SOLIDARITY IN B.C. MORE OFTEN THAN NOT
Book covers labour movements that shaped employment on West Coast
While mainstream Canadian journalism has never been noted for extensive or sympathetic coverage of labour news, for many years Rod Mickleburgh was an exception, filing authoritative and competent labour stories to The Vancouver Sun and Province.
(Full disclosure. I have known Mickleburgh for decades. We have, from time to time, discussed stories one or both of us were covering when I reported on the labour beat for the online journal The Tyee, and my 2016 book Hells History appears in his bibliography.)
Mickleburgh’s new book from Harbour Publishing, On The Line, (a project of the B.C. Labour Heritage Centre) tells the stories of organized labour in B.C.
As the author notes in his introduction, “A militant labour movement has been part of British Columbia’s identity going back to earliest times … Confrontations, when they took place, were often rough. For years, the B.C. labour movement was the most combative in the land, full of radicals and talk of general strikes.”
Here’s an emblematic story. Archibald Muir, a Scot, came in 1849 to work as one of the territory’s first European-ancestry coal miners at the Hudson’s Bay mine at Fort Rupert. Muir and another miner were clapped into irons in 1850 for organizing a strike. He died, 35 years later, in a methane explosion in one of the notoriously unsafe mines operated by Robert Dunsmuir.
In one life, two of the major themes that recur in Mickleburgh’s book — repression of worker attempts to organize, and murderously dangerous working conditions that lead to unnecessary worker deaths.
Another theme might be called “solidarity and its discontents.”
Worker attempts to organize to improve conditions and wages have too often been corrupted and weakened by racism and sexism, and sometimes trade unions were divided against each other by politics and personality.
On the Line is admirably frank about these tragic failures of solidarity, and provides many stories of Indigenous, female and non-white workers, undercutting the stereotype that portrays the typical worker as a white guy in a hard hat.
The final chapters of the book record labour’s tardy but gratifying progress on these fronts, and rightly praise former B.C. Federation of Labour Jim Sinclair for his principled advocacy for temporary foreign workers and marginalized, low-income workers.
If you work for a living, you need to read this book. It is your history, too, and Mickleburgh has done us all a favour by telling our stories.