ne ali (Fishing Unions ee _ Possibility that the coming convention of the United Fish- men’s Federal Union on Mareh 20 will see plans well ad- a anced for the amalgamation of all existing fishermen’s unions “ue B.C. in one united organization was strengthened this week Li 3 ith the news that the B.C. Fish- iwemen’s Protective Association eis requested information on ues of affiliation to the UFFU. ive the BC@FPA is the last of a sequsimber of local unions of gill- stters and irollers which form- x tly existed on the Coast, and timaich im recent years, with the ime cePuon of the BCEPA, have hyeerged with the UFFU. Its lembership is mainly confined to linet fishermen who operate on sine. Eraser River. Rp warlier this year William Bur- enti SS UFFU secretary, submitted Var foposals’ for amalgamation to = fs Deepsea Fishermen’s Union — Prince Rupert. Burgess sug- just ‘sted that the Prince Rupert Thee eve nt ne rt od § , bh organization merge with the UFFU, which would then estab- lish a union centre at the north- erm port to cover adjacent fishing areas and set up an autonomous Jocal embracing all those now members of the Deepsea Fisher- men’s Union. Coupled with the likelihood of some form of amalgamation be- tween the UFFU and the Native Brotherhood of B.C. fishermen believe that at the March 20 con- vention it will be possible to com- plete the uniting of all fisher- men’s unions in the province into a single, united organization, with a single charter from the Trades and Wabor Congress of Canada and with locals at all fishing centers along the Coast. -plood Donor Campaign “pens With Conference Two weeks before the all-union campaign to enlist 20,000 flood donors in the coming months will officially get under- iaig aY with a conference of union delegates at Hotel Vancouver, ie @iembers of the committee in charge of the campaign report 4 at already the number of do- a0 itions from war working union- a its has been considerably step- 2 qed up. Many pledge cards have @so been submitted! by mem- rs of the Mabor-Progressive arty here. : jes Fhe union conference, planned Ini, suggestions from executive iriembers of the LPP city com- e-imittee in conference with union Gus ficials, will be held February he@', in Vaneouver Hotel. The con- loss rence call was sent to every okeeChL, AFL and Amalgamated om faion in the city, and it is ex- G2cted that the hall, which will ‘at 390, will be filled. Doctors from city hospitals will be present, and a complete unit from the Blood Donors Clinic here will be transported to the hotel, where Vancouver Labor Council president HE. E. Leary “will contribute his sixth pint of blood, after which he will be pre- sented with a silver button by elinie officials. Major-General ~G. R. Pearkes has been invited to attend along with members of the Army Medi- cal Corps, some of whom will tell the conference of actual uses of blood plasma on the field of battle. } 1esti a a ne id e e “Candimaviams pri : dep eo. : ‘Play Big Tole a Senha influence on North America, and Canada in he Farticular, from the early Norse voyages of discovery to Ice- offand, Greenland and Vinland to the exploration of the Cana- ‘Pian Arctic by Knud Rasmussen and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, byignd the contribution made by. ng, \candinavians to Canada’s demo- dsif-atic traditions were described uel, Mrs. Mona Morgan, member my £ the provincial women’s coun- BGil of the iLabor-Progressive fela@arty, as the guest speaker at ni@1e annual midwinter Scandin- ust#vian festival in Hastings Audi-— ; tg tium here last week. : ell 'Speaking of the part played py “nivorkers from Scandimavion coun- y.4ies in building the trade union a#iovement, Mrs: Morgan said: 5 i Lhe pioneering spirit of the eyvalcandinavian peoples led them acto many lands and logically to sjeanada, a country similar in iedaany respects to their own lands. 9 Msritish Columbia, with its forests, wisiountains and fjords, especially ela ppealed to them and they came ‘olkere to follow their occupations r¥s loggers and fishermen. And hecause in their homelands many opt them had been members of rade unions and knew the im- i ortance of organization they ‘trove for trade union organiza- tion here. Today, if we look at the names of trade union lead- ers in our province, in the wood- working industry particularly, we find that many of them were born in Scandinavian countries or are of Scandinavian descent.” Pointing to the new conception end heightened importance of Canada’s own north as a conse- quence of tremendous wartime developments, Mrs. Morgan re- minded her audience that only a secant few miles separated Hiles- mere Island, as Canadian terri- tory, from Greenland, under the Danish flag, both of which are acquiring new significance in the future of international aviation. “The shortest route from Can- - ada to Norway is across Green- land,” she said, “and Canada, the Scandinavian countries, the Sov- iet Union and the United States, through Alaska, all have a com- mon interest in aviation in the north because between them they share the coastline of the Arc- tie Ocean—the Mediterranean of the north.” Labor Men Disapprove New Code TORONTO, Ont.—The past week has brought fresh charges that the long-awaited federal Labor Code is useless in its present dratt form. It is no secret that a draft of the proposed code has been sent out to provincial labor min- isters, industrialists and others. While there has been no official indication of the code’s contents, information that has gone the rounds has led labor circles to the belief that the code will be a continuation of the restrictive Wage control order-in-council un- jess drastically revised. . hast week J. L. Cohen, K.C., a former member of the National War Labor Board, charged that contemplated restrictions in the code would seriously undermine collective bargaining and dis- criminate against bona fide unions. Im an address to the University CCF Club, Cohen further charged that the code prepared by Ottawa shows that the federal govern- ment has not yet come to under- stand “the facts that the national interest dictates the need of an honest solution of the labor ques- tion. Hinting at provisions in the code that would deprive workers of their rights just as the poll tax Gisfranchizes “Negroes and- poor whites” in the U.S. South, Mr. Cohen said: “Until labor is permitted full partnership in all industry, in- dustry