Toronto Workers History Project
Ken Traynor 00:00
How do you, you know, more of a hybrid model going forward? Because we can get, you know, we can get specialists from the forestry industry, from the ministry in DC and stuff like that, to Zoom meetings. It will never get to, you know, if they have to drive two hours to come to the meeting from Nanaimo or something like that. And so we're really giving it some thought as to how you can kind of meld the, you know, come up with a hybrid model that'll work so you can get access to those folks. We're live.
Craig Heron (Host) 00:33
I think that's what a lot of people are going to be talking about. And it's, It’s a mixed blessing, obviously, because people who are working on Zoom all day are not ready to spend another evening on it. I don't think so.
Ken Traynor
We're live.
Craig Heron (Host)
That's not me. But good. Well, we're still a little short of seven o'clock, so we'll wait a couple of minutes.
Brenda Wall
But the exposure for, say, Indigenous communities. You know, there have been so many great webinars and so on, people who normally couldn't get to the to the First Nations physically, but you know now with so many different Zooms, it's they're almost every night, if you want one.
Craig Heron (Host) 01:11
Yeah, that’s remarkable.
01:19
Yeah, hi everyone.
Craig Heron (Host) 01:22
Hello.
Brenda Wall
There's another Luckhardt.
Craig Heron (Host) 01:34
This is a quite a change. We usually start right on seven o'clock, and if we're meeting in a hall, it would be 7:10, 7:15pm.
Craig Heron (Host) 01:41
The standard left wing 10 minutes, you know, or quarter hour.
Kathy Walker 01:50
It's Kathy Walker.
Craig Heron (Host) 02:08
Hello, Kathy. You we need more idle chatter so people don't think they're being left out.
Ken Luckhardt 02:14
I see Dan O’Meara.
Dan O'Meara 02:16
Indeed, I just sent a message to Brenda.
Dan O'Meara 02:24
I think the last time I saw you Ken was at the waterfront in Cape Town with Pat Clancy in 1994.
Ken Luckhardt 02:29
Likely, likely, wow.
Dan O'Meara 02:32
You had a little more hair than I did.
Ken Luckhardt 02:36
Yeah, a little, not a lot, but a little more.
Dan O'Meara 02:38
Yeah. How you doing?
Ken Luckhardt 02:40
Well.
Dan O'Meara 02:44
And I want to say hi to Sam Boskey, who sent a hello to me.
Craig Heron (Host) 02:50
Okay, everybody. I think it's probably time to start seven o'clock. Thank you all for showing up, and most particularly thanks to the panelists who appeared tonight to give us what will be a fantastic presentation I'm absolutely certain. Let me begin by, as we always do, by acknowledging the land on which this meeting is taking place. The Toronto workers History Project acknowledges that Toronto is situated upon the traditional territories of the Wendat Anishinabek nation, the hottest Hoda Sony Confederacy, and the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. The treaty that was signed for this particular parcel of land is collectively referred to as the Toronto purchase and applies to lands east of Brown's line to Woodbine Avenue and north towards Newmarket. We acknowledge the enduring presence of indigenous peoples on this land, the TWHP also acknowledges serious ongoing marginalization of and discrimination against indigenous communities in Ontario and Canada and pledge our collective efforts to remedy this colonial heritage.
Okay, a little bit of business. First, a little, can I ask everybody who has shown up to please turn off your mic, turn put your all your microphones on mute, and leave them there unless you're ready to talk. We're going to have a panel presentation that will be chaired by one of the panel and then we'll have a chance for some questions. We hope the whole session will probably run a little bit around about an hour and a half. And if you have questions that are emerging as the session is evolving or towards the end, please put them in the chat line at the bottom, and we'll try and make sure that they're probably properly dealt with.
