City of Vancouver Archives

e Early logging camp near Vancouver. The McNair Fraser Logging Camp on Hollyburn Ridge show bunk houses typical of the period. Rail line hauled logs to the

water about 2 miles away. Photo taken in 1911.

Continued from previous page

LW.W. Millworkers from Japan struck in 1903
to save the job of their foreman. And immi-
grants also from India, Finland, Sweden, Nor-
way and the Ukraine provided the required
skills and muscle, not because they were par-
ticularly fond of forest industry work but be-
cause conditions in their home countries
drove them to immigrate, and the industry
saw them as a source of cheap, exploitable
labour.

So people were brought over from Europe
and Asia because the employers believed they
could treat them in ways that would be unac-
ceptable for native citizens:

Thomas Shaugnessy, CPR President after
whom the wealthy Vancouver district was
named, said of railway construction workers,
as others had said of loggers:

“Men who seek employment on railway
construction are, as a rule, a class accus-
tomed to roughing it. They know when
they go to work that they must put up
with the most primative kind of camp ac-
commodation ... it would be a huge mis-
take to send out any more of these men
from Wales, Scotland or England...it is
only prejudicial to the cause of immigra-
tion to import men who come here ex-
pecting to get high wages, a feather bed
and a bath tub.”

Shaugnessy did not lack support from gov-
ernment: C. A. Rigg, Director of the Employ-
ment Service of Canada, said about 1924:

“One of the great problems is the ne-
cessity for maintaining in Canada, under
our present industrial conditions, an
enormous mobile army of workers which
must be ready to drift from pillar to post,
from one area to another, quickly and
freely in order to meet the demands of
industry.” i

Wobbly strikes, influenced both by their an-
archist ideology and by the itinerent lifestyles
of most of their membership, were quick,
spontaneous, often consisted chiefly of the
workers drifting off, more or less in a body, to
some other place, some other work. Later,
they were to be much criticized oF Pa ee it

iven their membe!
oo Bence oF bush work in those days,
there was much choice.

n organizing these people the I.W.W. had
more in mind than “cleaning up the
camps”. They knew that to appeal to the
average “working stiff,” whether Swedish
or Japanese or whatever, they had to be able
to show practical results. They probably pro-
vided the leadership, or most of it, for a B.C.
(Lower Mainland) lumber handlers and long-
shoremen’s strike in October of 1907, which
succeeded in winning the eight hour day. This
was a Showcase of I.W.W. orientation and phi-
losophy: eighteen nationalities joined in, fol-
lowing the advice of a Prince Rupert Wobbly:

“When the factory whistle blows, it
does not call us to work as Irishmen,
Germans, Americans, Russians Greeks,
Poles, Negroes, or Mexicans. It calls us
to work as wage-earners, regardless of
the country in which we were born, or
the colour of our skins. Why not get to-
gether, then.as wage-earners.”

They certainly did improve camp conditions
in logging, from California to B.C. to Ontario.
Every logger and construction worker who
has a clean, dry bed, or eats a good meal in
decent conditions owes a debt to the IWW.

But they were after bigger game. They were
“syndicalists”. Bill Haywood, who had risen to
prominence in the Western Federation of Min-
ers, said that syndicalism was “socialism with
its working clothes on.” It sought to deliver
working people from the bondage of raw
nineteenth century capitalism by union ac-
tion, job action alone. “Political democracy”
wasn’t enough. The enslaving system had to
be destroyed by concerted industral action of
the whole working class, and then only could
a just society arise. “We shall bring to birth a
new world from the ashes of the old” was a
line that in those days had a very specific
meaning.

mos Tobias (Tom) Hill, a Finnish im-
migrant who was recruited in 1915
by the I.W.W. to organize Finn bush-
workers in Northern Ontario, and
who continued to do so for thirty years, was
certainly dedicated to the dream of a new, in-
dustrialy managed commonwealth. He and
others like Alf Hautamaki worked with log
drivers struggling for better wages and condi-

tions along the Algoma Central. Like others
after them, they distributed leaflets describing
the better conditions that had been won on
the West Coast; the $5 day, the eight hour day,
improved camp conditions. They worked
with many who later would become promi-
nent in B.C. struggles; J.M. Clarke who was
still working with the “red” leadership in Oc-
tober of 1948, Jack Gillbanks, Glen Lamont,
the Palmgren brothers - men who had a dis-
tinctly “revolutionary” view of things, but
were not Wobblies.

What was on the mind of Neil Gainey as he
worked on the river drives, or of Henry Ned-
ergard’s father, Isak, as he fell giant redwoods
in Northern California? (see page 15). It is not
likely that many such members harboured
elaborate syndicalist theories. They sang
songs that made fun of the preachers’ promis-
es of a good life in the hereafter; “You'll get
pie in the sky, bye and bye.” That skepticism
was no doubt triggered also by revolutionary
promises of “a new world.”

But they certainly wanted more out of life
than clean camps. Speaking to me sixty years
after that Kootenay strike, Gainey was still an-
gry, but he was angrier about the business-
man’s failure to recognize his equal humanity
than he was about bedbugs, or about not hav-
ing showers for a decent wash.

And Isak? And the tens of thousands of
Scandanavian and French Canadian, etc., for-
est industry workers across Canada? We have
to guess. I think they wanted, among other
things, a “place” for themselves and their fam-
ilies. For the immigrants in a new world; a
place denied them in the old, (often because
they were younger sons whose older brothers
inherited the already too small farms) and
that would be denied them and his fellow
workers again, in this exploitive new world,
but for strong union action. And they knew, as

~those predeeding and succeeding them in log-

ging camps have always known, that short of
the great day the leaders talked about, the
revolutionary “pie in the sky,” the only way to
gain a “place” in this new world was with
money.

An anonymous Wobbly, another immigrant
from Sweden, put it this way: “We want a
break in the monotony of camp life...We
want amusements, comfort, leiswre. We also

Continued on page fifteen

LUMBERWORKER/NOVEMBER, 1995/9