Chapter 3. 3 Left and Right

Trade union history can be complicated. For example, what do “left” and “right” or “conservative” and “progressive” mean in the context of the labour milieu? It is not that these overly used terms are helpful in neatly categorizing trade union activists; they most certainly are not, and sometimes they even confuse the issues at hand. However, an attempt to distinguish between them should be made as these labels were commonly bandied about in the labour milieu in the past and continue to be in use today. Analyzing them also facilitates an understanding of how politics and trade unions could be on a fluid spectrum of values. While there was definitely continuity, terms and their definitions kept shifting over the years and could lose some of their traditional meanings. In particular, since the Communist Party of Canada played a major underlying role in the events leading up to and including the Lenkurt Electric strike, tracking part of its evolution in British Columbia is key to a better understanding of the politics of labour within IBEW Local 213. Figuring out “left” and “right” would thus depend on time and place and the union in question. In the case of Local 213 in the post–World War II era—and somewhat before—through to the 1960s, the answers might best be understood through the prism of class relations in both British Columbia and Canada.

Riding a surge in popularity for socialist ideals issuing mostly from the reality of hardships during the Great Depression and progressive laws passed by labour-oriented governments elsewhere in the English-speaking world—the perceived successes of the Russian revolution undoubtedly also being a major contributing factor—the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) won 33.4% of the popular vote in a 1941 BC provincial election.1 As a result, the relatively new socialist party had a record-breaking fourteen MLAs, and it looked to many like a government-in-waiting. It was the second provincial election in which the CCF managed to garner more than 30% of the popular vote.2 Adding fuel to the left-wing fire was that this upward trend seemed directly connected to the decades of confrontation, futility, and often violent battles by workers who were attempting to establish basic trade union recognition in British Columbia.3 Achieving legally enforceable collective agreements in the resource extractive sectors, the goal of countless activists and their sympathizers, was then suddenly aided by a major cataclysmic event in the form of World War II. On the labour relations front, the consequence in British Columbia, as in the rest of Canada, was persistent organizational turmoil backstopped by a shortage of labour. In order primarily to get re-elected, the governing Liberal-Conservative coalition of the day felt enough pressure to present friendly amendments in the British Columbia Legislature to the long-standing, but virtually toothless, Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (ICA) Act. After decades of weak and unenforceable language, and in various iterations, these amendments for once became strongly worded and finally forced employers to negotiate directly with the union officials who represented their employees. The amendments to the ICA Act were presented to the provincial Legislature in early 1943 by George Pearson, Minister of Labour and, in a rare show of political unanimity, passed without dissent by all sitting members. It was his second effort at bringing about reforms to the Act, and Pearson hoped the new amendments would allow employers and employees to negotiate collective agreements “without that battling and disturbance and bitterness” that had characterized much of the labour strife during the previous decade.4 Nigel Morgan, a well-known Communist, and one of the leaders in British Columbia of the International Woodworkers’ of America (IWA), approved of the ostensibly pro-union amendments.5 He had notably declared in an earlier newspaper interview that “If these amendments are passed the basic cause of two-thirds of the industrial disputes—the question of union recognition—will be eliminated.”6 Providing path-breaking room for new industrial unions like the IWA to finally secure their place in society, the ICA Act amendments were, according to BC labour historian Paul Phillips, “the most advanced in Canada.”7

Initiated by a normally business-oriented British Columbia coalition government, though not always in an amenable political entente, the progressive amendments to the ICA Act permitted the ruling parties to appear sympathetic to the left; they had now passed legislation facilitating the recognition of unions, a long-standing goal of a large and significant number of industrial workers and their organizations in the province. Despite an increase in the popular vote for the CCF in the 1945 provincial elections, the governing Liberal/Conservative coalition won a majority of seats yet again as it had apparently done enough to retain political power.