I only want to do one little commercial before we launch, in which is to remind everyone that our organization, the Toronto workers History Project, relies on membership fees to keep us going. We have no other source of funds. It's very inexpensive. It to join. If you're a fully employed person, it's only $20 a year. If you're unemployed, a student or retired, it's only $5 and if you want to make a bigger donation than that, so that's even better. If you'd like to really help us, you can buy one of our beautiful water bottles, which are only $20 you can do all of this through our website, which is twhp.ca.
Okay, I am going to turn this the evening over to the person who is going to introduce the panel for us, the member of the panel who will introduce the rest of the panel, Ken Luckhardt, who is a long time labor activist, author and deeply committed anti-apartheid warrior from way back So Ken, take it away, please.
Ken Luckhardt 05:46
Thank you Craig. Good evening everyone. Ken Luckhardt, here I would like, the SACTU solidarity committee would like to thank the Toronto workers history project for giving us this time tonight to add a new chapter to Canadian labour's untold story. The focus tonight is the theory and practice of international solidarity, internationalism. There's five of us who will be making the presentation: myself, Brenda Wall, Ken Traynor, Jane Armstrong and Vince Greason. The five of us were the core committee that kind of guided the work of the SACTU committee over the eight years that we worked in the labor movement.
We, as the five of us, have been talking for the past few weeks about this presentation, and what we've decided is that there are probably some questions that we need to ask right at the outset. So my first segment here is going to focus on three questions, anyone of which could take an entire evening, but they won't.
The first is, what is active? Who is active?
Secondly, what is apartheid?
Thirdly, what was it like to do this work in the height of the Cold War? Those are the three questions I'm going to quickly try to address before I turn it over to Brenda. What is SACTU? SACTU was the first non-racial trade union organization in South African history, formed 66 years ago last month in 1955 in March in Johannesburg. SACTU was part of the broader struggle against apartheid from within the country. Sector was one of the five organizations that made up the Congress Alliance. The other organizations are the African National Congress, of course, the liberation movement of South Africa, the South African Indian Congress, which made up of Indian South Africans who had been brought their ancestors had been brought to South Africa as indentured labor in the 19th century, the so called South African Congress of Colored People. The term colored is one of those apartheid words. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's the term that is used to refer to people of mixed parentage. And finally, the Congress of Democrats, predominantly white South Africans, progressive White South Africans, who were part of the anti-apartheid forces back in the 50s and 60s. Those five organizations make up the Congress Alliance. SACTU was one of them.
As you can see, SACTU is the only class-based organization amongst those five that, in itself, is the lead into what we did here in Canada. But yeah, so SACTU operated openly in the country as a trade union federation would from 1955, its formation year, until the early 60s, when the repression by the state became so heavy that many of the SACTU leaders and activists had to leave the country, as did members of the African National Congress and other of the three organizations I've mentioned, SACTU operated openly until the early 60s, and its leaders would often have to leave the country. So that's who SACTU is, and we'll come back to that many times.
Of course, the two next questions, what is apartheid and what was it like to work in the Cold War are asked because the five of us who put this together are all retired old people now. So we are wondering to ourselves, how much do younger activists know about apartheid? Maybe a lot, maybe not a lot. Secondly, unless you were born well before 1970 I don't think you'd have much of a sense of the Cold War. So those are the two questions that we think provide a context which then will be used to explain the work that we did.
