Leaflet on the birth and history of the Canadian section of Industrial Workers of the World. The author later became involved with fascist groups, which we oppose, but we reproduce this text for its useful information.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Established in 1886, the American Federation of Labor had by the

turn of the century secured its domination over North American

organized labour. True, the federation was still a shaky affair;

the AFL - interested primarily in "respectable" craft unions --

refused to organize the great bulk of industrial workers. But

with the Knights of Labor (the first genuine, albeit mystical

attempt to bring all workers together under one all-embracing

organization) everything but buried, and industrial unions like

the American Railway Union destroyed and the Western Federation of

Miners under increasing attack by the mine owners, the AFL managed

to establish hegemony and either batter down or absorb all

rivals.

This craft union hegemony existed in Canada as well as the United

States. The original Canadian unions -- insular and indecisive --

failed. The same fate met the first mass- industrial union from

the U.S., the Knights. In 1902, the Trades and Labour Congress,

already the leading force in Canadian labour and controlled by the

AFL union branches in Canada, expelled from its ranks all Canadian

national unions, British internationals, and the Knights of Labor.

The opposition formed a Canadian Federation of Labour (CFL) but it

never amounted to much. Prospects seemed clear for the TLC and,

behind it, Samuel Gompers, U.S. president of the AFL.

Yet only three years were to pass before the IWW emerged as a

revolutionary challenge.



BIRTH OF THE IWW

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in 1905 in

Chicago. The driving force behind the new union was the Western

Federation of Miners, which had been fighting a bloody but losing

battle throughout the western US and Canada. Joining were the

WFM's parent, the American Labor Union (which included several

hundred members in B.C) the United Brotherhood of Railway

Employees, and Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance.

Observers were sent from the United Metal Workers (US and Canada),

the North American branch of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers

of Great Britain, the International Musicians Union, the Bakers

Union, and others.

Keynote speeches were delivered by Big Bill Haywood of the WFM,

Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, Mother Jones of the United

Mine Workers, DeLeon, Lucy Parsons, anarchist and widow of a

Haymarket martyr, Father Hagerty, who drew up the One Big Union

industrial structure, and William Trautmann from German Brewery

Workers of Milwaukee (who was expelled from that union for his

participation in the IWW convention). Trautmann's and Hagerty's

views were influenced by European anarcho-syndicalism, as were

Haywood's by the revolutionary syndicalism of the French CGT. A

claimed membership of 50,827 was pledged to the IWW. The

professed aim was nothing less than the overthrow of the

capitalist system by and for the working class.

Two months later, after the United Metal Workers brought in 700 of

their claimed 3,000 members, the actual total of union members was

a mere 4,247. There was a magnificent $817.59 in the treasury.

The new union had begun to march on the wrong foot and the AFL

crowed with delight. Within a few years all the founding

organizations had either quit the IWW or had been expelled. By

1910, a low year with only 9,100 dues-paid members, the IWW was

the unruly bastard of the labor movement, ridiculously challenging

the AFL and the Capitalist Class to a battle to the death.

However, the IWW then suddenly burst out with an amazing explosive

force, becoming a mass movement in the US, Canada, Australia, and

Chile, and leaving a fiery mark on labour in South Africa,

Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Great Britain and the world maritime

industry.

The reasons for this sudden expansion lay at the very root of the

economic crisis underlying capitalist society in the years

immediately prior to the First World War. To begin with,

organized labour, divided as it was into squabbling craft unions,

was in a pitiful state, unable to effect even the most innocuous

reforms. The larger mass of unorganized and chronically

under-employed workers lived in appalling misery as it reeled from

a capitalist "boom and bust" cycle of high speculation followed by

crushing depression every five or ten years.

Yet despite this seemingly tremendous weakness of the working

class, many unionists had already recognized the great power

inherent in the vast industrial monopolies which the

ever-shrinking number of super-industrialists themselves scarcely

knew how to handle. That a working class already trained in the

operating of these industries might continue to do so in the

enforced absence of the capitalist owners was a matter of

new-found faith and high expectations. At this particular moment,

it was precisely the IWW which gave not only voice to these hopes

and desires, but also offered the first INDUSTRIAL strategy to

effect that transference of power.

The IWW, cutting across all craft lines, organized workers into

industrial unions -- so that no matter the task, all workers in

one industry belonged to one industrial union. These industrial

unions formed the component parts of six industrial departments:

1-Agriculture, Land, Fisheries and Water Products, 2-Mining,

3-Construction, 4-Manufacturing and General Production,

5-Transportation and Communication, and 6-Public Service. The

industrial departments made up the IWW as a whole; yet although

functioning independently, they were bridged by the rank and file

power of the total general membership to vote on all union general

policy and the election of all officers of the General

Administration coordinating the industrial departments.