A similar dynamic took place a year later at the federal level in February 1944, when federal order-in-council PC 1003 was passed under the War Measures’ Act. The order meant that employers were legally required to negotiate with unions across the whole of the country and could no longer bypass the collective will of the workers in their employ. As in British Columbia a year earlier, this provided immediate security of sorts with collective agreements being required by law if a majority of workers so desired. Provincial laws with similar intent finally followed in the remaining provinces under the National Emergency Transitional Powers Act, which remained in force until 1947. The result was that industrial workers who had never before been union members, or who had abandoned these fledgling organizations as a result of unemployment during the hungry thirties, flocked into a burgeoning trade union movement. Union membership across Canada jumped from 16.3% of the non-agricultural workforce in 1940 to 24.2% in 1945, and to 28.4% in 1950.8 In British Columbia, the province with arguably the most combative trade union movement in the entire country, particularly in the dominant resource extractive sectors, union membership went from an estimated 12.7% of the non-agricultural workforce in 1939 to a Canadian-best 53.9% by 1958.9

Legal recognition meant that accommodations now had to be made with employers within the significant confines of signed collective agreements, and the effect was soon noticeable. Prior to the provincial ICA Act in 1943 and Ottawa’s PC 1003 a year later, several of the contracts achieved by IBEW Local 213 in the construction industry were verbal contracts, based on the goodwill of both employers—who needed skilled workers—and the union. Signed contracts with these employers came back into force during the war years, as there was now a shortage of labour and the union temporarily had the upper hand.10 For many newly organized workers, the hope was that wage increases would quickly follow and that class war encounters in their rawest forms, with picket lines, physical confrontations, imprisonment, and even gunplay, would henceforth be reduced in scope and number. Conversely, as both PC 1003 and subsequent legislation explicitly outlawed strikes during the term of a collective agreement, workforce stability and continuity of production would also be promoted during the all-out war effort. That these two policy objectives might be continued after the worldwide conflict was likely the hope of employers and the federal government. The strikes that had impeded industrial production at home during the war in 1943, the largest wave of strikes in Canada since labour’s national revolt in 1919, would hopefully become “errors” of the past, soon to be forgotten, though 13,000 steelworkers in Trenton, Hamilton, Sydney, and Sault-Ste-Marie had other ideas at the time: they wanted enduring, entrenched union recognition, and an end to war-time wage controls.11 At this crucial point during World War II, their pressure through strike action and the accompanying surge in popular support for the CCF across the country is what ultimately helped turned the tide toward the promulgation of PC 1003. As in British Columbia previously, moving “left” with progressive legislation on the union question was one of the pivotal strategies used by the federal Liberal Party to retain popular support. Led by Canada’s shrewd and manipulative prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, his game plan appeared to work as the federal Liberals similarly won national re-election in 1945, though the immediate results delivered an unexpected minority government outcome.

Despite multiple pronouncements of sympathy toward organized labour, Prime Minister Mackenzie King would quickly steer the trade union movement toward acceptance of tripartite councils and “neutral” government agencies. These government bodies occasionally appeared to be fair upon pronouncing decisions during episodes requiring their intervention, but they were rarely neutral. In return for an increase in wages and semi-security in terms of continuity of employment, the result was eventually characterized by a system of pattern bargaining and master contracts. These covered both large industries such as steel and auto manufacturing or, in the case of electrical workers, “international agreements,” that is, contracts between industrial contractors and the International Offices of the building trade unions. These agreements allowed the industrial contractors to operate without having to involve themselves in the troublesome process of collective bargaining at the local level. On many levels, the term was synonymous with master contracts. International agreements were imposed on multi-jurisdictional construction sites encompassing long-term mega-projects such as pulp mills or hydroelectric dams and sometimes elicited resentment in less capital-intensive business ventures and the collective agreements agreed to at the local level.12 This was paralleled by the growing acceptance by labour of the bureaucratic-driven concept of the “legal strike,” brokered by a “neutral” state, and was exchanged for growth in purchasing power and a social safety net of increasing quality and extent. New social programs, such as family allowances and unemployment insurance, were underpinned at the same time by significant government spending and legislative subsidies for business.13 The mostly positive upward spiral in the economy was noticeable and a virtuous circle of Keynesian production and consumption seemed to be taking place; this provided a distinct contrast with the hopelessness of the Great Depression and the global conflict of World War II. But it became abundantly clear with the passage of time that working people and their unions would need to continue to struggle and go on strike to get their piece of the pie, while property relations, the often-aggravating management prerogatives of employers, and capitalism writ large would remain intact.

