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LABOUR AND SOCIAL HISTORY

IWA ARCHIVES

= Seen outside the Duncan
Local 1-80 hall in 1953 were
local union officers and staff,
including Joe Poje (centre).

Duncan Local 1-80 opened
office over fifty years ago

It’s hard to believe that 50 years
have passed by since one of the
IWA’‘s pioneer locals opened its
current office in early December,
4953. Duncan Local 1-80 proud-
ley inaugarated its Brae Road
office to accolades that the new
facility was “a credit to the com-
munity in its design and equip-
ment.” The building, as it looks
very much today, contained
offices for the president, finan-
cial-secretary and business
agents. Downstairs was
reserved for the union hall,
where local union meetings are
still held today. On December
13, 1953 local loggers and mill-
workers streamed into the office
and hall to hold elections for the
upcoming IWA Region One and
B.C. Federation of Labour con-
ventions. Nineteen delegates
were elected for the IWA con-
vention, including local presi-
dent Tony Poje and financial sec-
retary Ed Linder. At the meeting,
the members approved a dues
assessment to support Interior
IWA members on strike (see
story right). The building com-
mittee reported on the growing
local union’s successes, saying
‘ the new office and hall “firmly
e establish our organization as a
permanent institution in the
communities embraced by Local
1-80.”

Former IWA president

spoke for public medicare
Forty years ago, as support for a
universal health care system in
Canada was reaching fever pitch,
the IWA‘s own former Region One
President Joe Morris, who was
then an Executive Vice President
of the CLC, was
invited to speak
at conference of
private medical
services plan
_ | providers in the
| state of Arizona.
Brother Morris
stood up at the
podium in
December ‘63 and told the prac-
tioners that, in Canada, public
medicare was on its way and no
private agency “has the right to
Pursue its existence, when the
goverment can do a better job.”
Jaws dropped in the crowd. He
added that Canadians were no
longer willing to wait another gen-
on for complete coverage. “In
_ my country, the end is in sight for
rivate medical plans,” he said,
g that benefits of modern
were seen as a right.

IWA ARCHIVES

= In 1953 Local 1-424 members near the community of Penny set up
picket camps along 35 miles of the Fraser River. :

Solidarity benefited Interior’s struggles

Bitter strike in B.C. Interior saw
IWA Coast locals dig deep to

help workers’ strive for parity
The IWA’s rich heritage points to
numerous historical struggles to help
out workers in parts of the country
when they were truly “in the barrel.”
A glowing example of this is one-
half century ago when woodworkers
in the Northern and Southern B.C.
Interior regions struck for union
security and wage parity with their
IWA bretheren on the Coast of B.C.
On September 28, 1953, 20 of 34
operations in the Northern Interior
walked off the job. Over 1,500 IWA
Local 1-424 members hit the bricks
and the whole international union
rallied behind them. On October 23,
Locals 1-417, 1-423, and 1-405 walked
out in 19 operations.
Coast local unions overwhelmingly

approved a special assesment to aug-
ment the IWA’s strike fund, boosting

strike pay to $15.00 a week for family
men. The same locals, assisted by the
Coast Women’s Auxliaries, gathered
over two tons of clothing to send to
the Interior region, mostly for kids.
At all conceivable points of railway,
airline and highway traffic junctions
in the Lower Mainland, Vancouver
Local 1-217 members set up informa-
tion pickets, warning scabs from
going to the Interior. Fund-raising
occured at the sub-local level too. Port
Alberni Local 1-85 members at the
Tahsis Inlet operation held a “smok-
er” (amateur boxing night) to raise
funds for the relief effort.

The B.C. Lumber Worker noted that
for the previous three years, Interior
lumber operators “have ruthlessly
used their economic power to dictate
conditions of employment for
Interior Lumber Workers...”

