven through the collaboration of the bosses and the opponents of industrial unionism in the organized labor movement. The same, or worse, labor conditions that produced the industrial union sentiment still prevailed. However, the Trade Union Educational League was organized inside the trades union movement, to foster the desire for industrial unionism through amalgamation. It was at work in the new Council and a resolution calling for the amalgamation of the existing unions into industrial unions was adopted to be submitted to the 1923 Congress in Vancouver, where it was defeated and labelled by the leaders as the work of the Communists. The All-Canadian Congress of Labor A number of independent unions composed of members who disagreed with the policies of the T.& L.C, some of them barred by the A.F.of L. as dual unions, like the Amalgamated Carpenters, the oldest carpenters' union in the city, others that had broken away from the A.F.of L. and some that had been organized independently were drawn in the Central Council of the A.C.C.L. in 1926. Comparatively new, with but little tradition behind it, the A.C.C.L. has not played any great part in the labor movement to date nor led any strikes of outstanding character. At its sixth convention the A.C.C.L. was faced with a major split on the issue of unity, in which the extreme right-wing and pro-fascist elements broke away and formed a "Canadian Federation of Labor." The Workers' Unity League The latest factor in shaping the labor set-up in Vancouver was the Workers' Unity League. Organizing solely among the unorganized workers the W.U.L. made history in the few short years of its existence. In organizing the loggers, the miners, the fishermen and the relief camp workers, the W.U.L. brought struggle back into the field of trade union activity with successful strikes of the loggers in 1934, the Cumberland TQM EWEN miners the same year and the relief camp National organizer, strike and trek of 1935. W.U.L. Page Forty-eight The Army and Navy During these militant strikes of the B. C workers the army and navy have been called to the help of the bosses on seven occasions. First in 1877, when the British battleship Rocket was used against the Wellington miners; in 1890, when a battery of artillery was sent into the same territory; in 1900 a regiment of militia was sent against the fishermen on the Fraser; in 1911 the Rainbow was dispatched to Prince Rupert to put down a strike of roadgraders; in 1913 nearly a thousand regulars and militia were engaged on the Island, in all the coal camps; on May Day, 1914, the artillery were again called out in Nanaimo, lastly, one-half of the Canadian navy, the Skeena, supported by aeroplanes, was sent against the Any ox miners in 1933. The R.CM.P. and Provincial Police have recently been equipped with machine guns and gas equipment and are now doing the anti-strike work once performed by the army and navy as we have seen in the struggles of the unemployed and at Corbin and Ballantyne Pier, but the militia are still available if the boss needs them. Amongst these struggles Anyox and Corbin were W.U.L. strikes. Since the passing of the O.B.U. the principle B.C. strikes, with the exception of those on the waterfront, have been conducted by the W.U.L., the two referred to and at Princeton and Cumberland among the miners and the lumber- workers. A Lesson Learned The police terror launched against them is sufficient proof of that. At Anyox, one of the worst company towns in Canada, where everything was controlled by the Granby Company, where the stores were what are known in Cape Breton as "pluck- me's." Foreign owned, and where Col. Warden, organizing a battalion during the war, was refused permission to land to recruit for his 102 nd regiment. Page Forty-nine ARTHUR EVANS District Organizer W.U.L. The miners had been mulcted three cuts in pay but no reduction had been made in the charges for room and board. Out of a wage of $2.40 they were docked $1.11 for the use of scurvy bunkhouses and garbage meals. When they struck against these deplorable conditions, the answer of the company was as stated above. Picket lines were established in Prince Rupert and Vancouver but the battleships and planes won. At Princeton the year before, the miners belonging to the same organization, the Mine Workers' Union of Canada, were crushed as mercilessly by the forces of the state, the tool of the mine bosses, and their leader, Arthur Evans, sent to jail for twelve months under the iniquitous Section 98. Again at Corbin, the brutality of the police morons came to the aid of the foreign mine-owners, running over the miners' wives on the picket lines with a caterpillar tractor and beating them with pick-handles, crippling some of them for life. The ruthless manner in which these strikes were defeated is proof of the correctness of the militant policies and tactics of the W.U.L. The bosses feared them as the CP.R. feared the U.B.R.E. and the ruling class feared the O.B.U. But the workers in the W.U.L. have learned from Lenin that "Capitalism leaves as an inheritance to Socialism, Trade Unions, which only very slowly and in the course of years, can and will develop into broader industrial rather than craft organizations (embracing whole industries and not merely crafts, trades and professions)." Confronted with the fact of a trade union movement in Canada split into four, more or less helpless divisions, and the masses of the workers without any organization whatever, the Workers' Unity League took the lead to end the deplorable condition, to bring about a united, powerful trade union movement throughout the length and breadth of the Dominion that will not Page Fifty Jbe hampered by three or four national central bodies and that will organize the hundreds of thousands of workers now outside of |the trade unions. This is the greatest contribution of the Workers' Unity League to the Canadian labor movement, its program of trade union unity overshadowing even the magnificent victories of the League in organization and strike struggles. They have therefore disbanded their League and gone into the American Federation of Labor. The A.F.of L. unions in the Trades and Labor Congress of Canada are traditionally and factually the main force in the Canadian labor set-up, composing as they do the vast majority of the organized trade union movement. The barriers that separate the other organizations from them will have to be overcome for only out of these trades unions can develop the industrial organization needed by the workers to maintain their wage scales, to resist all attacks on their standard of life, to fit them to battle with the most relentless of all enemies, the exploiting class. Today, forty years after industrial unionism became a trade union question in B.C. the Committee for Industrial Organization (CI.O.) is fighting on the inside of the A.F.of L. for the right to organize industrial unions of the unorganized mass production industries according to the decisions of the San Francisco Convention of 1934 and one of the tasks of the membership of the A.F.of L. unions is to see that that work is kept on the inside, while at the same time working to break down the barriers between already existing organizations, and bring all workers into a naturally developed "One Big Union" that will be more than a match for the bosses, that will not only resist all encroachments on their standard of life but through its power secure a greater share of the wealth they produce. Page Fifty-one Q ^ N 3 & ^ Page Fifty-two FRASER RIVER FISHERMEN'S STRIKES, 1900 AND 1901 1900 a While many strikes had taken place before the beginning of the century, particularly among the Island miners, the first great mass resistance to the bosses' efforts to force wages down occurred on the Fraser River. The fishermen had only been organized three months, but the union had been accepted so enthusiastically that the whole river was practically organized by the time the run was due. Puget Sound canners were paying 28c. The Fraser canners offered 20c. The men demanded 25c. As the canners refused to raise their price a strike was declared, and immediately between 7,000 and 8,000 fishermen and cannery-workers became involved. The Japanese had their own union but were linked up with the rest of the fishermen through a Grand Lodge. White men and Indians belonged to the same locals in Vancouver, New Westminster, Steveston, Ladner, Eburne, Port Simpson and Canoe Pass. When the strike was declared the headquarters was established at Steveston. Immediately all the provocative tricks of the bosses came into play, to drive a wedge between the whites, Indians and Japanese. The food supply of the Japanese was cut off at the canneries. Bell Irving protested to the Indian Department at Victoria asking "that the Indians be warned not to take sides with the union men or any one else in the present trouble." The leaders were proclaimed to be in the pay of the American canners who wanted to steal the market of the Fraser cannerymen, as they could not compete against the better quality Fraser sockeyes, although apparently they were able to pay 8c a fish more to the fishermen. The strikers as a whole were slandered and lied about as Tom Mclnnes lies about the loggers and longshoremen today. The cannerymen refused to recognize the union. They said the union men were "mostly loafers from American territory, too glad of a chance to stir up trouble." "Twenty-five cents or no fish," became the slogan, but more than prices was involved. The fishermen, while pursuing their Page Fifty-three dangerous calling, were housed in cannery shacks worse than dog kennels. They could not live in their sailboats and had to live in the dumps provided for them by the canneries they fished! for. The greed of the cannerymen brought about a condition J on the river where more than half the licenses were issued to Japanese, whom they could bully into fishing on their own terms more easily than the whites and the Indians. Fraudulent naturalization papers were secured by political trickery for Japanese immigrants only a few months in the country, and the threat of deportation held over them. The whites and the Indians were being squeezed out and demands for better living condition*! and the restoration of former rights entered into the struggle also* A Popular Strike No strike that has taken place in Vancouver since has been so heartily and thoroughly supported as the 1900 fishermen's strike, not even the loggers' strike of 1934. Almost everybody was on their side except the cannerymen, the newspapers and the police. The whole labor movement (except Ralph Smith), the city council, the storekeepers and the small business men, were behind the strikers in their demands. At the head of the strike were the two most outstanding working-class leaders of their time, Frank Rogers and Will McClain. Both of these men, members of the United Socialist Labor Party, knew that the workers never win anything except what they fight for and their leadership developed the militant spirit of the fishermen. Chief Kelly of the Tsimpsian Indians guaranteed the solidarity of the Indians, but pleaded with the whites not to desert the Indians as they had done in a strike that took place in 1893. A monster meeting such as had never been seen in the history of Steveston took place on the first night of the strike. Frank Roger's outstanding statement at that meeting was that "force will not be used unless it is necessary, but no fish will be sold below the price set by the union." A parade then took place to every cannery on the river, halting before each Japanese boarding house and bringing out the few who stiB remained outside of the union. Speeches were made at each place and interpreted by Japanese union men. Page Fifty-four Patrols were set up with six men in a boat, the strike flag Iflying on each boat, a white flag with "25" on it in red figures. From Mission to the Gulf they maintained their patrol, examining ; every boat out. Few scabs were picked up, not more than two or three in the first three weeks and they were handled so that the fishing industry did not interest them for the rest of the season. Organization and Agitation Eight thousand men and their families had to eat. The Japanese were given permission to catch fish that was sold in the city to provide them with rice. All the trades unions of the iLower Mainland, the miners of the Island and the Boundary Country, the storekeepers of Vancouver, Westminster and Na- | naimo dug down to feed the strikers at the dining rooms set up by the union. The first great labor demonstration since the |K.of L. days was held in Vancouver. Over a thousand striking : fishermen who lived in the city, supported by their' fellow workers of the other trade unions, marched through the main streets, headed by the Indians' band, and staged a meeting at the Court House, where the Cenotaph now stands. The leaders, ,with the Indian band, went to Nanaimo and staged parades and demonstrations there. At all these demonstrations funds rolled in. Meantime, the cannerymen were not idle. They used every I manoeuver to defeat the fishermen. To behead the strike Frank Rogers was arrested, held long enough to inconvenience the plans of the strikers and then the charge withdrawn. A tugboat, the Starling, was hired by the strikers. It was used to tow the canoes with the Indian band to the Island on one trip. She was ; seized there for carrying passengers without a license, although j she carried no passengers, and fined $100. The fine was paid by the Nanaimo miners. Canners Use Militia During the strike there had been no trouble, although the I provincial police had shipped in carload after carload of spe- \ cials. No damage had been done to property. The strikers had | been orderly and acted only within their legal rights, but among the cannerymen were J.P.'s and police magistrates and they Page Fifty-five played their last card on the 23rd of July; they called out the militia. The 6th D.C.O.R. arrived from Vancouver during the night and when day broke were in possession of Steveston. j Leaving Vancouver at midnight on the Comox they were hooted and jeered by the few people on the streets at that hour. At their head were men who were interested in the canneries, among them C. Gardiner Johnson and Duff Stuart. The presence of these "sockeye soldiers" was enough to break the morale of some of the Japanese fishermen, and the strike was over for that season. A week later the men went fishing on the cannerymen's terms, but they maintained their union. The capitalist press figured the men had lost 240,000 days' work through the strike, but none of them figured how many days the militiamen lost. 1901 With the beginning of the next season the struggle was resumed. The fishermen demanded 12^4 cents a fish; the canners offered 12 Yl cents till July 27th and 10 cents after that. We must remember that this price had to be split three ways— one to the netman, one to the boatpuller and one to the boat —which belonged to the cannery in most cases. The average wage earned by Japanese fishermen worked out at 90 cents to $1.00 a day* The union had lost no influence through the failure of the previous year. On the Skeena 300 Japanese went out to fish but were driven to the shelter of the cannery docks by the Indians in their war canoes. No battle took place but no fishing either. Some Japanese victims of the labor contractors were intimidated into fishing on the Fraser and the Gulf but the mass stood by the strike. The patrols were set as in 1900. Police patrol boats also sailed the river this year, directed by the cannerymen. Specials from all over the province were brought in. The Japanese strikebreakers were armed with rifles and revolvers and had orders from the canners to use them if approached by strikers' patrols. A statement from the union, signed by Frank Rogers, was issued, which read: "The fishermen consider this *Royal Commission on Oriental Immigration, 1902. Page Fifty-six arming of the Japanese as a step which means civil war and will ask all white men and Indians to govern themselves accordingly." War The strikers recognized they were engaged in a war. The patrols boarded every boat out on the fishing grounds. The only shooting was done by strikebreakers; the union had issued orders that no strikebreaker was to be harmed unless he shot a union man. Every strikebreaker the patrols boarded was armed. Their rifles and revolvers were taken and thrown into the sea, their nets cut to pieces, their boats turned adrift and the strikebreakers themselves put ashore. Some of these Japanese were put ashore at places that were a long way from the street-car lines, in fact six of them were landed on Bowen Island, where they stayed till a Union Steamship Co. boat came and rescued them. A story about this had been given to one of the Province reporters, Roy Brown, and he, in spite of his claim on the stand that he could not divulge who told him the story because of "professional ethics," was compelled to give evidence against Rogers. The crew of one patrol boat, six men, was arrested. Next morning at the trial, Frank Rogers and another strike leader, Desplanes, were also arrested. At this trial were present three men who were to loom large in the labor history of B.C.