When the responsibility for labour laws reverted back to the provinces in 1947, a succession of business-friendly governments in British Columbia attempted to impose a more controlling framework of laws and regulations governing the new reality of corporate-union relationships. Between 1947 and 1972 at least six major amendments to the ICA Act were passed by governing parties, whether they were a Liberal-Conservative coalition variant or Social Credit Party. While the new postwar political and economic realities of Canada would not permit a reversion to the barely disguised anti-union pre-war pattern, workers and their organizations now had to deal with a series of bills that tried to impose restrictive legislation on their efforts surrounding collective bargaining. Ben Isitt writes that these were all hotly contested in the (not so) Pacific province, and that bitter fights erupted “over the laws of union certification, bargaining, and picketing, and rulings of the Labour Relations Board and Workmen’s Compensation Board.” Between 1947 and 1972, these included Bills 33, 39, 42, 43, 87, and 128.14 In 1948, at the beginning of this cycle of constant disputation, when asked for his opinion on Justice Henry Bird’s proposed amendments to the ICA Act, Harvey Murphy, a well-known left-wing labour leader from the industrial smelter town of Trail in the West Kootenays, summed up the labour movement’s suspicions during the entire epoch: “His proposals are ridiculous. They boil down to compulsory arbitration, and the establishment of labour courts to settle wages. Maybe he doesn’t want trade unions at all.”15

Union leaders were faced with a number of choices upon encountering these new bureaucratic layers after World War II had come to an end. Those who looked for accommodation with employers through strict adherence to the letter of the law and what was written in collective agreements and who, if at all possible, avoided conflict through strikes, even punishing their own rank and file who had the audacity to organize walkouts during the term of a collective agreement, might be deemed “conservative” or “right-wing” trade unionists. Those activist workers who were less accommodating to the articles agreed to in collective agreements, and who argued that contracts were signed in the context of an unequal playing field during bargaining sessions, with the employer almost always holding the upper hand, might be deemed “progressive” or “left-wing.” Yet, politically, both of these groups would for the most part have identified themselves as CCF and, by 1961, when the latter formally became allied with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), NDP voters. Indeed, many trade union leaders in British Columbia were card-carrying members of Canada’s largest left-wing party. Others were even Liberal supporters; very few would have identified themselves as politically conservative. Most believed in a social democratic Canada of sorts, from a tepid version, in which CCF-NDP governments are elected to provide safeguards for working people within the framework of a capitalist economy, to more interventionist versions. The supporters of interventionist approaches were more inclined to include the nationalization of key industries. In the case of activists within Local 213, these would have included the BC Electric Company and the BC Telephone Company, both monopolies—or near monopolies—of electric utilities in BC.

Although in some ways interesting, at the end of the day these political differences were not all that significant. What was emphatically important is that unions increasingly began to discipline their own members if they got too far out of line. Co-authors Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz have described this evolutionary aspect of Canadian trade union history in an expressive and telling juxtaposition: “What before had taken the appearance of the charge of the Mounties now increasingly took the form of the rule of law by which unions policed themselves in most instances.”16

Prime targets for trade union law-and-order types among Vancouver’s electrical workers were the so-called “dangerous elements” within Local 213. These were the electrical workers who were often disparaging of the perceived ameliorating reforms emanating from CCF-NDP oriented trade unionists. Mostly Communist-inclined workers, they believed that the dual aims of job security and wage gains were best pursued through the immediate and complete abolition of the capitalist system. This could most readily be accomplished through a vanguard of educated and enlightened workers agitating both at work and in the political arena. Trade unions were particularly important in this regard. Lenin had famously declared, “We must remain in the reactionary unions, work there, conquer the masses, drive out the leaders and turn the unions into organs of the revolution,” but the scenario he outlined was seriously stalled and certainly quite some distance in the future in Canada.17 To use a sports analogy, the traditional Communist solution to wage and employment insecurity for workers was to change the game being played, not to try to do a better job of playing the existing game, with all of its restrictive laws and exploitive rules in place. Depending on the period of time being considered, these militant and class-conscious workers could be considered even further to the “left” of the other trade unionists.