The IWW was characterized by a syndicalist reliance on the job

branch at the shop floor level; a strong distrust of labour

bureaucrats and leftist politicians; an emphasis on direct action

and the propaganda of the deed. Above all, Wobblies believed in

the invincibility of the General Strike, which to them meant

nothing less than the ultimate lock-out of the capitalist class.

They wrapped their theory and practise with a loose blanket of

Marxist economic analysis and called for the abolition of the wage

system.

The IWW pioneered the on the job strike, mass sit-downs, and the

organization of unemployed, migrant, and immigrant working people.

It captured the public imagination with free speech fights,

gigantic labour pageants, and the most suicidal bluster

imaginable. Its permanent features were an army of roving

agitator-organizers on land and sea, little red song books, boxcar

delegates, singing recruiters.

In Australia IWW members were involved in a plan to forge

banknotes and bankrupt the state. During the Mexican revolution

of 1911, Wobblies joined with Mexican anarchists in a military

effort that set up a six-month red flag commune in Baja

California. In the Don Basin they faced Cossacks; at Kronstadt

they died under Trotsky's treacherous guns; in the German ports

they were silenced only by the Gestapo; in the CNT anarchist

militias and the International Brigades they battled Franco.

CANADA 1906 - 1918



The IWW immediately began organizing in Canada, and experienced

erratic growth from 1906 to 1914, especially in B.C. and Alberta.

The first Canadian IWW union charter was issued May 5, 1906 to the

Vancouver Industrial Mixed Union No.322.

Five locals were formed in BC in 1906, including a Lumber Handlers

Job Branch on the Vancouver docks composed mainly of North

Vancouver Indians, known as the "Bows and Arrows."

By 1911, the IWW claimed 10,000 members in Canada, notably in

mining, logging, Alberta agriculture, longshoring and the textile

industry. That year a local of IWW street labourers in Prince

Rupert struck, initially bringing out 250 but swelling to 1,000

assorted strikers. 56 arrests resulted from several riots, and a

special stockade was built to house them (reportedly by TLC union

carpenters). A number of strikers were injured and wounded; the

HMS Rainbow was called in to suppress the strike.

In 1912 the IWW fought a fierce free speech fight in Vancouver,

forcing the city to rescind a ban on public street meetings.

Organizing began in 1911 among construction workers building the

Canadian Northern Railway in BC. In September a quick strike of

900 workers halted 100 miles of construction. IWW organizer

Biscay was kidnapped by the authorities and charged as a

"dangerous character and a menace to public safety." A threatened

walkout by the entire Canadian Northern workforce prompted a

not-guilty verdict in a speedy trial. In December, a 50-cents a

day pay raise was won by on-the-job action.

THE 1,000- MILE PICKET LINE

By February 1912, IWW membership on the CN stood at 8,000. A

demand for adequate sanitation and an end to piece-rate or "gypo"

wages was ignored by the government. On March 27, unable to

further tolerate the unbearable living conditions in the work

camps, the 8,000 "dynos and dirthands" walked out. The strike

extended over 400 miles of territory, but the IWW established a

"1,000-mile picket line" as Wobs picketed employment offices in

Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, and Minneapolis to halt

recruitment of scabs.

Meanwhile the strike camps were so well run and disciplined that

the press began calling the Yale camp in particular a "miniature

socialist republic." While not going that far, the west coast IWW

weekly, Industrial Worker, proudly pointed to this example of

working class solidarity in which Canadians, Americans, Italians,

Austrians, Swedes, Norwegians, French and other countrymen --- one

huge melting pot into which creed, colour, flag, religion,

language and all other differences had been flung -- were welded

together in common effort. Even "demon rum" was proscribed,

which alone indicates the seriousness of the strikers.

Authorities arrested the strikers by the thousands for "unlawful

assemblage" and vagrancy. Many were forcibly deported at

gunpoint. But the picket lines held. In August they were joined

by 3,000 construction workers on the Grand Trunk Pacific in BC and

Alberta. The entire action, better known as the Fraser River or

Fraser Canyon Strike, was popularized in song by Joe Hill's

"Where the Fraser River Flows." The strike also spawned the

nickname Wobbly. A Chinese restaurant keeper who fed strikers

reputedly mispronounced "IWW" in asking customers "Are you eye

wobble wobble?" and the name stuck.

