British - Columbia :

the people's story

9 - RISE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT

By HAL GRIFFIN

THE beginnings of trade union organisation in British

Columbia are those of the province itself. Thirteen years after the colony of Vancouver Island was proclaimed and only four years after the colony of British Columbia came into being, the first unions were founded in Victoria.

The craftsmen who followed the gold miners to the burgeoning city of Victoria after 1858 brought with them ideas of union organisation which were rapidly gaining ground in the lands of their origin, in the Canadas, the United States and Britain. The first to organise were those trades in which these ideas were most advanced. By 1862 (the exact date the union was established is obscure) Victoria printers had their own union. Their president was Robert Holloway, who had travelled by prairie schooner across coun- try from Quebec to become the first printer of the Cariboo Sentinel at Barkerville, The printers were followed by the shipwrights who, in 1863, formed the Journeymen and Ship- wrights Association of Victoria and Vancouver Island.

Although they were the first to take strike action, the coal miners: of Vancouver Island apparently had no actual trade union organisation until the eighties. But their solidarity in face of intimidation and persecution, the resolution with which their committees conducted their struggles is attested by the struggles themselves—five months on strike in 1870-71, four months on strike in 1877, when the Wellington miners drove out the strikebreakers and held their company-owned houses against the sheriff until the Elliott government sent the militia to eject them.

’ For two decades trade union organisation was confined to Victoria. Then, in the eighties, with the coming of the transcontinental railway, the mushroom growth of Vancouver from a sawmill settlement to a city and the rapid expansion of the primary industries, the trade unions emerged to become a major force in the life of the province. While the newly-fledged industrialists, the promoters and the specula- tors, with the connivance of the Smithe government, were founding fortunes by seizing the richest natural resources for themselves, the workers whose labor was building those fortunes were organising against unrestricted exploitation.

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‘In’ 1884 the first local of the Knights of Labor was formed at Victoria, The organisation grew so rapidly that within two years it had four assemblies in the province, two embracing New Westminster and the newly chartered city of Vancouver, and one eath at Victoria and Nanaimo, and was strong enough to sustain publication of a weekly news- paper at Victoria, the Industrial News.

~ Originally formed as a secret society at Philadelphia in 1869, the Knights of Labor had emerged from its Reading, Pennsylvania, convention in 1878 as a general union organisation, establishing its first Canadian assembly at Ham- ilton, Ontario, three years later. The period of its expansion in British Columbia was also the period of its greatest strength in the country as a whole, some 250 locals organised in seven district assemblies.

- The basic unit was the local, composed either of a single craft or occupation or, as the tendency increasingly became, of various crafts and occupations. The only stipulation was that three-quarters of its members must be wage earners. But this was offset by another clause admitting to membership anyone over the age of 18 who was “working for wages, or at any time worked for wages.” Only doctors, lawyers, bankers and saloon-keepers were barred., In British Columbia its greatest following was among the lumber workers, wood- workers, teamsters, longshoremen and laborers, although its

membership covered virtually every occupation.

An early Vancouver Labor Day parade turning off Cordova on to Cambie Street

The idealistic expectations of easy reforms held by most Knights of Labor leaders were reflected in the aims of the Industrial News as expounded by John M. Duval, its editor, in the first issue on December 26, 1885: “... It will advocate a reduction of the hours of labor, that the toiling masses may have an opportunity to improve their minds, to beautify their homes, and to take their place in society to which, from their numbers and importance, they are entitled.”

The demand for a reduction of working hours was one raised by workers in every industry, Only a few months earlier, in April, 1885, Victoria carpenters had struck for and won the nine-hour day in principle and then found them- selves still working the ten-hour day because of their inability to enforce conditions on the job. But for a large part of the workers, on railroad construction gangs, in logging and mining camps and in the squalid company houses of the Vancouver Island coal mining towns, the right “to improve their minds, to beautify their homes” meant little. Their struggle was for a living wage, for decent food and accommodation, and against working conditions that took a fearful toll of maimed and killed.

The militancy of the membership in British Columbia, as elsewhere, was constantly in conflict with the attitude of the leadership of the Knights of Labor in pursuing its pro- claimed aim of “no conflict with legitimate enterprise, no antagonism to necessary capital.” In. British Columbia, work- ers could not accept unrestrained land speculation as “legiti- mate enterprise” nor federal-provincial financing of Robert Dunsmuir’s control of the Vancouver Island coal fields as “necessary capital.”

At the same time that the Knights of Labor were organ- ising in British Columbia, several craft unions, beginning with the Victoria printers in 1884, were affiliating with the American Federation of Labor, originally launched in 1881 as the Federation of Organised Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada and subsequently dissolved and reorganised as the American Federation of Labor in 1886. By the time the Vancouver Trades and Labor Council, embracing both ‘AFL and Knights of Labor locals, was formed on December 5, 1889; the AFL included among its affiliates printers, carpenters, shipwrights, iron moulders and tailors.

Within a year, two other trades councils, New Westminster.

and Victoria, were established, and all the newly organised strength of the trade union movement was being rallied behind the struggle for the nine-hour day. NEXT WEEK: RISE OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT (Continued)

Four years afterwards

Four years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of May 17, 1954 against racial segre- gation in schools—

Seventy-four percent, of 2,214 of the 3,008 school dis- tricts affected by the ruling, remain segregated. Only 764, or 26 percent have officially desegregated.

Of 2,806,000 Negro school children enrolled in, 17 South-

’.ern and border states and the

District of Columbia, only about 190,000, or less than 7 percent, actually attend mixed schools, although approxi- mately 257,000 are énrolled in districts officially desegregated About 2,616,000 remain segre- gated.

No districts have been de- segregated in. six Southern states: — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.

Eleven Southern states have passed 148 laws to circum- vent the Supreme Court rulings, or to delay compli- ance.

Desegregation in some dis- tricts has been accompanied by reprisals against Negro teachers; in Oklahoma alone, 300 Negro teachers have been ousted.

Segregation “in fact but not

in law’ — according to a study of the American Jewish Committee — exists in the

public school system of nine major northern cities with a total Negro population of four million — New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleve- land, Los Angeles, San Fran- cisco, Cincinnatti and Newark

But President Eisenhower, speaking in Washington on May 12 to a luncheon meeting of Negro leaders sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association, said:

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. we must have patience and forbearance ... I do not decry laws, for they are necessary. But I say that laws themselves will never solve problems that have their roots in the human heart and in the human emotions.”

The Negro leaders rejected his advice. Roy Wilkins, secretary of the National As- sociation for Advancement oi Colored People, declared thai the Negro people had been patient for 90 years, and ail they ever got was “a kick in the teeth.”

May 23, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 9