What is apartheid? Well, most people would know it as a general, generally speaking, as a system of racial discrimination, a complex hundreds of laws, regulations, mechanisms that allowed 13% of the population, the white minority to oppress 87% of the population, the black majority. That much is known by most people. I guess. Because it was described by the United Nations many times as a crime against humanity, rightly so. But SACTU always thought that that definition wasn't precise enough. An early conference in Ghana in 1964 the then General Secretary of SACTU Marc chope, spoke at that conference and said the root and fruit of apartheid and racial discrimination is profit. Profit. Joe Slovo, who is very well well known white South African Communist Party, member and leader of many of the movements in South Africa, wrote a book in 1976 12 years later, entitled South Africa no middle road. I quote from that book, he said, for all the overt signs of racism as the mechanism of domination, the legal and institutional domination of the white minority over the black majority has its origins in and is perpetuated by economic exploitation. So we want everyone to understand that apartheid wasn't just a system of racism. It was racism for a purpose, the production of profit to benefit the white ruling class. You find that way. You can appreciate then the importance of international working class solidarity, unions here, supporting unions there, and that's exactly what our work was about. The final point I want to make on this. What is apartheid? Is the term black in South Africa is a political term. It doesn't refer just to a certain segment of the majority population. It refers to all those who are African that would be the majority, so called colored and Indian South African. So black is a political term, not a biological term. That's something we need to always keep in mind. So that is apartheid.
Okay, what was it like to work in the Cold War period? Well, some would say it was the most difficult time to work. Others might say, no, it was the best time to work because the battle lines were pretty clearly drawn on many issues. We began our work 41 years ago, next month, in May of 1980 and Cold War, many of you will know, is kind of a battle between ideologies, those who were on one side of the Cold War, they fully accepted the capitalist established order. They thought the established order was fine. Capitalism was the pinnacle of human development. On the other side are those of us, many of us, who believe that that's not what it is. There's something better. It's going to be something better than capitalism in the evolution of human society. Let's call that, for the sake of it, democratic and socialist. And I'm not going to go beyond that, just say that that was the tension between the Cold War.
Now, the labor movement in all the western countries was never immune from that Cold War. It was common that the central labor bodies of all European and North American nations would exercise a particular view of the world. That was predominantly the view that the established order is pretty good, and regard to the unions, each of those central labor bodies in Europe and in North America, had an international affairs department, that international affairs department worked together in unison with each other in what was called the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions based in Brussels. Now we all know from our experience that the word free is a bit of a puzzle, free trade unions, free trade, free world, freedom. All of these are problematic in reality.
So the politics of the ICFTU, with regard to South Africa is particularly important for you to know in the context of our work, for the context of our work, the ICFTU, in Europe, fully supported the emergence of black trade unions, encouraged it, but it also told those black trade unions that they should not be involved in politics. That was the line of the ICFTU, back in the time we're talking about in the 50s. Now, can you imagine being a young African trade unionist, being told you should not be involved in politics if your parents, your grandparents may have been part of forming the African National Congress back in 1912 and throughout the decades, but you're being told you shouldn't be involved in politics? A concrete expression of what that meant for the ICFTU was in 1959, four years after SACTU was founded, Steven Dlamini, the president of SACTU, at that time, based in Durban, was asked to go to a meeting, a luncheon by ICFTU representatives that were coming to South Africa. ICFTU wanted to talk to SACTU. So lunch began, and in the course of the conversation, the ICFTU representative, said to Steven Dlamini, “we want to help you. We'll offer you 30,000 pounds, 30,000 British pounds, if you will break your alliance with the African National Congress”. That's the reality of the ICFTU politics toward African Trade Unions at that time. That's what you need to understand.
So back in our country, in Canada, it also had an international affairs department, and at first, when we were created in 1980, there wasn't any hostility from the CLC. In fact, you know, they didn't pay much attention to us. Why should they? We hadn't done anything yet. So over the course of time, as our success gets bigger and bigger, the CLC International Affairs Department begins to get a little bit upset because they're the ones who are supposed to be generating solidarity with South Africa. They think here's this upstart group from Toronto, predominantly, that's doing the stuff that we want to do. Now many people would have defined that as the battle then, between the SACTU committee and the CLC, many people defined it that way. I'd like to twist that a bit. I think the battle was between the CLC International Affairs Department and the CLC affiliates. The affiliates decided they wanted to do the solidarity in one way, and it wasn't necessarily consistent with what the international affairs department wanted. So this is the contextual history, what we want you to be familiar with before we turn now to the work of our committee. So I'm going to turn it over to Brenda Wall now, who will talk about how our committee came to be Brenda.