The CN strike lasted until the fall of 1912, when exhausted

strikers settled for a few minor improvements: better sanitary

conditions and a temporary end to the gypo system. The BC Grand

Trunk strike was called off in January 1913 after the Dominion

government promised to enforce sanitation laws. A greater gain

was development of the "camp delegate" system in which the IWW

secretary in town delegated a worker to represent him in the field

-- a method later refined into the permanent "Job Delegate" system

of the roving Agricultural Workers.

Other unique features of the strike are worth mentioning. One,

used again in the 20's on the Northern Railway strike in

Washington, was to "scab on the job" by sending convert Wobs into

scab camps to bring the workers out on strike. Another came in

response to the "free" transportation offered scabs by the

Railways on condition a man's luggage was impounded until such

time as his strike breaking wages repaid the fare. Large Wob

contingents signed on, leaving the Railways with cheap suitcases

stuffed with bricks and gunny sacks, and then deserted en route.

Edmonton, Alberta was then a major railroad construction center

and in the winter of 1913- 14, thousands of workers from all over

Canada and the US were stranded there without jobs or funds. The

city fathers refused to alleviate their plight. The IWW

established an Edmonton Unemployed League, demanding that the city

furnish work to everybody regardless of race, colour or

nationality, at a rate of 30 cents an hour, and further, that in

the meantime the city distribute three 25-cent meal tickets to

each man daily, tickets redeemable at any restaurant in town.

These demands were backed by mass parades which police clubs and

arrests could not stop.

On January 28, 1914 the Edmonton Journal headlined the news: IWW

Triumphant! The city council provided a large hall for the

homeless, passed out three 25-cent meal tickets to each man daily,

and employed 400 people on a public project.

That summer the IWW began organizing a campaign in the Alberta

wheat fields, but the guns of August were drawing near.



REPRESSION IN W.W.I

With the outbreak of World War one and Canada's subservient entry

as British cannon fodder, the federal government effected a number

of articles in the War Measures legislation embodied in the

British North America Act. IWW members were hit by a wave of

harassment and arrests that presaged that which swept most of the

American IWW leadership into jail in 1917-18 (by 1920 there were

2,000 Wobblies behind bars in the USA). In late 1914 the union

could claim only 465 members in Canada and in 1915 its last three

remaining branches dissolved. Agitation continued, however,

especially among Finnish lumber workers in Northern Ontario.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 caused severe jitters in the ruling

classes around the world and with the unilateral withdrawal of

Russian forces from the war effort against Germany, the conflict

in Europe reached a critical stage. This was coupled with a

number of mutinies in the Allied forces and weary dissension on

the homefronts. Repression was intensified and Canada a number of

Wobblies were jailed in 1918. The "Vancouver World" of August

5, 1918 outlined the "facts" in the case of Ernest Lindberg and

George Thompson:

**Two IWW Prospects Caught in Police Trap-- Couple Declared Active

at Logging Camps Arrested and German Literature is Seized... "Lot

of Good Rebels Quitting, stated letter...Message in German to

Tenant of House is postmarked Glissen.**

Lindberg, accused of delivering speeches in a logging

bunkhouse, after which a number of workers quit their jobs and

returned into the city, was held under the Idlers Act. Thompson,

**who is alleged to be a firebrand and whose connection with the

pro-German element is said to be close**, was charged with having

banned literature in his possession, including copies of the Week,

LaFollette's Magazine (LaFollette: anti-war Progressive US

Senator), and of the Lumber Worker, as well as letters written in

German.

The World went on to editorialize:

** For some time past the Dominion authorities have been alive to

the situation existing in the camps, and have been desirous that

the ringleaders of the movement which is responsible for draining

of the logging centres, should be found... By the arrest of

Lindberg and Thompson, the authorities believe they have succeeded

in locating two main workers in the IWW cause, although there are

others who will be carefully watched and apprehended in due

course... The IWW is the short term used for the Industrial

Workers of the World, an American organization with very extreme

policies, Bolsheviki principles, and far reaching aims for the

betterment of the conditions of the masses. Like other large

organizations, it has two factions, the red flagging element

generally regarded as dangerous as inciters against the observance

of law and order. The organization is disowned by all but the

lowest type of union labour men, as well as by Socialists.***

On September 24, 1918, a federal order in council declared that

while Canada was engaged in war, 14 organizations were to be

considered unlawful, including the IWW and the Workers

International Industrial Union (DeLeons' expelled Detroit faction

of the IWW).. Penalty for membership was set at 5 years in

prison.

The same order banned meetings conducted in the language of any

enemy country (German, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Turkish etc) or in

Russian, Ukrainian or Finnish (except for religious services.)