— W. J. Bowser, the prosecutor, who sent the militia into the Vancouver Island coal field in 1913; Constable Dan Campbell, of Esquimalt, who afterwards shot Ginger Goodwin, and Frank Rogers, who was ambushed and murdered by CP.R. thugs in the U.B.R.E. strike. Police Drive Against Rogers Fifteen charges were laid against Rogers, including kidnapping, marooning and carrying firearms; and six against the patrolmen, one of whom was a Phillipino who was later third- degreed by the police in an attempt to extort "a confession." With their leader in jail now, held without bail, the indignation of the fishermen reached boiling point. A mass meeting was called in the city. The general feeling amongst them was that their next move was to go down to the wooden city jail and take Page Fifty-seven Rogers and the others out. But at the meeting "saner" councils prevailed—the reactionaries won. One leading Social Democrat asked them, "Do you want to fight the whole British army . . . without the workmen being able to carry out a regular revolution this breaking of the law is so much bosh." Real leadership was never more needed, but it was wanting. The militant spirit of the strike died out and the men went back to work after 19 days of actual warfare in which hand-to-hand fighting with armed scabs was a common occurrence, seven such battles occurring in one night. "The Crown Could Not Get a Fair Trial" —Bowser. The first trials of Rogers and the six patrolmen took place in Vancouver. In spite of the ferociously vindictive instruction of a prejudiced judge, who called them "thieves and robbers of the very worst class," the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty in both cases. The judge showed his class bias so openly that he did not offer the jury the usual "thanks." As there were still some more counts on which they were charged, Bowser asked for a change of venue for the next trials, claiming in an affidavit of the chief of provincial police that "the City of Vancouver from which the jury panel is drawn, is thoroughly union, and the union juries must necessarily be very much affected by the sympathies of the prisoners who are union fishermen." One part of Bowser's plea should go down in history: "The crown could not get a fair trial." They changed to Westminster for the next trials, banking on a farmer jury but with little more success than in Vancouver. The patrolmen were found not guilty and the Rogers jury disagreed. Rogers was held for the next Assize, but was released on $10,000 bail, through the pressure of the workers, after being in jail four months and the case never came up again. So ended the last big struggle of the fishermen, still spoken of by old-timers, enthusiastically, though sometimes with trimmings that make it unrecognizable—the fights are magnified, and scowloads of Japanese ate marooned—and to the shame of Vancouver labor Frank Rogers is almost forgotten. Page Fifty-eight Fishing and Cannery Workers' Organization Boat. Page Fifty-nine THE U.B.R.E. STRIKE, 1903 The New Unionism Confronted with the failure of craft unions in strikes, the workers, particularly in Western America, turned their minds to industrial unionism. After the collapse of the Switchmen's strike in Buffalo, Debs organized the American Railway Union. After the defeat of the Coeur d'Alene miners in 1893, the Western Federation of Miners was organized, the most powerful and most effective fighting union ever developed on the American continent whose history is, not a series of struggles, but one long uninterrupted battle. A common centre for this groping industrial union sentiment was established in the American Labor Union and of this central organization, the Western Federation and the United Brotherhood of Railroad Employees, were part. The U.B. R.E. sought to embrace, ultimately, all railroad employees inside of its ranks, but it began first by organizing only those railroad employees who did not belong to a craft union. Branches were established at several points in the province, Vancouver being the principal one, the membership consisting mostly of clerks. As the A.L.U. adopted the program of the Socialist Party as its own, such a union as the U.B.R.E. could not be allowed to become a power among the workers to threaten the corporate rapacity of the C.P.R., so a strike was precipitated to smash the union. A leading union member was fired without cause. The union demanded he be reinstated, which demand being refused they struck work. This was the beginning of a four months' struggle that was to spread to Vancouver Island, to the Boundary Country and the Crows Nest Pass and even to Calgary and to bring about the murder of one of the best and most courageous leaders the Vancouver workers ever had. Almost a General Strike! The freight, baggage and ticket clerks were immediately supported by the freight handlers, who refused to handle any documents issued by others than the strikers. The teamsters refused to haul freight to or from the C.P.R.; the longshoremen Page Sixty refused to work the CP.R. boats; even the CP.R. telegraph messengers came out in sympathy. Steamboat men refused to handle any cargo to or from the CP.R. and the company was compelled to notify all shippers that they could not accept or guarantee delivery of any freight or cargo. The miners and stevedores of Nanaimo put an embargo on all coal destined for the CP.R. or for transportation over its lines. The strike extended to Victoria, where the sailors on the CP. Navigation boats refused to handle any scab cargo. They struck and only returned to work when a promise was given them that they would not be asked to work unfair cargo, an agreement that was broken two days later. (There is no record anywhere of such a "gentleman's agreement" of a capitalist boss ever being kept). The sailors kept their word to the U.B.R.E. They struck immediately. Work on the CP.R. came to a standstill. The management made every effort to get scabs locally, but failed. One hundred and fifty Italians were hired as trackmen; they were sent to unload steel rails for the CP.R. off the Blue Funnel boat Achilles. They refused. Japanese brought from the Interior started unloading, but when they learned there was a strike on they quit. But scabs were to be got, the offscourings of Montreal and Seattle, although they were too few in number to affect the situation much. CP.R. Refuse to Arbitrate The city suffered from a coal shortage. In March! The strike committee issued a permit for men to operate a coal barge and a tug to bring in a load from Ladysmith—but none for the CP.R. Offers of mediation were made by the Board of Trade, by the City Council, by the Provincial Government. The men were willing but the CP.R. was adamant. The U.B.R.E. must be smashed. The company were willing to have the matter arbitrated by a committee of their own unions, the Railroad Brotherhoods, who had declared the shops fair and when the strikers agreed to that proposal, they withdrew it. In the meantime the W.F.M. were busy. They were 100 per cent organized in the hard rock country and organizers were out on the Island coal field where the miners were rolling into Page Sixty-one the union. The Federation hoped to bring the whole weight of their organization to the aid of the railroad men. The same "alien" argument cropped up again. (Tom Mclnnes is not very original). Dunsmuir issued a statement in which he declared that the W.F.M. was in the pay of the American copper trust to paralyze the copper output of B.C. The president of the U.B.R.E., Estes, was arrested in Victoria, charged with "wilfully delaying the mails." At his trial two Vancouver newspaper men, who had interviewed him, gave evidence against him. This was the second time this had occurred in B.C. strikes and should be a warning to militant labor leaders to steer clear of capitalist reporters. The case against Estes, however, was dismissed. Mackenzie King Helps CP.R. The forces arrayed against the U.B.R.E. and the W.F.M. were too powerful. The wealth of the CP.R.; the Dunsmuir interests; the Dominion government, and worst of all, the antagonism of the railroad craft unions, while at the same time the W.F.M. had 30 strikes on its hands, and could not finance the Island miners. The Dominion government had sent a Labor Commission "to investigate the situation." Our present Premier, W. L. Mackenzie King, was a member of it. The report they made is a shining example of the intelligence that "runs" our country. This commission of wise heads "found" among other things "that the A.L.U., the U.B.R.E. and the W.F.M. confederated with each other, engaged in a conspiracy to sweep all the CP.R. employees into the U.B.R.E. and all the miners into the W.F.M." that "the spirit of legitimate trade unionism ought to be encouraged and protected while irresponsible ones of socialistic tendencies should be prohibited and declared illegal"; that disputes ought "to be settled without the interference of any person residing outside the Dominion," and, brightest gem of all, which bodes ill for the land that has W. L. Mackenzie King at the helm, "the labor problem, so-called, is incapable of final solution and will be with us as long as human nature remains what it is and civilization endures."* *Report of Royal Commission on Labor, 1903. Page Sixty-two They had put up a good fight for four months. With all these forces arrayed against them the strikers' morale evaporated. The U.B.R.E. strikers went back to work on an agreement that was never made public. The U.B.R.E. was smashed and with it the longshoremen's union, and from then on till the I.L.A. was organized in 1912 the waterfront workers were at the mercy of the stevedoring and shipping companies. Murder of Frank Rogers The outstanding event of the strike, and the most tragic, was the murder of Frank Rogers, shot down on the picket line by hired thugs of the CP.R. Rogers was ambushed at the foot of Abbott Street about midnight of April 13th while walking along the track with two other strikers. They were met with a volley of revolver shots, only Rogers being hit. He died a couple of days later in the hospital. He was hounded by the police because he was a thorn in the side of the Vancouver bosses If the police had no love for him, neither did he for them. When !Lc j I*0 ant,e-m°rtem statement by detectives "to help hem find the murderer he replied, "You go to hell and find out that s what you re paid for. A. K1HlWa'?ltyPC I lea<?Cr Wh° builds real unlons that fight Ae battles of the working class. From 1897, when he came to and\Z I' W'S the m0St active member of the fishermen's membe7^TTI IH *t ^^ 6gUre in their strikes. » member of the Trades and Labor Council and the SociaHst Party. Jim Hawthornethwa.te at the following Labor Day celebration m Vancouver, said of him, "He had been houndedbythecapT tahst press as a dangerous man. This same man had been crueffv he h °dUbeyed°ne * ^V^ a11 0*» means W ttWLIf W ceaS to 327 f * U°?°T°n ^ ™™ would I nave ceased to ttus day to call for the avenging of his murder ev^S^T ^ °foed Land ^cLinalhTwet; rj, fVe bf?-ru" t0 earth- Th^t murder will be a stam on the justice o this Province till it is avenged." rested The noH P ""If" "t* a M°ntreal scab were ar- Page Sixty-three take all the witnesses up there. There was no doubt that the accused was the murderer. He was defended by the slickest of the CP.R. law sharks, E. P. Davis; all the CP.R. money was behind him, for the strike was still oh. The result was known before the farcical trial took place—not guilty. Frank Rogers — A Real Unionist The best epitaph to Frank Rogers was written by the secretary of the Fishermen's Union, just before the outbreak of the strike in a criticism of two fakers who were supporting an anti- socialist labor candidate for parliament: "Did you ever see either of these two gentlemen out in a patrol boat or otherwise doing any work for the union during the strikes ? I guess not! Did you not see Frank Rogers—ready and willing to sail in first and scrap for the union whenever it was necessary? I guess you did!"* But Frank Rogers will be avenged, though the mills of proletarian justice grind slowly, they grind surely. o_^^) *C. Durham, Secretary, Fishermen's Union. Page Sixty-fou. VANCOUVER ISLAND MINERS LOCKOUT, 1912-14 Dunsmuir—Miniature Edition of the CP.R. The Dunsmuir concern on Vancouver Island was a miniature edition of the CP.R. Robert Dunsmuir, the "coal king," grabbed off the public wealth, just as the CP.R. did, only on a smaller scale. He first secured from the Province a grant of 1000 acres of coal lands for a promise to develop it. Later, from the Dominion he received $750,000 in cash and 1 ,- 900,000 acres of land free of taxation for all time for building the E. & N. Railroad. The cash subsidy itself was more than enough to build the line. In all, the public wealth given to this family and their alien associates has been estimated at $200 million.* In return for this Dunsmuir has earned the reputation of being one of the worse enemies of labor on this Coast. Drunk with power and blinded by class hatred, he attempted to impose on the Island min- Nanaimo Miners' Union Badge, 1889 *Mr. Mitchell, M.P., New Bruns. Reverse Side, Used for All-too-frequent Funerals , in House of Commons, May 9, 1900. Page Sixty-five ers the worst forms of peonage and serfdom. Strikes occurred in his mines almost annually. Early Strikes Judge Howay, who passes for a historian in the lecture I rooms of the Art and Historical Society, in his ponderous two- volume History of British Columbia, says, B.C. had its first strike at Wellington in 1877. The miners were on strike over a question of wages and weights. They had beaten off the scabs Dunsmuir had secured and the British warship Rocket was brought to Nanaimo to deal with them. Even with the Navy at their doors the strikers refused to be evicted from the company shacks, and a month after the Rocket came 80 or 90 militiamen from Victoria to help the sheriff throw them out on the street. The unprincipled character of the Dunsmuir interests in their dealings with the miners may be seen from the line-up in this struggle. At that time Dunsmuir had a partner named Diggle who had invested $5000 in the company, an interest he sold out to Dunsmuir in 1883 for $700,000. This Diggle was one of the officers in command of H.M.S. Rocket, Lieutenant Diggle. Another lieutenant named Edgerton on the same ship and the Captain of H.M.S. Boxer, Farquharson by name, then stationed at Esquimalt, were also partners of the Coal King in the exploitation and robbery of the Island miners. An excellent arrangement for Dunsmuir. If it had not been for the use of the army and navy, the historian, Judge Howay, might never have learned about the strikes of the Island miners till 1913, when he played a disgraceful and inglorious role himself, referred to later in this chapter, for the 1877 strike was not the first strike in B.C. As far back as Jan. 6, 1871, the Colonist announced the arrival in Victoria of "a deputation from Nanaimo to obtain aid for the coal strikers," and on the 24th of April following, four months after, that the strike had been settled.* Again, in 1874, the miners of the Vancouver Coal Co. were on strike for a week over the question of the doctor; and on *Quoted in Williamson's B.C. Directory, 1882. Page Sixty-six I Aug. 1, 1876, a strike of the Wellington miners was brought (to a close.