Craig Heron (Host) 16:58
Thanks, Ken. So how did the SACTU solidarity committee begin? I'm going to go into a bit of personal history here, but it's important for the development of the committee. I think in 1976 Ken Luckhardt and I were grad students in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, 1976 was also the time of this Soweto uprising in South Africa, and it was the year of the Montreal Olympics in 1976 when 28 countries under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity boycotted the Montreal Olympics because of New Zealand's sending a cricket and rugby team to South Africa in defiance of the sports ban. So this was the backdrop, and Harry Oppenheimer, the South African mining magnet, decided, with I'm sure, the support of the apartheid regime, to sponsor a cricket team to tour Canada at the time. And people mobilized across country against this South African cricket team, which represented apartheid and in Edmonton, 61 of us were arrested at a cricket pitch and spent a night in jail, in the Edmonton jail, with, you know, a number of people supporting us from the outside. When we came out in the morning, the last person to come out of jail was none other than Joe Hill himself, and so we were eventually acquitted. But in the meantime, we were part of a group called the Free Southern Africa committee, and we decided we wanted to do a lot of educational work around apartheid.
In Edmonton, we met an older trade unionist, George Poonen, who actually was a Black South African, South Asian, South African Trade Unions from the 1930s in Durban, from the textile workers union, and he was living in exile with his daughter in Edmonton. He said, “You must go out and work with the unions. That's the only way to do the solidarity work”. At the time, we also met with James Stewart, who was a visiting SACTU trade unionist who'd come out of the country recently and was touring Canada, and he had copies of Workers Unity and other publications from SACTU, and told us, you know, we should get involved directly with SACTU. Ken and I were very interested in doing so, and decided we would give up our studies and go and work directly for SACTU if they'd have us so, armed with a letter of support and reference from George Poonen, we flew to London, England, and arrived on the doorstep of the General Secretary of SACTU John Gaetsewe who welcomed us with open arms. He wasn't quite sure what our role should be.
We slept on his floor for many weeks, and he met with the SACTU executive, and they decided what they wanted was to document the life histories of comrades who were in exile in the frontline states in Zambia and Tanzania. And also trade unionists coming in and out of South Africa from the from the underground work. So before we were gathering these life histories, we thought we need to do the research on the background of those times in South Africa in the 50s and 60s, before the organizations were banned.
It was quite foresight that led to Phyllis Altman, who was a white South African Assistant General Secretary within the country in the 50s and 60s. Phyllis saw, saw what was coming in South Africa, and sent a lot of the organization's publications out of the country, like saccharine workers, unity and the ANC publications, progressive newspapers, Phyllis sent them out in the early 60s to the British Museum library, to the Marx Memorial Library in England and to the Oxford University Library. So that's where we started our research, going through all those documents and old newspapers and anything else we could find before we went down to southern Africa.
When we went to we arrived in in Tanzania, and I see Dan O’Meara is with us. We stayed with Dan O'Meara, who was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam. We stayed with the SACTU people in Lusaka Zambia, and we it was quite a life changing time. We worked alongside black and white workers, women and men, part of the movement. We were accepted by the movement. We were given shelter and food from the ANC farm that was on the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, we lived and ate with many young students, sometimes up to 20 young people who were forced out of the country. They were, you know, after the Soweto uprising, they fled the country, and many of them kept coming into the frontline states and stayed in the house with us. So we cooked together. We had food from the ANC farm that we all you know, took turns cooking. It was, it was quite an amazing time.
We met people like Doug Miller and Nelly saka Miller, who worked for the CUSO liberation support project. If you can believe in those days, an NGO was set up, setting up a program just to support the liberation movements in southern Africa. And that was beginning of a great relationship. And we also saw some horrible things there, because it was dangerous times for the movement. We were sitting on the SACTU House steps one day when we saw ambulances coming by with women and children injured and killed because the Rhodesian regime had bombed a refugee camp on the outskirts of Lusaka. They called it a terrorist camp. It was a refugee camp called Liberty. So, you know, for us, we were, you know, Canadians and we were going back home, but for the people who were forced out of South Africa, for young people and old, it was a very, very difficult time.
