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FRENCH-CANADIAN WORKERS FIGHT FOR RIGHTS. Over 2500 Montreal trade unionists staged a march on Feb. 27 to demand the Union Nationale government enforce the laws guaranteeing the right to collective bargaining against the U.S.-owned Seven-Up company. 160 workers in Montreal have been

on strike for eight months.

Giant giveaway looms

behind port fracas

Cont'd from pg. 1

$560 and-evade tax contributions to Canada. Here we have a prime example of how such dollar-patriots are bleeding our economy white, while Victoria and Ottawa fall over one another to serve the various monopoly interests in their political camps.

Behind the maze of complex manoeuvers and technical constitutional jurisdictions, is the fact that some $67 million will have to be underwritten by Provincial, and, or Federal taxpayers to speed the overseas shipment of raw materials — coal, ores, oi] and pulp — that should be processed and manufacturered in B.C. to provide needed jobs and higher returns.

Sixty-seven millions dollars will be spent to facilitate the gutting of our natural resources for the benefit of foreign trusts, but not a penny to stimulate the development of refining, processing and manufacturing that could provide a vast steel, shipbuilding, and petro- chemical complex with thousands upon thousands of new jobs for Western Canada.

Is it not time that governments (Federal and Provincial) ended the rape of our irreplaceable resources for foreign benefit and made the taxes taken from us available instead for promotion of Canadian industrial development? Why

shouldn’t government tax moneys.

oe

LECIS

CKWX 10:10 P.M.

1130x.c, SUNDAYS

COMMUNIST PARTY'S WEEKLY RADIO COMMENTARY

©

by NIGEL MORGAN

(being used to provide facilities for the benefit of the Kaiser-Nippon trust) be directed to develop new smelting, processing and manufacturing industries at home to provide jobs and supply the vast markets of Asia, Africa, South America and the Socialist sector of the world with manufactured goods.

Our very future, no less than present needs, requires that the whole emphasis be changed to that aim. Our natural resources, the birthright of our people, should be repatriated and brought back under public ownership and control. CPR profiteering at the people’s expense should be answered by nationalization. We should stipulate by law, as the U.S.; Japan and other countries do, that a high proportion of Canadian products must be carried by Canadian transports.

We should demand policies that will stimulate the all-round development of the Canadian economy and particularly the building of a merchant marine as well as docks aimed at facilitating the export of manufactured products instead of raw materials. The benefits of such a policy would be immense to many thousands of workers, merchants and the economy as a whole.

LABOR SCENE:

IWA Coast talks open as |

| __ fil ii ieee ih AWA Lh

Interior fight sharpens

Approximately 5,000 IWA lumberworkers have been on strike in the Southern Interipr of B.C. for over five months. When this strike first began on October 4, 1967, it covered the whole of the B.C. Interior lumber industry, involving some

8,000 workers.

Key issue of the strike, and one of long standing, centered around the demand of IWA Interior lumberworkers for wage parity with Coast rates. That meant for the Interior IWA a wage increase of a flat 50-cents an hour, nothing less if parity was to be realized in a new 1967-68 wage contract.

With living and all other costs equally as high, if not higher than the Coast, Interior IWA workers saw no valid reason why they should be subject to lower wage standards than their Coast brothers, more so with Interior lumber operators profits at an all-time high.

For purposes of wage contract negotiations (there may be other reasons) the B.C. Interior lumber industry is divided into two regions, the Northern and Southern Interior, with many of the largest operations in the South.

Negotiations had scarcely got under way before Socred government members began publicizing their views that the Interior lumber industry ‘‘could not afford to pay parity wages’’ etc. with the Coast, while at the same time, unsolicited by the IWA, the Bennett government appointed Mr. Justice T. Craig Munroe as industrial inquiry commissioner to help meditate the dispute; this even prior to complying with the IWA demand for a government-supervised strike vote. This was the new Socred ‘‘strategy”’ in union interference, designed to short-circuit IWA wage negotiations.

- Clearly the Bennett government

had gone to bat for the Interior operators, and have remained there since the beginning of the dispute, a factor confirmed by Bob Schlosser, president of IWA Local 1-417 in a recent letter in the Union Newsbulletin: ‘‘The government has wrecked the entire negotiation procedure in this province for political purposes .. . any further government interference or biased reporting by the press will do nothing

Dowling in the. New York Herald Tribun: “Think that might hold until November?’

MARCH 15, 1968—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 12

but prolong the settlement of this strike’.