* So much for Judge Howay the historian! For years, Nanaimo, Wellington and strike were inseparable words. In 1890, "C" Battery of the artillery was called into Wellington by Dunsmuir to break a strike. In 1891, fifteen Wellington miners were arrested for intimidation, rushed to the train and hustled off to Victoria where they would have a hostile jury, for trial, because they staged daily processions during a strike. Mayor J. P. Planta read the "Riot Act" which had the effect of stopping the others parading, but their wives and daughters, I with the courage that has always been displayed by the womenfolk of the miners, carried out the processions themselves. Such has been the labor set-up on the Island coal-field since coal was first dug there and when George Norris took up the cudgels to defend the miners in 1877, Dunsmuir sued him for libel. The same charnel-house conditions obtained in the mines during the reign of both father and son and every obstacle was placed in the way of miners' organizations. In 1901, a gas ex- i plosion at Extension killed 17 miners and injured many more. James Dunsmuir "kindly" donated $5,000 to the relief fund, a little more than the CP.R. donated in the Vancouver calamity, but still only $294 to each of the murdered miners' families, leaving nothing for those injured. Shortly before the war the Dunsmuirs sold out their coal mines to MacKenzie & Mann for eleven million dollars. They in turn "promoted" the Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir Ltd.) in England. They sold fifteen million dollars' worth of preference shares and ten million dollars' worth of common stock along with over two million dollars' worth of gold bonds, which brought in 25 million dollars, according to Skinner's Mining Manual, on which the miners were expected to produce the average rate of "interest." The new company maintained the same tyrannical and oppressive policy towards the miners as Dunsmuir was guilty of. *Nanaimo "Free Press" Diamond Jubilee Edition, 1934. Page Sixty-seven Pttfaii Commercial Street, Nanaimo, 1913. Most Dangerous Mines in the World This company was operating the mines at Extension and Cumberland when the greatest Island struggle commenced. Already the miners, knowing how weak they were locally, had appealed to the United Mine Workers of America to help them. Organizers were sent in and four locals were set up: at Cumberland, Wellington, Nanaimo and Lady smith, as District 28. Although all the shareholders of this company were in England and the mine bosses were imported from Pennsylvania the cry of "alien organization" was again broadcast. These Island mines were already proved by disinterested investigators to be the most dangerous coal-mines in the world. As early as 1902, B.C. held the record for killing miners. "World Mining Statistics," published by C Le Neve Foster, King's Printer, London, in that year stated that, "The death rate per 1,000 persons employed in coal-mining is 1.29 for the British Empire; 2.38 for foreign countries and for British Columbia and Nova Scotia, 4.15 and 3.32 respectively."* Figures published by the Canadian Conservation Commission about the time the strike broke out showed the average *Labor Gazette, April, 1902. Page Sixty-eight fatality rate in coal-mines per 1,000 employees, from 1898 to If 1908 to be: Belgium 1.03, Great Britain 1.3, France 1.65, iPrussia 2.13, United States 3.5, Canada 5. In Great Britain four miners were killed out of every 3,000; in Canada five out of every 1,000. In 1909, 8.08 miners were killed per 1,000 employed in B.C. That is to say, one-half the coal-miners of I the province are killed every 56 years. Let us keep these facts in mind while reading of this lock-out, for it was not a strike. Beginning of the War The men's gas committee reported gas at No. 2 Extension las required by the Mines Regulations Act, and for this they were I discriminated against by the company, one man, Mottishaw, being actually told there was no more work for him. The miners of Cumberland and Extension called an idle day to discuss the matter and were immediately locked-out. This was in September, 1912. In the ensuing months the miners were subjected to every kind of indignity and provocation. One hundred and thirty specials were rushed in. The Chinese came out in the first place at Cumberland and were dragooned into going back to work by the specials with the usual threats of deportation. The few scabs brought from the outside were encouraged to stir Bowser's "Seventy-twa" on Church Parade, Nanaimo, 1913. Page Sixty-nine up trouble. These scabs were armed by the bosses and on several occasions attempted to use explosives against the pickets. One of them blew his own arm off, not being quick enough on the "throw." The miners' wives were insulted in the grossest manner by the scabs in the hearing of the police, who refused to take any action. The worst piece of provocation took place in Ladysmith on May 1 st, when the strikers were celebrating May Day. The scabs were marched up into town just as they came out of the mine, without a wash, obviously to make trouble that would warrant the calling out of the militia. Strike Over the Whole District On May Day, 1913, the District declared a strike over the whole coal-field. The U.M.W.A. sent Frank Farrington to take charge of the strike and the funds to carry on, about $ 16,000 a week. The scabs' assaults on the miners became more common. One miner was stabbed but the police refused to do anything about it. The miners then passed a resolution stating that, "If the police do not extend to our members the protection of the law we will be compelled to take measures to protect ourselves." Mass pickeing was established and on a rumor coming from Extension that some miners had been shot by scabs the whole body of Nanaimo miners started for Extension to help their fellow strikers. Both at Extension and South Wellington, the few scabs the company had been able to get, were housed in "bullpens." When the strikers reached the bullpen at Extension they were met with a fusilade of gunfire. Fortunately, although one man was hit, no one was killed. The result of this demonstration was that the bullpen was burned to the ground, whether by the strikers or the scabs is not known, and the scabs took refuge in the mine. The miners' offer to maintain order was no bluff, and when a boatload of special police from Vancouver, 25 in number, landed at Nanaimo, the pickets quietly but firmly put them back on the boat, after taking the gun away from one of them, and sent them back whence they came. Page Seventy The Militia The answer of Bowser to the miners' offer to maintain order came on August 15th, in a statement in the House: "When day breaks there will be nearly 1,000 men in the strike zone wearing the uniform of His Majesty. . . This is my answer to the proposition of the strikers that they will preserve the peace if they are left unmolested by the special police." Next day 300 militiamen of the 72nd and 6th regiments from Vancouver landed at Union Bay and another detachment of the 88th and CA.S.C and other details and a company of the regular army landed at Departure Bay, with horses, machine guns and equipment for a long campaign. Almost a thousand men in all, as Bowser had promised. They left their headquarters with "sealed orders" in regular "penny dreadful" style, and their destinations were all the coal camps from Cumberland to Ladysmith. They took possession of the post offices, the telephone exchanges and railway depots. The Lying Press The inspired press throughout the province indulged in the vilest calumny and vituperation to work up the war fever. The Associated Press wire to all its affiliates appeared the same day as the militia landed. In the Albertan, Calgary, of that date, it read: "Nanaimo, heart of Vancouver Island strike district, is in ruins. The little town of Extension, between dynamite and fire is a mass of wreckage. . . . This is the situation in the strike district of Vancouver Island tonight." The miners were accused of burning bridges, dismantling railroad locomotives and wrecking property, not one word of which was true. The high command suggested that newpasper- men submit their stories to be censored. He was afraid some journalist might tell the truth. The first task of the invaders was to rescue the scabs, eleven of them, who had taken refuge in the Extension mine. An old striking miner who led the militia-men into the mine was rewarded the next day by being thrown into jail. Then the mass arrests Page Seventy-one I Commercial Street, Nanaimo, 1914 began. Nanaimo jail, that had been empty for ten years, was soon filled. Some individuals had already been thrown in prison, including Joe Naylor, the president of the union at Cumberland. Fruitless Search for Arms Although martial law was not declared the militia took control of the district. In Nanaimo they tore up the floor of the Athletic Club searching foi arms. Great amazement was expressed by these Bonapartes and Hanmbals and their press toadies at the skill the miners had shown in hiding their guns and ammunition, since they could not discover any. It did not occur to them that the miners had no arms. They looked everywhere, even under the seats on the passenger trains, but the only place where they found any arms or ammunition was in a glass show-case in a hardware store in Ladysmith. This was described in the gutter press as a secret store of ammunition.* The Vancouver & Nanaimo Coal Company had made overtures to the miners to get them back to work in their mine, the Jingle Pot. While the union at Nanaimo was holding a meeting with 1,200 men present to discuss the offer, the hall * News-Advertiser, Vancouver, Aug. 18, 1913. Page Seventy-two was surrounded by massed forces with fixed bayonets and machine guns trained on the only exit. The gallant Col. Hall, the generalissimo, sent in a message giving them two minutes to get out and if anybody tried to run they would be bayonetted. The miners, however, finished their business. As they left the hall they were searched and 46 of them arrested. Work at the Jingle Pot was resumed but they were still fighting the Canadian Collieries and the Western Fuel. Solidarity of the Seamen In Vancouver, on the night the militia-men left on the Princess Pat, although it was the middle of the night, a hostile demonstration took place at the dock. The Bowser hirelings were taunted and jeered at, and appealed to. "Off to kill the women and children!" and "Going to shoot your brothers!" were hurled at them without avail. The firemen and seamen walked off the boat whenever they learned they were to haul scabherders and their places were taken by Chinese, thought to be off the Empress. The following Sunday at a public meeting in Victoria a resolution was passed expressing "admiration and thanks to the members of the crew of the Princess Patricia who refused to be a party to the trans- Nicol Street, Nanaimo, 1914 Page Seventy-three portation of the militia from Vancouver to Nanaimo on the night of the 14th of August." Many of the unions expressed in no uncertain terms their estimate of union men who would lend themselves to the dirty work of greedy politicians and be willing to shoot down their fellow workers during the strikes. The Building Trades Council decided that no militia-man could belong to any of its affiliated unions and the Amalgamated Carpenters and Joiners passed a resolution to expel any member who joined the militia. Miners' Liberation League A Miners' Liberation League was set up in the city to defend the arrested miners, composed of the B.C. Federation of Labor, the T.&L.C, the I.W.W., the S.P.of C, the S.D.P. and the general public. The B.C. Federation proposed a 48- hour general strike, which was condemned by Farrington and turned down by the T.& L.C, Farrington asserting that "only fools who could not keep their mouth shut were in jail." This looked like a split in the union ranks, an encouragement to Bowser, and more arrests took place. Two hundred and fifty- six arrests were made altogether, 92 of the cases being dismissed, the men in the others going to jail. The first batch to be tried were victims of "legality." The defense lawyers advised them to plead guilty as it had been fixed with the prosecution that the charges were merely technical and they would be released soon. The miners did not agree to this without a fight. This "gentlemen's agreement" was like every other "gentlemen's agreement" made by workers with capitalists. The judge, a willing tool of the coal barons, berated them for not being penitent and handed them outrageous sentences, some as high as two years in the pen. He "found fully 90 per cent of the women ranked with the men in their disregard for property and even life." And further, he said, "I find your women singing, 'Drive out the scabs'." He was very merciful, however; he never sentenced any of them to be hanged. The venue of all other trials was changed to Westminster and this coal-owners' lickspittle, Judge Howay, went straight to Westminster and gave out a prejudiced interview to the West- Page Seventy-four minster News (Oct. 27, 1913) in which he stated that the miners were "nothing short of monsters, destitute of all mercy and devoid of all human instincts." This was to prime the minds of the Valley farmers they hoped to have on the juries. Justice Morrison at the Assizes later, denounced the union and called all the defense witnesses perjurers. Capitalist justice! Criminals and Criminals! Bowser won—or did he win?—with his army, among the officers of which were Col. Currie of the 5th regiment, afterwards "General Officer Commanding the Canadian Army in France," Sir Arthur Currie; and Captain Cooper, afterwards Col. Cooper, who squeezed into the job as Relief Officer in Vancouver when the Reverend Ireland landed in jail for stealing five per cent out of the mulligan stew of the hungry unemployed workers. These two gallant gentlemen distinguished themselves on the Ladysmith sector; at least they had guts enough to go to France a year later, but the cowardly brute who made the Nanaimo miners run the gauntlet of cold steel, crawled into a funk- hole in Victoria. When the coal barons thought there was no more likelihood of "trouble" the main body of the soldiers was withdrawn but a skeleton force remained behind. When May Day came around again, the miners proposed to celebrate along with their fellows in other parts of the world. They made plans for a parade and demonstration at one of the parks. Immediately, the mayor, A. E. Planta, called out the mliitia again, 400 of them this time. And on May Day, 1914, the artillery rumbled along Commercial Street once more. The parade was prevented but the other part of the program was carried through under the guns and bayonets of the enemy. Mayor Planta, who called out the militia that day, was made a Senator for his services to the party of Bowser, the Tory Party. He is now in the penitentiary, serving a two-year sentence for the theft of money entrusted to his care by some of his real estate clients. The miners went to jail for trying to make the mine-owners obey the law and prevent themselves from being slaughtered for profit, but Planta went to jail for being an Page Seventy-five ordinary crook, an unvarnished thief. In this he was not much different from his masters, the Western Fuel Co., which, in 1914, was haled into the United States courts for swindling their own government (the U.S.) out of half-a-million dollars. After the war broke out in 1914 and the miners who were still on strike were being importuned to save the country, and other workers were being handed typewritten slips on which was written: "Your King and country need you; we don't,"* the Western Fuel Co. was doing its bit by selling coal to the German warships in 'Frisco. A photo in the San Francisco Bulletin showed the Leipzig being coaled with coal dug by Nanaimo miners, from Western Fuel Company barges in 'Frisco harbor after the outbreak of the war. Capitalist patriotism! Reason for the Lockout The strike was called off on September 14th after two full years. Those who had taken a leading part in it were hounded from pillar to post. Joe Mairs, a young boy from Ladysmith, died in jail; others might as well have died there. Many of them left the country but the fighting spirit of the miners was not killed; Cumberland has already proved that and Nanaimo soon will. There is hardly any doubt but that the strike was engineered by MacKenzie & Mann to calm the outcries of the shareholders in England. The mines could not pay dividends on 25 million dollars and if there was any noise it would kill the chances of MacKenzie & Mann's 100 million dollar bond issue for the Canadian Northern Railway then in the London Market. The B.C. politicians were in with the promoters; some of them had already shared in the loot when the transfer was made from Dunsmuir to MacKenzie & Mann. This is the reason why the Island miners were locked-out. *B. C. Electric. Page Seventy-six THE 'GINGER' GOODWIN 24-HOUR GENERAL protest STRIKE No event in the history of B.C. ever called forth such a wave of spontaneous mass indignation as the cold-blooded brutal murder of "Ginger" Goodwin at Comox which brought about the 24-hour general strike of August 2, 1918. When news of this crime against the working-class was received in Vancouver, the responsible leadership of the Trades Union Movement, the Metal Trades Council and the T.