When we got back to England, we had all this research, and SACTU executives said, “Well, with all this wealth of material, we think that this information should be turned into a book”. And so Ken and I were privileged to write the book, the history of SACTU called “Organize or Starve”. I think Frank has a slide. We missed a couple of the early ones, but this third slide, Thanks, Frank. So this is the book.
This is the cover of the book that was produced in England, but in South Africa. They also printed a white covered one, which was for use in the trade unions, in the underground movement of SACTU inside the country. We've never been able to get our hands on one, but other people have talked about them. So we know, we know they were existing and they were being used. So as we came back to Canada after, or this book was launched at the 25th anniversary of SACTU in London in May, in March of 1980 and so that was the time that our job had really ended there, and we were heading back to Canada. And so SACTU asked us if one of us might work for them full time and one of us get a job.
So that's what Ken and I agreed to do. We came back to Canada. We met with Ken Traynor and Jane Armstrong, and they also agreed that that was the arrangement that that they would be happy with, that one of them would work full time for SACTU and the other would get a job. Ken had been working for CUSO in southern Africa too, and Jane was working for Canadian Airlines Employees, which became part of UAW. So we set up the committee at the beginning. It was us, and it was Enver Domingo who was around, a relative of George Poonen in Edmonton, an ANC member; Jay Nair, whose brother Billy Nair was incarcerated in South Africa with Mandela and others until the late 80s, when he was set free. He became, later became staff person with United Food and Commercial Workers. Sam Gindin, Pat Clancy and Hassan Yussuf, all from UAW Canada, which became UNIFOR. All were part of the committee at the time. We had great, George Lata from Communication Workers.
We had great support from the postal workers. Eric depot was the president of the Toronto local, and he and his local agreed to give us space in their in their union offices, on, on, just on near the Danforth on Broadview and also lots of in kind support. And UAW and postal workers in particular gave us a lot of support. So we had space, we had the people. We had a letter from SACTU saying, “You are to be our representative in Canada”.
So we were a different kind of anti-apartheid group from others in existence and others afterwards, because we were set up on behalf of SACTU. That's why I gave you the long introduction. But that's, that's, that's a different kind of role. It wasn't that we were, you know, working from some far-off organization that we didn't support the aims of. We fully supported the aims of SACTU, challenging apartheid capitalism inside, and organizing international solidarity outside. And so, together with SACTU and this committee, we started doing the work of the education research and sanctions that followed, sanctions and actions that followed, and the fundraising for the SACTU strike fund. So I'm going to turn it back to Ken to talk about those three areas of our work now. Ken Luckhardt.
Ken Luckhardt 26:52
Thanks, Brenda, I'm back again. It's my last session. I want to ask a question. Doesn't sound like a very appropriate question to begin this part of it. The question I ask is, where was apartheid in South Africa? Anywhere else but South Africa at the time we started this work? My answer is, yes, it was in every supermarket in this country, canned fruit. You could go to the fresh fruit aisle, find outspan oranges. South Africa was in the fruits. In the food stores. You go to the liquor store. South Africa was in the liquor store, the brandy, the wine. It was there. Go to the beer store. It was there too. Carling O'Keeffe, which everyone thought to be a Canadian company, was owned by Rothmans of South Africa. So apartheid was in all those consumer places where you would go to have your beer and alcohol and much of your food. It was also in Scarborough, Ontario, where there was an SKF plant owned by a Swedish company, SKF, that decided it would be better to move its operation to South Africa to pay starvation wages to black workers than to continue to pay a living wage to Canadian workers in Scarborough. So it was a, it was all over.
