SUS AIAN) (UMN TVET MM

Phillips, Ogden CP

nominees in Vancouver

JACK PHILLIPS

BERT OGDEN

Well known trade union figure and provincial organizer of the
Communist Party, Jack Phillips, has been nominated as the Com-
munist Party candidate in the federal riding of Vancouver Kingsway.

A former officer of the Canadian Union of Public Employees,
Phillips also served on the executive of the Vancouver and District
labor Council before stepping down from his union posts in 1974 to
assume full time work for the Communist Party.

Phillips will run against incumbent Liberal Simma Holt and NDP
nominee Ian Waddell in the Kingsway contest, expected to be among
the sharper of election battles in B.C.

In Vancouver South, the Communist Party this week announced the
nomination of trade unionist Bert Ogden. Ogden, welfare and safety
director of the United Fishermen and Allied Worker’s Union, was the
unanimous choice of a constituency meeting last Wednesday at the
Blue Boy Hotel in South Vancouver.

An activist in the peace movement, Ogden was last year elected to
the presidential council of the World Peace Council, based in Helsinki.

Hydro forcing Peace
farmers to sell land

Con’t from pg. 1

costs will soar because it will have
to be transported from southern
B.C.

B.C. Hydro has passed off
criticism of the dam project as
“premature,’”’ claiming that the
dam is still being studied. Michaels
points out, however, that Hydro is
buying up land along the river
bottom and is using economic and
political pressure to intimidate
farmers into selling out for bargain
prices.

“Hydro should. be producing
power, not speculating on land,”’ he
asserted.

Apparently, Hydro has been
buying up land and renting it back
to farmers. The power corporation
has held flood reserves on most of
the Peace River valley for some
years, and the reserves have
deterred most farmers from
making substantial investments in

their farms. Hydro’s current plans
have ‘‘put farmers over a barrel”’
because local banks will no longer
accept the farm land — which they
fear may soon be under water — as
collateral for loans. ‘‘Farmers live
on credit,” Michaels said, ‘‘“Now
they have no choice but to sell
cheap.”

The Dawson Creek protest is
similar to recent outcries against
the McGregor and Revelstoke
Dam projects, all of which will
cause environmental damage and
are unnecessary in the absence of
an energy policy for the province.

Michaels has pledged to continue
the campaign in Dawson Creek to
stop the Peace River project, but
he is unlikely to get any assistance
from local MLA, Don Phillips, the
Socred minister of economic
development, and an outspoken
supporter of Hydro’s dam building

program.

U.S. opts for Kitimat

As the West Coast Oil Port
Inquiry prepares to re-open for a
brief three day session to allow for
“summing up,” the United States
Senate and House of Represen-
tatives have agreed on a course of
action that indicates their first
choice for an oil port is at Kitimat,
B.C.

This week the Seattle Times
reported that the U.S. joint com-
mittee on energy and natural
resources has produced an ad-
vanced Bill to replace the Udall
Bill, which called on president
Carter to negotiate agreement for
an oil port at Kitimat with prime
‘minister Trudeau.

The new Bill has the names of
U.S. Senator Henry Jackson and
representative John Dingell at-
tached to it and carries forward the
main propositions of the Udall Bill.
The Jackson-Dingell version is

more flexible, however aimed at
winning wider support for Kitimat.

“We had Kitimat in the back of
our minds,” Senate lawyer John
Folsom is quoted as saying, ‘“‘We
left the deadlines loose to allow
time for the Thompson Inquiry and
the National Energy Board in
Canada to consider the Kitimat
proposal.”

The Times also quotes Trans
Mountain president Ken Hall who
termed the Cherry Point and Port
Angeles port sites ‘“‘dead horses”’
with a “lack of industry support.”’
The Times editorially infers
support for the Kitimat proposal.

In spite of the growing pressures
for a Kitimat port, there is still no
sign that Thompson will call for the
resumption of his investigations
into the proposals of the oil com-
panies to build a supertanker oil
port at Kitimat when the summing
up begins Tuesday in Vancouver.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 9, 1977—Page 8

Canada-wide bank union
best objective for CLC

The Canadian Labor Congress
has set up a national organizing
committee, with representatives
from a number of affiliates, to
organize Canada’s bank em-
ployees.

According to available statistics,
there are 7,200 bank branches,
spread across the country, in every
province and from the American
border to the far north. Of the
145,000 full-time employees, 107,000
or 73 percent, are women

Obviously, the CLC has un-

_ dertaken a major campaign.

Five big banks, the Royal, the
Imperial Bank of Commerce, the
Montreal, the Nova Scotia and the
Toronto Dominion accounted for 91
percent of all banking assets in
1975. The Royal alone controlled
nearly one quarter of the total
assets.

In 1967, R. G. Lafferty, a Mon-
treal investment dealer presented
a brief to the Commons Committee
on Finance, Trade and Economic
Affairs. He characterized
Canadian banking as “a nation-
wide, monolithic structure with
participants being governed by
manuals and regulations designed
to mold the system into a cohesive
form that responds to a narrow
management structure surrounded
by interlocking directorates... a
banking machine which responds
to the policies of the hierarchy and
not the consumer.”

A list of the directors of the big
five reads like a directory of the
dominant figures in the financial-
industrial complex that dominates
the economic life of: Canada.

Peter Newman, in his book The
Canadian Establishment,
published in 1975, put it this way:
“The corporations represented on
each bank’s board of directors
trace the bloodlines of big business
power in Canada. The clusters
formed by this interlacing of
friendships, shared concerns,
opens doors, and common policies
decide who gets what portion of the
$40 billion in loans that the banks
have outstanding at any one time.”’

