Those Lake People by Lynne Bowen

Author:Lynne Bowen [Bowen, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS006000
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Published: 1996-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In April, union local president Mack MacKinnon sent a letter to all employers at the lake, informing them that the union wished to negotiate a package that included a satisfactory wage scale, union recognition and a union agreement. In a bold gesture to match his bold demands, he also informed the press. Then, in a move that proclaimed the union meant business, MacKinnon challenged all logging workers on the rest of the island and the mainland coast—there were virtually no organized lumber workers in the interior of the province—to walk out on May 4.

In those early days of May, Lake Logging, already affected by the closing of the railroad it shared with VL&M, was shut down by its own workers. Mr. Rounds and Mr. Hunter, who were at the meeting when the men voted, refused to consider union recognition, but they were willing to meet the men halfway on wages. When the men voted to strike anyway, it was a personal defeat for Superintendent Neil McDonald, who had been so sympathetic to blacklisted loggers. One hundred and eighty strikers threw their packsacks onto flat cars and climbed into the railway coaches. When they climbed down at the Crossing in Lake Cowichan, the majority of them registered at the community hall, which had become union headquarters as the strike expanded. A lot of them cashed their cheques and contributed a day’s wages to the strike fund. Some of them headed down the road for Duncan, but many moved into the picket camp which was, of necessity, being enlarged.

The realization that most of the sawmills in the area were going to keep working was a blow to the union’s hopes for a quick settlement. Especially bitter were the men in Camps Three and Six, both of which belonged to ITM at Youbou. While most of the men in the camps walked out, most of the Youbou men kept working. Added to that disappointment was the realization that loggers in the rest of the province had failed to walk out as well. As Stan Anderson said in later years,

We were told that we had to go on strike so we went down to the foot of the lake and we went on strike, and we were the only lousy outfit in British Columbia that did.

Stan was a union man through and through, having spent his young manhood in one altercation after another as the unemployed sought to better their lot in the Depression-ridden West. The diminutive man had been part of a farmer-labour group that was gassed on the steps of Calgary city hall in 1933. In Lethbridge he had to defend himself in court against a false accusation of rioting.

I was on the stand for about three bloomin’ days, and they tried to convince me that my name was not Anderson, it was Androvitch. We were all classified as “pinkos.”

He had been in Vancouver’s Victory Square in 1935 when the men from the Bennett camps rioted; during a Vancouver waterfront strike, he had been part of a ragtag group that published a strike bulletin using stolen paper and type.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.