~ Her roots are in the working class Interviewing Mickey Beagle y life wouldn’t mean anything if I didn’t have my roots in the working class,’’ reflected Mickey Beagle, outstanding pioneer trade unionist and socialist, as we sat on the front stairs of her home. in Queensborough, New Westmin- ster, where she’s lived for most of her working life. We look across the open ditch between her property and the road, past the train tracks that slice Mercer Road in half, to the equally old houses on the other side. Mickey tells me that a hotel used to be there, at Mercer Road and Ewan Street, which housed the construc- tion workers of a mill, which was to close almost immediately after it was built — the company merely needing an excuse to win timber rights. : Mickey’s neighbourhood, settl- ed on land below sea level beside the Fraser River, is made up of working people of different ethnic origins, fishermen, railway hands and workers, who are employed at the numerous industrial sites scat- tered along the banks of the river and farm lands. . The house where she grew up still stands behind her house, and it was there that her father first made Mickey aware of the notion that she lived in a class society. “My father was unique in his day because he believed in a society where there was no exploitation of man by man. One of the first pro- ponents of socialism in Canada, he was tremendously excited by a man called Lenin who cropped up in frequently.” She laughed to remember that he first pronounced Lenin’s name — **Len-een.’’ Her father fished. the Fraser River and Smiths Inlet during the fishing season, and during the off season would build boats in the back yard. Ina thumbnail sketch of her family written as a preface to a paper she wrote in July, 1979 on “Segregation and Discrimination in the West Coast Fishing Industry,’”’ she notes that from the early 1700’s her ancestors were fishermen and sealers in New- foundland. : ‘My grandfather used to tell us about the years when the fish har- vest was plentiful, how the merch- ants would charge high prices for gear and provisions and in the lean PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY 2, 1980— Page 8 - years, would charge less for the same articles,’ she recalls. “So it didn’t make any_dif- ference to the fishermen whether the fish harvest was large or small, the low standard of living remained . the same.” : Mickey learnt a class analysis not only through reading and discus- sion but by her own experiences from the very outset of her working life. Her first jobs were in the fields picking vegetables and later on the production lines in fruit canneries. ‘During those days,’ Mickey says, ‘‘there were only individuals struggling against the bosses, and they, more often than not, would lose their jobs for their efforts.” After her marriage to Mervin Beagle, a longshoreman, they moved to the States and there Mickey stepped up her political in- volvement, becoming active in the Congress of Industrial Organiza- tions (CIO). By JANICE HARRIS Upon their return to Canada, Mickey found work in a plant sor- ting veneer for fruit baskets, and her trade union expertise gained from her work in the shipyards in the States must have shone through because she soon was elected recor- ding secretary for her local of the International Woodworkers of America. When the IWA went on strike in 1946, Mickey organized the non- union women on the assembly line to go out in support of the strike. The men who worked the lathes and machinery had no other choice but to go out — they were union. She was fired from the plant shortly after the strike, and in 1948, left with her 15-year-old daughter to seek work up the coast in a fish cannery — a second wage by this time was an ‘‘economic necessity.’ “My brother worked for the Canadian Fish Company in Carlyle on the Skeena River Slough and I asked him if they hired women and he said ‘yes’.”’ She wasn’t at Carlylelong before _the fishermen’s organizing boat, skippered by union organizer, Tom Parkin, reached the salmon cann- ing plant where she was working a 5 CNOOLS & woex i ia and signed the cannery workers up with the union. She was elected shop steward in 1949. “I have never planned on taking a leading role wherever I worked, but because I felt strongly about workers’ rights, it just turned out that I did.” First a cannery worker, then a filleter and later a full-time general organizer of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, Mickey, like her father and-grand- father before her, centered the ma- jority of her activity around the struggles of workers in the fishing industry. She wasn’t in the union long, when cold war broke out, ‘‘serious- ly hampering the fight for pro- gressive policies in the union.” Much like the situation today, Mickey notes that progressive trade unionists made economic as well as political points against the arms build-up. ‘“‘We said that money was wasted on arms while pro- grams for people were neglected. We struggled to get resolutions on the floor on trade with all coun- tries.”” One of her proudest moments came when, after struggling for three days to pluck up the courage to ask her co-workers at the Im- perial canning plant in Steveston to sign a peace petition, the over- whelming majority of them signed, “despite the cold war philosophy which was permeating their lives.” “T had to have influenced them enough before I could ask them to sign the petition; if I hadn’t they would have refused and I’d have been isolated from them,’’ she remembers. Amajor feature of the fishing in- dustry which has occupied the thought of Mickey for a long time, 3 I H is the segregation and discrimina- tion of its workers. A particularly glaring example of discrimination, the discrimination against women, stands out in her mind. Although the conditions of work and wages have steadily improved throughout the years, discrimina- tidn against women still exists in a number of forms. Mickey recalls that women used to fear equal pay because it would mean that men would get hired in- stead of them — a classic example of how women saw themselves as a source of cheap labor. ‘‘Many of the women felt that the men deserv-_ ed higher wages because they were the family providers; others felt that the sliding wage scale was the way it had always been’’ and the way it always should be. “Tt took years to make women aware of their right to equal pay and it wasn’t until women were convinced and had the support of the men that it became as issue for - negotiations,”’ she says. ‘And men came to realize too that keeping women down had the tendency to downgrade their — wages.”” Although equal pay in respect to the general labor base rate of pay has been established in contract agreements, there is still sex discrimination on the job as il- lustrated in the recent case of Sue Jorgenson, a B.C. Ice worker deliberately excluded from the higher wage of Group 1 even though she does work classified in the union contract as Group 1. Conversely, men could work at Group 2 jobs with women, yet con- tinue to receive Group | wages. Mickey says that whenever equal pay for equal work is brought to grievance proceedings or arbitra- 2. « &* * aX > * \s -women and minorities until “ . couver, 1960. LEFT: With her sist Ke i eee tion, equal work is always anal ed as the “‘same work.” ——— Ina brief submitted to the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1968, she noted that” “equal work is not necessarily the” same work not does it have to be of a comparable nature in order to be equal. tee “Work performed by womei can be entirely different than work | performed by men but still equal value. The work can be equal i training time, in skills in hours work, in production, equal in tensity and equal in necessity to the overall production.” The union is now wor fresh fish operations by elimina’ the group 1 (heavy work) group 2 (lighter work) categorie, and even more generally, the union is continuing to wage a persistent struggle against intolerance, Pre judice, racial discrimination forms of discrimination are en! for all time.”’ That’s the way Mickey looks 4 things — and always has. To h mind, real unity can only be achiev- ed in this highly-diverse, highly- monopolized industry, if the i dustry workers fight to ene. discrimination and segregation within their ranks. = “Organization and unity are still the main means of improving living” standards and securing a better life for fishery workers, and in fact, for” every worker.” a PHOTOS, TOP: Mickey speaking at the Vancouver Trade Union May Day rally at Exhibition Park, Var Rhoney Greenall (r) at Carlyle Can nery, 1949. RIGHT: With delegates” at the annual UFAWU conventic March, 1970.