& L.C. called upon the organized labor movement to strike for 24 hours on the day of Ginger's funeral. The response was almost 100 per cent. Arthur Goodwin, "Ginger," was an ex-vice-president of the B.C. Federation of Labor. He went through the Island strike with the Cumberland miners and was later secretary of the Mill, Mine and Smelter Workers' Union at Trail. He was a mem- mer of the S.P.of C and took part in the fight against the imposition of conscription in Canada. When conscription was enacted he was placed in Class D as physically unfit. Shortly after, he led a strike of the Trail Smelter workers for the extension of the eight-hour day to the mechanics and chain gang. During the course of the strike, he was, through the machinations of Blaylock, manager at the Trail Smelter, called up for re-examination, put in Class A and ordered to report at military headquarters. This was obviously a move to behead the strike. In spite of this the company was forced to grant the eight-hour day. Ginger disappeared and was not heard of again till he was shot with a soft-nosed bullet by a special policeman called Campbell in the hills above Cumberland. Canada's First General Strike At noon on Friday, August 2, the strike became.effective. Almost every worker affiliated to the organized labor movement in Vancouver quit work. The longshoremen, the shipyard workers, the building trades workers all went home and most of them Page Seventy-seven I "GINGER" "Strikers are given the maximum penalty while those who are helping the masters to defeat the strikers are let off with the minimum . . . Stop appealing and praying . . . Line up in this great world-wide movement of socialism and use the concerted action of all workers to wrest.from the masterclass the means of wealth production." — Ginger Goodwin, Cumberland, 1913. Page Seventy-eight had to walk because the streetcar-men put their cars in the barns at noon, stopping in the middle of their runs. The capitalist press played its usual role of provocator. The war in Flanders was forgotten for the war in Vancouver. Glaring, screaming headlines inspired the backward "patriotic" elements to mob violence. Their editorials were the worst kind of inflammatory incitement of a war-maddened rabble to riot and murder, stirring up the worst passions and prejudices in the name of law and order. In the afternoon the city was given over to mob law. Between five and six hundred returned soldiers, mostly cripples from the military hospitals, filled with rum, were urged on by the profiteering business elements to wreck the Laboj Temple. The furniture was smashed, books, documents and papers thrown out of the windows and anybody they could lay hands on made to kiss the flag. But they did not get the strike-leaders, whom they were after. Raid Organized by C.M.A.- and B. of T. The raid was organized. Behind it was the Canadian Manufacturers' Association and the Board of Trade; the Daughters of the Empire did the appealing; the soldiers were merely dupes. For all their mob law the wheels of industry did not turn, the streetcars stayed in the barns. The "good" citizens staged a public meeting at night in the Empress Theatre at which a few labor rats spoke. At this meeting resolutions were passed "that the Dominion Government should immediately take strong and stern measures to suppress all seditious and anti-war movements and language; and further that any persons, especially the leaders, fostering such language or movements, should be placed at once in military service for duty overseas." The resolution also called upon "all loyal patriotic members of organized labor to oust the disloyal leadership of the Vancouver labor movement." The mayor offered to lead a gang to deport the strike leaders, seven of whom were named, including J. Kavanagh, W. A. Pritchard, E. E. Winch and Joe Naylor. This deportation proposal was later embodied in a demand of the Citizens' Com- Pargre Seventy- nine mittee but the workers replied that for every workers' leader deported they would see that two of the "prominent citizens" went. The only one to go was the skulking organizer of the raid on the Labor Temple, George Bushby, chairman of the Manufacturers' Association, who got scared for his life, sold out his interests in town and has never been seen since. Battle at the I.L.A. Hall On Saturday the battle was continued. Demands of some deluded returned men that the longshoremen go back to work immediately, met with a decision of the longshoremen to continue the strike till Monday. Their hall was made the scene of a second attack which lasted all afternoon, held up all traffic on Pender Street West, with the whole Vancouver police force engaged, the I.L.A. men beating off every attempt to storm their hall. Other workers from the striking unions helped to hold the fort and the deluded officer-led rabble got a hot welcome and retired beaten. The longshoremen went back to work at the time they decided. This strike is the best demonstration of solidarity in the history of Vancouver labor. The movement was better organized than at any other period and class spirit more pronounced, not alone among the leaders, but throughout the whole mass. Lenin's name was becoming known and the ferment was at work that was later to challenge the reactionary policies of the A.F. of L. leadership, with the O.B.U. The strike was made an excuse in an attempt to smash the trade union movement. The longshoremen had agreed to meet a committee of the returned men. One demand this committee made was that "the T.& L.C. being in the hands of a bunch of men who did not represent the ideas of organized labor as a whole, should resign in a body and seek re-election." The council decided to do this to prove the temper of the Trade Union movement, although some unions refused to be dictated to, since they considered themselves capable of running their own business without the help of any Citizens' Committee. In the re-elections, almost all the delegates were returned to the council, only one or two changes being made. Page Eighty Ginger and Cumberland Ginger was buried in Cumberland where he first broke into fthe labor movement. Everybody except the mine management look part in the funeral, even the town policeman. All the specials had been warned by the miners to get out of town before the funeral—and they did. The killer particularly had to get but as no waitress in town would feed him and he had to go elsewhere or starve. The workers honored "Ginger" for his faithful service to them in the Island strike and at Trail, and the bosses honored him by finding his murderer not guilty. During the long years of company rule at Cumberland his grave was allowed to become overgrown with weeds, just a spot in a graveyard; but since the Miners' Union has become a power in the coal town, it is looked after by the members of the union and a headstone, carved from the natural rock by the loving hands of miners, now tells the visitor that a miner lies there who paid with his life for his activity in the working- class movement, fighting the fight of all workers against oppression, hunger and slavery. Ginger Goodwin is not the only victim of the labor-hating management of the CP.R. Trail Smelter. Romeo Albo, an Italian miner, who, along with Ginger, organized the Italian workers at Trail, was arrested for doing so, at the behest of that grasping corporation, held for months in jail to await deportation where he contracted rheumatism through deficiency in the diet, from which he died in Lethbridge Hospital. Another victim of Blaylock! Xf A Miners' Tribute. Page Eighty-one street car men and the b.c. electric How to Win Increases in Wages Somebody has said of the Americans that "they never lost a war and never won a conference." This might be parodied in the case of the Vancouver street railwaymen to read that "they never lost a strike and never won an arbitration award." All their gains have been made by the strike or the threat of strike, but in the forensic trickery of conciliation boards the company always came out on top. Street car men's strikes succeeded in getting under the hides of the Canadian bosses more than those of any other category of workers except one, for the militia have been called out to deal with striking street car employees in more instances than in any other branch of industry except mining. In London, Ontario, 1899; Toronto, 1902; Hamilton, Ontario, and Winnipeg, 1906, the militia and regular army, infantry and cavalry, had to be brought out to help the grasping, nickel-squeezing companies to beat the fighting street car men. In Vancouver the militia have not been given that job—yet. Profit-Sharing Although an effort was made to organize a union in 1890, it came to nothing as the company righted the grievances that were agitating the men and it was not till 1898 that the Vancouver Pioneer Division was organized, about the time Socialism began floating in the Vancouver air. The men were kept from developing any hankering for big wages by what Mr. Buntzen denied was a profit-sharing scheme but a "participation in a definite proportion of profits." What was left over after the stock and bondholders got theirs, the men were to divide equally. They got twenty-five dollars the first year; in 1910 it had risen to about ninety dollars. That year the union voted the .scheme down with a demand that they wanted what was coming to them as wages, not hand-outs. Nice pats on the back from the management who always had "the employees' interests very much at heart" also helped to ease the pain of a long Page Eighty-two Ilpread-over working day and a seven-day week. As one blurb ||or the B.C. Electric in a local paper put it in 1901 : "The heads mi the union and the management have a simple conference together, and a few business-like words on either side has hitherto : proved an efficient means of staving off all labor troubles." There were 175 men working for the company at that time for the magnificent wage of 20 cents to 22 cents per hour with prices plmost as high as they are today. Even streetcar men, however, can stand only so much! In 1903 they had a slave-driving efficiency expert placed over them as superintendent, who attempted to introduce the Taylor system. This was the cause of the first strike. The cars stopped f running and in half an hour Mr. Franklin with his Taylor system I did not work for the B.C. Electric any more. The general manager fired him. Thirty minutes' good work! These comparatively low wages and long hours were the jrule till the war. Then things began to happen. First in 1916 they forced the six-day week, prevalent in other provinces, but j Murrin, who handled the dispute for the B.C. Electric, fought stubbornly and only the threat of a strike by the men and legislation by the government secured them one day off in seven. An Annual Event From then on Vancouver had its annual street car strike for three years in a row. In 191 7 to meet the increase in the cost of living the union made a demand for a raise of five cents an hour. It was refused. They met at midnight and struck without any further notice. They needed no pickets for there were no scabs and the electrical workers decided that the power would be shut off when the first scab stepped on a street car. After ten days the company surrendered. The following year saw another tie-up for a further raise in wages and for an eight-hour day within a ten-hour spread. The strike was of even shorter duration than the previous one, nine days. The B.C. Electric pleaded poverty. Murrin wailed for his parasitical shareholders, but not a car moved from Chil- liwack to Steveston or in Victoria. This strike was linked up with that of the electrical workers, who had demands of their Page Eighty-three own, for increased wages and a closed shop. They both won! | their demands in full. Nearly all the affiliated unions voted for] the T.& L.C. to call a general strike if the company did not! settle within the second week. "A Gentleman's Agreement" The men returned to work on Wednesday and on Saturday at midnight, all the lights in the city went out, all power was shut off, the cars stopped running again. And they stayed that way over Sunday and Monday, for the electrical workers had pulled the switches. The "gentlemen" who manage the B.C. Electric were keeping their agreement as such gentlemen invariably do. The electrical workers in their employment were notified on Saturday that the privileges they had always enjoyed as part of their wages were being cancelled—street car passes, special rates for gas and light—and long-service men were being fired. Two days was plenty to bring Murrin to time in this case. The discharged men were reinstated and the cancelled privileges restored. In the general strike of August 2, a month later, when Ginger Goodwin was being buried, it was the stoppage of the street cars that raised the loudest squeal from the Citizens' Committee scoundrels, and it was against the streetcar men their spleen was vented most fiercely, for the street car men's action spelled success for the strike. The same was true in 1919 in the Sympathetic strike in solidarity with the Winnipeg slaves of the Dominion Bridge Company, when the cars stayed in the barns for four weeks. This was the last street car men's strike in Vancouver, but the threat of strike was sufficient to win their demands when the last agreement was signed—something no conciliation board ever did for them. The. adoption of the strike policy by the street car men has * raised their wages to where they are today. In 1917, new men started work at 27 cents an hour with no guarantee. They might hang around the bullpen all day and get a two-hour "coffee and special," but as like as not they would go home at night without having earned enough to buy a street car ticket. In 1936, they Page Eighty-four start work at 56 cents an hour with a guarantee of $97.00 a jfnonth, work or no work. In 1917, the maximum wage was 35 cents an hour, which :could only be reached after four years' service. In 1936, the fciaximum is 63 cents, which may be reached in 18 months, with any time over a 10-hour spread paid at 20 cents an hour extra. This has only been won by maintaining a solid union, though Murrin would no doubt like to see the same conditions here as in Sir Herbert Holt's other street car company in Winnipeg, where two unions, fighting each other, have prevented the men from raising their wages much above that of common labor. <^^i) Page Eighty-five 1917-18-19 Years of Strike These three years represent one long continued strike in B.C. breaking out in one place now, another place next. Ten strikes was the previous yearly average for B.C., according to the Labor Gazette. In any of these years there were twice that number in Vancouver alone. With the outbreak of the war the "patriotic profiteers" seized their opportunities to amass millions. With half-a-million men taken from industry and thrown into the maw of the War God, the exploitation of those left behind to carry on was intensified. At the same time the destruction] in war of the wealth they created sent prices soaring. Everything cost double what it had before 1914. The working class could only maintain its standard of life by fighting—and it did. Organizations grew, till there were more members in one union (loggers) than there had been in the whole labor movement in Vancouver before the war. Wave upon wave, the boss class were confronted by striking workers. The strikers were met with howls and snarls or hirelings like Tom Mclnnes. They were denounced as Huns, pro-Germans, and later, Bolsheviks. Appeals of so-called patriots were made to them to work for starvation wages to save our country from destruction, while Flavelle, Holt and Company acquired millions. These strikes embraced every kind of worker and though all of them were for wage increases, many of them involved other demands also. To show that the eight-hour day was still a long way from being general: at Hastings Sawmill, where Eric H amber, our present Lieutenant-Governor, was "bull of the woods," the teamsters demanded a nine-hour day. At P. Burns Packing Plant they struck for eight hours with ten hours' pay. In the shipyards it took eighteen months and five strikes to win the forty-four hour week, and believe it or not, the Vancouver teamsters won a 9^-hour day in 1918. Strikes in Unexpected Places Wage increases were won in almost every case but union recognition was fought most stubbornly by the bosses. In 1898, Page Eighty-six Sir Thomas Sutherland, chairman of the P.