- FEATURE

The lessons
of °32

A page
of

workers’ history

By VAUGHN BOWLER

As the latest economic crisis
deepened in the early 1980s, represen-
tatives of monopoly in Alberta targeted
¥S trade union movement for destruc-

on.

In the summer of 1986, Tory Peter
Pocklington set out to smash UFCW
Local 280P at the Gainers packing plant
in Edmonton. His voracious appetite
for concessions had been whetted in
1984, when the union gave in on several
fronts. By 1986, though, when a new
contract was due to be signed, Gainers
workers had come to realize that one

concession inevitably led to another.
_ They had to stand and fight.

The result was the now-famous
“Battle of 66th Street.”’ As the presi-
dent of the Alberta Federation of
Labor, Dave Werlin, said at the
beginning of the strike-lockout:
“Unless the union wins the fight that
has been imposed on them .. . conces-
sions already forced on the building
trades could become a trend which
would grow and spread to be picked up
by all employers. The AFL will be call-
ing on organized labor to mobilize its
full support ... to do everything pos-
sible to stop the scourge of concessions
bargaining by greedy employers.”

The self-destructive policy of
concessions is not new in Alberta’s
labor history. Back in the 1930s, the
leadership of most local unions took
their orders from the U.S.-based
American Federation of Labour. _

Its policy was that during economic
crisis there was little the unions could
do to defend their members’ wages and
working conditions.

There were unions, however, which
thought and acted otherwise. One of
the most noteworthy was the Mine
Workers Union of Canada (MWUC),
Which affiliated with the militant trade
union centre, the Workers Unity

League, in 1931. Among the left-wing
leadership and rank-and-file of the
union were many members of the
Communist Party of Canada, including
Harvey Murphy who led the Crowsnest
Pass miners’ strike of 1932. Murphy
had the ability of sparking the coal min-
ers into action. ‘‘He was his best on the
public platform,’” commented one ob-
server, ‘‘workers loved his caustic jibes
at their bosses, the police, and the poli-
ticians.”” :

By 1925, mass unemployment and
wage reversals among the miners were
so bad that they decided to act. They
abandoned their old international union
with its concessionary policy and began
a recruiting drive for the MWUC.

People who believed in concessions
retained influence in the new union,
until 1929 when capitalism’s near col-
lapse made the system’s bankruptcy
crystal clear. Leadership in the union
then passed to Murphy and the left-
wing forces. When the bosses began to
import ‘‘reliable’’ labor from Wales
while most local miners could only get a
few days work a week, and when they
refused to negotiate with the Workers
Unity League, a strike was called, and
picket lines sprang up at the mines in
Blairmore, Coleman, Bellevue and
Hillcrest.

The mine owners did not fear the
strike initially. Much like Peter Pock-
lington at Gainers, they thought they
saw an opportunity to smash the union
and render the Workers Unity League a
death-blow. They failed to reckon,
however, with the resolve of the miners
who, one historian recalled, ‘‘were fed
up with the kind of lifestyle imposed on
them by economic depression, the fed-
eral government, and corporate
totalitarianism.”

On May Day 1932, the miners of
Blairmore, along with the youth-wing
of the union and the women’s organiza-

“In a spirit of working class solidarity, May Day Photo: Communist Party leader Tim Buck,
was proclaimed a civic holiday, and Blairmore’s _ standing left of car, in the Alberta town of Nor- ~
main street was renamed Tim Buck Boulevard. degg in 1935.

tion, staged a large and colourful
demonstration. Trailing through the
valley, beneath the white peaks of the
Rockies, could be seen red banners
emblazoned with the hammer and sick-
le, bearing slogans such as ‘‘No Sur-
render, Nationalize The Mines.”

On May 12, the strike began to look
shaky when the Coleman miners voted

- to return to work by a margin of 292 to

237. The company, helped by a conser-
vative ‘Citizens League’, had or-
ganized a vicious racist campaign to
convince the Coleman miners that their
problem was not the anti-worker sys-
tem but ‘‘insidious foreign elements.”
Under the guise of a crusade against
communism, the ‘‘true blue British’”’
were successfully split by ‘‘divide and
rule’’ tactics from the various miners of
Italian, Slavic and other origins. Soli-
darity at Coleman crumbled, and for
their efforts and racist elements were
rewarded with a company Union and
wage cuts. Meetings of the MWUC
were brutally broken up, and John Sto-
kaluk narrowly escaped the designs of
unidentified gunmen.

