a ie ane nem aren sar A esi , Ses Se ; < = fe a * : = : : = Segregated in “slave camps” remote from urban centres, jobless single men defeated “Iron Heel” Bennett’s scheme to make them invisible. They fought the blacklist, organized protests and established a union. In December, 1934 they returned to Vancouver under their own self-imposed discipline in the first relief camp workers’ general strike. & S were nothing but tarpaper shacks, with eight to 10 men in each shack,” says Willis Shaparla, looking back to his Own experiences in the relief camps 50-odd years ago. “There were single cots laid out across the bare floot with a straw pallet, a pillow and, if you were lucky, a second blanket.” For Shaparala, as for most of the single unemployed in the 1930s, the physicial des- cription of the relief camps doesn’t go much beyond that — because there wasn’t much more to describe. The original relief camps, set up in 1931 in British Columbia as well as a few other provinces, were administered under emer- gency federal legislation by the provincial governments. They were designated as “work camps” because, as one advisor to R.B. Bennett emphasized: “. . .it is unthin- Kable that we should resign ourselves to the development of a huge dole system, wher- eby the unemployed receive charity from public or private sources without. ..making any return to the community.” But a year later, a confidential report to Bennett accused the province and camp administration of giving work to men “‘who were not bona fide unemployed” and pro- viding relief at levels that were close to wages. The federal government intervened to establish the federal-provincial Fordham Commission which took over administra- tion, reduced the number of camps, evicted several thousand unemployed and cut the relief payments to $7.50 per month. But it was General A.G.L. McNaughton’s 1932 scheme to bring the relief camps under the Department of Defence that ultimtaely framed the Tory government’s policy of dealing with the hundreds of thousands of single unemployed: segregate them in iso- lated camps where they would be removed from the urban centres — and forgotten. McNaughton’s scheme for relief camps — within months they would be known universally as “slave camps” — was officially launched by order-in-council in October, 1932. Purported to provide work for men “on undertakings of general advantage to Canada,” the plan really had another pur- pose which McNaughton laid out ina report prepared in 1934: “Projects have been directed to the breaking up of the conges- tion of single homeless men in the principal centres of population and if these had not been dispersed, it is hardly conceivable that we would have escaped without having had recourse to the military forces to suppress disorder.” That “breaking up the congestion” of single unemployed was the essential objec- tive of the Tory government was revealed even three years earlier by Labor Minister Gideon Robertson who wrote to Bennett: “If these transients were provided with employment opportunities, segregated in camps,. . .and placed under proper supervi- sion (it would) relieve the communities of the transient menace which is growing more difficult and serious.” The depression policies of the govern- ment were also enshrined in the financial administration of the camps. McNaughton was instructed to keep the costs per man to $1 per day, a sharp contrast with the $6 per man and higher costs undertaken by governments in Ontario and Manitoba under the provincial schemes. By imposing spartan, military condi- tions, he did it: in his 1934 report, he noted that the costs per man had been $1.17 per man per day — of which only 20 cents was paid to the men in wages. In return they worked eight hours a day, 44 hours a week preparing road grade, clearing brush, “grubbing” (digging up roots and brush) for airstrips. . . It was camp conditions that sparked the first protests. : Robert “Doc” Savage — the “Doc” was added as he became known for his first aid skill, developed because of the absence of doctors — remembers an incident at the camp in Squamish touched off, strangely enough, by the dinnerware used in camp. “We used to have old enamel tin ware and chunks of the enamel were always breaking off. One man — we called him Sinbad — swallowed a piece with his food and got sick over it. “We played it up and the men staged a protest over it. We took every one of the dishes and through them out into the salt chuck,” he says. ““You’d look out over the ocean and there were cups and plates ever- ywhere, floating and sinking.” Shaparla who was part of the same pro- test, remembers that they were forced to eat sandwiches for a day or two, but the solidar- ity of the men finally won the point: they got proper porcelain dinnerware. “As a result of that incident, we decided to hold a meeting and call a strike — and it made me realize that we could organize and we could strike. “It was around incidents like that that people were becoming organized all over the province on a local, camp basis,” he says. The relief camp was a meeting ground, throwing together the young unemployed from Prairie farms with World War I vete- rans, the immigrants from Europe and elsewhere with members of the Young Communist League and the Communist Party. And the causes of the economic crisis that had thrown them together dominated the nightly discussions. “There were discussions every night — we used to have concerts as well — and often it was the older men from Britain and Scotland with solid trade union experience who led them,” Shaparla recalls. 