& O. Steamship Co. was horrified when told of a threatened strike of P. & O. officers. "My God!" he said, "Officers and gentlemen don't strike!" The Merchant Service Guild thought different, for 400 masters and mates of the Guild handed in 48 hours' notice to the shipping companies after four months' negotiations for increased wages and to get their union recognized. Fifty to one hundred per cent higher wages were being paid across the line. They won. Vancouver policemen organized and had to fight for recognition. Three of their members were fired for joining the union but the weight of organized labor compelled their reinstatement. City firemen pulled off the first firefighters' strike in the history of labor on the North American continent. After a three-hour layoff they won one day off in four. Postmen wasted fourteen months in fruitless negotiations and then won wage increases after a one-week strike. So it was throughout the whole range of labor. Miners, brewery-workers, meat-packers, smeltermen, machinists, Chinese shingleweavers, chambermaids at the Vancouver Hotel, longshoremen, street car men. The civic employees left the street cleaning to the sparrows; Oily John's refinery workers at loco invited the super to lay all Rockefeller's five-dollar gold pieces from the ship to the tanks and see how much oil moved. (The strike leader who extended the invitation is now a member of the Communist Party). The Dominion Government Takes a Hand In the Crow's Nest Pass the miners were on strike intermittently from November 1916 to July 1917. Towards the latter period they were demanding a 10 per cent increase to meet the skyrocketing prices of necessities. The stubborn resistance of the mine-owners, who absolutely refused to grant their demands, was met in July by the government taking over and running the mines for the duration of the war and granting the miners a raise of 7 J/2 per cent. At Anyox, most malodorous of company towns, where the Granby Company was making half a million dollars a month Page Eighty-seven profit, and workers had to pay fifteen dollars for share of a dog-box room, they struck. Early in 1919, inspired probably by the Seattle general strike, the school teachers in Victoria were on strike two days for a wage increase; there were only a half a dozen weaklings amongst them. They won. In spite of war regulations, the workers at James Island explosives plant of the C.X.L. struck against the rotten sanitary conditions of their living quarters and had the camp made more fit to live in. The strike fever was so strong that even the high school students in Victoria and Burnaby struck against a cut in their Easter holidays. The Loggers' Union, that propagated a policy of strike in the woods, was born in 1919, but that story belongs to another place. Of all the strikes of these hectic three years only one or two were lost. <L-X^e) Page Eighty-eight the sympathetic general STRIKE, 1919 Strike in Winnipeg In 1919, the iron workers of the Dominion Bridge Company in Winnipeg were engaged in a struggle for the most elementary of working-class needs, a living wage and the right to organize. Organized labor in Winnipeg stood solidly behind them and Went out in a sympathetic general strike on their behalf. This general strike was proclaimed by the henchmen of the bosses in the press and the pulpits, as an attempted revolution, an effort to set up a Soviet in Canada. Vancouver's second general strike, in which Westminster participated, took place in sympathy with the great Winnipeg strike and was declared immediately the state forces were brought into that sector of the class war. The possibility of such action had already been forseen in May when the T.& L.C published a special notice asking all affiliated unions to call special meetings to take a strike vote on the question of a general strike in event of the military interfering in the Winnipeg struggle. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor. The unions with the masses of members were solid for strike; longshoremen, street car men, all the building trades, the metal trades, electrical workers—the backbone of industry. The printers considered that the vote in their union, although in favor, was not large enough to warrant them coming out, but they set up a censorship on the press covering all news dealing with labor. This led to the printers on the Province newspaper actually being the first men out on strike as they refused to set up a scurrilous editorial on the day the strike was declared. The Councils, T.& L.C. and Building Trades endorsed the plans of the strike committee that was set up. Several categories of workers were to remain at work: bakers and milkmen, water- department employees, hotel and restaurant employees, laundry workers, ice-wagon drivers for hospitals only, theatre employees, policemen and firemen. Gas workers were to produce gas for Page Eighty-nine household use only; the first attempt to use gas in an industrial plant was to bring all the gas workers out. Forty-five unions took part in the strike. Again the CM.A. For a full month Vancouver and Westmnister workers produced no profits and during that month the boss class resorted to every form of slander, villification and lying abuse against the strike. A vigilante Citizens' Committee was set up, with an official sheet to broadcast the lies the printers refused to print. Guns were mounted on the armory and kept trained on the Labor Temple, the headquarters of the strike committee. The Manufacturers' Association hired thugs and gunmen as they had already done in the 'Peg. They tried to hire men with machine gun experience just back from France but the returned men were getting wise by this time and they did not get any. In the ranks of the strikers were many returned men and some of the ex- soldier organizations endorsed the strike (Campaigners of the Great War and Ex-Soldiers' and Sailors' Labor Council). The conduct of the strikers allowed of no excuse for calling in the militia. They had their own defense force. Two hundred of the huskiest, from the ranks of the unions policed the downtown areas, each wearing a white lapel button with a red "L" on it—the "Red L's" they were called and they had more influence than the city police. The City Council played its usual strikebreaking role, making jitneys legal to break the morale of the streetcar men. In return for this the strikers cut off the telephone service which till then had been in operation. The solidarity of the Australian seamen was again demonstrated, when the crew of the Makura refused to allow goods of any kind put aboard without a permit from the strike committee. "Police Raids" The arrest of the strike leaders in Winnipeg, one of whom was W. A. Pritchard, was followed by nation-wide raids. In Vancouver the homes of all the members of the strike committee, the offices of the Federationist, the Camp Worker and the Page Ninety Red Flag and the headquarters of the S.P.of C were burglarized by the R.N.W.M.P. Everything portable, tons of it, was carried off, in the search for evidence that might incriminate the arrested leaders. The arrests brought about the collapse of the sympathetic strike in Winnipeg; the workers went back on the job and turned their energies towards defence work. The sympathetic strikes were called off in all the Western cities—Edmonton, Regina, Brandon and in Vancouver—exactly a month after it began, bringing to a close one ,of the most glorious pages in the, history of Canadian labor. ^^> Page Ninety-one IMPROVING THE LOT OF THE LUMBER WORKERS An "Idyllic Life" Previous to 1919, no body of workers was more at the mercy of their bosses than the lumber workers, who were exploited by the most grasping and greedy plunderbund that was ever let loose on the natural resources of this or any other country. The life of the logger, particularly, might be made to look idyllic in a story-book but in fact, it was worse than chattel slavery. From dark to dark, 10, 12 and 14 hours of slavish, backbreaking, soul-destroying labor; the vilest of food, discarded remnants of the slaughterhouses and the canneries; overloaded bunkhouses with vermin-infested, muzzle-loading, double-deck bunks, three decks in some cases, and for which the logger had to pack his own blankets; no sanitary conditions or wash - houses; swindled and robbed by employment sharks, grafting foremen and the steamboat companies. Such was the lot of the timber- beasts in B.C.'s banner industry! Millmen were a little better off because they mostly lived in civilization, but it was a bye-word on the Coast that if a sawmill man's children wanted to know what their old man looked like, they had to go into the mill in the day-time, as they were not yet out of bed when he left in the morning and were back in the hay when he came home at night. The wages paid, in both branches, were always rock bottom for B.C. workers. Lack of Organization The reason why these conditions prevailed was that the lumber workers were never organized. Numerous attempts were made but they consistently met with failure. In 1903 the first real effort to form a loggers' union was made by the A.L.U. The shingle weavers were already organized and were made a Page Ninety-two Arne Johnson base for the job in the woods, but nothing came of it In 1912 an organker from the W.F.M. was sent out by the Vancouver T & L.C. and the A.F.of L. without any greater success for the International Federation of Loggers and Lumber Workers. Again in 1917, an organizer of the Internahonal Union of 1.ruber Workers of the A.F.of L. tried to organize the mill workers in Vancouver, but got nowhere either; one of the masons for hi failure was that after they got started, the sawyers and filers pulled out and set up a union of their own. During the years from 1906 on, the I.W.W. had been signing up members, issuing red cards and holding meetings on the skidroad in Vancouver. If they did any organizational work it was dissipated in hall-cat discussion in the city, for the loggers continued to be crucified on the altar of profits. The role of the I.W.W. was to be played later. Log-hungry Timber Barons' Idea of Home—for the Loggers. Results of Organization The year 1919 saw the loggers organize themselves. They appealed for some assistance from the T.&L.C. and at the first meeting they held, 500 members took out cards. This was Page Ninety-three the beginning of what was to be the biggest union in all Canada, rising in membership to 15,000 in one year, the Lumber Workers' Industrial Union of Canada. Before many weeks their numbers had grown so that they began to tell the bosses things. More strikes took place in the logging and construction camps in the following two years than in all B.C. industry in the ten years proceeding the war and everyone of them improved the lot of the loggers. They raised wages; they established the eight- hour day; they compelled the boss loggers to tear down the old disease-breeding shacks and build new ones with shower baths and drying houses; they ceased to be blanket stiffs and made the companies put in beds for every man; they forced the government to enforce the sanitary regulations already on the statute books; they filled the camps with working-class literature and raised the general level of comfort and intelligence of the men who worked in the woods. They did not confine their organization to the Coast but spread to the Interior, to Alberta and to the vast hitherto unorganized Ontario woods. They were in at the birth of the O.B.U. and were the mainstay of that ill-fated movement, from which they withdrew over proposals to organize that body on a "geographical" basis, instead of on the lines on which the L.W.I.U. was organized, industrially. It was the only Canadian union affiliated ' to the Red International of Labor Unions. Karl Paimgren Smashing the Union As with the U.B.R.E. the smashing of such a union became the first and immediate task of the lumber barons and all their resources were mustered for that purpose. Thousands of European immigrants who had no trade union tradition behind them, were imported; R.C.M.P. stool-pigeons were placed in every camp to spot the active union men, and a blacklist, the most efficient ever known in this country, was devised. Even these measures could not have brought about the smashing of the union had not dissention been sown in the ranks. The I.W.W. mem- Page Ninety-four bers who joined the union, did so with the intention of making I it a "wobbly" union, failing in which they were willing to see it I smashed. This fitted in entirely with the plans of the bosses and was the main factor in the destruction of the organization that had been able to make life tolerable for the loggers. In conjunction with the other moves, it put the union out of business after it had been in existence for six or seven years. If the I anarcho-syndicalists can get any pleasure out of it, the smashing \ of the two greatest, most militant and most effective unions we ever had in B.C.—the W.F.M. and the L.W.I.U.—must be placed to their credit. The blacklist ensured the elimination from the woods and the mills of the pick of the men who had done the organizing work, men who were a credit to their class. Some of them have never been able to get a job in the lumber industry since—ten years ago now. Reorganization The need for organization, however, is produced on the job. The new blood that supplanted the old union men soon learned the kind of merciless machine in which they were trapped, and when, in 1931, the W.U.L. started in to organize the industry again, there were many lumber workers ready and willing for organization. Before long, strikes in Barnet, Fraser Mills and other places proved that in spite of the police stools, I.W.W. disrupters and the blacklist, the lumber workers will continue to fight against the intolerable conditions the exploiters would like to fasten on them. The L.W.I.U. was reorganized and since has conducted a strike that compelled the B. C. Government to establish a minimum wage in the industry, a strike that showed to all think- Page Ninety-five Picket Camp, Cowichan, 1936 J ing, reasonable people, that the only interest the logging companies have in B.C. is to rob it of its forest wealth, the spoils going in large measure to alien capitalists.