Apartheid was everywhere, and it was in the banks. Canadian Charter banks were still giving loans to South Africa. It was in the state at all provincial, federal and local levels, trade, military procurements. Apartheid was everywhere in this country, and with that knowledge that we had at that time, which was minimal compared to we had later, based on Ken Traynors research, we, then we had a story to tell. The story had to be told to the labor movement. That was our mandate, as Brenda has said. So, you know, we used our minds as much as we could. What is Solidarity? Solidarity? As Samora Machel, first president of independent Mozambique, said, “solidarity is not an act of charity, but rather mutual aid between forces fighting for the same objectives”, that's the way we defined our work. We want to engage Canadian workers, Canadian unions with black workers in South Africa, emerging unions above ground in South Africa after SACTU had been forced to work underground, that was our task with the education program, which I coordinated. Ken Traynor coordinated the research, and you'll hear from him soon.
We went from not knowing anyone in the labor movement, we all had just come to Toronto, Toronto that year, that spring, by the time, in seven years’ time, we calculated we were speaking to 10,000 Canadian workers every year. And uh, 10,000 workers. I bet you, there isn't a single solidarity organization in the history of Canada that can say that they ever had a chance to speak to 10,000 workers in a given year. I bet now, the only exception I could think of that would be the support that the farm workers in California got when they were mobilizing around their issues. So that's what we did.
We start with education, because if people don't know what the hell apartheid is and the connections they have to it, then they're probably not going to be willing to do too much about it. So as being new to Toronto, new none of us had ever worked in the labor movement for we might have been members, but we never worked in the labor movement. You put your ear to the ground. You start talking to people. Who do you work with?
First, I'm going to take a few moments here and flesh out the depth of the union support and how we got it what's worth your knowing. That's what this story is all about. You put your ear to the ground in 1980 and you hear Bob White's name mentioned UAW, Canada, before it became ca W in 1985 and broke away from the UAW in the States. So as Brenda mentioned Bob White, Sam Gindin, we took Poonen, who was by that time in Toronto, living with his daughter, took Poonen with us to meet with Sam Gindin, the research director, pretty progressive chap, as many of you know. So Sam took our information and said he would get in touch with Bob White, and he did now, what really helped the relationship with the UAW was that we would bring SACTU people to Canada whenever we could.
So one of the most important SACTU leaders, Zola Zembe, who had been one of the founding members of SACTU back from Cape Town in the railway and harbor Workers Union. He had that by this time, gone into exile in the early 60s, had become the national secretary, treasurer of SACTU and based in London, and was responsible for the entire solidarity work in North America. So we invited Zola over to Toronto, to Canada and Brenda, I knew, Brenda and I knew Zola quite well by that time, having worked with him in London. So we arranged for Zola to go to Port Elgin, where Bob White was that particular weekend for where they have the education center at CW Education Center. So Bob white and Zola Zemba had a very productive first meeting, they might even go so far to say they liked each other. So that was the basis of a lot of things that happened.
The UAW Canada was the only union in this country at that time to have what was called a paid education leave program. It's a bargain benefit where workers from the shop floor get to go to port Elgin for four weeks. Union education program paid for by the boss, but the union controls the entire content of the program, unique at that time in Canada. So four weeks for lots of people, activists, local union leaders, our success with the UAW Canada, then the CAW, and as Brenda said, later becomes UNIFOR. But at that time, UAW caw, we were invited to 26 consecutive PEL programs, between 1981 and 87, that's 1000s of activists, 1000s of local union leaders who would go through the program, and they would go back to their locals and talk to their members about their experience.
And what they were able to do is to couple that experience of having heard the presentation that we gave with a letter that Bob White had sent to every local union in the UAW, saying, we encourage you to support SACTU solidarity committee. Invite them to your locals, listen to their story and support SACTU through them as much as you can. So that was the UAW, and it started with a trip from Zola Zembe to Canada. Okay, so the UAW only.
