History of the I.W.A.

Continued from page thirteen

sent money and messages of encouragement.
The one voice that was conspicuously silent was
that of Joe Smallwood.”

Here again is Ladd again from his 1983
speech:

“When I said to Mr. Ross Moore President of
the company at that time, ‘is there any way to
get an agreement?’ He said “Yes, Mr. Ladd,
there is. Take a wage cut.” On December 31,
1958, after receiving a 97% strike vote, we went

on strike against the AND Company. I was out ~

at Gander having come in from Ottawa and
there were a number of company people on the
plane and one of the officials of the AND Com-
pany came over and said, ‘Mr. Ladd, would
you like a lift into Grand Falls?...It would
give us an opportunity to talk’. I said ‘Well,
if you have something to talk about,
talk.’...’Well,’ he said ‘...Do you remember
the strike in Quebec, the asbestos strike,
which Dupplessis crushed...let me tell you
something , if the I.W.A. goes on strike in
Newfoundland, that asbestos strike will
look like a tea party...You’ll find the Gov-
ernment of Newfoundland will support the
companies and not the union....they owe
us and we mean to collect.’ Oh, how right he
was.

“..we had many problems conducting a strike
of that size, over the distances to be covered,
but by the tenth of February, 1959 the I.W.A.
had won the loggers’ strike. The company was
putting out feelers, we had people meeting in
Montreal with Mr. Elliot Little of the Pulp and
Paper Association. The President of the Con-
gress, Claude Jodoin, discussed how we could
resolve the matter and put it to bed.

“Well, on the 11th of February,...I turned
on the radio and there was a story about a
wire, a telegram that had been sent to the
Premier from Badger and it said that 800
I.W.A. loggers were marching on the jail at
Grand Forks to release the prisoners that
had been taken by the R.C.M.P....and across
the land there were great headlines that
said ‘Civil War, Civil War in Newfound-
land.’ Hundreds of loggers are on the
march and attacking a town. I got the
information through the telegraph who it
was (that sent the wire) it was a merchant,
a very nice guy, sympathetic, thought he
was (when) he sent the wire to Mr. Small-
wood saying that 800 loggers were march-
ing. And I said to him, ‘that’s not true, is
it? He said, ‘no, no no...I was drinking. I
was drunk,’

Ladd made the merchant wire Smallwood
with a retraction and an apology. He also sent a
wire himself, wired, saying that the story was
totally false. Smallwood privately accepted the
apology, advising the merchant that he “should
never mix liquor wit a strike.” But publicly, he
had the hysteria that he needed.

o on the evening of February 12th, 1959,

Joey Smallwood broke his long silence.

He vilified the I.W.A, declaring that it

was not conducting a strike, but a civil
war: “How dare these outsiders come into this
decent Christian province and by such desper-
ate methods try to seize control of our province’s
main industry? How dare they come in here
and spread their black poison of class hatred
and bitter bigoted prejudices?” He said he
would create a new union for the loggers, the
“Newfoundland Brotherhood of Woodworkers,”
and promised them that they would qualify for
Wel ake the minute they resigned form the

When it was obvious that the loggers would
remain loyal to the I.W.A. - Ladd was drawing
many more to his union rallies than Smallwood
could attract to the “founding meeting” of his

creation - the Premier resorted to the most
bizarre legislation ever passed in a Cana-
dian jurisdiction. On March 6th the Provin-
cial House of Assembly passed two laws,
the first decertified the I.W.A’s two locals,
and the second permitted the Government
to dissolve any trade union in the province
whose leaders had been “convicted of such
heinous crimes as white slavery, dope-ped-
dling, man-slaughter, embezzlement, such
notorious crimes as these.”

Smallwood was determined to whip up a
mood of public hysteria, and the simple truth
that no I.W.A. leader had been convicted of, or
even charged with such crimes was no deter-
rent.

Tragically, and through no fault of the union,
he was soon to be greatly assisted in his smear
campaign. Three days after the passing of the
two laws, a member of the Newfoundland Con-

TUMBER@SAWMILL
WORKERS’ I

i

¢ Following the Reesor Siding incident Members of Local 2995 were marched to the Kapuskasing

Inn hotel by the Ontario Provincial Police were they were charged with unlawful assembly.

stabulary was killed at Badger.

Following is the account of events from Ray
Timson, the only reporter present;

“Marching three abreast and carrying
nightsticks, a column of 66 policemen
waded into a throng of striking loggers
last night, clubbed two of them uncon-
scious, flattened dozens more while wives
and children screamed for them to stop. I
watched the attack on mainly defenseless
men for about an hour. One Newfoundland
policeman was hit with a two foot long
piece of birch wood and is in Hospital in
Grand Forks in critical condition. One
Mountie was punched in the face. Both
blows were struck after the police started
wielding bullies. The police sticks were
eighteen inches long. I heard three sicken-
ing skull cracks. None of the loggers were
arrested; most had been beaten to the
ground, hand-cuffed and dragged to their
feet. At the height of the club-swinging,
which occurred beside the Full Gospel
church, children stood watching and began
crying. Their mothers cried with them. One
shouted ‘the men can’t do anything, there
are too many police.’ At another point, a
logger standing in a backyard bordering
the road watched the police escorting hand-
cuffed, dazed loggers away. He shouted
‘You sure have guts, haven’t you?’ An offi-
cer pointed to him and yelled ‘get that man,
get him now.’ The logger turned and fled
and about 25 mounts and policemen cleared
the fence like jack rabbits and chased him
down toward a row of houses. He was beaten
to the ground and arrested.”

Constable Ross, the injured policeman, died
the next day, and Earl Laing, a logger, was
charged with murder, but the charge was dis-
missed when no evidence was produced at trial
that Laing or the other loggers were armed
with anything capable of killing a man. Ross
may well have been killed when a fellow police-
man aimed a viscous blow at a logger, and hit
the wrong man. But the trial came too late. The
Newfoundland public, taken in by Smallwood
and an hysterically anti-union media, sup-
ported his increasingly general anti-labour
stance.

Outside Newfoundland, in media and govern-
ment, there was witlesWnend condemnation of
Smallwood’s tactics and legislation. Then Prime
Minister Deifenbaker, to his credit, refused a
Newfoundland request for R.C.M.P. reinforce-
ments and publicly criticized Smallwood for
conduct that invited violence. The R.C.M.P.
Commissioner, thus deprived of an opportunity
for more picket-bashing, resigned in disgust.
The International Labour Organization, a tri-
partite body set up by the United Nations,
denounced the “emergency labour laws.”

The strike wore on for months, but it was
essentially lost on March 9, 1959. It had cost
the I.W.A. over a million dollars. For thousands
of Newfoundland loggers and their families, it
had imposed an immense burden of sacrifice
and uttering: Smallwood had handsomely paid
his debt to the AND.

But Newfoundland loggers in their thousands
femme” loyal to the I.W.A for decades there-

r.

Continued on page fifteen

¢ At strike headquarters in Oppasatika, Ontario, Lumber and Sawmill Workers’ Union members

received strike pay.

14/LUMBERWORKER/JUNE, 1998