British - Columbia :

the people's story

9 - RISE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

By HAL GRIFFIN

THE beginnings of trade union organisation in British

Columbia are those of the province itself. Thirteen years
after the colony of Vancouver Island was proclaimed and
only four years after the colony of British Columbia came
into being, the first unions were founded in Victoria.

The craftsmen who followed the gold miners to the
burgeoning city of Victoria after 1858 brought with them
ideas of union organisation which were rapidly gaining
ground in the lands of their origin, in the Canadas, the
United States and Britain. The first to organise were those
trades in which these ideas were most advanced. By 1862
(the exact date the union was established is obscure) Victoria
printers had their own union. Their president was Robert
Holloway, who had travelled by prairie schooner across coun-
try from Quebec to become the first printer of the Cariboo
Sentinel at Barkerville, The printers were followed by the
shipwrights who, in 1863, formed the Journeymen and Ship-
wrights Association of Victoria and Vancouver Island.

Although they were the first to take strike action, the
coal miners: of Vancouver Island apparently had no actual
trade union organisation until the eighties. But their solidarity
in face of intimidation and persecution, the resolution with
which their committees conducted their struggles is attested
by the struggles themselves—five months on strike in 1870-71,
four months on strike in 1877, when the Wellington miners
drove out the strikebreakers and held their company-owned
houses against the sheriff until the Elliott government sent
the militia to eject them.

’ For two decades trade union organisation was confined
to Victoria. Then, in the eighties, with the coming of the
transcontinental railway, the mushroom growth of Vancouver
from a sawmill settlement to a city and the rapid expansion
of the primary industries, the trade unions emerged to
become a major force in the life of the province. While the
newly-fledged industrialists, the promoters and the specula-
tors, with the connivance of the Smithe government, were
founding fortunes by seizing the richest natural resources for
themselves, the workers whose labor was building those
fortunes were organising against unrestricted exploitation.

og 5° 3 3

‘In’ 1884 the first local of the Knights of Labor was
formed at Victoria, The organisation grew so rapidly that
within two years it had four assemblies in the province, two
embracing New Westminster and the newly chartered city
of Vancouver, and one eath at Victoria and Nanaimo, and
was strong enough to sustain publication of a weekly news-
paper at Victoria, the Industrial News.

~ Originally formed as a secret society at Philadelphia in
1869, the Knights of Labor had emerged from its Reading,
Pennsylvania, convention in 1878 as a general union
organisation, establishing its first Canadian assembly at Ham-
ilton, Ontario, three years later. The period of its expansion
in British Columbia was also the period of its greatest strength
in the country as a whole, some 250 locals organised in seven
district assemblies.

- The basic unit was the local, composed either of a single
craft or occupation or, as the tendency increasingly became,
of various crafts and occupations. The only stipulation was
that three-quarters of its members must be wage earners. But
this was offset by another clause admitting to membership
anyone over the age of 18 who was “working for wages, or
at any time worked for wages.” Only doctors, lawyers,
bankers and saloon-keepers were barred., In British Columbia
its greatest following was among the lumber workers, wood-
workers, teamsters, longshoremen and laborers, although its

membership covered virtually every occupation.

An early Vancouver Labor Day parade turning off Cordova
on to Cambie Street

The idealistic expectations of easy reforms held by most
Knights of Labor leaders were reflected in the aims of the
Industrial News as expounded by John M. Duval, its editor,
in the first issue on December 26, 1885: “... It will advocate
a reduction of the hours of labor, that the toiling masses may
have an opportunity to improve their minds, to beautify their
homes, and to take their place in society to which, from their
numbers and importance, they are entitled.”

The demand for a reduction of working hours was one
raised by workers in every industry, Only a few months
earlier, in April, 1885, Victoria carpenters had struck for and
won the nine-hour day in principle and then found them-
selves still working the ten-hour day because of their inability
to enforce conditions on the job. But for a large part of the
workers, on railroad construction gangs, in logging and mining
camps and in the squalid company houses of the Vancouver
Island coal mining towns, the right “to improve their minds,
to beautify their homes” meant little. Their struggle was for
a living wage, for decent food and accommodation, and
against working conditions that took a fearful toll of maimed
and killed.

The militancy of the membership in British Columbia,
as elsewhere, was constantly in conflict with the attitude of
the leadership of the Knights of Labor in pursuing its pro-
claimed aim of “no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no
antagonism to necessary capital.” In. British Columbia, work-
ers could not accept unrestrained land speculation as “legiti-
mate enterprise” nor federal-provincial financing of Robert
Dunsmuir’s control of the Vancouver Island coal fields as
“necessary capital.”

At the same time that the Knights of Labor were organ-
ising in British Columbia, several craft unions, beginning
with the Victoria printers in 1884, were affiliating with the
American Federation of Labor, originally launched in 1881
as the Federation of Organised Trades and Labor Unions of
the United States and Canada and subsequently dissolved
and reorganised as the American Federation of Labor in 1886.
By the time the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council,
embracing both ‘AFL and Knights of Labor locals, was formed
on December 5, 1889; the AFL included among its affiliates
printers, carpenters, shipwrights, iron moulders and tailors.

Within a year, two other trades councils, New Westminster.

and Victoria, were established, and all the newly organised
strength of the trade union movement was being rallied
behind the struggle for the nine-hour day.
NEXT WEEK: RISE OF THE
LABOR MOVEMENT (Continued)

Four years
afterwards

Four years after the U.S.
Supreme Court ruling of May
17, 1954 against racial segre-
gation in schools—

Seventy-four percent, of
2,214 of the 3,008 school dis-
tricts affected by the ruling,
remain segregated. Only 764,
or 26 percent have officially
desegregated.

Of 2,806,000 Negro school
children enrolled in, 17 South-

’.ern and border states and the

District of Columbia, only
about 190,000, or less than 7
percent, actually attend mixed
schools, although approxi-
mately 257,000 are énrolled in
districts officially desegregated
About 2,616,000 remain segre-
gated.

No districts have been de-
segregated in. six Southern
states: — Alabama, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi
and South Carolina.

Eleven Southern states have
passed 148 laws to circum-
vent the Supreme Court
rulings, or to delay compli-
ance.

Desegregation in some dis-
tricts has been accompanied
by reprisals against Negro
teachers; in Oklahoma alone,
300 Negro teachers have been
ousted.

Segregation “in fact but not

in law’ — according to a
study of the American Jewish
Committee — exists in the

public school system of nine
major northern cities with a
total Negro population of four
million — New York, Chicago,
Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleve-
land, Los Angeles, San Fran-
cisco, Cincinnatti and Newark

But President Eisenhower,
speaking in Washington on
May 12 to a luncheon meeting
of Negro leaders sponsored
by the National Newspaper
Publishers Association, said:

“ce

. we must have patience
and forbearance ... I do
not decry laws, for they are
necessary. But I say that laws
themselves will never solve
problems that have their roots
in the human heart and in the
human emotions.”

The Negro leaders rejected
his advice. Roy Wilkins,
secretary of the National As-
sociation for Advancement oi
Colored People, declared thai
the Negro people had been
patient for 90 years, and ail
they ever got was “a kick in
the teeth.”

May 23, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 9