In his capacity as industrial inquiry commissioner, Mr. Justice Munroe recommended a 44-cent an hour increase on a two year contract. In the Northern Interior, because of

-community, press, employer and

government pressure upon the workers, a number of IWA units were forced into acceptance, unaware that the 44-cent increase didn’t even become operative until January 1, 1969. The solidarity in the Northern Interior had been broken, as the employers and government planned, but the Southern Interior held, and still holds solid.

The IWA has made every effort to

Charging bad faith, IWA District president Jack Moore said Tuesday that while talks with the Interior operators were proceeding earlier this week company lawyers were applying for injunctions in many Interior centres.

get talks back to the negotiating table, but on every occasion, even as late as Monday of this week in Vancouver, the Southern Interior operators have flatly refused to consider any of the union’s proposals.

On this and previous breakdowns in IWA — company negotiations, the ‘Kamloops Sentinel’ of March 2 ina front-page feature quotes the president of the Kelowna IWA: “British Columbia operators want to prolong the Interior lumber strike, as part of a ‘poker game’ to control Interior forests. It is our opinion there has been a continual poker game going on between these large corporations as to who is going to buy out who and when’’.

There is a growing opinion among IWA strikers and others in the Southern Interior that the continuous breaking off of negotiations by industry spokesmen indicates that they are depending on the Bennett government to get them off the hook by the enactment of Bill 33 and its initial test as a strike-breaking weapon in the Southern Interior. These Southern Interior ‘‘poker players” haven’t been able, with government help available to date, to clamp the Munroe under-parity recommendations upon the Interior woodworkers, but with the provisions of Bill 33 applied, they are hopeful.

One of the disturbing features of the Southern Interior strike is the fact that in the Celgar and Weldwood settlements between union and management, in which parity rates were achieved, for approximately 1,200 workers, these settlements were not accepted by the other Southern Interior operators as a pattern for industrial peace and progress. This is basically what the IWA are urging — that Celgar serve as a pattern for the whole Interior. On the contrary such settlements have been damned by the hang-tough operators and their spokesmen.

During the past week some of these outfits, by the use of ex-parte

‘injunctions against the IWA, have

attempted with the aid of office staffs and running scabs to get their plants into operation. This attempt at strike-breaking is seen as 4 further attempt to provoke an ‘incident’, thereby providing an excuse for direct government interference in the IWA strike, via the Bill 33 route.

At Nelson last week Judge Leo Ganser granted an exparte injunction which would limit the IWA picket line on the strike-bound Kootenay Forest Products Ltd., to 12 pickets, with six of these only permitted within a 300-foot radius of the plant property, and not more than three at any one place. Such an injunction against a union engaged in a struggle for its members’ bread and butter, reduces the right of workers to picket their jobs to 4 cynical farce. Especially when it is known that the struck company is planning a scab-hiring campaign to get its plant in operation!

~ In Vancouver, Jack Moore, IWA regional president, forwarded wires to the company and the mayor of Nelson, urging that type of company provocation be ended. Moore’s wire to the Nelson mayor said: ‘‘Would urgently request that you publicly ask Kootenay Products Ltd. to desist in their provocative actions which could easily lead to unfortunate furmoil in your community.”’

Initial talks in Coast wage contract negotiations are expected to get under this week between the IWA Coast Negotiating Committee and Forest Industrial Relations (FTR»

In view of the rapid rise in living costs and other essentials which absorbed all and more than IWA increases totalled in contract negotiations of two years ago, the wage conference body, representing over 26,000 Coast members of the IWA considered the new wage demands put forward as quite modest and realistic.

Minister of Labor Peterson, in line with the Bennett government’s policy of increasing interference in the internal affairs of the unions on matters of collective bargaining, proposed an “impartial fact-finding” body, in line with the 1966 Nemetz recommendations, which would compile a volume of factual data on the economy of the lumber industry of B.C., and on the basis of such material determine the industry’s “ability to pay’.

The IWA accepted this proposal, although it felt, justifiably, that the government rather than

management and labor should bear

the cost and effort required in such a study. However, the IWA’s ‘‘terms of reference’’ which included opening of the industry’s books to public scrutiny, was totally rejected by the latter. Consequently the IWA withdrew completely from the government-proposed scheme. Without a complete disclosure of all industry operations, costs, profits, etc., there was nothing to be gained by the union’s participation in such a farcial procedure.

It is therefore expected that initial talks this week will open with FIR’s hardy perennial plea that the industry ‘‘just cannot afford” wage increases and other ‘‘inflationary” labor costs ‘“‘at this time’? — and keep their profit balance sheets tightly closed meantime.

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