Continued From page 2:

Alsbury motivated
y fear of labor unity

root cause'of his rantings — “His
name is Jack Phillips.”

Four years ago the Trades and
Labor Congress of Canada, un-

der’ the leadership of president-
emeritus Percy Bengough, acting
under instructions of the USS.
State Department, decided to
“clean out” all Communists and
progressive workers from’ Cana-
dian unions, and to instruct the
rank-and-file of these unions
that they could elect only such
union officers as were acceptable
to. the AFL bureaucracy or else
face expulsion.

The Vancouver Civic Employees
Union (Outside Workers) was
one of the unions chosen to be
“cleaned out.” TLC vice-presi-
dent, Carl Berg of Edmonton was
dispatched to Vancouver to do
the job — either to wreck an old
established union, or bring it
into line with official cold war
policy. “Socialist” Tom Alsbury
was selected as Berg’s assistant.

Berg “explained” to the local
presS at the time that in his’ job
of performing a surgical opera-
tion upon a union, he was ‘“‘just
like a doctor.” From then on he
was “Doctor” Berg to the men
chosen as his surgical victims.

Following a long and bitter
struggle to preserve their union
and retain their democratic right
to elect their own officers with-
out outside interference, the civic
workers — some 1,600 of them —
defeated the Berg-Alsbury wreck-
ers and kept their union intact.
Defeated. by the workers, Berg
and Alsbury set up 4 new local
composed of-a splinter group of

ane

RECTOR CIGAR
Only Union Made Cigar in
Vancouver
Hand Rolled Finest in Dutch
& Havana Tobacco
SOLD AT HOTELS
or
214 Union St., Vancouver

some 70 members drawn from
Vancouver School Board and
Airport workers. .

It is from Local 407 with its'

handful of members that Als-
bury, a school principal and
therefore ineligible to represent
the teachers’ union, receives his
“credentials” to sit as a delegate
in the Vancouver Trades and
Labor Council. i

Since then, in annual wage
negotiations, the civic outside
workers have made substantial
gains around a policy of unity
with all civic employees, gains
from which the Alsbury splin-
ter group benefits, but to win-
ning which it contributes little
or nothing.

Alsbury is satisfied to remain
a hitch-hiker, concentrating his
energies against his prime obses-
sion Jack Phillips, secre-
tary of the Vancouver Civic Em-
ployees (Outside Workers).

In his final article Alsbury
portrays Phillips in the role of
a*Communist Machiavelli, train-

ed at the Moscow “Lenin Insti- |-

tue in 1947.”

True, Phillips has been abroad
— as a soldier in the service of
his country, serving in many
countries of Western Europe dur-
ing the Second World War. But
he has still to make his first trip
to the Soviet Union for Commun-
ist “training” or anything else.
And Alsbury accuses the Com-
munists of “lying”!

Upon numerous occasions Phil-
lips, in the interests of his union,
has appealed to any “better judg-
ment” Alsbury might possess,
but his appeals have fallen on
deaf ears.

On other occasions Phillips has
suggested that Alsbury should
“see a psychiatrist” when some
of his ‘current statements or ac-
tions revealed a. mental obsession
rather, than differences on trade
union policies. Alsbury’s replies
have confirmed the soundness of
Phillips’ advice!

There are several important
conclusions labor must draw from
Alsbury’s Vancouver Sun articles
— eonclusions which the articles
are designed to confuse and ob-

scure,
&

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First there is the great trade
union merger in process; the
bringing together of a million-
strong Canadian Labor Congress
through the uniting of the two
big trade union centres, the
Trades and Labor Congress and
the Canadian Congress of Labor.

There is need to bring into the
CLC the Canadian and Catholic

Confederation. of Labor, the
many progressive independent
unions — and above all, the

need to organize tens of thous-
ands of unorganized workers in-
to a great democratic congress,
having as its aim the winning of
higher wages and living stand-
ards, and the exercise of its poli-
tical power commensurate with
its economic strength and im-
portance in the scheme of things.

Rank-and-file unionists look
upon the merger as the ex-
pression of a new labor unity
and a means of winning tre-
mendous wage and working
advances by 1957-58 when many
union contracts expire—a unity:
no. longer menaced by union
raiding and internal strife.

The trade union bureaucrats,
high and low (and Alsbury is
among the latter), are still play-
ing the game of cold war politics
under the guise of “fighting
Communism.”

They have another concept
of merger — a great bureau-
cratically controlled per capita
paying machine, in which they
will run the new CLC to their
own liking, and in conformity
with the wishes and desires of
big business. :

No better example of that aim
need be sought than in Berg’s
recent attempt to force a five-
year wage contract on B.C.
unions — a wage contract arriv-
ed at and signed in the USS.
without consultation with any
union membership, specifying a
wage cut of from eight to 87
cents an hour lower than the
prevailing rate now being paid
in B.C. on pipeline construction.

Berg just couldn’t sell that
shoddy package in B.C. any more
than he could hand over the
Civic Employees Union to Als-
bury.