Up in Prince George, workers who
were sold lumber for their homes had
their last cheques frozen by the com-

panies, as the local fought to get their
wages released. The town’s CCF hall
set up a soup kitchen which served
moose stew three times a day. Local
farmers donated vegetables and mer-
chant donated foodstuffs. Some car
dealers suspended the need for pay-
ments from strikers.

Meanwhile, local unions bolstered
their picket lines to taken on compa-
ny goons, which would look for lines
with fewer IWA members to try to
crash through. In the local media, the
union was attacked as stories were
fabricated against the strikers.
Lumber bosses crept so low as to
send letters to strikers’ wives. One let-
ter from an employer in the
Thompson/Okanagaan wrote: “We
are writing this to the lady of the
house because we feel it is the moth-
er and the children who suffer in the
case of a shutdown...”

Wives of members in Galloway
and Canal Flats in the province’s
southeast, formed new Women’s
Auxiliaries and a Hutterite farmer in
Alberta donated turkeys at cut rate
costs for Christmas.

The B.C. government appointed
Justice Arthur Lord to head an
Industrial Enquiry into the labour
dispute. District One President Joe
Morris told Lord that the operators
were trying to “liquidate” the IWA by
forcing their own terms of a contract
by “coercion.”

The IWA wanted a 6 cents an hour
across-the-board increase, three paid
statutory holidays, job category revi-
sions, better grievance/arbitration
and a maintenance of membership
clause in the agreement. A settlement
was reached on January 6, 1954
which won the latter and achieved a 5-
1/2 cent per hour increase.

In subsequent years, the IWA
would struggle in the Interior regions
to achieve parity. The monumental
Interior strike of 1967 and 1968 would
be the culmination of that struggle
and, once again, the Coastal member-
ship would dig deep to help out.

Son of a clergyman was
socal democratic pioneer
BEFORE 2003 ROLLS OUT it might
serve Canadian trade unionists well to
recall that it was 70 years ago this past
July that the Co-operative
Commonwealth Federation, the fore-
runner of the New Democratic Party,
held its first national convention in
Regina. At that convention, where its
landmark policy document, The Regina
Manifesto was adopted, the CCF dele-
gates elected James Shaver
Woodsworth as their first leader.
Woodsworth was born in Etobicoke,
Ontario in 1874 — the son of a clergy-
man. His family moved to Brandon,
Manitoba when J.S. was nine, as his
father was appointed as the
Superintendent of the Methodist
Mission for Western Canada. After
graduating from Winnipeg's Wessley
College in 1896, Woodsworth went to
Oxford England to study at Mansfield
College. Near the colleges field house,
he encountered starvation and destitu-

NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF SASKATCHEWAN.

= The CCF elected J.S. Woodsworth,
seen here in his 20's, as its first leader.

tion among England’s poorest and was
forever changed by the experience.
Back in Canada, from 1904-1913, he
would work with immigrant slum
dwellers in the north of Winnipeg and
author books on social issues, calling into
question the country’s social and eco-
nomic systems. During the r1919

Winnipeg General Strike he was arrested,
and later dismissed on sedition charges, for
contributing to the Western Labour News.

Woodsworth, after working in Gibsons
Landing and on the Vancouver longshore
for a period, joined the newly-formed
Federated Labour Party and won a parlia-
mentary seat for Winnipeg in Ottawa in
1921. In 1925 when Prime Minister
McKenzie King lost the House of
Commons majority, J.S. backed the
Liberals in exchange for establishing pen-
sions for Canada’s destitute elderly. He
would barnstorm the country, speaking to
groups of any size, rallying support
among farmers, church groups and
labour to support the foundation of the
CCF in 1932, in the city of Calgary.

He opposed Canada’s involvement in
both the First and Second World Wars.
Like many other socialists of his time, J.S.
viewed war as a by-product of the capital-
ist and imperialist systems. He died on
March 21, 1942 and was recognized by
foes and friends alike for his tireless work
on behalf of the poor, as the CCF’s popu-
larity grew to unprecedented levels.

DECEMBER 2003 THE ALLIED WORKER | 19