Larger-than-life forest union boss fought for workers
Jack Munro was hot tempered, profane — and effective
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
At 6-foot-5 and 265 pounds, longtime International Woodworkers of America leader Jack Munro seemed as big and imposing as the mighty firs and cedars his members chopped down.
He had a temperament to match. Blunt-spoken and given to world-class bursts of profanity, he couldn’t care less if he offended people — his job was to defend his members.
Hence his aversion to something like endangered species legislation, which he thought might harm loggers.
And his incendiary comment at the height of the controversy over old-growth logging in 1990: “I tell my guys, if they see a spotted owl, to shoot it.” He fought with a lot of people. “I remember one time when Jack really uncorked on (some forest company negotiators), read the riot act, called them chisellers and ordered them out of the room,” former IWA vice-president Fernie Viala once told Tom Hawthorn of The Province.
“After a few minutes, their spokesman came back. He said, ‘What the hell do you mean for us get out? You get out! This is our building!’ ”
John James Munro was born in Lethbridge, Alta., in 1931 and grew up on a farm in Seven Persons, near Medicine Hat. His father got tuberculosis and died when Jack was 11. His mother became destitute and the family was moved to a relief farm, which Munro described as a “godforsaken hole.”
He dropped out of school in Grade 10. After working as a machinist for the Canadian Pacific Railway, he became a welder at Kootenay Forest Products in Nelson, where he joined the IWA.
When he stood up to a supervisor, his fellow workers asked him to become a shop steward.
He quickly rose in the union ranks, and in 1973 became the IWA president, when it had close to 50,000 members.
But cutbacks and technological changes made things tough for unions through the 1980s and ’90s, dramatically reducing their membership and clout.
To many, the defining moment of Munro’s career came when unions and the public formed Operation Solidarity in 1983 to battle the “restraint” program of massive government cuts imposed by B.C. Premier Bill Bennett.
Munro cut a deal with Bennett to end the threat of a provincewide general strike. It was denounced as a sellout by the left, and Munro later regretted doing the deal at Bennett’s Kelowna home, which he thought looked too “palsy-walsy.”
The angry union boss side of Jack resurfaced in 1986, when he led the costliest strike in provincial history, a $2.5-billion, 18-weeklong walkout over contracting out work.
He died on Nov. 15, 2013 at the age of 82.