The Vancouver Sun, in typical

Alsburian style, featured Berg’s |

failure to cut wages and hogtie
workers with a. U.S.-designed
wage contract in a headline which
read: “Pipeline Threatened by
Union Dispute,’ implying that
the delay in natural gas pipeline

construction would be due to.

the workers’ demands for decent
wages, rather than to Tory, Lib-
eral and Socred giveaway poli-
cies and monopoly-efforts to con-
trol the people’s resources.
Alsbury’s articles are an
attack upon the trade union
movement rather than upon
“Communism,” which merely
provides him with the pretext.
They are intended to head off
the desire for trade union unity,
to keep the militants out of
the new CLC, and to give a
_ small trade union bureaucracy
the power to wreck what they
cannot rule. :
Alsbury observed that he ex-

pected to be attacked. He would! U.S

have rendered organized labor
a better service had he kept his
disagreements with “commun-
ism” (which is his democratic
right) on a much higher plane
of fact and reality. Since he
preferred to do it at gutter level
he has no grounds to complain
if, in the backwash, labor splat-
ters him in his own muck.

Malayan pact signed

Tunku Abdul Rahman, chief minister of Malaya (right)
takes the pen from British Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-
Boyd to sign the agreement which will give Malaya nominal
independence by August 1957. Real extent of Malaya’s in-
dependence will be determined by what agreement the govern-
ment reaches with the Communist Party in Malaya.

By SAM RUSSELL

: MOSCOW
The Soviet Communist party
i“ig not afraid to declare that
there were mistakes in our foreign
policy” in the past ‘““when we, too,
were to blame for increasing ten-
sion,’ Anastas Mikoyan told the
party’s 20th congress here last
week.

“The Yugoslav question is a
caSe in point,’ he added. “Since
then steps have been taken to
Bscties the ‘position, and such
| steps could only have been taken
by Leninists.
| “The abolition of the military
, base in Finland and the treaty
| with Austria likewise show the
| boldness of our policy and how
' it takes into account the realities
of the situation.”

, Mikoyan, a first deputy pre-
| mier, said that there were also
‘shortcomings in the Soviet;
Union’s foreign trade policy;
which had to be eliminated.

Certain aggressive circles, he
said, had made a great deal of
play with their talk about a so-
called iron curtain erected by the
Soviet Union which, they said,
was a sign of weakness...

“We have dispelled this myth,”
he said, “and established strong
.contacts with other countries.”
| But, telling of difficulties in
| exchanging visits with the U.S.
,—ineluding one of restaurant
workers—he added: “Evidently
the U.S.State Department fears
even our cooks.” .

He declared there was no
“fatalistie necessity” for’ war, for
there existed the strength of the
working class against war, there
was also the strength of public
opinion, and there was the fact
that the Soviet Union had the
atom bomb and rockets that
could go to any part of the
world, ‘

Mikoyan went on to deal with
the situation in agriculture in the
Soviet Union and made a striking
comparison between what is hap-
pening in the USSR and in the

He pointed out that in his
presidential message to the U.S.
Congress Eisenhower had spoken
about & program for taking 25
million acres of cultivated land
out of production.

This, said Mikoyan, “is one
of the expressions of the decay

Mikoyan tells congress:
‘We too made errors
in foreign policy’

of agriculture under capital-
ism. Instead of ploughing up

FE!) LR

they were. — ‘

land they are turning cultivated -
areas into virgin land again,
while the USSR will be plough-
ing up 75 million acres of virgin
land this year.”

“Though men do not have

‘enough to eat—59 percent of

humanity—yet they cut the acre-
age of crops,:and these are the
people who claim world domin-
ation.” : :

Dealing with the overseas act-
ivities of the United States, Mi-
koyan pointed out that the U.S.
takes $1,950 million in profits
from oil out of the Middle-East
countries every year.

“This,” he said, “is so-called
‘world leadership’. If these oil
profits went to the peoples of
the Middle East, they could
have developed their coun- |
tries.” t
Like two other speakers before

him, Aristov and Suslov, both
secretaries of the Communist

| party’s central committee, Mikoy-~

an developed the remark made
earlier by Khrushchev that “mak- —
ing a particular leader a hero
and miracle worker” minimised
the collective leadership of the
party. ;

After a long break, said Mikoy-
an, there was now collective
leadership in the party and this
was the main thing that charac-
terised the Soviet Communist
party today. ‘

“The principle of colleetive
leadership,” he said, “is elemen-
tary for a party of the Leninist —
type. Yet for 20 years we did |
not have collective leadership
but the cult of the individual.
This had a harmful effect.” ;

At the morning session’ on
Thursday last week, the 1,430
delegates attending the congress
in the Great Hall of the Kremlin

were givenra practical lesson in) |

what is meant by abolition of the
cult of the individual. SPE
As each session opened, in
the morning and again in the
afternoon, they had risen to cheer
the leading members of the party
when they walked on to the plat-
form. a
On Thursday morning, Krush-
chev went to the microphone and
said that there was a request
from members of the presidium
that the congress should stop this.
He appealed to the delegates to
behave in a Communist way and
as the masters of the congress