What sometimes blurred and made inadequate these facile political distinctions within the trade union movement was that within a decade of its inception in 1921, the Communist Party of Canada—like many Communist parties around the world—had become a near-appendage to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Taking their direction from Moscow through the Communist International, or Comintern, this meant that Communists in Canada became well known in the 1920s and 1930s for periodically changing their line and shifting their critiques of capitalism and world affairs. Many of these ideological zigzags were an attempt to promote the previously unfamiliar notion of preserving “socialism in one country.” Then World War II erupted. At the start of the worldwide conflagration, Communist parties around the world derided the conflict as similar to the First World War, in that it was described as an imperialist war between rival capitalist nations. After June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in contravention of their previously ratified Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which attempted to keep the Russians out of the looming armed conflict, Communists immediately changed their line and suddenly became enthusiastic allies of the war against fascism. The party in Canada grew in size and prestige again, to the point that, in 1943, Fred Rose, a Communist (and an electrician by trade), was elected as a member of Parliament for the federal riding of Cartier in Montréal. The all-out effort to defeat the Axis powers also meant that the Communist Party officially campaigned after 1941 for a no-strike pledge at their places of work for the remainder of the war. Ironically, this now meant that critics could easily castigate its members for taking the same position as right-wing supporters of employers and the exigencies of duly signed collective agreements. The political landscape in British Columbia got even more contradictory in the autumn of 1943 (before PC 1003), when the Communist-led IWA sanctioned a two-week strike in a crucial part of the war industry on the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii). Under federal jurisdiction at the time due to the war, and hence not within the provisions of the provincial ICA Act, the strike was fortuitously well-timed as it temporarily brought to a crashing halt the harvest of giant Sitka spruce used in the production of airplane wings for the famous and fast-flying wood-built Mosquito bomber. For the first time ever, and with concerned federal government officials prompting both sides, restless loggers on the remote and rain-soaked Islands succeeded in forcing employers to sign a one-year collective agreement.18 The strike demonstrated that out on the west coast, as elsewhere and in other unions, the Communist Party did not have monolithic control of a militant and determined membership; on occasions such as these national party directives would have to be temporarily shelved in order to win a long-sought-after collective agreement with a traditionally anti-union set of companies.19 The “battle of the Charlottes” was strategically crucial to the IWA’s goal of achieving a province-wide collective agreement in the forest industry.20 In short, being a “left-winger” on the job during the war years could easily lead to some confusion. Politics did indeed make for strange bedfellows.

The positive feelings the Communist Party evoked during the all-out war effort could not last. In fact, the second half of the 1940s proved to be a disaster for the Communist parties in both Canada and the United States.21 Western capitalist countries soon rejected their alliance with the Soviet Union and their pre-war abhorrence of all things Communist came back with a vengeance. In the ensuing Cold War, no direct conflict between the Soviet Union and the major western powers took place, but small proxy wars around the globe kept international tensions high. In Canada, additional internal dynamics fed into this postwar shift of sentiment against the Soviet Union. Armed with sensational spy stories told by the 1945 defection of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk working in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, the Canadian state renewed its anti-Communist efforts. It soon fell into lockstep with efforts south of the border to root out all Communists from positions of societal importance, including the trade union movement. McCarthy-era witch hunt for Communists in all walks of life had a severe and damaging effect on the entire North American political landscape. In the trade union movement, Communist activists were rooted out or fired from elected positions or were suspended from Canada’s central labour bodies by their unions. The result was that organized labour lost, or sometimes appeared to deliberately hamstring, much of the class consciousness and militancy that had taken decades to build up in different regions of the country. The purge of the reds and the ensuing trade union in-fighting in no small measure helped to embolden increasingly business-friendly provincial and federal governments; a weakened labour movement could do little to oppose the imposition of a controlling postwar framework of industrial relations policies and procedures.22 The end result was that in some local unions, such as Vancouver-based IBEW Local 213, the Communist Party by the early 1950s became visibly cautious in advocating identifiably socialist policies. The realities of McCarthyism and Cold War politics had forced Communists in Canada to burrow deep into the organizations to which they belonged—and this is indeed what happened in Local 213.23

