Injunctions, fines used
against Skyway

The courts continued to play a
More and more direct role in B.C.

labor disputes as an additional 15

Strikers at Vancouver’s -Skyway
Luggage Company awaited the
Outcome of a second series of
Contempt of court proceedings
Initiated by the U.S. company in
the 10-week-old strike.

Earlier, Local 1 of the Upholsters
International Union and eight
Members of the union, including
business agent Penny Goronuk,
were fined a total of $2,700 after
being held to be in contempt of an
injunction issued April 30 .which
Specifically prohibited strikers
from interfering with “‘ingress and
€gress of people and vehicles to
and from the premises of the
Plaintiff (Skyway Luggage).”

As well as determining: what
action should be taken against the
Istrikers now before the courts —
Including jail sentences of up to
three years — the current hearings
are expected to issue a second
order which will direct the union to
‘allow Skyway to move a truck
loaded with about 1,200 pieces of
hot luggage which has been stalled
at the luggage plant since May 11.

The moving of the truck has
€come a central issue in the
dispute, which began on April 6
When the 100 workers, mostly
Women and immigrant workers,
Went on strike to back their
demand for a $3.50 increase in
Wages over two years. Wages in
the plant currently range from
$2.85 per hour to $3.30.

Goronuk explained that to many
of the strikers the loaded truck has
great ‘‘symbolic value.” She said
that the company has tried to move
the truck a number of times since
May 11, and on one occasion drove
the truck into the picket line
knocking one picketer to the
ground.

Goronuk also denied any tam-
pering with the truck, after plant
manager R. E. Kingston had
charged that all of the tires on the
truck had been deflated and sugar
had been dumped into the truck’s
fuel tank. The Tribune found the

truck to be in apparent good order, -

with all tires fully inflated the
same day that Kingston made his
charges.

However, Goronuk stressed that
the union was not making any
attempt to stop the truck from
leaving the Skyway” premises.
“We're picketing that’s all. There
are four orfive of us on the line and
we’re picketing in a peaceful
manner back and forth across the
entrance to the property. And we
will continue to picket until we are
ordered to stop by the courts.”’

Since the strike began, the
shocking conditions under which
the employees have been working
have become public information.
Though the minimum wage in B.C.
is $3 per hour, most of the Skyway
workers make only $2.80 per hour.
As one striker said, “‘After two
weeks work, I go home with $160.
With a family of six kids, that’s not
much money.”’

Action urged to halt
Peltier extradition

A renewed campaign demanding
that justice minister Ron Basford
not sign the order allowing ex-

tradition to the United States of

Leonard Peltier was launched last
Week immediately following the
decision Friday by Mr. Justice W.
A. Schultz that there was sufficient
evidence to send him to trial.
Justice Schultz ruled that a
‘prima facie” case had been
€stablished on four counts — two of
Murder, one of attempted murder
and one of burglary — against
Peltier, although one count of
attempted murder in Oregon was
thrown out for lack of evidence.
Following the decision, sup-
Porters of Peltier began a new
Campaign to win asylum for the
Oglala Sioux while his lawyers
began mapping a case for appeal to
the Federal Court of Canada.
The appeal procedure may hold
Up the case for several months but
the final decision on the extradition
rests with justice minister Basford
and it is toward him that the
Campaign has been directed.
While Basford offered no com-
Ment as to his final decision,
Members of the Peltier defence
Committee marched through
downtown Vancouver streets to a

VLC backs
peace appeal

Delegates to the Vancouver and
District Labor Council voted last
Week to endorse the Stockholm
Peace Appeal — the sixth such
Council in this province to move
endorsement.

Labor councils in Victoria,
Campbell River, Kamloops,
Nanaimo and New Westminster
had already voiced their support
for the world-wide appeal.

>

rally in the courthouse square
reiterating their. demand for
political asylum for Peltier.

Advocates of Peltier’s bid for
asylum — including several trade
unions, the Vancouver and District
Labor Council, the Communist
Party, the New Democratic Party
and the Congress of Canadian
Women — have argued that the
FBI charges against Peltier have
been deliberately framed and have
stressed that he could not obtain a
fair trial in South Dakota where he
is wanted.

Delegates to the Vancouver and
District Labor Council voted at
their last meeting to instruct
council secretary Paddy Neale to
follow up earlier council action on
the case and press Basford not to
sign the final extradition order.

A benefit sponsored by the
Freedom for Leonard Peltier
Coalition has been organized for
this Saturday, June 25 in the
Fishermen’s Hall, 138 E. Cordova,
Vancouver. Admission is $3.

strikers

In addition to the starvation
wages, conditions at the Skyway
factory are right out of the 19th
century. Safety guards have been
taken off the machines to speed
production and the plant itself is 50
years old and in a state of
disrepair. Goronuk said that the
union has been fighting an unen-
ding battle with the company just
to bring the standards up to a
minimum level.

Incredibly, workers in the plant
are escorted to and from the
washrooms and timed, and em-
ployees have been docked up to two
hours pay for talking, or for time
lost: by standing in line to use one,
rarely cleaned washroom.

One striker said that things are
so bad in the Skyway plant that
many workers have to bring their
own toilet. paper from home
because the company will provide
only three rolls per day for the
more than 80 women workers.

The B.C. Federation of Labor, in
issuing a ‘‘hot’’ declaration for all
Skyway products - correctly
described the working conditions
at Skyway as a “sweatshop which
most people think disappeared
from B.C. 30 years ago.”