Brenda mentioned the postal workers. Most of you will probably remember that there was a very progressive president of the postal workers in those days, and for many days after Jean Claude Perrot, who had gone to prison because he refused to follow it back to work order that had been issued. He stayed on strike, went to prison in support of his members to stay on strike. Zola also met with Jean Claude Perrot on that same trip. It was May Day weekend. I remember it very well. And again, like with Bob White, Zola and Jean Claude had a very good first meeting, first session, Jean Claude then sent a letter to all of his locals across the country.
And this is a public union, public service union, so all of a sudden, we started getting invitations to postal workers schools that we held regionally, community by community by community, and I remember that meeting between Zola and Jean Claude. Jean Claude was in negotiations with Canada Post management at the time that we came to his location. Jean Claude actually excused himself from Canada Post. He said, “I've got a meeting”. The meeting was Zola and the they said they set that relationship right there. And from that point forward, CUPW, locals all across this country became supporters of SACTU through our committee.
Then out west. Let's move out West. I see Kathy Walker's on the screen. There was a second Central Labor body in Canada at that time called the Confederation of Canadian unions. These were unions that had either broken away from American parent unions, as the UAW had done, or it was about to do, and unions that were very progressive in the sense that they were more or less left leaning, socialist minded leaderships, and that included many sectors, pulp and paper, Kmart Castle, that's a smelter operation up in Kitimat. Kathy Walker was part of Kmart and bus workers, bus drivers in Vancouver, and I think most importantly, mine mill up in Sudbury. Most of you probably have heard of mine mill as being a very progressive union in the mining industry that had taken on Falconbridge and the steel workers over many, many issues, Falconbridge being the company, steelworkers being a competing union, obviously, mine mill, actually, we have documentation of mine. Mill gave support to SACTU long before we even created. Created back in the 60s when SACTU was underground and had been forced out of the country. Some people forced out of the country. So mind mill had a long history of knowing about SACTU.
Now those CCU affiliates, many of them, later on, merged with the caw, came on others Casa and the leaders that we had worked with in those days in Vancouver then often became national reps for the CAW, Kathy Walker included, so that's part of that history, of the connections we were beginning to establish all across the country, coast to coast.
Where do I want to go next? Communication Workers, two major unions in Canada, the CWC that Brenda made reference to, George larger here in Toronto, they represented Communication Workers, mainly from Atlantic to the prairies, and in British Columbia, there was the Telecommunication Workers Union, and so we had established relationships with both CWC and the TWU. Sid Schnaid was part of the TW TWU research department. And he was very, very helpful, based in Vancouver, and he now is very active in the independent Jewish Voices campaigns around Palestine. And so that's part of that history.
We decided after a while that the strength in BC was so good, so solid, that we would create another committee in Vancouver, called the SACTU solidarity committee brackets Vancouver, and we did. And Jef Keighley, formerly with came on Susan Stout, airlines. Then, by then, CAW reservation agent at the airport. They were instrumental in helping the people we had worked with at those local levels and national union offices to put together a committee that would replicate the work that we were doing in Toronto, but they would do it in BC. Worked very, very well. Okay. I want to also mention, I told you I'm going to put some flesh on this phone, longshore workers.
Now, this longshore union in the West Coast of the US had had a long history of solidarity with black workers in South Africa. They had on many occasions, refused to offload cargoes that were coming in on ships that applied from Durban to San Francisco in particular, and they had refused to load cargo that was going to go back to South Africa. They had done this many times. There was no SACTU committee. There was no SACTU present. They did it because they knew they should.