IWW organizer Dick Higgins was tried under the War Measures Act in

Vancouver, but a defense by the Socialist Party of Canada kept him

out of jail. In the USA, two of those receiving minor sentences

were well known British Columbia unionists who had been

temporarily organizing in the USA, as headlined in the B.C.

Federationist September 1918:

**IWW Members Given Long Terms: G. Hardy and A.E.Sloper are among

those who received year terms.**

POSTWAR GROWTH

1918 witnessed a major change in Canadian Labour. The drive for

industrial unionism resumed and stiffened resistance against the

AFL affiliated TLC and the latter's support for conscription and

the suspension of civil liberties.

This groundswell culminated in the founding of the One Big Union

at the Western Labour Conference in Calgary in March 1919.

Directly affiliated to the OBU were a number of independent mining

and lumber industrial unions, but its influence reached into a

majority of TLC locals west of Port Arthur, Ontario. This

explosive mix of militant independent unionists and rebellious TLC

units resulted in the Winnipeg General Strike that summer. It

began with the building trades striking for recognition, followed

by the metal trades, and on until 30,000 workers were out directly

or in sympathy and a Central Strike Committee was running the

city. Fred Tipping, a member of the Strike Committee, explains

the situation:

**First of all, you should remember that there were a series of

unsuccessful strikes through 1918. In a sense the 1919 strike was

a climax to many months of labour unrest due to a great deal of

unemployment after the War, big increases in prices and no job

security. Bear in mind too that Winnipeg and Vancouver were

centres of advanced radical thought at the time. The Socialist

Party of Canada/Marxist had been strong for a number of years and

had gained support among industrial workers and even farmers. In

the Winnipeg Trades and labour Council you would find men who were

Marxists and others who supported the IWW. There was also the

Social Democratic Party, many of these people were strong

enthusiasts for the Russian revolution and were commonly called

Bolsheviki. When the Social Democrats split during the War some

of these later joined the Communist parties. Others of us became

members of the Labour Party -- later to become the Independent

Labour Party and then the CCF. The idea of the general strike

seemed to have been in the air. Don't forget that not too many

months before, some key people on the Strike Committee had

attended the OBU conference in Calgary and the general strike was

a weapon much favoured by the OBU. Then there was the attitude of

business. They were first generation businessmen. I call them

Ontario bushmen. Most of them had been farmers. They felt

paternalistic to the workers. "I don't want a bunch of workers

telling me how to run my plant," was a remark commonly heard. On

the other hand the union leaders had come from industrial England.

They had years of bitter strike experience. They were not

novices**---- Canadian Dimension/Winnipeg----

The strike was smashed by a combination of government troops and a

"Citizens committee." Many strike leaders were arrested and tried

for subversion. A number of immigrants were deported. The OBU

was shattered as an all-industry federation as court after court

ruled that the TLC "internationals" owned the contracts in the

majority of organized locals, though the OBU continued to hold the

Lumber Workers Industrial Union, some mine unions, the Winnipeg

streetcar workers, and Saskatoon telephone operators.

After a series of disastrous strikes by its 23,000 members, the

LWIU collapsed in 1921. Stepping into the breach, the newly

founded Workers Party -- later the Communist Party-- declared war

on the OBU's industrial unionism and succeeded in directing it

into "geographical unionism," following the dictate of Lenin's 3rd

International union strategy, which was to break up dual or

independent unions and bring them into locals affiliated with the

AFL, which the Communists hoped to capture from within. By the

mid-twenties, the Communist TUEL had captured about a third of the

important union positions in the AFL, but were purged overnight by

a counter-coup of the Gompers faction.

The Communists were aided in the move for geographical unionism by

some syndicalists, especially in Edmonton, who had moved toward

that defensive concept in the period of the OBU"s decline. In BC,

the Communists managed to get many of the lumberworkers "east of

the hump' into the AFL Carpenters union.

AT the same time, however, the IWW was reorganizing in Canada. In

1916, virtually extinct in the rest of the country, the IWW had

moved from the Minnesota iron fields in the Mesaba Range northward

into Ontario and had gained a large following in the northern

woods, especially among Finnish Lumber workers. After the orders

in council outlawing the IWW in 1918, organizers went underground.

In 1919 the Ontario lumber workers joined the OBU, but Wobbly

delegates continued to bootleg union supplies to the minority who

wanted to keep their IWW membership books as well, as well as did

OBU-IWW delegates in B.C. On April 2, 1919 the ban on the IWW was

lifted. Two branches were formed in Toronto and Kitchener.



