IN my last blog I
touched on the dilemma of the working man in face of the decline in unions. It
may seem puzzling as to why unions, the very bedrock of the advancement of the
condition of working people, should have declined.
Where
I grew to adulthood, in New Zealand, the Labour government of 1935-49 had passed
legislation making it compulsory for anyone who had a job to join a union. Thus,
when I left school to work in the local newspaper, I joined the New Zealand Journalists’
Union, and was covered by the provisions of the nationally-negotiated contract
covering all newspapers in New Zealand.
I
grew up to be proud of this union membership, even though, with hindsight, it
could be argued that such a system did lead to the creation of some unions that
were, as the saying goes, deadwood, whose executives were not really imbued
with the principles of unionism, and were inactive in the defence of the rights
of their members.
At
the time the politics of the general society in which the Cold War was settling
in, interfered with the running of unions to a certain extent. In the
antipodes, in particular, as on the West Coast of the United States, the
wharfies, as they were called, workers on the nation’s wharves, tended to be led
by members of the Communist party, which at the time, though small in number
were large in influence, because of their concentration on the welfare of
working people, especially in the unions. There, as in Canada, which had is own
Communist-led Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU), the leaders of the more orthodox
union collectives were firmly set against the Communist unions, and since it
was mainly the Communist-led unions that caused industrial strife, such
collectives --- the AFL-CIO in the United States, for example, the Federation
of Labour in New Zealand, the Canadian Labour Congress in Canada ---- gradually
began to act more or less in lockstep with their governments. My sympathies at
the time were with the more militant unions, which not only were strong in
defence of their members, but also had no hesitation in using their influence
in support of foreign workers. For example, it was not at all unusual for the
Australian wharfies to refuse to handle ships for political reasons, such as in
support of anti-imperialist struggles
being fought in various parts of the world, and I firmly supported these
actions. With the enthusiastic backing
of the media, governments were easily able to portray these actions as being
stimulated by Communist affiliations with the Soviet Union.
It
is undeniable, of course, that western
Communist parties lost all hope they may have had of broad public support
when they first opposed the Second World War because of the pact between
the Soviet Union and the Germans, and then, when Germany attacked Russia in
1941, they changed their minds on a dime, and became effective fighters against
the Nazis.
Thus,
immediately after the war, it was easy for non-Communist Western governments to
use the Communist stick to beat the trades unions with, and they didn't
hesitate to do it. In the United States unions
became tainted with corruption and gangsterism, but this was not enough for the
employers, who frankly set out to denigrate unions and used every trick in the book to undermine them. Years later I worked on finishing a small
film made at the NFB called Who Needs
Unions? which followed the career of a man whose business it was to
propagate the anti-union case, something he and others of his ilk did with
sensational success.
When
I left New Zealand in 1950, and a year later was hoping to get a job in
England, I ran into the problem of jurisdictions that was altogether avoided in
New Zealand by its system of mandatory unionism. Many English unions were what
was known as “closed shops.” That is, you could only join them by getting a
job; but to get a job you needed to be a union member. Some were simply “union
shops”, that is, once you got a job, you had to join the union. And then, of
course, there were jobs that were non-unionized. Although I eventually succeeded
in getting a job for a small weekly in Coventry,Warwickshire, I really cannot
remember that I was ever required to join the union, although I am fairly sure
the journalists on the local evening
newspaper --- which owned the little weekly for which I worked --- were union
members.
It
was not until I came to Canada in 1954 that I ran into the non-union shop, and
that with a vengeance. My first port of
call was Toronto, where I was told I needed Canadian experience to be hired by
a Canadian newspaper --- if one were to describe this in the jurisdictional
terms outlined above, I suppose this could be called the “Canadian shop” or the
Canadian version of the English “union shop”
--- “you can get Canadian experience only by working in a Canadian
newspaper, but to get a job in a Canadian newspaper, you need Canadian
experience.”
When
I was hired to work on the Northern Daily News in Kirkland Lake, I ran into the
Thomson newspaper chain, Roy Thomson’s infamous creation, a chain of small-town
newspapers built on the firm principle of paying the lowest wages possible
consistent with keeping unions at bay.
Here I discovered an entirely new instrument in my experience, an
electronic tape that could be attached to a linotype machine and do the work
that hitherto had been done by a linotype operator. The sole purpose of this
was to avoid hiring the skilled staffers who were always the most likely to be
unionized. The tape was sent out from
headquarters in Toronto, containing news dispatches from around the country and
the world, and even editorials, pre-written in Toronto. The editorial staff was
run by two members, an editor and chief sub-editor (a recovering drunk, who was
down on his luck from a ruined career in the metropolitan centres) who might be
considered full-time workers, while the reporting staff was made up of people
like myself, experienced journalists, most of us, from England (a descendant of
the poet Wordsworth), South Africa, Jamaica, Latvia and New Zealand who had
drifted into the country from abroad, and were willing to accept whatever wage
was offered. We were expected to work at any time of the day or night, any day
of the week, and whatever we wrote was set in type by the sole linotype
operator needed to keep the system moving.