* Since these aliens are not trade unionists, however, the Fascist Tom Mclnnes does not attack them over the air. The present L.W.I.U. has only been built up after a great deal of hard work and more is necessary to make it the peer of the 1919 union which is so necessary for the coming struggles. *Weyerhauser, J. D. Rockefeller, etc. <^^) Union Boat on Organizational and Defense Tour - with Johnny Eklow and Joe Kelly Page Ninety-six w% MARITIME WORKERS' STRUGGLES A Stern Struggle Of the inveterate character of class warfare there is no xbetter demonstration than in the relentlessness with which that group of alien capitalists, English, American, French, Scandinavian, German (Nazi), and Japanese, known as the Shipping [Federation, attempts to smash every organization on the water- pfront that they cannot control. In the last two great strikes at • least a couple of million dollars is reputed to have been spent by that conscienceless body to prevent the longshoremen and seamen perfecting an organization that would be able to maintain a tolerable standard of wages and cut down the accident list due to the intense exploitation in the Port of Vancouver. Long before Vancouver came into existence the waterfront workers on the Pacific Coast knew the benefits of organization, and in 'Frisco in 1853 the first longshoremen's union was or- fganized. At the same time that the K. of L. set up the first longshoremen's union here, the 'Frisco workers had already established a maritime federation covering all waterfront and marine workers, the "Wharf and Wave Federation," embracing maritime workers in California, Oregon, Washington and B.C. In the Northwest steamboats were not large in the early days, the average crew being captain, pilot, engineer and a deckhand. The gap between the captain and the deckhand was not very wide either at that period and they did not spend much money on brass buttons or braid. In 1889 the Union Pacific, which controlled the Oregon R. and N. Co. attempted to put into effect a cut in the wages of all except the deckhands. The men affected not only refused to accept a reduction but put in a demand for increases. The result was a general tie-up of the whole steamboat business from the Columbia River north. Transportation was held up for a week. The reductions were recalled and the engineers actually got a slight raise. The spirit of trade I unionism was getting away to a good start. Page Ninety-seven from i Unionism on the B.C. waterfronts was a natural growth __ the movement down the Coast. The struggle to unionize thi whole marine industry in the early days was carried on without much worry about legality. In 1893 one English ship, the! Bawnmore, which was operating on the Coast with a non-unionl crew, put into Nanaimo for coal, and in the night was boarded by! a group of sailors belonging to the Coast Seamen's Union. Theyl kidnapped the crew who had signed on at the English rate of £3/15 a month. Rough stuff, maybe, but necessary, to prevent the shipowners from cutting seamen's wages to the $ 18 a month I Old Country scale, as they wanted to. First Historic Strike on Vancouver Waterfront Out of these conditions the Vancouver stevedores' union grew, a K. of L. organization that maintained the wages and kept working conditions from becoming too rotten. In 1896 they pulled out of the K. of L. and formed a local Stevedore Union with eighty members, and before long were engaged in their first big struggle, a lock-out that developed into a strike, with the Pacific Coast Shipping Company. Back of this lockout was the question that has been at the bottom of nearly every • waterfront tie-up -— smashing the union — and with it another contentious point—hiring of men. The company wanted to put a man of their own on to boss the job and interfered with the walking delegate. A union smasher, the "King of Seattle" who boasted that he had smashed every longshoremen's union on the Coast, was brought in to do the same here, but he didn't succeed. After several months the men won. The next strike was to accomplish what the P.C.S.S. Company had failed in—the smashing of the union. In the U.B.R.E. strike in 1903 the longshoremen went out in sympathy with the railwaymen, first against the C.P.R., then against the Union S.S. Company. The U.B.R.E. was broken and with it the Stevedores' Union, and not again did the longshoremen play any part in the trade union movement till the International Longshoremen's Association was organized in 1912. In the meantime, without any organization, in 1907 they struck for a raise Page Ninety-eight Ja wages and succeeded in establishing a rate of forty cents |br day work and forty-five cents at night. I.L.A. Raises Wages Longshoremen's wages had remained low considering the lasual character of their work till the coming of the I.L.A. Increases were forced from the companies, but differentiation of the tates for ship and dock work were imposed. In 1917 the wages had risen to sixty cents and ninety cents on the ship and forty-five tents and sixty-five cents on the dock. Demands were made on pie stevedoring companies that the dock rate be raised to sixty Rents and seventy-five cents. All the bosses agreed except the E.P.R. In spite of the howls of the reptile press that the strikers were pro-German, were helping the Huns to win the war, the C.P.R. was compelled to come through; no work was done on the whole waterfront till they did. The strikers would not return to work either till all the demands of the I.L.A. Auxiliary mere granted, this latter union having struck first in sympathy land then presented demands for increased rates which the steve- pore companies were compelled to agree to. One of the notable [events of this strike was the refusal of the Niagara's crew to allow any scabs to handle cargo on their ship. A solidarity ban- Iquet was staged when they returned on the next trip which is one of the milestones of the labor history of the waterfront. During the sympathetic strike of 1919 the crew of the Makura played a similar part, further cementing the bonds of solidarity between jAustralian and Canadian workers. During the war years the I.L.A. was the only union that ;was able to prevent the military authorities interfering with their members on the job. After the passing of the Conscription Act, when the business agent, Pete Sinclair, was arrested by the military for evading the Military Service Act, a two-day strike jsecured his release and an undertaking not to interfere with the .Waterfront workers again. The I.L.A. was becoming too powerful; they had boosted wages from 35 cents to 90 cents and were going to do some [more boosting. In 1923, a demand for an extra 5 cents for handling lumber, the most dangerous of all longshore work, was Page Ninety-nine 1 turned down, and the Shipping Federation used the opportunity of the strike that followed to destroy the I.L.A., the C.P.Rj taking the lead. Scabs were gathered from every part of the Dominion and preparations made for a long battle. At the encB of it the I.L.A. as an organization was driven off the waterfront, j Growth of Sailors Union In the meantime, seamen and firemen operating coast and J offshore boats had their own struggles. There were not manyl deep-water sailors around Vancouver in the old days, since thel only local ocean-going boats were the CP.R. Orient liners! manned by Chinese crews at Hong Kong wages. The usual practices that curse seaports were worked here] as in all the ports of the world. Boarding house "crimps"! flourished at times as the crews of low-paid European ships] deserted as often as not. No records will ever tell of the numberI of sailormen "shanghaied" at Vancouver, but one case in 1906 of a man named Keating created quite a stir in the city. Every seamen's union had its quota of members; the International Seamen's Union (Coast Seamen's Union) ; Marine Firemen and Oilers; Cooks and Stewards, and the I.W.W. I Marine Transport Workers Union; but not one of them developed any great strength. After the war the Federated Seafarers' Union, a local organization which took in all classes of steamboatmen, came into existence, largely because membership in the I.S.U. was considered worthless as it brought no results j to the men in the port. One of the organizers of this union and its first secretary, was Earl King, now of the Marine Firemen and Oilers in California and the victim with two other members of his union of a characteristic frame-up—likely to become another Tom Mooney. No outstanding strikes took place, though on several occasions the coast coats were tied up by disputes over wages, and the steamboatmen took a promnient part in the U.B.R.E. strike. In 1917 a three weeks' strike held up the coast boats of the C.P.R., the G.T.P. and the U.S.S. Company. The sailors and firemen demanded a raise of 20 per cent. They succeeded in getting a 15 per cent increase. Then in 1919, during the Page One Hundred general Strike, when the seamen, firemen and stewards went jmt with the other workers the CP.R. was only able to keep feme of the boats running with officers and engineers and replacing the stewards with girl scabs. Sporadic strikes were carried on by the F.S.U., mostly Lgainst the deep-water ships of the Canadian Government Merchant Marine, the living conditions on which were the worst on Ithe North American continent, and the ships themselves but little better than coffin-ships. The solidarity of the F.S.U. with the Hong Kong Chinese seamen's strike of 1925, was demonstrated when the union spread a resolution on their minutes "not to man any Empress or other boat affected by the Hong Kong strike." In the spring of 1929 several members of the union, including Allan Campbell, demanded that the ship they were on, the Canadian Seigneur, of the C.G.M.M., be turned back at Cape Flattery and made safe. They refused to work her and she put back to Victoria, where they were lined up before a magistrate and sentenced to six months in jail for "mutiny." In 1932 a branch of the Marine Workers' Industrial Union was established in Vancouver and had not been long in existence when a policy of uniting all the seamen on the Coast into one union was drafted. This task was accomplished, the F.S.U., the Canadian Amalgamated Association of Seamen and the M.I.W.U. passed out as organizations and their place taken by one single organization of seagoing men, the Seafarers' Industrial Union. New Union—Old Conditions The organization of the strikebreakers into a union after the smashing of the I.L.A., the Vancouver & District Waterfront Workers' Association, controlled absolutely by the Shipping Federation, however, laid the basis for the building of another organization to take up the struggle, for the conditions that produced the I.L.A. still obtained on the docks. This was a long, hard job that took ten years, and not only was it accomplished but all the longshore organizations on the Coast were welded into a federation along with the sailors, the Longshore and Water Page One Hundred One Transport Workers of Canada. The six-month lock-out of last year in which police brutality, gas bombs, mass arrests and jailing of the strikers and their leaders added to the methods of 1923 was the bosses' answer to this industrial organization. The shipping interests on the Coast had become terror- stricken by the successful strikes of 1934, which were well sup ported by the Vancouver longshoremen, and the building of a powerful maritime federation. To keep Vancouver marine workers out of such a federation was the prime move of the local! bosses and to break it up was the objective of the organized! shipping and stevedoring companies on the Coast. They began] at the weakest link, Vancouver. Although they partially suc-j ceeded here, the Maritime Federation has grown stronger. The] defeat of the strikers in this case was due in the main to their failure to recognize the thorough preparation organized by the shipping interests of the whole Coast, with the definite purpose of destroying every vestige of militant unionism on the waterfront in Vancouver and B.C. Not recognizing the magnitude of the ! offensive, insufficient preparations were made to meet it with consequent disaster. The Struggle Continues The struggle in Vancouver is not over. The Shipping Federation imagines they have broken the back of the militant marine workers' organization with the help of the scab-herding Citizens' League, the fascist Mayor McGeer and the gangsters of the Mounted Police and their new strikebreakers' unions. The I.L.A. has become the centre for reorganizing the marine workers. Not only is the I.L.A. not dead but the men who put the fight in the I.L.A. are not dead either; they are still on the waterfront. The bosses said they were willing to recognize the I.L.A. during the strike and they will be compelled to do so in the end or shut up shop on the Vancouver docks. Page One Hundred Two the unemployed movements Unemployed struggles did not begin with 1929. Although fortunes were being made here during the last 50 years, men, 'women and children were going hungry at the same time for I lack of employment. Thirty-five years ago relief lines were worrying the Gerry McGeers of that day. In 1895 the News- Advertiser carried a news item reporting that "Relief work discussed at the meeting of the board of works and a decision made that married men be paid $1.75 and single men $1.25 (sounds quite familiar!), three days a week; that the aldermen had to hand out the jobs in their wards." The men who got this measly relief had to work nine hours a day fo rit. In 1905 again, the T.& L.C lodged a protest against the city paying the miserly, sum of $1.50 a day for relief work. It was not, however, till 1912 that unemployment became an acute problem for the solons. The boom had burst. The leading industry, real estate, was a flop. Men who thought they were millionaires found themselves on their uppers inside of a few weeks. Twenty thousand workers without relief of any kind, walked the streets of the city. The S.P. and the I.W.W. set to work and organized them. They staged a parade down Hastings Street and the eyes of the real estate sharks popped out of their heads. Police Brutality On the following Sunday a meeting held on Powell Street Grounds was smashed by the police Cassacks. For four weeks the same thing happened and many arrests were made. In the end the city was compelled to pay out relief till in 1913, they were paying $2.00 for eight hours' work. All the men arrested who elected for summary trial got six months in jail, but those who went to the Assize, one of whom was R. P. Pettipiece, were found not guilty of "illegal assembly." Even the outbreak of the war did not ease the situation for quite a time. Four-fifths of all trades were out of work; it was the subject of discussion in every trade union and labor meeting. Page One Hundred Three Single men were exiled to Burnaby, to make a cemetery—for their board and bunk. They were without organization, without power, at the mercy of every jack-in-office. In the spring of 1915 the city refused to pay out any more relief and cut everybody off. The next day a mass meeting was held at MacLean Park and parades again passed down Hastings Street, right past the recruiting sergeants. Two days of parades brought no results so the paraders started smashing in the fronts of department stores and restaurants. Some arrests were made but the next day the Provincial Government put up enough to pay 50 cents a day for eight hours' work. Ultimately the war liquidated the unemployment question of that period with the demand for soldiers and workers to manufacture the goods that were to be destroyed in carrying on the war, munitions, foodstuffs, ships. Demobilization The problem was revived with demobilization. In 1922 it had again become acute. On the initiative of the Workers' Party steps were taken to deal with it. A committee of 25 was set up consisting of representatives of the trades unions and working-class political parties. Grievances of the unemployed in the city and South Vancouver were dealt with but the committee never got much in the way of results. The unemployed workers themselves on the relief jobs had more success. South Vancouver was bankrupt but the unemployed were organized and made the commissioner find them work. During the next few years partial stabilization effected an equally partial solution of the unemployment question but it was only working up to a more intensely critical situation. Communist Party Organizes the Unemployed In 1929, when the crisis broke, the Communist Party immediately issued a call for the organization of an unemployed association. In two days, almost 2,000 members had joined. It was a mass organization and it compelled the city council to open up work and pay out relief. But the organized unemployed were not satisfied with the conditions of the relief work or the" rates and called a strike in January, 1930. Workers from all Page One Hundred Four the jobs marched into Powell Grounds on that afternoon to discuss the demands to be placed before the council. The meeting was broken up by mounted and foot police. Fifteen or sixteen arrests were made, four of the arrested leaders being charged with "illegal assembly" and sent to the Assize Court. This was the beginning of a reign of police terror that has spread to every part of this province along with unemployed organizations. In every place where the unemployed workers followed the lead of Vancouver this terror has been rampant. Since that 16th of January, 1930, the Canadian Labor Defense League has defended nearly three thousand members of the working-class of B.C., mostly from the ranks of the unemployed. Hundreds of them have gone to jail but such relief as is being paid out today is the result of their struggles. The struggle for the streets as well as for relief was bitterly fought. Many who took part in that struggle were deported, one of whom, Hans Kist, the capitalist press reports as having been murdered by the fascists in Nazi Germany. While the organization was maintained, the demands kept relentlessly before the powers that be, by demonstrations and hunger marches the unemployed workers' lot improved. Militancy abolished relief work and made the councils pay out direct relief; stopped the handing out of sacks of groceries and pay in script; made R. B. Bennett change his policies and pass an unemployment insurance act. The Hunger Marches and the Trek The hunger marches organized by the B.C. unemployed workers in 1932 and 1933 deserve mention in this connection because of the magnificent organizational effort they demonstrated the victories they had won and the great masses of workers they represented, greater numbers being involved than in any of the general strikes that took place in the province. Fifty- seven organizations were represented in the 1932 march to Victoria. They registered gains in winning a 10 per cent increase in relief in 1934 and they impressed on the government the mag- Page One Hundred Five George Black, One nitude of the unemployment question and forced upon it a recognition of the sufferings of the jobless. Although