ORGANIZING IN THE 20'S

An exchange of union cards was arranged between the IWW and the

OBU locals still functioning in the lumber fields, seaports and

Great Lakes. This exchange was a system in which separate unions

recognized as valid the union cards of workers transferring into

their own jurisdiction from that of the other union and required

no initiation fee. an OBU an d IWW delegate travelled together

to the 1921 Red International of Labour Unions conference in

Moscow. The obu delegate, Gordon Cascaden, was denied a vote

because he represented the "anarchist wing "of the OBU.

The IWW delegate, who originally supported ties the RILU, argued

against affiliation on his return.... Among the ultimatums RILU

attempted to impose... was that the IWW affiliate the virtually

defunct Lumber Workers Industrial Union/OBU in Western Canada,

already permeated by Communists.

Following the collapse that year of the LWIU, the IWW, OBU and the

Communists all made bids for the former members. Some sections

joined the Communist Red International (a way station to the AFL

Carpenters) others made an abortive attempt to revive the LWIU,

which still had support in the east. The remainder joined IWW.

largest section being the Vancouver LWIU branch, which had

revolted when LWIU joined the Communists. By 1923 IWW had three

branches with job control in Canada: Lumberworkers IU 120 and

Marine Transport Workers IU 510 in Vancouver and an LWIU branch in

Cranbrook BC for a total of 5,600 members.

Organizing in the 20's was extremely difficult. The defeat of the

Winnipeg General Strike and the depression of the early part of

the decade weakened unions everywhere. During 1921 and 1922 the

usual cause of strikes was resistance to wage reductions. Most

such disputes were won by the employers. A large number of

strikes were smashed by scabs drawn from a vast pool of new

workers migrating from the farms to the cities.

Nonetheless, 1924 marked a peak year for the IWW in Canada. This

was in direct contra distinction to the US IWW, which underwent a

disastrous split over the questions of decentralization and

amnesty for IWW prisoners in federal prisons (the decentralists

demanded total autonomy of all industrial unions, with no central

clearing house or headquarters dues. The anti-amnesty faction

called for a boycott on any federal amnesty., instead relying on

class struggle to win the release of imprisoned Wobblies).

The split in the US IWW puzzled the Canadian membership, who

decided to support the Constitutional IWW in Chicago instead of

the decentralist Emergency Program IWW in the West -- the latter

lasted for ten years; the resulting raids and counter-raids

destroyed IWW power in the western lumber fields and caused a

temporary membership drop nationwide.

In Northern Ontario the Canadian Lumber Workers (the OBU remnant

of the LWIU) voted in 1924 to bolt the geographically based OBU

and join the IWW. The same referendum elected a Finnish

lumberworker, Nick Vita, as secretary. Vita had joined the IWW in

1917 and secretly carried an IWW red card through the War Measures

Act and his years in the OBU. In 1919 he had attended the IWW

Work People's College and then Ferris Institute, a business

college in Michigan, after a meagre three months of school before

adulthood.

Vita's first chore as secretary was to issue 8,000 IWW union

cards. Branches were set up in Sudbury -- Ontario head office -

and Port Arthur. Vita began organizing railroad workers and

miners in Timmins and Sudbury districts, but a brief success of

3,000 recruits soon faded. That same year an Agricultural Workers

Organization IU 110, was formed in Calgary. Four IWW organizers

were arrested on charges of vagrancy. IWW headquarters in Chicago

provided legal fees and three of the cases the charges were

quashed. On January 1, 1924, after the firing of an IWW member of

the Cranbrook BC branch IWW Lumber Workers IU120 struck the lumber

owners, calling for an 8 hour day with blankets supplied, minimum

wage of $4 per day, release of all class war prisoners, no

discrimination against IWW members and no censuring of IWW

literature. After three weeks the camp operators tried to bring

in scabs from Alberta and Saskatchewan. Pickets severely

curtailed the scabbing and on February 26 the operators served an

injunction on the officers and members of the IWW to restrain the

strikers from picketing. The seven companies asked for

$105,340.41 in damages. At a mass meeting March 2, strikers voted

to "take the strike back on the job." As the injunction came up

for review on June 24, the Mountain Lumbermen's Association paid

to the IWW $2,450 to settle out of court.

In 1925 the LWIU branch disappeared from Cranbrook -- a not

unfamiliar event in the IWW, which still refused to sign binding

contracts with employers, and often dwindled away as an

organization after specific demands had been won. A new

Agricultural Workers branch was formed in Winnipeg, bringing the

IWW a total of 6 branches in Canada for a membership of 10,000 --

the same as in 1910.