Although
two of us on that staff later received the Order of Canada (Fred Bruemmer,
later a famed Arctic photographer and myself), the newspaper that resulted from
our efforts was a poor thing, indeed as were all of the other newspapers in
Thomson’s chain. Roy Thomson had been an itinerant businessman whose efforts to
get going all proved fruitless until he tried to sell radios in Northern
Ontario, and decided to set up a radio station to encourage sales. This had caught
on until he was able to buy his first small local newspaper in Timmins, and the
rest is history. Thomson Newspapers became one of the mightiest businesses in
the entire world of journalism, operating in several countries, and buying the
man himself a peerage in the British realm. His first quality newspaper, as
they are called, was the well-regarded and long-established Scotsman. Next he was able to establish the first
Scottish TV station, which, he said, in a famous quote, was “like a permit to print
money.”
I
lasted only three months on the $45 a week he paid me, and soon moved on to the
Winnipeg Free Press, another
low-paying non-union paper but one with a solid reputation that rested on the
fact that its editor for more than 40 years, J.W. Dafoe, had such political
influence that his turgid editorials were said to be capable of toppling
governments. I used to whisper in the editorial room that the newspaper was
“regarded as a great newspaper by more people who had never read it, than any
other in history.”
When
I moved on after two years to Montreal, I found myself in a very strange
newspaper situation. This was 1957, and although the tranquil revolution had
not yet arrived, French-language journalists had managed to get themselves
unionized. Through a stroke of good fortune I became friendly with many of them
and they introduced me to a side of Quebec life ---modern, radical,
anti-clerical, pro-union and alive to the outside world --- which seemed to be
unknown to those running the English-language newspaper for which I
worked. On our side of the town, we were
employed by a steadfastly anti-union boss, who nevertheless had sense enough to
peg his wage structure at just below the higher wages won by the French
journalists through their union.
I
remember after I had been there a couple of years, someone arrived from the
American Newspaper Guild in the United States who had the intention of perhaps
organizing Montreal’s English-language journalists. He asked me what sort of
support he could expect from the journalists on our staff, so one evening I ran
through the list of some 130 editorial staffers with him, and came up with four
whom I considered might be relied upon in a union organizing drive. He went
away.
In
fact, the behaviour of the French journalists at that time was a revelation to
me. While we were mere creatures of the editors and management, without any leverage
to control our work, the French journalists were extremely active at the level
or professionalism, and did not hesitate to strike when they felt they had good
cause. On one strike at La Presse they had not been content just
with picketing, but had managed to produce every day a miniature version of the
newspaper which they called La Presse
Ouvriere that became a considerable weapon in their armoury. That strike
ended with the overthrow of the administration of the newspaper and its
replacement with a new editor, with some of the more vigorous and radical younger
journalists promoted to management positions. A result like this could not even
be dreamed of on the English-language side.
I
had never been impressed with the management of The Montreal Star, an immensely profitable newspaper that continued
rolling on thanks to its guaranteed huge classified advertising every day. After
I left the newspaper the proprietorial McConnell family wanted money more than
they wanted a newspaper, and sold the paper to a chain organized by the
Winnipeg Free Press. They were finally
unionized in the 1970s. But on neither side did they have experience of negotiating,
and when in 1979 negotiations seized to a halt with a strike, the conflict was
allowed --- in my view through stupid management --- to drag on for so long
that when the strike was settled the newspaper had lost its formerly
unchallenged circulation.
So,
a deal --- a dirty deal, if I may coin a phrase --- was made between the Free
Press outfit and the Southam’s chain that owned The Gazette, the only remaining English-language newspaper. The Southam paper in Winnipeg would be closed,
leaving the field to the Free Press, and simultaneously the Star in Montreal would also be closed leaving the field to the Gazette.
I
suppose these are the kinds of deals one has to expect from capitalism, where
money and profits are the only criteria of success. But since I returned to
Montreal I have mentioned from time to time that I had worked on The Montreal Star and have been surprised
at an almost unanimous reaction: oh yes, the Star was such a good newspaper, we miss the Star, we read the Star
every day.
I
am not sure the Star ever deserved
such accolades. But certainly its loss has been an immense one to Montreal as a
city, much greater than those of us who wrote for it could ever have imagined
in the years leading up to the tranquil revolution.