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Continued from Page Five

The Lumber Barons
Obstruct Production

the operator’s calculated provoca-
tion. Only now that its very ex-
istence is at stake has it been
forced to strike.

Labor has pledged its energy
and strength in the battle for pro-
duction to defeat the Axis, which
the union and its membership rec-
ognize as labor's big job.

We realize that as industrial
workers in one of the key war
industries, we have become sol-
diers in the great army of the
United Nations. We realize that
the outcome of this battle will de-
termine the whole future course
of humanity for years to come—
whether we shall be driven into
the terrible darkness that has ov-
erwhelmed Europe or whether we
shail lift that darkness and ad-
vance into a new world of pros-
perity and peace.

We realize that to win we must
have total war, which in this day
means total war for those in over-
alls just as much as it does for
these in uniform.

But how can the loggers con-
centrate their full energies on
their task when reactionary
forces. who apparently hate labor
more than they fear Hitler, ham-
per their efforts to accomplish it
in an organized wey.

A united effort depends on mu-
tual respect and cooperation be-
tween iabor and management
Mutual respect in industrial rela-
tions depends upon orderiy col-
lective bargaining—a factor which
cannot exist if labor is unorgan-
ized cr denied its basic demo-
cratic right.

Ss

fied the powerful B.C. Log-
gers and Lumber Manufac-
turers’ Associations are openly
defying the intent and spirit of
Jabor legislation of both the pro-
vincial and Dominion govern-
ments, refusing toe sign agree-
ments with their organized em-
ployees and encouraging the Bp-
erators in the Queen Charlotte
Islands to refuse to sign an agreec-
ment with the union of their em-
ployees’ own choice. And this
mind, even after a government
arbitration board has proposed a
signed agreement with the union
in its award.

For two years the loggers of
the Queen Charlotte Islands have
patiently maintained spruce pro-
duction because they knew the
need for it in aircraft construc-
tion plants. At the same time they

have endeavored to secure recog-
nition of their union through the
medium of a signed agreement,
similar to thse in effect in practi-
eally every other industry, The
operators’ propsals for a memor-
endum instead of an agreement
is an insul{ to labor and would not
be acceptable to any genuine
trade union.

The operators claim they will
recognize the union, but it is im-
possible to believe they are act-
ing in good faith when they re-
fuse fo embody in it an agreement
as is being done by thousands of
companies in dozens of other in-
dustries throughout Canada.

Lumber is virtually the only
major industry in this province
where collective agreements
dealing with wages, hours and
working conditions are not being
adopted as a basis for improved
understanding and greater coop-
eration so essential today for in-
creased war production.

Their claim that they are not
opposed to collective bargaining
while refusing to sign an agree-
ment with the union only means
that they approach the question
with their tongues in their cheeks,
haying decided beforehand that
they have no intention of signing
an agreement

se

tAgE unions should stand on
guard against fink union
agreements. Every union should
stand behind the IWA in its fight
fer union recognition. There can
be no real collective bargaining
unless negotiated with represen-
tatives of the union the workers
freely choose to represent them.”

The operators’ action is a com-
plete negation of the principles
laid down in PC 2685 and is, in
fact, a challenge to the entire
trade union movement Every
fiemocratic organization, whether
it represents labor or not, should
protest it because its spirit is
more akin to the things against
which we are fighting than the
high purposes of the war.

It is not an issue confronting
the TWA alone. If the operators
are permitted to get away with
their policy, the effect will be to
weaken the whole structure of
trade unionism in this province.

se

HE QCI companies defy the
provincial government, which
at the last session of the legisla-
ture introduced amendments to
the ICA Act making the princi-

azis In Norway

UICIDES, desertions and insan-

ity are common occurrences
among the Germans in Finnmark,
the extreme northern section of
Norway, a school teacher who
escaped recently to London told
the Norwegian Information Serv-
ice.

We ascribed as causes for low
German morale the 40 degrees
below zero cold in the long wint-
ers, the extremely long nights
(Germans because of lack of vita-
mins suffer from night-blindness),
the bleak Scenery, heat and
swarms of mosquitos in summer,
plus the undeyiating hostility of
the Norwegian and Lapp popula-
tion. : :

Wo German is ever invited into

a Norwegian home. If a German
tries to buy something in a store,
the shopkeeper always tells him:
“All sold out!”

The Russians described by tea-
chers as “only a few miles away
from the Norwegian frontier’—
this would seem that Soviet
troops must have penetrated Fin-
land at this point—send over leaf-
lets which are passes on which
Germans and Austrians can sur-
render.

Sometimes whole companies of
Germans or Austrians going over
to surrender have been caught by
the SS elite guard. When they
resist, they are shot down. Usu-
ally though, the German desert-
ers let themselves be tricked back
by promises of retirement to la-

ples of collective bargaining
binding upon all employers. They
cynically refuse to abide by the
recommendations of a govern-
ment arbitration board which af-
ter lengthy deliberations recom-
mended the signing of a collec-
tive agreement between the lum-
ber operators and the IWA.

They refuse to deal with legit-
imate unions—they want to play
at “negotiations” with puppets.
The open shop and the blacklist
are the weapons they have used
for years to hound every logger
whe dares to speak up for him-
self and his fellow workers. They
insist that they intend to keep it
that way.

In effect, they are saying—to
hell with the government and
damn the public. We've never be-
fore had to be bothered with ne-
gotiations about conditions for the
men who work for us. We’re go-
ing to keep on having things our
own way—and no one can stop
us.

The labor and progressive move-
ment must let the King govern-
ment know in unmistakable terms
that it does not intend to allow
the operators’ provocative action
to go unchallenged, and that it
will not countenance disruption
of lumber production at this criti-
cal stage of the war.