In short, Canada’s chartered
banks form one of the most con-
centrated banking systems in the
capitalist world. Yet only a few of
its employees have been organized
into trade unions.

It is against this background that
we should see the recent an-
nouncement by the Canadian
Labor Congress that it intends to
launch a major campaign to
organize bank employees.

Ina letter to all British Columbia
affiliates of the CLC, the regional
director of organization sum-
marized the plan as follows:

*The CLC Bank Workers’
Organizing Committee is to
provide a nation-wide structure,
created from several affiliates.

* Bank workers will be en-
couraged and assisted to join

existing unions with a view to

establishing a Canada-wide bank
union at some later date.

* The organizing drive will be
national in scope and will be en-
sured the support of all CLC af-
filiates.

* Once the goal of organizing the
banks has been achieved through
the National Bank Organizing
Committee and there is the basis
for a functioning national union,
the bank employees themselves
will decide their future con-
stitutional status within the CLC.

In an interview given to the
eastern press, Donald Mon-
tgomery, CLC secretary-
treasurer, emphasized the fact
that the first stages of the cam-
paign will involve a number of
affiliates in organizing bank
employees. “For example,” he

said, ‘‘the Canadian Paper
Workers who are in Smooth Rock
Falls would be responsible for
bank workers in that’ town. In
Saskatoon, the Steelworkers are
hard at work.”

According to Montgomery, the
following are included in the
overall organizing committee:
Canadian Union of Public Em-
ployees president, Grace Hart-

LABOR
COMMENT

BY JACK PHILLIPS

men; the United Steelworkers’
national director, Gerard
Docquier; president of District 1 of
the International Woodworkers,
Jack Munro; president of the
Public Service Alliance, Andy
Stewart; the Canadian Paper
Workers Union president, Henry
Lorrain; United Auto Workers
president, Dennis McDermott; Al
Hearn of the Service Employees
International Union and Mike
Rygus, International Association
of Machinists.

Laraine Singler, a top officer of
the B.C. Government Employees’
Union, will be the national co-
ordinator. She will be assisted by a
small staff.

Montgomery concedes that ‘‘the
banks are a formidable bastion of
anti-unionism and they won’t
accept unionization without a long
fight.”

No one can quarrel with that
concept. It will take the active
support of the entire trade union
movement to make a major ad-
vance in organizing bank workers.
Labor will be coming into head-on
conflict with the most concentrated
complex of financial and industrial
power in the country, with the
disadvantage of having to organize
workers. at some 7,000 locations.

The United Bank Workers,
chartered by the Service Office
Retail Workers’ Union in B.C.,
played a significant role in setting
the stage for the organization of
bank employees. They now have 21
certifications in B.C. and
Saskatchewan, and it was in
response to their applications that
the Canada Labor Relations Board
ruled that an individual branch is
an appropriate unit for collective
bargaining. No other union has
more than three certifications. But
while the Labor Relations Board
decision made it easier to obtain
certifications, it also created a
major problem for collective
bargaining, because the banks will
be able to drag their feet in each
separate set of negotiations. This,
of course, would place a heavy
strain on any union, particularly if
it didn’t have a lot of resources to
fall back on.

As far as the CLC leadership is
concerned, it would appear there is
no place for SORWUC in its

. objective should be one, Canada’

pean eareeeenenn

organizational drive, becausé
SORWUC is not an affiliate. Ob
viously, it would be in the best|
interests of organized labor if
SORWUC became part of the CLC
which now has 2.3 million mem
bers.

However, if SORWUC will nol
become a CLC affiliate in the neat
future, there -should be enough
work for CLC bank organizers
without trying to take over thé
SORWUC certifications. Similarly
SORWUC would be wise to avoid
any unnecessary confrontation
with the CLC. The long-rangé

wide union of bank employees that
would be run for and by bank
employees, a union that would take
its place within the ranks of the
Canadian Labor Congress;
Canada’s largest trade uniol
centre.

The CLC, with its great
resources in membership and
money, will be in the best position
to undertake the kind of 4
sustained campaign the situatiol
calls for, provided no jurisdictional
quarrels develop among the af
filiates. However, the CLC would
be well advised to study the grass
roots techniques used by SORWUC
in its organizational campaign 1

OFL MEET

Con’t from pg. 1
deal with in Ottawa and Queen’s
Park but it knew it would get the
hell scratched out of it if it tried its |
layoff tricks in other countries,”’ he
said. A resolution adopted by the
convention called for thé}
nationalization of INCO and for a!
end to the proposed layoffs at
Sudbury and Thompson, Manitoba.

The failure to develop a com:
prehensive strategy of
nationalization as a means 0
developing full employme!
prompted some criticism of thé
statement on full employment,
however, as a number of delegates
pressed for more far-reaching
policies.

United Electrical Workers |
president C.S. Jackson told thé
convention that the Federatio?
should put ‘‘guts” into thé
statement by outlining deman
which would begin to control thé
power of the big corporations ove!
workers’ lives. Such demands, hé
said, should include nationalizatio®
of the natural resources of ¢
country coupled with the demand |
for the processing of raw materials
through development of secondary
industry.

Jackson also stressed the need
for the OFL to take the lead #2
mobilizing all its 800,000 member$
in a concerted campaign for jobs:

His comments were echoed
Oakville labor council president
Jim Bridgewood who also warne
that labor could not afford to wait,
as some have suggested, for ¢
next federal election and a changé
in government to get action 0
unemployment and other issues:

Back the paper that

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