IWA ARCHIVES
= Local 1-74 strike fund
committee at Woss Camp.

Union rallied in 60s to stop
‘runaway’ plants in Alberta

Back in the swinging sixties, the
IWA membership swung into
action to stop a Canadian Forest
Product's subsidiary, North
Canadian Forest Industries Ltd.,
of Grande Prairie Alberta, from
driving wages into the ground,
threating standards in B.C. and
elsewhere. IWA Canfor mem-
bers in B.C. played a key role in
boosting morale on the picket
line at the planer mill in Grande
Prairie. They sent numerous
donations and messages of sup-

port. In May of 1964, Local 1-71
loggers at the Canfor Woss
camp on Vancouver Island took
up a collection (see photo
above). Port Alberni Local 1-85
pledged a lump sum of $1,800
and a further $100. per month.
Groups as diverse as the IWA
Ladies Auxliary in Terrace raised
money for the strikers. The
issue was clear. The $1.42 to
$1.49 an hour that the company
paid in Grande Prairie was a
threat to the $2.08 an hour base
rate paid in B.C. Alberta Local
1-207 fought against scabs and
police. The IWA won a legal bat-
tle to prevent the Canfor sub-
sidiary from forming a company
union, in its efforts to smash the
strike. Local financial secretary
Keith Johnson was threatened
with legal action when he called
the strikebreakers “scabs” on a
radio broadcast. During the
strike, flying IWA Local 1-207
picketers shut down Canfor
operations in New Westminster
(Pacific Veneer), Harrison and
Chetwynd, where Local 1-357, 1-
367 and 1-424 members were
very happy to show their soli-
darity! The IWA condemned
Canfor for importing low-wage,
unorganized labour to work the
planer. “All the signs point to
the fact that the employers in
both provinces are trying to cre-
ate a haven for runaway low-
wage offshoots of their opera-
tions in British Columbia...’
wrote an editorial in the Lumber
Worker. “It is most convenient
for the employers to have low-
wage unorganized labour just
over the provincial bound-
aries...” to establish wages at
the lowest level.

F a

IWA ARCHIVES

= CCF premier Tommy Douglas, here pictured with IWA Regional Council
One president Joe Morris, was a great friend of Canadian workers.

Tommy Douglas and the win of 1944

Saskatchewan CCF party would
introduce public medicare and

pass progressive labour laws
Political events in the sparsely-popu-
lated prairie —-province of.
Saskatchewan sixty years ago would
pave the way for profound changes
affecting working people throughout
the nation. Little Tommy Douglas, a
man of giant stature, led the
Cooperative Commonwealth
Federation of Saskatchewan to win 47
of 53 seats in the provincial legislature
in June of 1944, becoming the first
social democratic government in
North America.

The CCF wasted no time in taking
on its pro-working class agenda. They
were the first government to push
through public hospitalization and
public medicare. Seventy-two of the

first hundred bills it passed were
aimed at social and economic reform.
The Department of Cooperatives and
Department of Labour were created.
In the first year of CCF rule, there was
free health care for pensioners,
including free hospitalization for can-
cers, tuberculosis, mental diseases
and venereal diseases. By 1947,
Universal Hospitalization coverage
provided access to medically neces-
sary procedures to the citizens of
Saskatchewan at the minimal rate of
$5 per person per year.

“Instead of the burden of these hos-
pital bills fully on sick people, it is
spread over the people,” remarked
Douglas, a former baptist minister
and federal Member of Parliament.
By the end of the 4os, over 80 per
cent of Canadians polled in favoured
of public medicare. In 1957, despite

strong opposition from doctors, the
Chamber of Commerce and the
media, Douglas passed the Hospital
Insurance Diagnostic Services Act.