4 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, ON-TO-OTTAWA SUPPLEMENT “I remember even back then looking at the timber around us at Squamish, the phenomenal salmon run up the Squamish River, the abundance in resources that was all around us. I can remember thinking then that something was fundamentally wrong with this government and this society.” It was the establishment of the Relief Camp Workers Union that transformed local protests and nightly discussions into a movement that changed the history of this country. Although the union functioned for some time as an outgrowth of the Single Men’s Unemployed Association in Vancouver as men were dispatched to camps from the Employment Service office at 411 Duns- muir, the union was formalized at a confer- ence in Kamloops in July, 1933. The aims of the organization were later set out in the constitution: “To organize all relief camp workers into the union. To promote and lead the strug- gles of the relief camp workers for higher living standards. To rely upon the principles of trade unionism and the democratic deci- sions of the membership to put forward our policy of struggle and, if need be, to use the form of strike if so decided. To actively support all measures that will give the right of franchise to all camp workers. To give assistance to all workers in their struggle for ‘non-contributory unemployment insurance, adequate old age pension, compensation for disability and sickness. In the spirit of the trade union movement, to resist all efforts to enforce our participation in impe- nialist war.” Founded initially as the B.C. Relief Camp Workers’ Union, and later changed The striking camp workers constructed a model of a relief camp hut and set it on the to simply the RCWU at the urging of Workers’ Unity League organizer Art) Evans, the union set up shop at 52% Cor-| dova Street under the leadership of Mal- colm MacLeod and Erie “Smokey” Cumber. From that same office, came the first issue of the Relief Camp Worker, the eight-page mimeographed paper that was to become the sparkplug for RCWU organ- ization in more camps around the province. “The paper was the greatest single organ- izational force that the RCWU had,” Sha- parla recalls, “It was a kind of invisible contact among all the men in the camps.” Since possession of the paper meant the blacklist, the paper was usually smuggled into camps, tucked into the corner of a knapsack as men registered in Vancouver for dispatch out to a camp. Occasionally it was mailed out as the union devised the tactic of using envelopes from some promi nent Vancouver businesses to disguise it. “Everybody who was any good at organ izing at all took papers and cards back into camp with him,” Bob Jackson, another relief camp worker, remembers. Men moving in and out of the camps did so for a variety of reasons — leaving in the late summer to go to the Prairies for the harvest was one of them. But as the RCWU organization took hold, the Department of National Defence countered it with 4) repressive campaign of evictions and black- | listing, throwing men out for “organizing” or “agitating.” Police often came into the camps late at night and picked up men fingered for agitating and drove them out ona lonely road before abandoning them to make their way to the closest town on foot. On their cards, camp authorities would stamp the words of the blacklist: “‘Evicted from Camp” and later, the letter “G”. “When you went back to the relief camp office, you couldn’t use your own card of your name, so you made up another — often men had 50 or more names,” says Savage. “You might be in camp for a month or a week or maybe just overnight before they kicked you out. But if you were in a camp that was organized, they couldn’t just throw you out.” And organize they did. Jackson recalls that often they would go into the camps at night “and meet with guys in the washhouse © the same way we organized the logging camps later, set up some contact and organ- ization and then move on to the next camp.” : By the summer of 1934, there were RCWU camp committees in a number of - camps in the Fraser Valley, the Interior, the — Kettle Valley and elsewhere. In August, a delegates conference of the union met in Salmon Arm and resolved: “That the camp workers’ union, its delegates and members combat the attempts of the Department of National Defence by placing before the _ workers an organizational program for ral- lying the relief camp workers to militant struggle; for work at trade union rates of wages and for the recognition of their elected committees and unions.” Four months later, the RCWU was to test its strength in the first general strike of camp workers in December, 1934. back of a truck for the May Day parade in 1935. The ‘‘NDD rules” refers to the Department of Defence military rules which governed the camps. Title photo: The relief camp at Harrison Mills after it became a forestry project under provincial jurisidiction in 1936.