will not be at maximum efficiency, and sc long as indus- iry fights against workers seek- ing union recognition, energy. is diverted to needless domestic warfare. No country can develop sound policy as long as conflict with labor prevails and the in- terests representing capital and employers are above the equal- ity of those who produce.” In government cireles an at- tempt was being made to allay eriticism with the story that the code had only reached the “rough” draft stage, and that the Opinions of labor and industry were still being solicited. LPP Member Dies at Gibson’s The progressive movement of this province lost a staunch friend with the passing of Mrs. Inglis, wife of Dr. D. F. Inglis of Gibson’s (Landing. Mrs. Inglis, & member of the Labor-Progressive Party, has sup- ported working class activities for many years, both financially and by her own participation. Her home was always open to visiting labor speakers, and she was one of the delegates to the LPP nominating . convention at North Vancouver last November. Prize Winners In LPP Draw Winners of the drawing held by the West End branch of the Labor-Progressive Party on Feb- ruary were announced this week as follows: First prize, W. Renlund, 859 Grand Boulevard, North Vancou- ver; second, F. lLubetski, 3892 Prior Street; third, W. Russel, 1819 West Second Avenue. Winners are asked to present their stubs at Room 209, Shelly Building, and receive the prizes. Labor Personalities—24 Jack Bovd By CYNTHIA CARTER HEN any section of the Vancouver labor movement decides to hold a public meeting, Jack Boyd is usually ealled upon to rent the hall, put up the posters and arrange a hundred and one other details. When a special evening is ar- ranged. as like as not Jack Boyd is responsible for ordering the refreshments and checking up on the printing of the tickets. Jack acts as last-minute messenger, supervises the addressing and mailing of envelopes when circulars are to be distributed, he digs in when a picnic or outdoor meeting is scheduled, and he acts as go-between, idea man and friendly advisor to half a dozen national groups in the city. And if all the posters Jack has put up in this city were laid end to end—well, they would probably build a bridge big enough to stretch from England aeross the Channel to Germany, and strong enough to support all the armies of the United Nations in their mareh on Berlin. At the same time, Jack Boyd has added to his actual experiences an under- standing of the social forces which make history, and is a keen student of world affairs. in his travels over the North American continent he has managed to be on the spot wherever anything was Happening. He turned up in San Francisco around the time of the big earthquake. He arrived at Galveston, Texas, in time for the flood. As one of the men who sat down in the Vancouver Post Office he compares the events of “Bloody Sunday” to the time he drove into Mexico City at the high point of the Mexican Revolution. He even managed to have the most money in the bank he had ever had in his life at the time of the 1929 crash. And he joined the unemployed move- ment just in time to take part in a demonstration on Hastings Street! : Jack Boyd was born in 1884 in Toronto. Ontario. As a boy, he read everything he could get his hands on. When he quit - school at fourteen he got a job chalking up stock returns) in the Toronto Board of Trade building. where he tried to puzzle out why the men who did nothing reaped the wealth, while the real producers—such as the farm workers with whom he lived during his holidays—lived in poverty. Jack had a successison of jobs in Ontario. working in the Cobalt mines and as a Sales- man out of Montreal. and when he was twenty he left for the southern United States. Picking prunes and packing walnuts and oranges in California in the early days of this century whole families worked for a wage of $1.25 per day and living conditions were terrible. Jack worked among poverty stricken Mexicans in the fruit fields, where the general greeting was “mucha trabajo. poco dinero’”— which roughly translated, says Jack, means “work plenty hard, make d——d little!” Z In 1909. when he was 25. Boyd started work in a San Fran- cisco hotel. For the next five years he followed the hotel busi- ness. aS eaShier. accountant. and sometimes as manager. When he was 30. however. he tired of serving financiers, society women, big business men and movie stars (once, annoyed by a number of foolish questions, Jack told a guest what he thought of him in no uncertain terms, and later found that the insignifi- eant man of middle-height he’d been addressing was the Great Lover, Douglas Fairbanks), he left for Mexico, and an office job with the Pearce Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. “T arrived in Mexico one hot afternoon during an armistice between the forces of General Carranza and General Villa,” re- calls Jack. “The town was quiet, except for the cries of the starving Mexiean children who roamed the streets in search of food. Two weeks later Villa marched into town. The oil com- pany folded, and I took a job teaching English in a Mexican school. Four months later, however, I left for the United States with four hundred non-citizens by mule train.” Back in San Francisco Jack married and went back into the hotel business. Several years later he moved back to Canada for a short time and in 1933 he came to Canada to reside perman- ently. During the depression years he was unemployed and was a member of almost every workingclass organization. He was a member of the Relief Project Workers Union, the Cana- dian Labor Defense League, the Consumers Council, the League for Peace and Demoeracy. In 1936 he joined the Communist Party. In the Post Office strike (his second strike; the first, in the Cobalt mines, had cost him his job) Boyd was a group leader and worked on publicity. Sinee the formation of the Iabor-Progressive Party he has been a member of Grandview Branch, where he is publicity di- rector. and he is now employed fulltime in party work. After work he finds time to bombard. editors of daily papers with pertinent letters on tonies of the day. : This winter, Jack will celebrate his sixtieth birthday, and great numbers of progressives in Vancouver will wish him many happy returns. A friend to everybody, and everybody’s friend, Jack Boyd has added new dignity to the term “Jimmy Higgins.” ; me