Labor Blitz

Union labor's drive for higher wages and lower hours boiled into violence last week. The Communist-tinged Canadian Seamen's Union called out 5,000 members manning the ships that ply the Great Lakes. The issue: an eight instead of a twelve-hour day. The union claimed that on about half the 153 lake ships, striking crews had walked out. Strike leaders tried to block the Welland and Cornwall Canals, vital links between Lakes Erie and Ontario, and Montreal. Strikers swarmed aboard the freighter Goderich in the Welland Canal, drove or dumped the crew ashore, lashed the ship to the lock. The canal was blocked for 24 hours, longest delay in its history, before a Government tug could move the Goderich.

At the Cornwall Canal, pickets hurled mud and clayballs at protecting "Mounties," as the motorship Redwood entered the lowest lock. Crewmen left the ship to join the strikers, forced the skipper to go back. Soon 18 ships were blocked in the canal.

In Halifax "raiders" boarded a freighter at midnight, "kidnapped" seven strikebreakers smuggled aboard the previous day. In other ports a few ships moved with officer-crews. In a week 150 strikers were arrested for violence and desertion.

Scabs & Stalemate. Wherever possible, owners sailed their ships with non-union crews, claimed that only a score or so were strikebound. In anti-union Montreal, some 200 non-union men, mostly veterans and husky high-school graduates, were recruited to sail the ships.

The sharpness of the struggle was reflected in negotiations between the union and the Dominion Marine Association. At first, management accepted the eight-hour day in principle, provided the union made no other wage demands. But as the strike continued, the parties drew apart. Angrily the owners charged the union with breach of its contract. A four-day truce, tentatively accepted by the negotiators, was flatly spurned by the two biggest operators.

Apparently the owners were confident that they could break the strike. The union, counting on its own strength and anticipated sympathy strikes from longshoremen and ocean seamen, was equally sure of itself. But what worried plain citizens was that every available ship was needed to haul next winter's coal from the U.S. Each wasted day meant cold homes for next winter.

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