The issue in this dispute is
clearly Industrial Feudalism or
Industrial Democracy. Upon this
issue not only the Queen Char-
lotte Island loggers, but the en-
tire labor movement and the peo-
ple of British Columbia must take
a definite stand. The Queen Char-
lotte Island loggers must have
support of the trade union move-
ment and all progressive people in
their struggle to secure thoge
things for which this war is be-
ing fought, including Industrial
Democracy. Do these things now:

® Wire Minister of Labor
Humphrey Mitchell demanding
the government enforce the prin-

ciples of PC 2685 and the Harper ~

Arbitration Board award.

@ Have your organization en-
dorse the union’s demand for
genuine collective bargaining and
signed agreements and publicize
that endorsation.

@ Help the loggers’ strike by
sending a contribution to the
Queen Charlotte Island Strike
Fund, in care of IWA-CIO Local
1-71, 204 Holden Building, Van-
couver, B.C.

eserting

bor battalions in pleasanter coun-
iry much farther south.

But other Norwegian sources
say that any deserters who let
themselves be sent to Kirkenes
stay there, in concentration
camps exposed to Soviet bombing,
and the men are fed little and
worked much, in terrible weather
and without adequate clothing, so
that they soon “die like flies.”

The German’s one consolation
is drunkeness, and when they are
wild with alcoholic stimulation,
they sometimes murder the civili-
aus, sometimes murder each oth-
er, and sometimes sink into gloom
and kill themselves.

“They find their only escape
is beneath the soil they came to
conquer,” said the teacher.

Labor Personalities—7

Ferqus McKean

By CYNTHIA CARTER

cE YOU thumb back through old copies of the B.C. |
News and the Advocate you'll find that one name
frequently—Fergus McKean. And if you read the repor
speeches he has made you'll find that the essence 0.
every one of them is a considered analysis of the
fronting the Canadian working people and a call for
to unite to achieve them. ~
MeKean was not one of
those who awoke late to
the menace of fascism.
When Hitler advanced over
a divided working class and
was placed in power by a
German ruling class which
saw in him the instrument
of its imperialistic ambi-
tions, he was already
warning that unless fascism
were destroyed in Germany
it must inevitably threaten
the peace of the world.
“Labor must present a
united front—the peoples
of the world must unite
against fascism,” he told a
May Day rally in 1938.
Yet little more than two
years later he was one of a
hundred Canadians, whose
word and action had been
dedicated to the struggle
against fascism, interned at :
Kananaskis. And here he became the spokesman fo
who had expressed the anti-fascist convictions of the ma
of the Canadian people. :
_ Later, in Petawawa internment camp, he conducted ¢
in Canadian geography and its effect on the political
ment of the Dominion. ’
Fergus McKean is a Canadian with an intense love of”
country. Long a student of its economic and political develo
ment, he likes nothing better than to talk on the subj:
Canada's past, present and future, whether it is with o
the scores of people he talks with every day in his office
before a class of students. ’

HORTLY after the town of Pictou was founded in
McKeans migrated from Scotland to Nova Scotia.

was born there in 190], a fourth-ceneration Canadian, a
tended Pictou Academy, the éldest secondary school in

When he was 15 McKean left high school and went te
as a rivet heater in the shipyards at Halifax:.In 1920 he
on as signalman on the governor-general’s private y

His next berth was on a freighter running from
St. Johns, Newfoundland. After that he shipped co
on a vessel making the trans-Atlantic crossing to British
on an oil tanker running between Montreal and New Orleai
a@ passeneger ship to the West Indies, and a freighter to
ossik, USSR.

When his part in a strike on a deepsea cable }
Halifax cost him his job, McKean set one for eae
He harvested in Manitoba in 1922, on the same land his fathi
in 1870, had helped to survey. In the harvest fields h
part in a second strike—and again lost his job.

In 1923 he came to British Columbia and worked as a
wright at Barnet Mill, Burnaby. When the Lumberwor
dustrial Union was formed in 1931 he was among the
take out a card. And when the workers went on strik
three wage cuts and introduction of the ‘speedup syster
chairman of the strike committee he was fired and blackli:

The year 1932 was an important one for McKean, for
year his activity in the unemployed movement earned ]
popsition of secretary of the Central Executive Commi
Burnably Unemployed Council and that year also he 1
a member of the Communist Party. Soon he was the
section organizer in Burnaby.

Blacklisted and unable to get a job at his trade—he
organizer for the Lumberworkers Industrial Union for a
McKean signed on as a seaman on the Prince Rober
running between Vancouver and Prince Rupert, in 19
joined the Seafarers Industrial Union. Within a few we
union struck in sympathy with locked out Vancouver 1
men. The seamen elected him chairman of their six
mittee, chairman of the central strike relief commi
following the Ballantyne Pier riot, organizer for the
strike committee. a

In 1936 McKean was elected as provincial organizer fo
Communist Party, a position he held until 1938, when he
elected as the party’s provincial secretary. Then, in June &
the Communist Party was declared an illegal organizatio
McKean was arrested and interned under Section 21
Defense of Canada Regulations.

Upon his return to Vancouver in October, 1942, he was
pointed secretary of the Communist-Labor Total War C :
and with the formation of the new Labor-Progressive Pa
August this year he was the logical and unanimous choice
position of party leader in British Columbia. .

Now, with the growing maturity of the labor mov
the realization within the trade unions of the need for po
action, the general recognition that labor must exert its”
strength to secure victory and fashion the post-war ful
Canada after its own aspirations, McKean is also logicall
of the men who can best represent the working peop
parliament. And when it was announced not long a
the Labor-Progressive Party would nominate a candidat
contest Vancouver Center constituency at the next fed
election the first name to be suggested was that of
McKean,