Adding to the indignation and the
determination felt by the striking
workers is the fact that Skyway is
an American-owned company
which made $10.7 million in profits
last year from only two plants —
the one in Vancouver and the main
plant in Seattle where 300 workers
work for as little as $1.95 per hour.

The company attitude to the
dispute was summed up by plant
manager Kingston during
negotiations when he said: ‘‘This is
a minimum wage industry and it’s
going to stay that way. If they (the
strikers) want more money, they
can go elsewhere. I can always find
others.”

However, as many of the strikers
realize, there is nowhere else for
them to go in this period of
unemployment, particularly for
female, immigrant workers. As
one woman noted, ‘‘Rich people
with an education wouldn’t come to
work here. It’s we poor people who
must because there’s nothing else.
But, I won’t work any more for
$2.80 an hour.”

As the strike drags on, support
for the workers has been coming
from many quarters, particularly
from the community in the im-
mediate vicinity of the Skyway
plant,. where a strike support
committee has been formed to help
the workers in any way possible.

In an attempt to bolster their
strength and dwindling resources
as the strike drags on, the 500
members of the local union voted
unanimously this week to join the
International Brotherhood of
Teamsters after receiving ap-
proval from the international

See SKYWAY, pg. 12

In a group portrait taken before the courts ordered them to allow free
Luggage Company plant, striking members of the

access to the Skyway

‘

Upholsterers International Union Local 1 block the driveway to the
plant penning in behind them a huge truck loaded with 1,200 pieces of
hot luggage. —Norman Nawrocki photo

The terse message carried by Mulan Lai underscores the brutality of
South African police whose first victims in last week’s shootings were

hardly older than she.

—Sean Griffin photo

Rally protests police
murders in S. Africa

Some 150 people in Vancouver
Saturday joined protesters all over
the world in denouncing the police
massacre of South African

students in Soweto, outside Johan-

nesburg last week.

At least 35 were killed and more
than 200 injured as police fired
openly into the demonstration at
Soweto, a peaceful parade of 10,000
elementary school students who

were protesting the mandatory use _

of Afrikaans as a medium of in-
struction in schools.

A senior police officer,
questioned about. the brutal
shootings, replied cynically: ‘““We
fired into them; it’s no use firing
over their heads.”

The following day in Johannes-
burg, thousands of black students,
joined by 1,000 white students from
the University of Witwatersrand
marched to city hall to protest the
shootings only to be attacked as
they approached city hall by
motorcycle gangs of whites who
assaulted them with chains, clubs
and broken bottles.

Police did nothing to.stop the
attack and-intervened only when
demonstrators sought to defend
themselves.

They then opened fire on the
demonstrators with automatic
weapons.

By the time rioting had subsided
Saturday, the death toll had ex-
ceeded 120 with more than 1,000
wounded. Hundreds have also been
arrested.

“The Vorster regime in South
Africa is fascist — make no

mistake about it,” alderman Harry

Rankin told the rally in Vancouver
Saturday. “It is a country which
rests on slavery.”

In a sharp statement aimed at
public opinion in this country,
Rankin: noted that ‘‘it is time’’ to
start considering actions to isolate
the South African regime.

“We've got to start talking about
boycotts of South African goods,
about pieket lines on-stores that
carry South African products,”’ he
declared. ‘‘And we’ve got to start
doing something about it.”

Rankin also suggested that he
would be considering advancing a
motion before Vancouver city
council denouncing the brutal
murders by the Vorster apartheid
government. .

Earlier, Clive Lytle, speaking on
behalf of the B.C. Federation of

Labor had stressed the need to
“stop our government’s complicity
in what is going on in South Africa.

“We have to bring the govern-
ment to a _ position of moral
decency instead of its historic part
in that system of slavery,” he
stated, noting that the Federation
would continue its efforts in sup-
port of black South Africans.

Anglican minister Reverend
Phillip Thatcher, noted that it was
significant that, despite the many
areas of oppression of South
Africans, it was the language issue
over which the protest erupted.

“Language is a symbol of the
refusal of black people to accept
that whites will define who they are
and who they will be,”’ he said.

The forced instruction of
Afrikaans — the language of the
ruling Boer faction in South Africa
— is seen as a symbol of oppression
and a means of perpetuating that
oppression.

Students want to be taught in
English which will give them a link
with the outside world. 7

Vancouver Burrard NDP MLA
Rosemary Brown told the rally
outside the Queen Elizabeth
Theatre that it was ‘‘tragic’”’ that it
took an act of brutality to make
people aware again of the struggle
going on in South Africa.

“Yet despite their talk of human
rights there is no one more silent
on apartheid than the federal and
provincial governments in this
country which are now doing more
business in South Africa than ever
before,”’ she said.

She joined other speakers in
urging a boycott of South African
goods, citing the Social Credit
government’s decision to rein-
troduce South African wines as a
specific area for action.

The Southern Africa Action
Coalition, sponsors of Saturday’s
rally, urged people to send
telegrams. of protest to prime
minister Trudeau-and the South
African embassy and to write to
MLAs protesting the ordering of
South African liquors for B.C.
liquor stores.

The group also called on the
federal government to end the
Commonwealth Trade Preference
still enjoyed by South Africa and to
recall the trade commissioner and
all diplomats from South Africa.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JUNE 25, 1976—Page 3