FOU TTI AAT TT RA ai IR tc theca adh AIUD Wb Deh ell el Pl tte a lhe lle ales lhe dll Badd | dia da A a : - ve f Ly me Pe @ FD y Vol. 6. No. 42. Vancouver, B.C., Friday, October 17, 1947 <3 Five Cents —_—. Asks Bill 39 amendment now Nigel Morgan, LPP pro- vincial..leader, this week called on*the Coalition gov- ernment to freeze all charges against trade union- ists under Bill 39 and to convene a special session of the legislature immediately to amend the unpopular la- bor law as demanded by or- ganized labor and recom- mended by the B.C. Liberal executive recently. “The B.C. Liberal Asso- ciation has only confirmed what all labor and the ma- jority of the people have been saying for months, that Bill 39 is undemocratic and discriminatory,” Mor- gan said, “The fact that it has now been upheld by the courts does not make the act any more demo- cratic. “Continued government prosecution of steel workers and revival of the threat to prosecute some 2,000 strik- ing furniture, packinghouse, foundry and_ boilermaker unionists constitutes open flaunting of the popular de- mand. Not labor, but the big business interests who wanted this bill to cripple the campaign for higher wages and so add to their huge profits are responsible for the present strike situ- ation. The way to intensify it is to defy popular opin- ion, The way to solve it is to call the legislature to- gether immediately to re- move the injustices being worked upon: both labor through Bill 39 and the ru- ral and farm taxpayers through the new school levies, “Common justice, public interest and the welfare of industry and agriculture as a whole demand that the government should act now.” eee STANI (10 demands price Herbert Hoover says eat less, Harold E. Stassen says Sat 15 percent less and President Harry Truman says waste less, controls But CIO President Philip Murray, shown here with Secretary of Commerce at a Washington conference * the Citizens Food Committee, suggests other measures _ “cluding restoration of price controls. TREET RAILWAYMEN BY DEMANDS - See page 8 illegal. ‘We’re sticking it out’ “I’m not out here in the rain because I like it, see? And I didn’t come out because any one in the union forced me to. I’m out here because my pay cheque just won’t stretch any further the way prices keep going up. It’s as simple as that.” : A pert dark-haired girl flung this at me, almost defiantly, one day this week when I went down to the United Packing- house Workers’ picket line on Terminal Avenue to talk to some of the strikers. In all the talk there has been about Bill 39 and the strike crisis it has pro- duced no one outside the labor movement, and particularly those daily newspapers which opén their columns wide to the sordid confessions of a convicted murderer and close them to the story of a worker, seems to have been concerned with the strikers’ viewpoint. No one, that is, ex- cept the public. And the public doesn’t own the daily newspapers and radio stations that have made a monopoly. of its information and would, if they could, make a monopoly of its thinking. Yet there is big news in what the Strikers on the picket lines are thinking. Because two thousand or so packing house workers, steel workers and furniture workers have struck in defiance of the legislation that was designed to keep them from striking the Coalition government in Victoria is going through a crisis. “They tell us what we're doing is It’s illegal to strike for more money when you can’t get it any other way. Well, what I want to know is, if it’s illegal for us to strike for more money why isn’t it illegal for the companies to raise their prices? We're part of the public that has to pay them.” It was the dark-haired girl speaking again. Yes, she said, she had read Wismer’s Statement about the necessity of uphold- ing the law. She knew that the govern- ment intended to proceed with its prose- cution of the strikers. “But we're sticking, see?” she declared, “We're sticking until they decide to do something about upholding our right to a decent wage.” The furniture workers at the Rest- more plant, across False Creek flats on the north side, had much the same story to tell. ; “Seventy-seven cents an hour sounds pretty fair until you start trying to figure out where it’s gone,” Ann Velichko, who works in the finishing department, told me. “We live in one room. That’s $15 a month, Our grocery bill runs around $15 a week. Then there are clothes and shoes and all the little things that run away with the money. It seems to me that these guys who figure out the cost of living never expect a girl to use lipstick or go to a show.” You listen to ‘the strikers on the picket line and you get a simple story. It’s the kind of story you can hear almost any night around the supper table of al- most any working class family. The cost of food, clothing, virtually everything you care to name, has gone up. The pay cheque is larger in the figures written across its face, but it’s smaller in what it will buy. It’s the simple truth before it gets into the mouths of the old-line poli- ticians and the industrialists to be dis- torted as a challenge to authority and a red plot to upset our top-heavy with profits economy.