Few in number, Communists in British Columbia trade unions during the two decades following World War II nevertheless survived and had a notable influence that reached far beyond their numbers. This was understandable as they were often the ones who had organized membership drives during the 1930s in the nascent CIO-affiliated industrial unions, then led the fight for better wages and working conditions during and after World War II. The popularity of Communist leadership was a combination of being highly sensitive to rank-and-file and community concerns, being able to successfully direct workers through job action at the work site, and their skill as negotiators. For many Canadian workers this is what mattered most. Foreign policy and events in distant lands were not always of prime concern if there were kids at home to feed and a mortgage to pay. Communist trade unionists in Canada had seemingly come a long way from 1928 when they were condemned by then secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor, Frank Morrison. According to labour historian John Manley, Morrison saw in the expulsion of Tim Buck from the International Associations of Machinists a reflection of a “labourist consensus” that “a man cannot be a Communist and at the same time a union man, because Communists are constantly working to destroy the union.”24 But by the 1940s and 1950s Communist trade union activists were still occasionally in leadership positions in British Columbia. Societal circumstances in part then forced them to moderate their efforts to openly use trade union structures as leading instruments of social and political change in the direction of socialism. Important legal decisions, followed by successive governmental laws, led to the institutionalization of most left-led trade unions. Undoubtedly the best-known of these legal renderings was the Rand formula of 1946, which made the payment of union dues by all employees in a bargaining unit compulsory if a majority wanted to be represented by a trade union. Individuals who had philosophical differences with the union, or who did not want to belong to the organization, were nevertheless forced to pay monthly dues as it was acknowledged that the collective agreement from which everyone benefited—including the anti-union types—had been the result of union bargaining efforts. The most important aspect of this famous arbitration decision that ended the 1945 strike in Ford’s auto plant in Windsor, Ontario was that it also made the union check-off compulsory. This meant that union representatives no longer had to contact each of their members individually to collect monthly union dues as these were taken directly off workers’ paycheques. Though it was not immediately implemented across the country, a major unintended consequence was that an important source of regular contact and interchange of ideas between union representatives and rank-and-file workers was lost. Local unions henceforth simply collected their dues through a company cheque that was then deposited in the former’s credit union account. Worse, employers could stop the flow of union dues if the collective agreement was violated by an illegal walkout. A parallel process of internal bureaucratization then gradually separated the left-leaning leadership from the rank and file. Two BC-focused historians, Mark Leier and Stephen Gray, have each in their own way reflected on this process of growth of working-class officialdom. Leier, in his extensive study of the early years of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, describes how bureaucracy was not a “crafty invention” of trade union representatives. Instead, faced with an increasing number of labour laws formulated with the passage of time by state-employed legal advisers, “it is negligent for unions not to hire and train their own experts to cope.” The growing and incremental necessity of specialists being hired, or trained by the unions themselves, exerted a discernible hand of influence upon this organized portion of the working class. With the imposition of the Rand formula, the dues check-off thus inadvertently created a source of stable income, the financial means to create a divide that had previously not been as visible or as extensive as before:

Obviously, it is good for shop stewards to know more, not less, about a wide variety of matters. When under attack, or pressing home an advantage, it is useful to have experienced, practical, and tested leaders at the helm. If members, or potential members, are apathetic or cowed, the union’s survival may depend on a cadre of class-conscious, highly motivated officials who have been removed from the day-to-day shop-floor struggle and can devote their time, energy, and knowledge to the cause.25

Stephen Gray, for his part, has commented only briefly—yet incisively—on this phenomenon and its outcome in the context of the Communist-led IWA, the largest union by far in British Columbia’s immediate post–World War II period. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, the massive thirty-seven-day forest industry strike of 1946—the largest in British Columbia to that date—he perceptively points out that governmental laws and groundbreaking legal decisions worked in tandem with the process of bureaucratization. The unintended result, in the IWA at least, was that it “ultimately proscribed the project of synthesizing industrial and political activity within the existing structure of trade unionism and industrial relations.”26

It followed that in unions where Communists managed to hang on to leadership positions, such as Mine-Mill, they were ironically—yet logically—forced to accommodate major employers through the confines of successive collective agreements. Harvey Murphy, for instance, led the industrial workforce at the massive Trail smelter on an official strike only once during the twenty-three years of his leadership—a two-day strike in 1964.27 Though there were Mine-Mill supported strikes of hard-rock miners elsewhere in BC’s extractive-oriented hinterland, the lack of consistent revolutionary rhetoric or symbolically resonant work stoppages was sometimes lacking in Communist-led unions; the Cold War, combined with McCarthyism, and the security of new collective agreements in the labour movement, had successfully stifled any possibility of an insurgent or revolutionary impulse in much of Canada’s working class.28 Referred to unsympathetically by critics for his infamous and alcohol-fuelled 1948 “underpants speech,” it was nevertheless emphatically meaningful that Harvey Murphy became regionally renowned as lead negotiator for over a decade on behalf of the Mine-Mill union.29 His shrewd efforts in successfully diverting more of Cominco’s profits to its workforce were rewarded in 1953 with the remarkable statistic that the town of Trail had the highest per capita income in all of Canada.30 Not that all that income flowed directly to the thousands of smelter workers toiling away on the Hill, or that there was an unusual number of Italian-style mansions proliferating in the nearby ethnic neighbourhood “Gulch”—far from it—but Murphy and his small team of dedicated comrades were convincing enough, and delivered enough—despite repeated high-profile raiding and red-baiting from the steelworkers’ union—to get consistently re-elected to represent Trail’s working-class interests. Despite the era’s backdrop of trade union compromise, and even concessions, across the country in exchange for an increase in wages and tenuous contractual security, Mine-Mill’s leadership focused on building a community-oriented and rank-and-file political culture in the West Kootenays.31 But this was unusual in post–World War II British Columbia; Trail, it should be pointed out, was also a town divided, as there was clearly a limit to what a Communist leader could accomplish during this period within the confines of a trade union.

