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