Page Six PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE July 9, 1987 The Péoples Advocate Published Weekly by the PROLETARIAN PUBLISHING ASSN. Boom 10, 163 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. Telephone: Trinity 2019 One Year ..--..-+-- $1.89 Half Year Three Months -50 Single Copy Make All Checks Payable to: The People’s Advocate. Send All Copy and Manuscript to the Chairman of the Editorial Board. Send all Monies and Letters Pertain- ing to Advertising and Circulation to Business Mgr. Vancouver, B.C., Friday, July 9, 1937 Renegade Miner Boosts Company Union ECENTLY there appeared in the daily papers a two-column letter signed by one Imer Beamish of Wells, B.C., in the Cariboo district where a strike of miners has been in progress for some weeks. The Beamish letter, obviously written by a literate shyster or pub- licity agent of the mining companies involved, is another boost tor the company union in the well organized campaign to extend that anti- working-class form of organization throughout the province to replace genuine trade unions. But who is Beamish? He is a renegade miner, or stool-pigeon posing as a miner, who was kicked out of the miners’ union because of his close association and cooperation with the mine management and his efforts to breals the strike. In the letter the miming company is praised to the skies, wages are high and condi- tions excellent—although the wage rate is below: that paid in the Bridge River district and sili- cosis prevalent and accidents frequent. Beamish was the creature the company used to form a company union for the purpose ot breaking the strike and putting the real union out of existence. This-fake union was called &Cariboo Gold Quartz Emmloyees’ Co-opera- tive Association.” and is frankly admitted by Beamish to be “fashioned on the lines of the organization at Trail.” This refers to General Manager Blaylock’s notorious company union which has been the chief mstrument for the starvation rate of wages and abominable work- ing conditions prevailing in the smelter town for the last twenty years. The company union stinks in the nostrils of every worker who, to eke out a livelihood, found himself compelled to work under its pernicious influence. The miners of the Cariboo are well aware of the nature of company-controlled qmions which are always oficered by company rats and stoolpigeons, and will have none of it. This explains why Beamish and his mas- ters have signally failed in putting their abor- tion across. Meanwhile, organized labor throughout the province should do its utmost to assist, morally and financially, the embattled miners of the Gariboo who are fighting for the preservation of trade unionism, not only for themselves but for the entire working-class of British Co- lumbia. The CCF Convention EEN disappointment is the reaction of all progressive people, including a jarge number of the rank and file of the party itself, as a result of the recent provincial convention of the CCF. For the convention marked no advance; on the contrary, it swung the party further to the right. The officers’ reports were chiefly a record of routine stewerdship with the exception of the report of the president which included recom- mendations for some organizational changes and improvement 10 the agitational and vote- getting equipment of menibers. No attempt was made to estimate the changes in the politi- eal and economic situation in the province, 20 recognition of the menacing comeback ot the Tory party, main political instrument of re- action. Neither was there any serious attempt to get at the real reason for the failure of the GCF to elect more members to the provincial house than in 1933. The Right Wing leaders contented them- selves with explanations such as the Connell split and intemal struggle, the blame for the latter being placed on the advanced section ot the CCE which was urging the united front of all progressive bodies in joimt strugele against reaction, the things that would have helped the CCF. The general attitude regard- ing the failure of the CCE to adyance seemed to be that expressed by Mark Twain in his famous prayer, VizZ.: thanking God that it was not worse. To be sure, the Communist Party was ac- cused of unduly influencing the CCE toward unity, thereby damaging it, notwithstanding that the two new seats won by the CCF in the recent election were precisely im those ridings where the CCF clubs, in defiance of the Pro- vincial Executive’s ukases, formed a popular front which included the trade unions and the Communist Party, whereas the two seats lost were in ridings in which there was no united front and the defeated candidates were rabid epponents otf unity. While the come-back of Toryism was almost wholly unnoticed, the Communist Party was attacked viciously as the main danger by the controlling Right Wingers and their Trotzky- ist supporters. A great deal of the time of the convention was used up in Red-baiting, which ran rampant, and in the debate which preceded the expulsion of A. M. Stephen trem the party for his struggle against war and fascism and his fight for unity- The line as regards the Trotzkyists in the party was given by Dr. Telford, who declared that the CCF would not permit the organiza- tion to be used as a battleground of Trotzky- ism and