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two and wounding 30 others.

By B. NORMAN
~ On May 15, 1919, at 11 a.m.
12,000 “organized and 12,000 wn-

i) their jobs in response to acall fora
” general strike by the Winnipeg
: “aa and Labor Council.

ssn wi sie ee
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_ The streets of Winnipeg, June 21, 1919. Mounted police tater

¢ organized workers walked off .

iS OUR SENTENCGBISS
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smashed through the demonstration,

the authority ofthe strike commit-
tee.

The: immediate cause of the
General Strike was the refusal of
the employers to grant higher
wages and union recognition to
workers in the building trades and
metal trades. When these work-
ers went out on strike for their

union rights, their actions served

as a catalyst for a sympathy strike
by other workers in Winnipeg.
The root causes of the strike
were, of course, much deeper
than this.

. The 1919 strike was the culmi-
nation of almost 20 years of in-
tense class struggle. In particular,
the years of World War I were a

_ period during which workers’ liv-

Paes, t

(LLEGALITIES
ARE OKAY
\= THEY ‘e|

SOKAYED.

[THOSE WHO )
IGNORE THE
UNITY ISSUE
ARE ALMOST
TREASONABLE.

Winnipeg 1919 filled
_ with lessons for today —

ing standards were hard hit by
sky-rocketing. inflation, while
employers grew rich on wartime
super-profits. In 1917, in-a
number of bitter strikes,
employers pursuaded the courts
to issue injunctions against pic-

keting. As a result, packinghouse -

workers, store clerks and con-
tract shop employees were unable
. to continue their strikes and suf-
fered defeat. The use by
employers of professional
strike-breaking agencies was not
uncommon during this period. —

In May 1918, all the unions of
civic workers walked off the job
when their right to strike was
threatened. All civic services, in-
cluding firefighting, water, light
and power, public transit and
railway maintenance were crip-
pled. Within 10 days, the city
government was forced to give in
to the workers’ demands.

In the period after the armistice
in November 1918, workers’
economic problems were intensi-
fied by the mass unemployment
which followed the demobiliza-
tion of thousands of war veterans.

In addition to the economic
problems which they faced,
workers were. also subjected to
political oppression. In. Sep-

tember 1918, for example, several

socialist and other leftwing or-
ganizations were outlawed and
the foreign language (mainly
working-class) press was surpres-
sed. In April 1919, a bill was in-
troduced in the ‘House of Com-
mons amending the Immigration
Act to provide for the exclusion
or deportation of any non-
Canadian born citizen who advo-
cated revolution,. or who be-
longed to ‘‘any organization en-
tertaining or teaching disbeliefs in

or in opposition to organized gov-

ernment”’.

In June 1919, the act was again
amended in order to legalize the
deportation of British-born Cana-

dian citizens, also. This later j

amendment was directed speci-
fically against the leaders of the
Winnipeg General Strike and was
rushed through both houses of
parliament in less than half-an-
hour,

Soon. after the General Strike
began, Winnipeg’s capitalists and
their supporters organized a

- “Citizen's Committee of 1,000".
This committee claimed to repre-

s

sent “‘neutral’’ citizens, but was
in fact merely a front for anti-
strike activities, organizing
scabs for “essential services’,
and recruiting ‘‘special police’’ to
act as an anti-strike militia. All
levels of government sided com-
pletely with employers, thus pro-
ving the Marxist dictum that the
state is an instrument of the ruling

_Class. It was in fact intervention

from the federal government
which eventually broke the strike.
The minister of labor ordered the
arrest of the strike leaders, and
the Mounties brought force to
bear, killing two people and
wounding at least 30 others. The
army too, was eventually brought
in to patrol the city streets and to
“keep order’’. ;

The Winnipeg General Strike
was an example of tremendous
worker solidarity and Working-
class consciousness. This was the
case not only.in Winnipeg. In
Brandon, Vancouver and across
Western Canada, as well as in To-
ronto, many workers walked off
their jobs in support of their own
demands and in sympathy with
the Winnipeg strikers. This was a
time when the workers became
actually aware that they had
common interests and that they

had to stand together to achieve

their aims.

The Mounties charging down Main Street.

This working-class solidarity
held strong despite the great ef-
forts to divide workers. In par-
ticular, the capitalist newspapers
such as the Winnipeg Free Press,
tried to divide the workers along
ethnic lines with their virulent at-
tacks on ‘‘foreigners”’ and their
call (before the strike) to
employers to fire non-English
workers and hire British-returned
veterans to replace them. Work-
ers of all ethnic groups and of var-
ious ideological orientations on
the whole shunned attempts to
divide them and stood firmly to-
gether in their demands for union
recognition, collective bargaining
rights and a decent standard of
living.

The Winnipeg General Strike
has been described by Jacob Pen-
ner, a strike participant and later a

. Communist member of the Win-
nipeg city council for many years,
as “‘the proudest achievement of
the Canadian working class’’.
Despite the mistakes that were
made (and there were mistakes
made), the 1919 strike provides
many important examples for to-
day’s workers to follow — above
all, the examples of working-class
solidarity and unity. Itis, after all,
only in unity and in mutual sup-
port that all of labor’s strength
lies.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY.4,.1979— Page 9

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