not a hunger march, a united front movement originiating in Burnaby that took in all types of working- class organizations, churches, lodges, etc., compelled the government to recognize the needs of the children and increase their allowance by 30 per cent. The most consistent and best maintained organization of the unemployed workers, of the Trek Leaders that of the single men in the slave camps, wrote a chapter in Canadian history because they were well organized. Their strike and the trek under the leadership of Arthur Evans, is one of the most glorious pages in the story of labor, not of Vancouver alone but of all Canada. Although they brought upon themselves the wrath of the "iron-heel, ruthless" Bennett government they succeeded in abolishing the slave-camps because they were well organized and capably led. The only cure for unemployment is work. The capitalist system cannot provide work for all the workers. Out of their ill-gotten gains the capitalists must be made to feed those whom they cannot employ, by inaugurating a non-contributory unemployment insurance act and in the meantime providing adequately for all who are unemployed or dependent on them. Unemployed organization is now at a low ebb, lower than it has ever been since the strike of 1930. This must be remedied immediately, for it is more necessary now than ever. While thousands of dollars are being squandered on visiting mayors, workers are being discriminated against and thrown in jail for not having a job and denied the right to go on such relief projects as are operating. New life must be injected into the unemployed organizations. While this book is being prepared for the printer one of the worst pieces of class vengeance in the history of the province has been perpetrated in the sentencing of Fred Grange and Harry Molland to two years in the penitentiary. Page One Hundred Six This vicious manifestation of class justice was dealt out to these two young workers for daring to voice the grievances of the inarticulate, discriminated youth, almost 200 of whom were jailed when they refused to accept the sentence of starvation imposed on them by the well-fed city, provincial and Dominion officials, and tried to make a job for themselves by selling flowers on the streets. B.C. Trekkers Entering Calgary Page One Hundred Seven THE INDIANS IN THE LABOR MOVEMENT The real native sons of B.C., the Indians, have played their part in the labor history of this province, although their industrial activity has been limited almost entirely to seal-hunting, fishing and canning. The fishermen's unions always found the Indians willing and ready to join them and never behind when it came to a fight for better prices for fish. The Indians are doubly discriminated against. Being considered "wards" of the government they are not supposed to have a mind of their own. The franchise is withheld from them and they are treated like children who lack the intelligence to know what is good for them. An agent, a political heeler for the government of the day, is appointed to act for them and the principal business of these Indian agents has been to keep the Indians out of the trade union movement or any other contact with white workers. In spite of this handicap the Indians have played a great part in the struggles of the industries in which they work. A Tale of Robbery and Cheating The story of the expropriation of the Indians of B.C. is substantially the same as that of all Canadian and American natives, from Labrador to California, a tragic history of pillage and robbery. It differs only that the B.C. Indians live on "reserves" to which they have no "legal titles" any better than "squatters' rights" and are squeezed off every time some empire-builder desires to erect a cannery, an industrial plant or a townsite or when some notoriety-seeking politician wishes to build a stadium. Of treaties such as those made with the Eastern and Plains Indians there are none in B.C. except Treaty No. 8, made with the Athabasca tribes of the Northwest Territories which embraces a few members of that nation living in northeastern B.C. "Word-of-mouth promises" between the innocent chiefs and political tricksters are their only guarantee outside of what is provided in the "Indian Act," which is not a treaty but an imposition in the making of which the Indian people had no voice. Page One Hundred Eight The "sale" of their lands to whites is a polite description of the meanest form of theft ever practiced on an innocent, trusting people. One scandalous example of this is the "legal" instrument executed between Captain Kendrick of the Boston fur- trader Washington and four chiefs, one of them being Maquinna, the best known of the Coast Indian chiefs, for a piece of land in the Queen Charlotte Islands. This shameful document, which is filed in the State Department at Washington, reads: "In consideration of six muskets, a boat-sail, a quantity of powder and an American flag (they being articles of which we at present stand in need and are of great value), we do bargain, grant and sell, unto John Kendrick, of Boston, a certain harbor in said Ahasset in which the brig Washington lay at anchor on the 5th day of August, 1 791, lat. 49° 50', with all lands, mines, minerals, rivers, bays, harbors, sounds, creeks and all islands, with all the produce of land and sea, being a territory the distance of 18 miles square, to have and to hold, etc., etc. Signed: Maquinna. Wicananish. Narry Yonk. Tarrasone.* The brazen New England skipper, a breed not noted for such a quality, seems even to have felt ashamed of himself, as the interpolation in brackets shows a tinge of remorse for the crime he was committing. We cannot excuse the British on the grounds that Kendrick was a Yankee because the same unscrupulous and avaricious policy has been pursued by all the so-called "superior" races that visited this Coast: Spaniards, British, Americans and Russians. It is stated of Sir Francis Drake, a pirate with a permit from "Good Queen Bess," that when he visited this Coast "he left only what could not be carried away" and Captain Meares who established British rule here "traded a pair of pistols with an Indian chief named Maquinna for a lease of the country thereabouts" (Nootka 1788). At that, these "land deals" brought the Indians just that much more than they received for the greater part of the country as a whole, which was seized without any recompense whatever. *Lewis and Dryden—"Marine History of the Pacific Northwest." Page One Hundred Nine Christian Civilization at Work The same "high principles" of Christian civilization obtained in all other dealings. "Trade" was a euphemistic name for cheating and robbery. One trader reported "good business" in exchanging $100 worth of cheap chisels for $8,000 worth of otter skins. Coal was first discovered on the Island at Fort Rupert (near Alert Bay) and the first ship to use it was the British naval sloop Cormorant, the commander of which was very pleased to report to his superiors that "62 tons of coal was taken on at Fort Rupert at a cost of less than four shillings (one dollar) a ton, being paid in trinkets of little value." The coal was dug and loaded on to the ship by the Indians. The Indian (known as "Coal Tyee" around Nanaimo till his death in 1881) who discovered coal at Nanaimo, from which field over a hundred million tons have been taken,* received from the Hudson's Bay Co., in return, a bottle of rum and had his gun mended "without charge." The studied policy of the white overlords, carried out with calculated cunning, both by the Hudson Bay Company and the colonial governments that followed it, was to make wage-slaves of the natives. They were needed to offset the shortage of labor in the early days of British occupation. Of course the Christian medicine man was brought in to help and between the upper millstone of scheming land-grabbers and exploiters and the nether millstone of proselytizing priests of all religions, the Indian had his primal culture ground out of him and was given in return a regime of bad whisky and worse morals. He suffered also from the racial prejudices developed and carried further West by the "pioneer" plainsmen who had to fight for every inch of soil they stole from the Sioux, the Black- feet and the Nez Perces and to whom "the only good Indian was a dead Indian"; who justified the massacre of innocent Indian children by the laconic and cynical epigram, "Nits make lice!" *Nanaimo Free Press, Diamond Jubilee Edition, 1934. Page One Hundred Ten No better description of this onward march of empire has ever been written than the last verse of Labouchere's poem: Where is the flag of England? Go sail where rich galleons come, With shoddy and loaded" cottons And beer and bibles and rum. Go, too, where brute force has triumphed And hypocrisy make its lair; And your question will find its answer— For the flag of England is there. Although a peaceful people, the Indians did not take all this civilizing without showing resistance at times. The Fort Rupert Indians demanded pay for the use of their land and its products when coal mining started and threatened to kill all the whites at the post if their demands were not met. Fear was expressed that the natives at Nanaimo might grow "mercenary' as at Fort Rupert. A few bullying and domineering whites were killed, in most cases, deservedly, their methods being openly brutal and lacking the finesse of the more polished "adventurers." The training of their primitive communal social organization made the Indians poor material for "wage slaves," though some of them did work in the coal mines at Nanaimo, being paid a dollar-and-a-quarter a day for coal digging, half the wages of the white miners, as late as 1875. Indian Seal Hunters Beat Monopoly But there were fields for which they were admirably well adapted—trapping, seal hunting and fishing—and of these wage- labor dominated the latter. By 1886, Victoria had become the headquarters of the North Pacific sealing fleet. The fleet was made up of small schooners manned by crews of captain, four seamen, a cook and 24 hunters and boatpullers. Half the hunters and boatpullers in the fleet were Indians. An American concern, the Alaska Commercial Co., with a 20-year lease of the seal rookeries from the Russian and U.S. governments, attempted to establish a monopoly on sealskins. The United States Congress made it a penal offence to kill fur-bearing animals in Alaskan waters, to further the interests of this monopoly. United States Page One Hundred Eleven revenue cutters were sent to the Bering Sea to enforce this law and in 1886 three Canadian sealers were captured on the high seas, 60 miles off shore in territory universally recognized in international law as free to the commerce of all nations. The schooners were confiscated; part of the crews turned adrift hundreds of miles from their homes, without food; the masters thrown in jail and fined. The following year, seizures were so numerous that the revenue boats merely ordered the captured sealers to report at Sitka—a one-man prize crew being put aboard. Those with white crews did so; but on one of them, the Alfred Adams, the hunters were Indians, and when the captain laid his course for Sitka, the Indians mutinied; ordered him to head for Victoria, stood by the compass to see that he did so, and threatened to throw the one-man prize crew overboard if he interfered. This course was followed by other Indian crews, and when the schooners reported at Victoria and their cases were heard in a Marine Court they were all adjudged to be in the right. The U.S. and their protege, the Alaska Commercial Company, were beaten and the rights of Canadian sealers settled later by the Arbitration Treaty of 1893 when the U.S. Government paid half-a-million dollars' compensation to the Victoria sealers. The Indian seal hunters had no union but this successful fight of theirs was as much a strike as that of the fishermen on the Fraser in 1900. The companies who owned the schooners attempted to develop the spirit of competition between the whites and the Indians, pitting one boat against the other, but the hunters, both Indian and white, refused to fall in line and the companies gave up the idea. In 1900 the Indian hunters were on strike in Victoria, demanding an increase of a dollar a skin. At that time they were being paid $5.00, and although they did not get the increase, they did not hunt and half the schooners remained in harbor the whole season. Attempts to recruit strikebreakers from among the Indians in Washington met with miserable failure and it is hard to understand why the Fraser River cannerymen expected to get strikebreakers to defeat the fishermen from the ranks of the Page One Hundred Twelve 1 r ■striking sealers, for the history of the Indians in these industries Iproves at least one thing—the Indians are not strikebreakers. I Indians Solid With Fishermen's Unions In both strikes on the Fraser, 1900 and 1901, they took a I leading part. After the failure of 1900, the chief of the Fort Ruperts I expressed surprise that the whites should allow the Japanese to ) fish under the protection of the militia and wanted to take his men out to give their bodies to the fish. His people went home, refusing to fish under the circumstances. In the 1900 strike most of them went home to their villages rather than fish on the bosses' I terms after the strike collapsed. In 1904 on the Skeena the In- i dians conducted a strike, themselves, for higher prices. The ; whites and Japanese did not fish but when the Indians left after three weeks the whites and Japanese went to work at a com- I promise figure. If the Indians did not make a grubstake that year neither did the canneries make any profit. In 1900, Bell Irving drew the attention of the Indian agent :to the clause in the Indian Act that provides that "the Indians may not interest themselves or make alliances with parties in such difficulties as these."* The agent acted accordingly, but without avail. The only other work that Indians have engaged in in large numbers is hop-picking in which they are exploited in whole families. Here they are no more willing to be swindled than at the canneries. In the early days only Indians were hired for this work. In 1905 at Agassiz, the growers put Chinese to work and the Indians, inspired by the white man's anti-Oriental policy, went on strike against Chinese being employed. They won their strike and the Chinese were fired. Another time at Sardis they struck against the size of the baskets and after two days had the baskets reduced in size. Indian Workers Good Fighters Indian workers have been involved in all the strikes on the Vancouver waterfront and in some places on the Island, with credit to their people. When the Dominion Trades Congress *The Fraser River strike. Page One Hundred Thirteen pfffTff" Was held in Victoria in 1906, an Indian delegate, J. Elliot president of the Federal Union, Duncan, B.C., perhaps the only Indian delegate ever to attend the Congress, made an appeal to the Congress on behalf of the Indian workers. The Congress passed a resolution that "favorable consideration be given to the claims of the Indians for the right of exercising the franchise." This disfranchisement of the Indians has created a barrier between the white workers and the Indians as they have been looked upon as beyond the pale to the labor vote-catchers. But with or without votes they increase the fighting strength of the labor movement; they prove this today at Deep Bay, where they are in the leadership of the workers, particularly the Indian women in the cannery. Back in 1893 the Indian fishermen, who had just come through a strike on the Fraser, in which they had been deserted by the whites were the feature of the Labor Day parade in Vancouver and the same must be said about Indian fishermen and cannery workers from Deep Bay in the May Day demonstration at Cumberland this year. ! <^<^d ■Page One Hundred Fourteen bRIENTAL WORKERS LINING UP Railroad Builders White workers have no rights of priority over Chinese workers on the Coast of British Columbia. When Meares first landed I at Nootka he brought with him 70 Chinese carpenters from i Hong Kong. These were the first mechanics of any color in this : country. They built the first ship to be constructed in the Pali cific Northwest, the Northwest America she was named. They 3 also built the first modern buildings to be erected in B.C. With the gold rush of '49, many of them came to California and they I broke into railroad building with the first transcontinental line. They laid the steel from 'Frisco to the Mountains on the Central Pacific to connect with the Union Pacific being built from I Chicago in 1867. The construction gang- on the U.P. were I Irish, and the contractors "speeded-up" both Chinese and Irish by taunting them with the tale that the others were beating them, la favorite exploitation of national spirit used by American slave- driving contractors. When the CP.R. took over the construction of the Pacific section of the line, their first move was to import two boat-loads of fresh laborers from Hong Kong, 2,000 in number. They I were kept below, battened down like other cargo on the passage [ across and suffered miserably. Over 10,000 in all were brought for the laying of that "ribbon of steel" across Canada. The wage paid to them was the princely figure of 10 cents an hour for a 10-hour day, a wage equalled only by that of the Vancouver letter-carriers, who, in 1898, earned $365 a year, working seven days a week, and exceeded only by that of the I CP.R. trackmen, who struck in 1900 against the magnificent remuneration of 90 cents a day paid them by that civilizing group of public-spirited citizens represented today by Sir Edward Beatty. Strike Out of this exorbitant wage these Chinese laborers had to find "their own bed, board and room" as had all other workers on the line. The contractor in charge of the commissariat, Collis Page One Hundred Fifteen Iff" >^i tf i^jCtitim A»b,1t«*flt $#*$b**S ^»a^«tfe^4^^:w- First Charter Issued to an Oriental Union in North America ■mm flii •fIfciP IP 111! Pagre One Hundred Sixteen I mL 5 P. Huntingdon, a California "railroad king" and an associate of Robert Dunsmuir in the E.