Included was a coal miners branch in Wayne Alberta which fought

that year the IWW's first large strike in coal -- a bitter and

losing affair. Fighting a mandatory dues check off to the United

Mine Workers, which did not represent them, the miners originally

joined the OBU, but along with the Ontario lumberworkers switched

to the IWW in 1924. The mine company offered a 10% wage increase

if they agreed to accept the UMWA. Considering it a bribe, the

miners refused and struck, unsuccessfully.

The Winnipeg AWO folded in 1926, as did the Alberta Coal Miners IU

branch, but a new General Recruiting Union branch was formed in

Port Arthur, in addition to the lumberworkers for a total of 4,600

members in Canada. Seven branches carried 4,400 members through

1927-28 -- the IWW General Convention in Chicago urged a joint

IWW/OBU convention, which did not materialize -- in 1929 the

Calgary GRU disappeared, bringing membership down to 3,975.

The IWW Lumber Workers Industrial Union 120, came under

competition in 1928 from the refurbished Lumber Workers Industrial

Union of Canada, organized by the Communists following the failure

of their AFL take-over bid, and in tune with Stalin's new 1928-34

"left turn" period which demanded independent Communist unions.

Communist organizers who had left for BC in the early 20's to

bring carpenters and lumberworkers there into the AFL now returned

home to build dual unions under the aegis of Workers Unity League.

A number of meagre contracts were obtained from small operators in

the northern Ontario woods, for whom the largely Finnish

lumberjacks worked. IWW branches asked that union policy be

changed to allow them to sign contracts as well, but the 1932

General Convention again voted against allowing binding contracts,

and a majority of Ontario lumber workers ended in communist

controlled unions. Ironically, it was only a few years later that

the US IWW was signing contracts and running in federal NLRB

elections.



CHANGES IN THE 30'S

The early 30s were a watershed era in the history of North

American labor. Initially stunned by the vicious poverty and

unemployment caused by the Capitalist breakdown in 1929-31, the

working class by 1933-34 had gained the offensive in a massive

wildcat strike wave that swept the continent. The period saw an

upsurge in IWW activity in Canada, a phenomenon applicable also to

the OBU, which even expanded organizing into the New England and

opened a hall in San Francisco, and the Canadian Communist Workers

Unity League, which was especially strong among textile workers,

needle trades, mine and mill workers, and seamen's unions.

Radical influence was also strong in the US mass strike period,

represented by the IWW: longshore, maritime, lumber,

construction, mining, metal trades, early auto organizing, and

unemployed -- the Socialist Party: needle trades, unemployed,

later auto -- the Communist Trade Union Unity League: mine and

steel, textile, furriers, longshore and seamen, teachers,

unemployed, veterans, Blacks ---- Trotskyists: Minneapolis

Teamsters -- and the Musteite CPLA/American Workers Party: Toledo

Auto-Lite strike, unemployed.

By 1930, the Sudbury IWW LWIU folded, but a new Lumber workers

branch formed in Sault Ste. Marie, giving the union 3,741 members

in Canada. Canadian delegates met in Port Arthur September 20,

1931, and voted to form a Canadian administration, primarily to

overcome customs problems over supplies sent from Chicago and to

coordinate specifically Canadian industrial activity. The move

was submitted for consideration at the IWW Convention in Chicago

November 8-19, 1931, where it was referred to a general membership

referendum and ratified. The Canadian administration was to be

autonomous but ultimately responsible to the General

Administration and paying a monthly 1/2 cent per capita for

international organizing costs.

IWW unemployment agitation generated a number of arrests,

especially one big crackdown by Royal Mounted Police at Sioux

Lookout, Ontario. Ritchie's Dairy in Toronto was unionized IWW

for a time, and a fisher's branch formed in McDiarmid, Ontario.

Organizing was undertaken in the Maritimes but did not sustain

itself. In 1935 the IWW had 12 branches in Canada with 4,200

members: 2 branches in Vancouver-- Lumber workers and General

Recruiting Union -- General Membership Branches in Sointula, BC,

Calgary, Toronto, Sudbury; lumber workers in Fort Francis,

Nipigon, Sault Ste. Marie, and Port Arthur Ontario; a General

Recruiting Union in Port Arthur; and a Metal Mine Workers branch

in Timmins, Ontario.

The working class rebellion of the mid thirties culminated in a

series of sit down strikes -- using the tactics developed a few

years earlier in the auto plants by the IWW, including the little

cards passed hand to hand, reading: "Sit down and watch your pay

go up." -- which established the Congress of Industrial

Organizations/CIO. The CIO was a reformist semi- industrial

movement launched by the United Mine Workers which succeeded where

the revolutionary industrial unions had failed. Its success was

due primarily to its willingness to collectively bargain with

employers for modest wage and conditions changes and then to

enforce submission to the contract on any subsequent rank and file

rebellion. Both the Roosevelt administration and a sector of

"far-seeing" Capitalists saw in this an opportunity to corral the

strike wave into the bounds of a lightly reformed capitalist

system. (Slower to move, the Canadian ruling class followed suit

only toward the end of the Second World War.)