All the other mining communities of
the Crowsnest Pass resisted the racist
campaign, preferring instead the
watchword ‘‘Workers Of The World
Unite!’ While they faced a co-
ordinated assault from the radio, press
and the reformist UFA government of
Premier Brownlee, the material and
moral support of groups such as the
Farmers Unity League and Workers
International Relief saw them through
to the conclusion of the dispute. Stead-
fast picketers forced the mine owners
into agreements tha maintained the
wage levels of 1930-32. Workers were
free to join the union of their choice,
blacklists of ‘‘red agitators’ were torn
up and the provincial government
promised relief for the unemployed.
New contracts were signed on Labor

Day, 1932, and while the owners did
backtrack on some provisions, the
MWUC was one of the few unions in
Alberta to avoid a wage cut during the
Hungry Thirties.

One of the significant political results
of the Crowsnest Pass strike of 1932
was the fall election of a workers’ slate
to Blairmore Town Council. That dubi-
ous creation of the coal companies, and
the Citizens League failed to seat a
single councillor.

The new mayor and the council set
about uncovering the corruption of
previous big-business administrations.
They organized a boycott of those firms
who supported the Citizens League,
sought more relief for the unemployed,
and collected taxes from the wealthy
that were in arrears. In a spirit of work-
ing class solidarity, they proclaimed
May Day a civic holiday, and renamed
the town’s main avenue Tim Buck
Boulevard in honor of the imprisoned
national leader of the Communist Par-
ty. Buck had been in jail since 1931,
along with other leading Communists,
because of their unrelenting exposure
of social conditions in Canada.

Blairmore’s Workers Town Council
was elected many more times in the
following years. However, when the
chill winds of the Cold War began to
blow, a new generation unmindful of
the miners’ struggle fell for the lies of a
new anti-communist crusade. Socreds,
Tories and Liberals covered up certain
undigestible facts. Street names were
transformed overnight. But the
capitalists, their media hacks and paid
politicos will never succeed in erasing
the historical record of the Crowsnest
Pass strike of 1932. Those events, like
those at Gainers in 1986, will live on in
the collective memory of Canada’s
working people, reminding them of
what can be accomplished under their
own banners.

“The projected sale of Dome Petro-
leum to Amoco Canada Petroleum — the
100 per cent-owned subsidiary of the
U.S. multinational Amoco Corp.,
Chicago — must be stopped,” urged the
Communist Pary in an April 26 press
Statement. It continued:

“Parliament, and every MP must be
called on to prevent this most shameful
sell-out to U.S. interests of vast Canadian
oil and gas resources. The federal gov-
erment’s announced approval of this so-
Called sale has demonstrated there 1s an

election promise that Brian Mulroney is
living up to: the final destruction of the

National Energy Program.

“Instead, the Mulroney government
bases its approval of this abject surrender
to U.S. monopoly on what Energy Min-
ister Marcel Masse calls, “The principle
of a private sector solution.’ This same
reliance on the private sector was, Mul-
roney told us, supposed to provide ‘jobs,
jobs, jobs’ and an end to mass unem-

ployment!

“In the case of Dome Petroleum, this.

Dome sell-out means end of NEP: CP

‘private sector principle’ is meant to drive
the last nail into the coffin of the
National Energy Program, and to write
‘finis’ to Canada’s strategic necessity to
have ownership control of Canadian
energy resources.

“Through its wholly-owned subsi-
diary Amoco Canada, Amoco Corp.,
Chicago would become the largest oil
and gas company in Canada. By this
sell-out, Canadian ownership of the oil
and gas industry will be cut to 40 per cent
from over 50 per cent.

“The immediate need is to prevent
final approval of this treacherous Dome
Petroleum-Amoco transaction by Invest-
ment Canada, the Mulroney govern-
ment-created agency which has yet to
reject a single foreign investment in Can-
ada.

“Canadians, through their mass
organizations and individually, can pre-
vent this happening by besieging
members of Parliament with the dem-
ands to stop the Dome Petroleum sell-
out and to restore Dome Petroleum to
Canadian control.”

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 6, 1987 ¢ 5