LCCC TN Operators Force 37,000 Loggers, Sawmill Workers To Quit LUMBER WORKERS?’ STRIKE | LEADS NATION WAGE DRIVE | Paewae | TRIBUNE Vol 1. No. 14- 5 Cents Vancouver, British Columbia, Friday, Biay 17, 1946 = Formerly PACIFIC ADVOCATE D — Sj — still, Bae. group Of monopolists last means of publicity > Powerful forces have launched an offensive desperate effort to turn back the course of history. This Continued on Page 8 LOOUTTHG HT HITED TO LI UR LGC! Trail - Kimberly _-SjNBUH BONHAM MARMOT Build Your Paper By NIGEL MORGAN Provincial Leader, Labor-Progressive Party HE Press Drive has now reached the half-way mark, with approximately 55 percent of the cash subsidy = raised through donations, and more than 50 percent of new readers. The Vancouver city clubs and all of the island points are doing: exceptionally good work, particularly in regard to bundle orders, but there is as we look down the notice board in the Tribune oftice, not heard from at all. What more effective machmery has laber in this province got, what more consistent champion, Tribune, at a time when on the side of the small but who own and control are aligned the paid press, radio, advertising, and’ every a few clubs in than the Pacific immensely powerful Canada, in a Men Celebrate New "Pact By CHARLES SAUNDERS TRAIL—Pat Conroy, secretary-treasurer of the Canad- jan Congress of Labor will be guest speaker at a victory banquet, sponsored by Local 480 of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, to celebrate the successful Cuimination ot negotiations with the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. Representatives of enaeement civic officials and members of the clersy have been invited to par- ticipate in the celebrations to be heid Hriday, May 17, in the Co- lombo Hall. of the agreement will inerease of 15%2 cents per hour over the average wart time wage paid by this company and makes provision for the establishment of a forty-hour week, with the transition from the present 48-hour week to be worked out between management and the union. The new agrec ent will establish a rate amounting from- a dollar to a dollar three cents per hour for miners at Kimberley and pro vides for a tradesmen’s rate of a dollar six cents per hour. @ne of the greatest advances made in the signing of the new agreement will be the stabiliza- tion of wages, by elimination of the bonus system. Bonuses were supposedly calculated on the bas- is of metal prices, according to the company, but it is a fact that the bonus Showed its greatest variation during the war years when metal prices were pegged. For instance the bonus dropped from a high of $2.34 in March 1937 to 29 cents in August 1939, and continued this type of vari- ation during the war years. Ow- ing to the method of calculating the bonus, the amount was prac- tically set arbitrarily by tne com- pany since the workers were nev er in a position to calculate it or challenge the rate set. President Fred Henne greeted the successful conclusion of nego- tiations between the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. and the Trail and Kimberley locals. Point- ing to the signal victory achieved by the union he stated, “The establishment of increases in wage rates and the provision for the 40-hour week should fay the basis for a better relationship be- tween labor and management in the solving of our mutual prob- lems during the reconversion period.” Union Proposals For Just Settlement Balked Today, from the remotest logging camp in the Queen Charlottes to the big sawmills along the Fraser River and the scattered operations of the In- terior, British Columbia’s great tumber industry, pivot of the province’s econ- omy, is closed down. At 11 o’clock Wednesday morning workers in every camp and mill, seme 37,000 of them, covered by the B.C. District of the International Woodworkers of America, quit work to enforce their demands for a 25 cents an hour wage boost, the 40-hour week, the union shop and the checkoff. After weeks of fruitless negotiations, which served to show All Proposals Flatly Rejected Pritchett Forced on to strike by the adamant refusal of the lum- ber operators to even con- sider sincere efforts of the union to avert a stoppage, some 37,000-odd B.