Hundreds of unauthorized work stoppages were suppressed by CIO

chieftains. At one point CIO head and leader of the United Mine

Workers, John L. Lewis, threatened to dispatch "flying squads of

strong-arm men" to bring auto wildcatters into line.

The CIO drive coincided with a far reaching right turn by Stalin

(and by iron-fisted extension, the then monolithic world communist

movement, sans Trotskyites of course). The Workers Unity League

was jettisoned by the Canadian Communists; its independent unions

were brought into the AFL or CIO or sabotaged. Communist

militants flocked into the CIO organizing committees and

assiduously worked themselves into key positions, ranging from

stewards to actual union presidents. The CIO ventures were highly

successful, initially in the US and after WWII in Canada.

The Communists captured the leadership of ten industrial unions,

including the United Electrical Workers, the Mine Mill & Smelter

Unions, the Fur and Leather Workers, the Canadian Seamens Union

and United Fishermen, and the B.C. Ship builders Union. They also

become strong in the International Woodworkers, especially in BC,

the AFL International Longshoremen, and others.

In the broader Canadian union movement, a number of things were

happening. In 1921 TLC expelled the Cdn. Brotherhood of Railway

Employees in favour of the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship

Clerks from the USA. In 1927, the CBRE, the OBU remnant, and the

old CFL joined together to form the All Canadian Congress of

Labour. The CFL had been the stillborn result of the merger of

the Knights of Labour and some national unions in 1903, after

their expulsion from AFL-dominated TLC.

First called the National Trades and Labour Council, in 1908 it

became the Cdn. Federation of Labour, a big name for so little,

and now in 1927 it dissolved into the ACC of L. The All-Canadian

Congress grew, in its own reactionary way; in the early 30s the

OBU supported the red-baiting bureaucracy, only to find itself

later ousted. In 1937 the ACCL chiefs aided the anti-union

Ontario Premier Hepburn in his attack on the AFL, CIO, and

Communists -- all seen as "American."

In 1938, however, the TLC under AFL pressure expelled the CIO

unions in Canada and, in a complete flip-flop, the CIO units

joined the ACCL in 1940 to form the Canadian Congress of Labour.

Considering that many of the CIO organizers were Communists, and

all the CIO unions internationals from the USA, it was quite a

marriage of convenience. In 1943 the CCL came out in support of

the social-democratic Cooperative Commonwealth (now the New

Democratic Party)-- although the Communists were supporting the

Liberal Party.

After WWII the CCL grew closer to the TLC, especially as both were

expelling communists en masse. Finally in 1956 the CCL and TLC

merged to form the Canadian Labour Congress. Another independent

union body organizing during this period was the Canadian and

Catholic Confederation of Labour in Quebec, established in 1921,

now the syndicalist

CNTU.

The success of a moderate semi-industrial unionism, temporarily

fringed with a radical hue, greatly hampered the revolutionary

industrial unionism of the IWW. Another factor was the extremely

conservatizing influence of the Second World War -- ostensibly an

anti-fascist crusade -- with its no-strike pledges, for which the

Communists were the strongest backers in the interests of the

Soviet Fatherland -- even to the point of denouncing all strikers,

such as the United Mine Workers, as "fascist agents."

Even so, the IWW in the USA was able to stabilize a number of

solid job units, particularly metal shops in Cleveland area, and

by fighting the no-strike pledge expanded general membership on

the docks and construction camps. In 1946 the IWW numbered 20,000

members.

IWW agitation continued strong in Canada until 1939, especially in

northern Ontario, but Canada's entry as British ally into the war

and the resulting mass conscription and War Measures Act, caught

the union without a job-control base. Moreover, in-fighting with

the Communists had become particularly vicious. Sudbury was being

organized by the Communist controlled Mine Mill & Smelters to the

point that J. Edgar Hoover later called it the "red base of North

America."

Wobbly units in Sudbury and Port Arthur were mixed membership

branches of scattered lumbermen, miners and labourers. During the

Spanish Civil War 1936-39, the IWW in Ontario actively recruited

for the anarcho-syndicalist CNT union militia in Spain, in direct

challenge to the Communist sponsored Mac-Pap International

Brigade. A number of Canadian Wobs were killed in Spain -- some

possibly shot by Stalinist NKVD agents. Not only weapons and

ammunition but even medical supplies were denied the CNT by the

Communist-controlled government of Madrid. Violent altercations

erupted at northern Ontario rallies for the communist doctor

Norman Bethune, soon to quit Spain for Mao's partisans in China,

when Wobblies openly denounced Communist perfidy.

