The 1930s:
Unemployed
organizing

Continued from page 10

taken in 2,000 members and is widely
credited with having forced the city of Van-
couver to begin a system of work and relief.

The organization would also bear the
sting of official repression, as police and
government set a pattern that was to be
followed throughout much of the decade in
responding to unemployed organization:
When relief workers struck for better rates
and conditions in January, 1930, and mar-
ched to the Powell Street grounds to
dramatize their demands, their demonstra-
tion was broken up by police.

The relief system, which was bandied
back and forth between the various levels of
government, also compelled the
unemployed-to adapt to new conditions
when the single unemployed were segregated
from the married men for provision of relief.
The result was the establishment of the
Single Unemployed Workers’ Association
which became part of the Workers’ Unity
League National Unemployed Workers’
Association, set up by the WUL to give
substance to its stated policy to organize
both employed and unemployed alike.

For single men, Norris recalls, “if you
could prove that you had been a resident for
a year, you got a ticket worth about $1.05
that gave you a room at a cheap hotel and a
meal ticket worth about $2.”

The married men had to line up outside
the relief office once a week with a-gunny
sack to receive a carefully rationed portion
of macaroni, beans, meat and other staples.

The campaign to change the relief system
and to compel authorities to pay in script
often graviated around the Single Men’s
Association. Ron Liversedge recalled the
organization’s work in his memoir,
Recollections of the On to Ottawa Trek:

“The single men’s organization was no
paper organization, but a real, live function-
ing body, the hall on (52%) Cordova Street a
hive of activity every day and most every
night...

“Here all kinds of committees were
elected. Committees for publicity, for relief,
for health, for recreation, for finance. These
committees would act as delegations when
necessary in the case of a worker being
discriminated against by the relief
authorities or in case it was thought that
some workers stood a chance of getting on
relief. Then, the whole committee would ac-
company the worker to the relief office and
argue his case with the authorities in the ma-
jority cf cases with success.

“In the case of evictions from homes, or
attempted evictions, there was always a
reserve pool of men at 52'2 Cordova to call
on for help for eviction picket duty.”’

Norris remembers the unemployed
organization printing a small mimeograph-
ed newspaper —— The Unemployed Worker
which sold for three cents a copy — and
holding open forums every week to which
were invited various speakers. Frequently,
the discussions were on unemployment but
often they ranged to such topics as.the
French Revolution.

From the office of single men’s associa-
tion also sprang the Relief Camp Workers’
Union, formed in 1932 when the
unemployed were again compelled to adapt
to new conditions, and chartered by the
Workers’ Unity League the same year.

Although the provincial government had
established work camps in 1931, they were
brought under the federal government’s
Fordham Commission in 1932 and then, in
June, 1933 turned over the department of
national defence which proceeded to build a
whole network of tarpaper and shiplap
“‘relief. camps’? throughout the country.
Prime minister R. B. Bennett would later
claim in a 1935 report to the House of Com-
mons that the camps “Shave won the warm
support and approval of those who have in-
spected them’’ but to the unemployed living
and working in them, they would always be
the ‘‘slave camps.”

Initally, the unemployed association
counselled members not to go to the
provincially-administered camps fearing
that they were part of a government strategy
PACIFIC TRIBUNE APRIL 29, 1983— Page 12

Part of the May Day parade of
15,000 people in 1935. At right,
the Communist Party banner.

to break up the organization and divide its
membership, but as more and more men
volunteered and as relief became more dif-
ficult for single men to obtain, they began to
organize the camps themselves. The cam-
paign gathered a new urgency when the
DND took over administration.

Under its regime, any form of organiza-
tion was illegal, and which was spelled out on
bulletin boards edict and underscored by
Col. Spry, the director of organization for
the DND. ‘The department will not
countenance any steps to bring accusations
before the tribunal of public opinion, either
by speeches, or letters inserted in the

newspapers, by men actively employed in

relief work,”’ he declared.

Many going to camps signed up at 5214
Cordova, from which the RCWU had been
formed, but the organization went on inside
the camps.

Jack Ewing, a pensioner now living in
Vancouver, remembers organizing the
camps in the Kootenays as part of the WUL
campaign.

The son of a former Wobbly, he
recalls rebelling against the camp conditions.
“‘They got me down — you felt like you were
in a concentration camp.”’

But organization didn’t move as quickly
as many have assumed.

“Tt was damned hard to organize.’’ Ew-
ing recalls now, ‘‘The men were mainly kids
and a lot of older men, many of whom were
broken-down former wage workers,
unemployed loggers, miners, farmhands.

‘*For many of them it was a safe place to
be — they got three meals a day, clothing
and tobacco that was sold to the government
by the big tobacco companies. Many were
immigrants who didn’t have citizenship.

‘‘They were good guys,’’ he emphasizes,
but many were afraid to take part in strikes
or protests because of blacklisting or th
threat of deportation.

And the threat was real. Scores of
unemployed organizers were deported back
to Britain and other countries from which
they had emigrated as the government’s
answer to unemployed organization.