€. loggers and mill: workers walked off the job at 11 a.m. Wednes- day. The tic-up, coming after long weeks of negotiations and stall- ing by the operators, followed shortly after coilapse of efforts to avert a crisis by Chief Jus- tice Gordon Sloan in a hurried- ly called Victoria meeting of union and operator representa— tives. “We have done everything hu- manly possible to bring about a peaceful settlement,” stated District President Harold Prit- echett, who, together with Inter- national Vice-President Karley Larsen, international Board Mem- ber Ernie Dalskog, District Vice— President Hjalmar Bergren, and District Secretary Bert Melsness, attended the Victoria meeting. “All our proposals were flatly re- jected by the employers,’ Mr. Pritchett said. “The responsibil- ity rests squarely on their shoul- ders.” : In the meeting with Chief Jus- tice Sloan, the union negotiators offered to settle by arbitration the questions of union security, providing the operators would agree to wage and hour demands. As a further proposal, in a last- minute effort to settlement, the union representatives even agreed to recommend continuation of work if the operators would grant an 18 cents an hour across the board, the 40-hour week, and ar- bitration of union security. The operators answered emphatically “No,” as they did also to the recommendation of Chief Justice Sloan that they should proceed with negotiations of wages and hours if the union would agree to postpone its deadline ten days. “The lumber operators appear determined to block the winning of the peace by refusing to even give due consideration of the unions just demands,” stated fn- ternational Board Member Ernie Daiskog. “Inereased wages are needed more than ever today to meet the rising cost of living and the shorter work week is impera- tive to the maintenance of full employment, the provision of jobs for thousands of veterans and others already unemployed. The operators selfish attitude reflect- ed in their provocation of a strike in order to extend their already over-swollen profits, at a time when lumber for homes is so ur- Continued on Page 8 See PRITCHETT ERNEST DALSKOG International Board Member District No. 1, TWA — HAROLD PRITCHEET District President, TWA Franco Holds Atomic Scientist By OWEN ROCHE MEXICO CITY. — (ALN)—Pro- fessor Enrique Moles, former head of the Physics and Chem- istry Department of the Rocke- feller Institute in Madrid and Spain’s leading expert in nuclear fission, is being held under “pro- tective custody’ by the Franco dictatorship to prevent disclosure of atomic bomb investigations be- ing carried on in Spain, a Madrid source informed Spanish Republican circles here this week. Moles had applied to go to the ,5U-'S. after being invited to aid in research on atomic energy. only the determination of the big companies to give no major con- cession to the union they have fought so long and bitterly, the strike was on. The employers’ attitude, the provincial govern- ment’s ineffectual last-minute -ef- forts to find a solution, left no alternative. There is no attempt to minim- ize the crippling effect the strike will have on industry and par- ticularly the construction indus- try. But neither is there any lack of understanding of the issue. It is a strike te maintain in the formative years of the postwar period the living stand- ards so glibly promised by gov- ernment spokesmen during the war years—livying standards now jeopardized by high prices and artificially created shortages that are. nowhere more blatantly ap- parént than in the lumber in- dustry itself. it is a strike ts win the rights without - which neither labor’s living standards mor its democratic rights can adequately be protected from the greed of monopolistic corpora- tions. Despite the propaganda cam- paign instituted by the com- panies, the big advertisements in the dailies with their collec- tion of misleading statements and figures, there is every indi— cation that the strike has the support, not only of organized labor but of wide sections of the public. Thousands of veterans, work- ers and others engaged in build- ing homes who have become dis- gusted by their imability to ob- tain lumber except at black market prices while the greater part of the province’s produc- tion goes to the more profitable export market, will recognize the justice of the union’s claim that operators are fully able to pay the cost of the wage in- crease sought out of excess profits. As IWA leaders have already pointed out in refuting the op- erators’ extravagant -claim that the 12% cents an hour increase offered and rejected would cost them nine million dollars a year, the cost, more accurately estimated by the union at $3,000,000 a year, could readily be met out of excess profits threes major companies alone, amounted to three million dol- lars. Course of negotiations since the first meeting between TWA officials, R. VY. Stuart of Stuart Research Service representing 147 lumber companies, and other em- ployers’ representatives reveals the companies’ desire to create a deadlock. From their first offer of 5 cents an hour increase made on April 7 aiter ‘strong. protestations of in- ability to pay, through a further offer of 10 cents an hour and a 44hour week on April 15 to a final offer of 12% cents an hour on April 24 contingent upon the union withdrawing all other de mands, the companies consistently rejected the demand. for union Continued on Page s- BED STRIKE a which, for .