The increasing standard of living by workers across British Columbia and Canada after the Second World War contrasted sharply with the difficulties of life during the Great Depression. One of the consequences was that the traditional political categories of left and right became somewhat more fluid. Workers could change their positions, with initially “conservative” workers becoming more “progressive” over time. Again, this was unusual. In most cases young workers who did not have much to lose lashed out at the imposition of seemingly arbitrary rules, and often became more conservative as time went by. Much of this fluidity depended on how much was at stake for workers involved in “playing the game.” Home ownership, paid holidays, and health benefits all helped to produce “conservative” workers who increasingly desired stability with employers through good collective agreements. Yet very little of this was given away by benevolent and generous employers during the so-called “postwar settlement” of industrial legality and regulation; difficult negotiations, confrontations, and strikes were too often required in this type of economy before an expectant rank and file could hope to see a difference in their material quality of life. Even though he didn’t invent the turn of phrase, W. A. C. Bennett, long-time premier of British Columbia during the 1950s and 1960s, ignored this increasingly disruptive reality and repeatedly used the alluring term “the good life” during elections to describe the growing appeal of a steadily improving economy in Canada’s westernmost province. Combined with warnings about “godless socialists,” while at the same time aptly co-ordinating the often disparate ambitions of big business and the regional interests of small town entrepreneurs, he was impressive in winning a significant percentage of the BC working-class vote in seven successive provincial elections. His peculiar “free enterprise” coalition of right-wing and business-oriented politicians under the Social Credit political umbrella could also turn definitions on their head. In 1958, Bennett’s Social Credit government nationalized the privately owned Black Ball ferries, followed by the BC Electric Company in 1961—both with full compensation—transforming them overnight into Crown corporations. Public control of the production of electricity had become particularly important to the premier, as he didn’t want a private company in charge of this vital resource unless it shared the premier’s vision of the kind of growth the province needed.32 His underlying belief was that key infrastructure projects built at government expense were necessary to promote private capital investments elsewhere in the economy more efficiently.33 The immediate effect on the political culture of his province was that the “right-wing” Bennett appeared simultaneously to have effectively stolen a major policy platform from the left. Politics could definitely prove to be a slippery slope in this period for those seeking to deploy traditionally tidy definitions in British Columbia.

Appeals of this nature from the Social Credit government of the day could also be tempting for less combative trade union leaders who desired and sought what were described as “good” relationships with employers through accommodating collective agreements. The problem was that employers, like capitalists everywhere, would seek to maximize their profit to survive against competitive rivals, satisfy their shareholders, and control an ever-increasing percentage of the marketplace. This created instability and led to inflation, unemployment, mandatory overtime, or the inability to provide for their families if union leaders were unable to win the basics of regular wage increases and better working conditions. The pressure put on union leaders was particularly pronounced in the boom-and-bust resource extractive industries of British Columbia which, moreover, were filled with physically arduous and dangerous occupations. However, this competitive environment was less noticeable in the electrical trades during the postwar period than in other fields of employment. The comparatively high degree of specialization required to become a powerhouse operator, a lineman, a construction wireman, or a shipyard electrician often shielded these workers from the unpredictable excesses of the capitalist system.

But this was not always true.

In short, trade union leadership was a fine balancing act, reflected in both the personalities and politics of the individuals involved. This became especially noteworthy in the structure and make-up of the leadership of IBEW Local 213.