FEATURE

In the face of injunctions,
Unionists devised the new

tactic of observer pickets

By SEAN GRIFFIN

t’s not an anniversary that many trade unionists are likely to
have marked down in their calendars — the strike that took
Place on Vancouver’s waterfront 25 years ago this June.
For one thing, the company that triggered the dispute —
Northland Navigation — is no longer in business, its ships

having been sold off.

And unions involved at.the time, like the rest of the labor
movement in this province probably have little time for anniver-
saties, having been thrust into new battles to defend wages and
conditions won over those 25 years and more.

But the traditions set by that strike are a central part of the
current history of the trade union movement in this province —
including the B.C. Federation of Labor’s picketing policy.

And more important than any anniversary are the contem-
porary lessons drawn from a strike a quarter of a century ago.

Just two months ago, as delegates to the Vancouver and
District Labor Council endorsed a motion pledging the full
support of the council to the Building Trades council in its

Picketing of Kerkhoff Construction at the
Harbor Cove condominium site, council
President Frank Kennedy recalled the
Northland strike.

__ Kemember,” he told delegates, “it was
citizens’ pickets that wom the Northland
Navigation strike in 1959.”

€nnedy should know; he was one of
three members of the Local 509 of the
International Longshoremen’s and Ware-
housemen’s Union who touched off the
events that led to the confrontation by refus-
Ing to accept dispatch to Northland after the
National: Association of Marine Engineers
had Struck the shipping company.
€ strike actually began inauspiciously,
although the political barometer already

indicated a storm, triggered by the W.A.C. —

Bennett government's passage in March,
1959 of the infamous Bill 43, the Trades
Union Act,

_ Bennett’s labor minister, Lyle Wicks, had
introduced the restrictive bill in the midst of
a campaign against the trade union move-
ment, centred on the “labor bosses,” a cam-
paign that except for the crudeness of its
thetoric, would be echoed by another Ben-
nett government 25 years later.

The bill followed Quebec's punitive for-
mula in establishing unions as legal
entities — opening the way for employers
to cripple them with damage suits. And
WOTSE, it outlawed sympathy strikes and
pickets, information picket lines, token
picket lines and secondary picket lines.

_ It gave further legitimacy to court injunc-
ions, particularly ex parte injunctions,
which had been re-introduced into labor
disputes by an earlier piece of Socred legisla-
tion, the Labor Relations Act of 1954.

B.C. Federation of Labor president Bill
Black charged that the government, in
drafting the legislation, had gone “all the
way down the line with management
proposals,”

The bill, he said, “is the first gun being
fired in the legislative war on labor, (and)
Bives the employers the lever they require to
continually harass, persecute and prosecute
the labor unions through the courts on the
slightest pretext.” :

But the Federation leadership was reluc-
tant to mobilize. its ranks to take the
government’s attack head-on. Federation
secretary Pat O’Neal acknowledged that
some 24 telegrams had been received from
affiliates requesting that the federation
initiate a work stoppage in protest against
the bill but the executive decided to opt for

an assessment on the membership to con

duct an education campaign and sent a ~~

small delegation to Victoria.

An advertisement was also placed in the
newpaper with this message for unionists
“All trade union members are warned to
refrain from acts which can be described as
unlawful under Bill 43...Bill 43 confirms
the position of the B.C. Federation of
Labor to the effect that just labor laws can
be obtained only through a political party
that is prepared to serve the interests of all
the people of British Columbia.”

Three months later, the actions of the
Longshoremen’s Union were to change that
profoundly.

The tiny engineer’s association had
sought for 18 months without success to
force Captain H.J.C. Terry, the owner of
Northland, to embody the terms of a federal
conciliator’s report in a new collective
agreement.

But Capt..Terry had an illegitimate ally.
The Seafarer’s International Union, which
12 years earlier had made itself available to
the Great Lakes shipping employers and
the Liberal government to smash the Cana-

- dian Seamen’s Union, had been raiding

NAME for three months and had also
levelled its sights on‘ other unions in the
maritime industry. Taking up the anti-
communist crusade, the SIU’s avowed aim
was to establish one union from Alaska to
Mexico, supplanting all other unions, par-
ticularly the militant ILWU.

Early in the morning on June 26, NAME

launched its strike, setting up picket lines at .

6 a.m.

Just 11 hours later, in a pattern that was
to be repeated again and again countless
hundreds of times over the next 13 years, the
courts granted Northland Navigation an
interim injunction barring any further pick-
eting by NAME, pending the outcome of an
application made to the Canada Labor
Relations by the SIU, to decertify NAME.

With the NAME picket line forced down
by the courts, several SIU scabs. moved in,
announcing their intention to man the
ships. At the same time, at the urging of
Kennedy and others, the longshoremen in
Local 509, the coastwide ILWU local,
refused to accept dispatch to Northland,
declaring that as far as they were concerned,
the picket line was still in place. Capt. Terry
angrily announced that they would not be
re-hired, prompting the ILWU to declare
that its members had been locked out by
Northland.

FISHERMAN PHOTOS

Again the SIU joined forces with Terry.
SIU president Norman Cunningham
announced that his union would take over
longshore work. According to testimony
made to the federal labor minister by
NAME president Richard Greaves, 12 SIU
goons were brought in as bodyguards for
the scabs.

As the strike moved into its second week,
the ILWU was faced with the hard choice:
take decisive action that was probably out-
side the law as the Bennett government had
now written it —or capitulate to an
employer and the strikebreakers of a cor-
rupt union.

Craig Pritchett, the president of the Can-
adian Area of the IL WU that had just been
established as an autonomous secti9n of the
international union in February of 1959,
recalls the union’s action on July 3:

“A couple of us — Roy Smith and I —
went down to the union hall and got
together two or three hundred men and
marched down to the Northland dock to
bring the scabs out.”

SIU members were working on two
Northland ships, the Island Prince and the
Haida when the ILWU contingent arrived.
The Vancouver Sun, in the briefest of com-
ments on the incident, reported:

“Two hundred longshoremen went to

Top: Observer pickets stand
watch over the Northland
Navigation loading sheds
along Vancouver's Commis-
sioner Street. Centre: Some
of those who took part pose
for photos on the embank-
ment opposite the Northland
dock. Bottom: Member of
the National Association of
Marine Engineers re-
establish their picket line on
July 8, 1959.

Northland and told STU members to leave.
They did.”

“Once we had established our jurisdic-
tion and cleared the scabs out,” Pritchett
remembers, “we went back out to the street
and set up the observer pickets.”

“Observer” pickets: however matter-of-
fact it sounded, it was a new tactic that the
ILWU and the trade union movement was
initiating, in response to the attack on its
rights embodied in Bill 43.

“Tt really was a new tactic we devised,”
says Pritchett, ‘“‘but we know we had to do
something quickly.”

Down at the Northland site, on the strip
of road that ran between the tracks and the
dock, hundreds of people’ now walked
quietly, back and forth. They carried no
signs or placards. In response to police
questions, they replied that they were only
“concerned citizens” who were “observing.”

“There were sometimes as many as 1,000
people down on the line — people came
down to serve coffee and there were even
kids in strollers,” noted Pritchett.

Kennedy recalls that the picket line began
slowly but as the days went by, it became a
focal point for trade unionists and suppor-
ters throughout the Lower Mainland.
“There was a lot of support,” he said. “We

see NORTHLAND page 15

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 2, 1984 e 13