& N. steal on Vancouver Island, i sublet the privilege of selling rice to the Chinese workers to profit-seeking merchants in San Francisco, who charged all that the traffic would bear. The work was not steady. Lack of materials meant idle days and an idle day meant no dollar, so that all the workers earned went to pay board bills. Their whole month's food sup- I ply, was about one mat of rice (50 lbs.) a month each, only about half enough to sustain their strength for the hard manual labor they were engaged in. An occasional piece of pork was thrown to them but not very often. Variety was provided during I the fishing season when they were fed fish heads brought by the carload from the Fraser River canneries. For this garbage they were charged from $ 12 to $ 15 a month. The result was that by 1884 about 2,000 had died, reputed to be from scurvy but actually from starvation. It is little wonder that Mr. Gordon, M.P. for Vancouver, declared before the Royal Commission on Oriental Immigration in 1884, that English and French gentlemen would not let their dogs live as these poor Chinese were compelled to live. mm^ At Lytton and Salmon Arm they struck work, demanding steady employment. They were unorganized; the "agitators" were picked out and shipped to Victoria and the others went on starving. Some of them are still alive and on the breadline in different parts of the province, particularly in Vancouver, Victoria and around Ashcroft, unknown and uncared for, while their exploiters made fortunes. Anti-Oriental Riots The anti-Oriental complex of the white workers is of long standing. At Yale in 1881, the whites struck and their strike developed into an anti-Chinese riot. In 1885, in Victoria, white unemployed workers went around to various establishments where Chinese were employed, demanding work. The riots of 1887 in Vancouver have already been referred to in another place. The worst demonstration, however, occurred in Vancouver, in 1907, which proved that the Chinese workers are capable Page One Hundred Seventeen ! of striking and willing to strike to protect themselves. Thousands! of hoodlums had made a raid on Chinatown, inspired by the! "white Canada" propaganda of demagogues like Tom Mclnnes. They rioted and left wreck and ruin behind them. From therel they proceeded to Poweil Street to do the same to the Japanese] quarter. The Japanese, however, were ready for them with rifles and revolvers and they fled like the cowards they were. Next day a general strike of Chinese workers was declared. Not a Chinese worker showed up at a hotel, restaurant or sawmill or any other place where Chinese worked. This strike lasted ! until white employers pleaded with them to return to work. First Efforts at Organization The first attempt to draw the Oriental workers into the trade union movement was made by the W.F.M. in 1903, during the U.B.R.E. strike. In Cumberland that year the miners were on strike for recognition of their union and against discrimination—300 white and 500 Chinese and Japanese miners, all in the W.F.M. Naturally they earned the denunciation of Mackenzie King's Royal Commission on Labor, which condemned the W.F.M. for organizing Chinese and Japanese. During the same strike in Vancouver, 25 Japanese who refused to scab on the Blue Funnel boat Achilles were cheered as they walked up Carrall Strete. In 1906 the Chinese laundry- men in Vancouver went on strike for a six-day week. They had the support of the whole labor movement and they won. In this same year (1906) the beginning of a working-class movement had begun among the Oriental workers in the sawmills with the organization of Chinese and Japanese guilds. They were not trade unions but inclined in that direction and out of them grew the organization of the Chinese shingle weavers. In the shingle weavers' strike of 1917 for the 8-hour day, an increase of prices was also demanded. Fifty-two mills were involved and great consternation was manifested at the Labor Temple because the Chinese sawyers were asking two cents more than the white men "but it was hoped the Chinese could be brought to reason." Unfortunately they were. These demonstrations pointed the way to solve the problem of white and Oriental labor Page One Hundred Eighteen r drawing the Chinese and Japanese workers into the organized5 j labor movement. ■;;/ Japanese fishermen had already established themselves in the, I trades union movement but a great deal more remained to be done Band it is the fault of the white workers that it was not. done. In 1920 the Japanese Camp and Mill Workers' Union was organized. This union is wider than its name indicates as it itakes in hotel workers and other Japanese workers who are not organized in particular industries; in a sense it is a general workers' union. The affiliation of this union to the Trades Council in 1927 was one of the first events to help in welding the I workers of both races together. Communists at Sun Yat Sen Funeral 1925 was a momentous year for China. In that year, Sun Yat Sen died. Funeral services were held for him in Vancouver as well as in Canton. Chinese workers wended their way in a parade through Chinatown, but only one organization of white j workers took part in it—the Communist Party. Later in the same year, when the massed forces of Imperialism launched their attack on the Chinese people, the Trades Council passed a resolution demanding the withdrawal of all armed forces and punishment for the killing of Chinese workers at Wahnsien. The anti-Oriental complex was being overcome. The fear that the yellow-skinned workers will lower the standard of the whites is no longer a factor in this question, since the bosses have now brought this condition about, with a quarter of the population living on inadequate relief allowances. Whites and Orientals alike have been brought to a level lower than that of the dreaded Asiatic coolie. The Workers' Unity League, carrying on the tradition of the W.F.M. has extended trade union organization activity to embrace the Oriental workers, particularly the Chinese. They have been drawn into the Fishermen and Cannery Workers' Pacre. One Hundred Nineteen I Union, on an equal basis with white workers; jobless Chinese workers have been organized in unemployed associations and have taken their place in all campaigns and demonstrations against hunger and starvation. This is the place for the Oriental worker, side by side with the white and Indian workers in the struggle for a better living against the exploiters who know no race or color in their demands for cheap labor. This is the solution for the 50-year-old Oriental question that has been such a bugbear for these many years. 1 <L^<e> Page One Hundred Twenty THE BUILDERS Although the trade union movement has been built by many unknown and unsung, diligent worker heroes, men and women who devoted the hours when they were not slaving to organizing and maintaining the unions, there are still some figures that tower above the mass during these 50 years. Of the Knights of Labor, two names stand out prominently, George Pollay, first librarian of Vancouver's first free library in 1889, and Thomas Hallam, consistent unionists till their deaths. In the A.F.of L. unions, the early trojans have already been noted, but George Bartley of the I.T.U., still in the Vancouver trade union movement, is deserving of special mention. He has been described as "The father of trades unionism in Vancouver," an honor he might have shared a few years ago with Joe Dixon of the U.B.C.J. Amongst the men who led in the great and fiercely-fought struggles of the W.F.M. and later of the U.M.W.A. in the Crows Nest Pass section of District 18, were Bill Davidson, executive board member of District 6; Jim Baker, especially marked by Mackenzie King's Royal Commission on Labor; John Riordan; Ernest Mills; J. Hazelwood; J. Wilks; J. MacLaren; Tom Beamish; Charlie Bunting; Andy Shilland; James Roberts; George Heatherton; W. B. Mclsaac; Percy Johnson; Marcus Martin; Alex Susnar; Frank Sherman; W. L. Phillips; Tom Biggs; Ginger Goodwin; Romeo Albo and Dick Marshall. Here too, we must mention J. W. (Jack) Johnstone, now a leading member of the C.P. of U.S. who was active around Nelson about the same time that the Rev. A. E. Smith (now national "secretary of the Canadian Labor Defense League), was making his Methodist pulpit into a labor forum in the same town. About the year 1900, new names began to appear on the minute books of the Trades Council. Harry Cowan and R. P. Pettipiece of the I.T.U.; Will McClain of the Machinists; John Peary, Streetcarmen; Ernie Burns, Frank Rogers, W. T. (Dodger) Green and Charlie Leer, Longshoremen and Fishermen; Joe Watson, Boilermakers, one-time president of the American Labor Union; J. T. Mortimer of the Tailors, being Page One Hundred Twenty-one J the most active; six of this group, by the way, were socialists. In the second decade of the century, new leading figures took their places, W. R. Trotter, I.T.U.; J. H. McVety, Machinists; Joe Hubble and Fred Hoover, Streetcarmen; and in the period immediately preceding the war and during the war years another generation took up the reins, although some of the old-timers still appear on deck: Jack Kavanagh, W. A. Pritchard of the I.L.A.; E. E. Winch, I.L.A. Auxiliary and Loggers; Bill Dunne, Electrical Workers (later editor of the New York Daily Worker) ; V. Midgley, Lathers"; Harry Neelands, I.T.U.; George Thomas, Gordon Kelly and Tom Nixon, I.L.A.; Helena Gutteridge, Tailors' Union. On the Island, among the miners at Cumberland were Joe Naylor and Jack MacAllister; at Nanaimo and Ladysmith, Jim Hodgkinson, Teamsters; Walter Head, Chris, Pattinson, Arthur Jordan, Joe Taylor and Sam Guthrie ,all miners. And in Victoria, Chr. Sivertz, Postmen; A .S. Wells, Amalgamated S.CJ.; Sandy Watchman, and Jack Stevenson, U.B.CJ.; Jim Watters, one-time president of the Trades Congress of Canada, and John L. Martin, both of the Laborers' Protective Association. Of recent years outstanding figures are few in number. The trade union movement of the province went to a low peak after the O.B.U. split. Percy Bengough, Machinists; Bill Page, U.B.CJ.; and Bill Bartlett, Blacksmiths, are among the prominent figures, but the most creditable work done since then in the A.F.of L. unions has been carried on by the rank and file members like Jack Flynn of the Steam and Operating Engineers, the outstanding member of the Trade Union Educational League, and Harold Pritchett of the Shingle Weavers. Percy Bengough The builders have been the men who or- Secy., t.&l.c. garnzecJ the Workers' Unity League unions, the loggers, miners, foodworkers, the unemployed: George Drayton, Arthur Evans, the organizer and leader of the Camp Workers' Trek; George Miller, Fishermen and Cannery Workers' Union, Page One Hundred Twenty-two and others whose names will be known some day, with men like Oscar Salonen, Ivan Emery and George Browne of the unattached waterfront workers' unions, who earned the hatred of the Shipping Federation for their work on the docks. Many more besides these carried on the work of the trades unions. Some died at their posts; some stayed with it through many years of discrimination and blacklisting; some "fell by the wayside"; some went down the road that leads to oblivion with the curses of betrayed workers ringing in their ears. They made the movement what it is. The men and women in it today will earn a place beside the honored ones of the past if they bend all their energies towards drawing in all the thousands of unorganized into a unified movement, not based on class collaboration but with militant policies that will better the lot of the wage earning class. If this is done thoroughly, here and throughout the Dominion, the Trades Congress may soon hold another annual convention where the second one was held in 1874—in the House of Commons at Ottawa. (L*—i Page One Hundred Twenty-three THE WORKING-CLASS PRESS A Necessary Weapon We cannot close without a word or two about the long, uphill struggle to build a workers' press, a press that would be at &..,........, the same time a herald, a propagandist, and an organizer of our labor movement. Millionaires were scarce in the early days of B.C. It was a country of workers, and the majority of the papers that sprang up had to reflect that condi- IPJF tion and express the hopes and desires of actual workers. Many papers were established by working printers, most of whom were trades unionists and a few avowed socialists, who packed their small hand-presses along with them and set them up wherever they saw a chance to make a living. They had no labor slogans at their mastheads, but they dealt with every question from the viewpoint of the working class. The first of these was the Cariboo Sentinel, the first and only paper published in the Cariboo during the gold-rush of 1860, which upheld the rights of the miners before everything else, supporting their political demands and voicing their grievances, of which they had many. On one occasion (June 23, 1866), they called a protest meeting to which the miners came from every part of the Cariboo. This was the largest meeting .that, until then, had been held in the Colony and the first protest meeting in the history of the Province. Their purpose was to consider the upstart tyrannies of Justice Matthew Begbie, now considered the shining ornament among B.C. jurists, and they denounced him in unmistable terms. The first actual labor paper, however, in the Province, was the Industrial News of Victoria. It was the official organ of the Knights of Labor and lasted for two years, 1885 and 1886. It took the lead for a mechanics' lien to be placed on the Statute Page One Hundred Twenty-four George Drayton, First Editor B.C. Workers' News -^tiWT^r/-" 1W& INDICATOR - \mmMmmm°% OUHVSfi* . - • - ': STRIKE BULLETIN Labor'w'matc ©R6AH12 F r L:.!^ __ ^.f—-^ E^HER-La»or# ADVOCATE , ) %yB&mtmtKf bar Gas, Buil&m^o Bread " ^.k*** 'u '«*— *-*» ^P°£ J*?**?^^ $ Western SocidtsU? C?r^|Sfe ^ J |\K^*i^i; *;'! Vj bv WefcterrsJ Clarion hpjp£ J . ,} VCrTS ,^J; f|e Mfekt £*a§er ' I tn 0KITISK COLUMBIA FHMATMmiSf i IMS! * ^ ' " "" **"
@en, "Copy signed by the author Other copies: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/12394287 Bruce, Malcolm ; Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection"@en ; edm:hasType "Books"@en ; dcterms:identifier "HD8109.B72 B4"@en, "I-1772-III-0221"@en ; edm:isShownAt "10.14288/1.0377578"@en ; dcterms:language "English"@en ; edm:provider "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en ; dcterms:publisher "[Vancouver] : [Broadway Printers]"@en ; dcterms:rights "Images provided for research and reference use only. For permission to publish, copy, or otherwise distribute these images please contact digital.initiatives@ubc.ca."@en ; dcterms:source "Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. HD8109.B72 B4"@en ; dcterms:subject "Working class--British Columbia"@en, "Labor--British Columbia"@en, "Labor unions--British Columbia"@en, "Labor movement--British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:title "Builders of British Columbia"@en ; dcterms:type "Text"@en .