WORLD WAR II

In Toronto where the IWW Canadian Administration headquarters was

temporarily moved, Wobblies gave physical support to the soap

boxing efforts of anarchists from the Italian, Jewish and Russian

communities. Pitched street battles often occurred at Spanish CNT

support rallies, and IWW secretaries McPhee and Godin, both former

lumberjacks, were noted for their quick despatch of Young

Communist goon squads.

But the War halted IWW organizing. A number of young Wobs were

immediately inducted into the Armed Forces. At war's end

re-growth was too slow. In 1949 membership in Canada stood at

2,100 grouped in six branches; two in Port Arthur and one each in

Vancouver, Sault Ste. Marie, Calgary and Toronto.

Meanwhile the government in the USA was attempting to destroy the

IWW once and for all. After refusing to sign the Taft-Hartley

anti-red clause, the IWW was denied the certification services of

the National Labor Relations Board. In 1949 the IWW was placed on

the Attorney General's list, which came replete with mailing

curtailments, refusal to members of government jobs, loans or

housing, and FBI harassment of individual members, especially at

their place of employment. To cap it off, the IWW was slapped

with a "corporate income tax", the only union in North America to

be so taxed. As a culminative consequence the IWW lost its last

shops, including all the IU440 Metal shops in Cleveland.

During the same period the AFL and CIO began a mass purge of

Communists in its ranks, an easy task, so riddled was the

Communist party with opportunism and cowardice. Completed quickly

in the US, the expulsions were slower and less thorough in Canada,

lasting beyond 1955. Those unions the reactionaries could not

purge they expelled and then raided. The Communists in Canada

managed to hold only the United Electrical Workers, the remnant of

Mine & Mill, and the United Fishermen in BC.

The Canadian IWW retained branches in only Vancouver, Port Arthur

and Calgary by 1950- 51. The following year the Canadian

Administration in Port Arthur folded and membership reverted to

the services of the Chicago office. By comparison, the OBU-- by

now a mild trade grouping in Winnipeg - continued until 1955-56

with 34 locals and 12,280 members at which time it merged with the

CLC.

THE DARK 50'S

The Cold War snuffed out the Canadian, British and Australian

administrations of the IWW. It remained for the General and

Scandinavian administrations to hold together scattered Wobs in

Canada, USA, Britain, Sweden, and Australia. Through the 1950s

the IWW still exerted some power on the docks and ships with IU510

branches in San Francisco, Houston and Stockholm. But with the

early sixties, the IWW was near extinction.

Yet, the IWW survived. One, in the courage and dedication of

old-timers who kept the structure going. Two, with the slow

influx of young workers of a casual labour hue. In the mid-60s,

the IWW organized a restaurant job branch in San Francisco, only

to be raided by the Waiters & Waitresses Union. In 1964 the IWW

led a blueberry harvest strike in Minnesota. With the Vietnam War

the IWW began taking in young workers with ties to the campuses.

IN 1968 it was decided to sign up students alongside teachers and

campus workers into Education Workers IU620. There followed a

wild and erratic campus upsurge, two notables being Waterloo U in

Ontario and New Westminster BC. The results were nil in

themselves, but it got the IWW over the hump and left a fine

residue of militants who left campus to find jobs.

The next 5 years spawned some 20-odd industrial drives, including

one among construction workers in Vancouver, another among

shipbuilders in Malmo, Sweden, and two tough factory strikes in

the USA. For the most part unsuccessful, a number had interesting

features.

In a Vancouver drive, a construction crew in Gastown was signed

IWW -- but certification before the Socred-appointed BC Labour

Board was denied, the IWW declared not a "trade union under the

meaning of the Act." A subsequent strike fizzled.

Industrial organizing efforts continue. The IWW has picked up a

number of newspapers, print shops and print co-ops over the years,

a few highly viable and long lived.

The new IWW has its own list of labour martyrs: the San Diego Wobs

shot, bombed and arrested during the 1969-71 Free Speech Fight and

Criminal Syndicalism frame up trial. Robert Ed Stover, knifed to

death in San Quentin Prison, where he was framed on an arms cache

charge; and Frank Terraguti, shot to death by Chilean fascists in

Santiago during the 1973 coup.

In 1975, the IWW is organizing in Canada, USA, Sweden, Britain,

Guam, New Zealand and Australia.

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*see also WHERE THE FRASER RIVER FLOWS, New Star (Canada) 1991*