On the Line: A History of the British Columbia Labour Movement by Rod Mickleburgh

Author:Rod Mickleburgh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor movement, Labour, British Columbia, History, 20th century, Strikes
ISBN: 9781550178272
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2018-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

IWA members at the Canadian White Pine Company just north of the Fraser River in Vancouver, November 1948. Standing second from left is a young Ray Haynes, who went on to lead the BC Federation of Labour from 1966 to 1973.

Tom Christopherson photo, Vancouver Public Library, 80727.

Appointed to the position on his thirty-eighth birthday and already infuriated by the Lenkurt charges, Haynes soon had more cause to be upset. “I’d been on the job one day, and already ten more people were in jail for contempt of court,” he remembered. For two years, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) had tried unsuccessfully to get maritime employers to recognize statutory holidays included in a rejigged Canada Labour Code. In a bid to bring the issue to a head, the union advised members to ignore a call to work on Good Friday. They did. This sent the employers to court. There, they obtained an injunction prohibiting the union from calling for a similar work stoppage on the next holiday. Union officers paid no attention to the order, and on Victoria Day the waterfront fell silent once again. A few days later, Canadian area president Roy Smith and nine local presidents were cited for contempt of court.

In a ringing courtroom defence, Smith justified defiance of the court’s order. “We cannot and we will not allow ourselves to be bullied by the employers into doing something which will take away the rights of the membership,” he declared. Unmoved, the court fined Smith $500 and the others $400 each, with the option of three months in jail. All chose prison. “To pay our fines would be an encouragement to the employers’ tactics of seeking injunctions and fines as means of harassing our union and draining its financial resources,” the group said in a collective statement.

Off they went to the provincial prison camp in Chilliwack. The fact that ten men were in jail for trying to force companies to comply with the Canada Labour Code roused the dozing federal government to action. Labour minister Jack Nicholson promised to strengthen the code’s holiday provisions to ensure they applied to dock workers. The ILWU got the holidays. But the fact that employers were able to use the courts to undermine such a legitimate cause reinforced labour’s determination to erase injunctions from the field of struggle. “This one item has caused more bitterness and unrest than any other issue in this province,” said Haynes. “It has no place in twentieth-century industrial relations.”

On the other side of the judicial bar, the courts were also getting edgy, frustrated that their orders were being regularly defied by labour leaders willing to accept time in jail. Instead of concluding that something was inherently wrong with the system, judges opted for even stronger sentences. The first figure to be hit by this “tough on crime” approach was the forceful head of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union, Homer Stevens.

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