But it took until 1959 for the CCF to
get its finances in shape to introduce
universal, prepaid, publicly-adminis-
tered health care, which became the
model for Canada’s health care sys
tem. Then, on July 1, 1961, the
Medical Care Insurance Act went into
place in Saskatchewan. Doctors
denounced the CCF’s action as “com-
munism” and “compulsory state med-
icine.” Everyone was covered for all
medical needs. Other parts of Canada
would fall in line and provide univer-
sal health care, partially funded by the
federal government, was in every
province by 1971.

In its first year of office, the CCF
passed the Trade Union Act which
made collective bargaining compulso-
ry. The United Auto Workers’ inter-
national president Walter Reuther
called it the most progressive legisla-
tion yet seen in North America. In the
first four years, the union movement
grew by 118 per cent. Public sector
unions were granted the rights to
organize and all workers were granted
at least two weeks vacation.

By 1964 the Saskatchewan Power
Corporation counted electricity to
over 65,000 rural homes, where only
about 300 such homes had electricity
twenty years earlier.

Of special note for IWA members,
in 1945 Douglas established the
Saskatchewan Timber Board, a crown
agency that oversaw the sale and pro-
cessing of crown-owned land.

That development helped the
Canadian Congress of Labour-affiliated
Prince Albert Woodworkers Union,
founded a year earlier, and several affil-
iates of the National Union of
Woodworkers to form into the
International Woodworkers of
America Local 2-184 by 1953.

Nazi Germany crushed

unions 70 years ago
THE HORRORS OF Adolf Hitler and
Nazi Germany have been well document-
ed. The regime’s systematic extermina-
tion of Jews, and genocidal invasions of
Europe, the Soviet Union, North Africa
and Baltic States are well-known. Less
talked about is the brutal way in which
Hitler and his henchmen destroyed the
free trade union movement in Germany
a little more than 70 years. Until the
Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic,
there had been an independent labour
movement in the country which enjoyed
a degree of autonomy. Two major federa-
tions, known as “Free Trade Unions,”
consisted of the General German Trade
Union Federation, with 28 industrial
union affiliates, and the General
Independent Employees Federation, with
13 white collar unions. There were
Christian Trade Unions and some other
independent unions which had legal sta-
tus. They participated in the economic
and social life of the country, negotiating
wages and benefits and influencing legis-
lation in the Republic.

On January 30, 1933 Hitler was
appointed as Chancellor of Germany by

= Nazi Robert Ley was appointed to
lead the German Labour Front.

President Hindenberg. Hundreds of
trade unionists were rounded up and sent
to the first German concentration camp
in Dachau by late March. In April, Hitler
appointed Robert Ley as the leader of the
“Nazi Committee for the Protection of
German Labour.” On May 2, 1933 com-
menced the complete destruction of
trade unionism. Nazi SA (Brown Shirts)
and SS (Secret Police) stormed indepen-
dent trade union headquarters, seizing
assets, arresting union leaders and con-
fiscating union finances.

SA and SS troops also scoured working
class districts throughout the nation to
eliminate all pockets of resistance. They
operated “private” concentration camps
along their routes.

The infamous German Labour Front
was created, with Adolf Hitler installed as
its “Honourary Patron” on May to. The
terror continued. Trade union leaders
faced assault and battery, were forced to
work in degrading jobs or far beyond their
physical capacity. Other faced concentra-
tion camps, starvation and solitary con-
finement while their family members
were arrested, assaulted and murdered.

In the factories the Nazis installed
“Factory Troops” which, Ley reporting to a
party congress in Nuremberg, called ideo-
logical “shock squads” that adopted a motto
that THE FUERHER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!
As the Nazi war machine consumed all,
the German working class faced rapidly
deteriorating social conditions.

The German Labour Front command-
ed 23 million workers and 10 million cor-
porate employees. By 1935 the Front took
responsibility for administering foreign
labour to slave inside the war machine.
The Nazis had succeeded in destroying
independent unions and taking away the
last vestiges of freedom from Germans.

18 | *THE ALLIED WORKER JUNE 2004