Dozens of others were arrested and jailed
under Section 98, introduced during the
Winnipeg General Strike and used again to
outlaw the Communist Party in 1931.

Hundreds more were fired from the
camps and blacklisted from returning — a
practice which led the unemployed to adopt
a widespread system of aliases. Ewing
himself, having naively reapplied under his
own real name to go to another camp after
he had briefly left one camp to attend a
RCWU meeting, was blacklisted. Months
later, he found on his card that he had been
discharged for attempting to organize.

Despite that, the organization proceeded
secretly. “‘At 10 p.m. the foreman would
come around to sound the bell for lights
out,’’ Ewing remembers, ‘‘and we’d call a
meeting in the dark. We’d get a dozen guys
together and the organizer would come
sneaking in from outside with the (RCWU)
cards.

‘Tater on, we’d find him a spare bunk in
one of the huts. In the morning, we’d sneak
him into the mess hall for breakfast, take up
whatever collection we could and then send
him on his way.”’

It was ‘‘damned hard,’ Ewing em-
phasizes again, but when the relief camp
strike was called in April, 1935, todemanda

program of work and wages, medical and
compensation coverage for camp workers,
election of camp committees , the elimina-
tion of military administration and a
workers’ social and unemployment in-
surance bill, close to 1,500 workers walked
out of the camps and began making their
way to Vancouver. :

Two ‘months later, their struggle
culminated in the On to Ottawa trek and the
brutal attack on the trekkers at Regina on
July 1, 1935 — an attack which, although it
ended the trek, also consigned the govern-
ment of R. B. Bennett to the political scrap
heap.

But in the two months between the open-
ing of the relief camp strike and beginning of
the trek, the unemployed struggle was again
focussed in Vancouver and the unemployed
leaders wrestled with new tactics, new ways
to bring their plight before the public and
their demands before the various levels of
government.

They organized a mass rally in Powell
Street Grounds at which 15,000 people re-
soundingly backed their demands. They
‘*tincanned’’ — for money in the streets, de-
fying city police and raising hundreds of
dollars to feed their members. And they
organized marches to city hall which forced
mayor Gerry McGeer to grant extra relief,
although that too was finally cut off.

At every step of the way, Norris recalls,
they sought to win wider support for the
strikers and their demands to keep their own
ranks united.

They were able to do, according to Steve
Brodie, the leader of the 1938 post office oc-
cupation by the single unemployed, because
every decision was discussed thoroughly by
the unemployed themselves before being put
to ademocratic vote. But once an action was
voted upon and agreed, they carried it out
with an exacting discipline.

They also brought to their organization an

exemplary unity that defied all attempts to
use racial or national discrimination to
divide the men. ‘‘There was no racism or
chauvinism among the unemployed,”’ says
Norris, ‘‘you never saw, you never felt it.
There was the real feeling that we were all in
it together.”’ :

The unemployed frequently threw its
weight ‘behind the Chinese unemployed
organizations, demanding that the Chinese
be paid relief on the same scale as white and
protesting the lousy conditions and often
rancid food that was given single

unemployed Chinese by the Anglican mis
sion.
Significantly, although the unemploye
had a close relationship with the é
affiliated unions, there was little impetus f0! |
unemployed organization and relatively lit
tle support — until later — from thé
mainstream trade union movement, a
filiated to the Trades and Labor Congress:
Says Norris, ‘‘That’s the big difference bel
ween then and now — most of tht
unemployed in the ’30s hadn’t belonged !
unions. Most of the unions had closed shop*
and their leaders mainly looked out fo
themselves.”’

But as the unemployed organizatiom™
grew in strength and later, as the founding of
the Congress of Industrial Organization
gave new life to union organizing, that rela
tionship grew. Many unions gave financ¢l
support and took part in conferences and
meetings of the unemployed.

- In the same year as the CIO was founded
— 1935 — the number of local unemploy'
organizations increased readily. Two y
before, at the urging of the Communist Pa!
ty, the National Committee of Unemployed
Organizations had been formed and in #
pamphlet entitled ‘‘Building a Mas
Unemployed Movement,” it urged thé
unemployed to set up ‘‘block committees
consisting of unemployed workers on
given street — and from those block com
mittees to establish neighborhood coun
which would bring together the unemploy®
and other workers’ organizations. In add
tion, central councils could be formed fro™
a number of neighborhood councils.

By 1935, considerable organization®!
work had been done and the block commit
tees were active in various parts of the cit:
raising grievances over relief. In com
munities around the province groups such #
the Port Coquitlam Workers’ Protecti¥’
Association and the Maple Ridge Citizen’
Protective Association were formed to také
up relief issues with local authorities.

Across the province, the Provinci!
Workers’ Association brought togethé
unemployed organizations together, wi
unions, ratepayer and youth groups, and
convened conferences on such issues as t
workers’ social and. unemployment 1”
surance plan initially proposed by thé
RCWU:

But it was the single unemployed wh?
most symbolized the jobless crisis of thé

See ORGANIZE page 20