FRIDAY, JANUARY 29, 1971

a

- Scenes from labor’s demonstration for jobs in Vicotria last Thursday.

—Paul Tate photo

Vol. 32, No. 4

JOBS

Cry echoes in Victoria
and all across Canada

We Want Jobs! We want jobs! was the chant from
the throats of some 2,000 people who gathered on the
lawn of the Legislature in Victoria last Thursday.

It was the most impressive demonstration seen in Canada since

mass unemployment became a fact of life throughout the nation.
From Vancouver, Chilliwack, Alberni, Nanaimo; from Campbell

River, Courtenay, Duncan and Victoria they came, and as they ~

marched from the Crystal Gardens to the government buildings
behind a B.C. Federation banner reading “B.C. Labor Demands
Government Action to provide jobs now’’, it was a sight not seen in
the staid old capital city for many a year.

The banners told the story of those in attendance. The IWA was
there, and the UFAWU; the electrical workers from the IBEW; the
Carpenters, Painters and the Sheet Metal Workers: the Plumbers,
the United Steelworkers; the Office Employees and CUPE: the
Seafarers and the CBRT; the Postal Workers and Pulp and Paper
Workers; the Marine Workers, and hundreds of women and men who
are forced to live on Gaglardi’s starvation welfare handouts.

Students who face a jobless summer and a bleak job future were
there, and bearded kids from the hostels, and young men and women
long out of university and technical schools— without jobs.

The B.C. Federation of Labor, and local labor councils which
organized the march did an excellent job of carrying out the task
assigned to them. That task .was plainly put forth in a program
endorsed by delegates to the recent B.C. Federation of Labor
convention which stated: The B.C. Fed should organize unemployed
committees in all unions hit by unemployment; that all labor
councils should encourage the establishment of unemployed
committees in their district and set up liaison through the labor
movement.

JOBS PROGRAM DEMANDED

In the Crystal Gardens, during the lunch hour which preceded the
demonstration, speakers from the Welfare Committees and
executive members of the B.C. Fed and Vancouver Labor Council
addressed the crowd.

Announcing the Poor Peoples’ March to be held on January 25, an
attractive young woman said Vancouver city hall was deliberately
disregarding the problems of the poor. She said their group would
demand that city-owned lands be used for low-cost housing, and that
cash assistance rather than vouchers be given welfare recipients;
money must be diverted to pollution control, and a crash program for
job opportunities be a priority of city council.

Alderman Harry Rankin said they were in Victoria to demand in
no uncertain terms that jobs must be created for the people. We
cannot afford a policy that ships our jobs, along with our resources,
to other nations.

“One-half that coal pile we saw at Roberts Bank would stoke a
lot of furnaces for industry in B.C.,’’ he reminded the people.

The brief submitted by the B.C. Federation of Labor on behalf of
the unemployed was given a total blackout by the press and other
media, even though it was the central purpose of the march to
Victoria.

See UNEMPLOYED, pg. 12

This week

in the Legislature
—See page 3