Now in Vancouver, we met with the local 400 of the Longshore there, and we they knew what their brothers and sisters had done in the states that we started to talk with them about how we could get them to do the same thing in Vancouver, because there was a Nedloyd shipping line that would send three ships to Vancouver every month or so. The three different ships plied from Durban or Port Elizabeth to Vancouver. And again, this education work is critical to it. I remember going to, we always had materials to distribute when I went to local unions for education. They went to Dave Crane, he was the president of the local. I said, “Dave, we normally put stuff out on the table, you know, for 40 or 50 people that come to an average sized meeting”. I said, “how many people do you expect at your meeting?”. He said, 1800 1800 people in the local union meeting. They didn't hold them every week, but they held that and they gave me, they didn't give me my usual 45 minutes. They gave me 20 minutes. That's fine. They ended up supporting us.
And as Ken Traynor will talk about later, they ended up doing the same thing to ships in Vancouver that their counterparts had done in San Francisco. In fact, Leo Robinson, who was one of the most important activists in the ILWU in San Francisco, just passed away about a year ago. We brought him up to Vancouver to be a part of the Vancouver committee's decisions to take actions against South Africa at the workplace. So there's a lot of things happening. By the mid 80s, longshore became part of our sanctions campaign, which Ken coordinated, and which we'll talk about very soon.
Now, some unions, let's be honest, are not progressive. They did not have progressive leadership. There's a lot of those at that time. There were a lot of them. How do you work with them? Well, you kind of keep your eye open and your ear to the ground, and you may hear that there's a really progressive leadership at a small local somewhere other than Toronto, somewhere out in the country, on the hinterland. That's exactly what we found with SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, not known to be particularly progressive on international issues at that time. But in London, Ontario, the opposite was the case. Many of the leadership in London local 220 had been in the Navy, World War Two. They had been to South Africa. They had seen what apartheid does to Black workers. They wanted to help, so they got involved.
They had us for educationals. They also began to put pressure on their pension plan to stop investing in any corporation that had ended up with South Africa. So that was part of that work that was beginning to evolve here in Canada, around sanctions so SEIU in London, Ontario, another example from South Africa. This one from South Africa. This is a fascinating one. South Africans are very creative. So when Zola came on that first trip, he stayed for three months, he brought with him an idea that we were then left with to put into practice.
The idea was that, what if black workers in South Africa as they traveled from the townships to their urban workplaces, or when they traveled from their urban workplaces back to the townships, when hundreds of workers would be amassed around a train station, what if those workers could actually hear a message from Canadian trade union leaders? So what we did, what they did in South Africa, is actually operatives. People who had been, were underground operatives. They would take a cassette tape recorder and attach it to a post in the middle of the train station at the appropriate time when people were quiet enough, the sack operative would push the play button. Here, message from Bob white, Jean Claude Perrot, even Dennis McDermott, the president of the CLC, which surprised us tremendously. I mean, Dennis may have done it just because Bob White did it. We don't know, but Dennis McDermott made a tape. So here are black South African workers in the train stations hearing messages from Canadian trade union leaders in Canada. Very creative campaign.
Okay, now the CLC, as you all know, CLC has subordinate structures, labor councils that are part of Central Labor body structure so. That because of the increasing success we were having, the CLC International Affairs Department kind of told the CLC reps across the country that probably shouldn't have too much to do with active solidarity committee. But nonetheless, because many of you affiliates that had decided to support us were into labor councils in Toronto, in London, in Vancouver, elsewhere, they started putting pressure on their executives at the labor council level to invite us to come and speak there too, which we did.
And the one thing we didn't get invited to were CLC weekend schools. Very often we can labor councils will have weekend schools that were put on by the CLC with one exception. I remember going to Timmins, Ontario for Timmins and district weekend school in the mid 80s, and did the usual presentation, and one of the CLC reps came up to me after the meeting. He said, “That was very good. What's wrong with you guys? Why aren't we supposed to support you?”. I said, “I don't know. Go back and ask your international affairs department. We'd like to know too, if it's open anti communism or anti progressive people, and make them say that”. So that was one exception to the rule that we didn't get to the weekend schools, but we did get to many labor councils. And the final example, I think, before I get to next section on fundraising, is pulp and paper.
Now, Ken's research showed us that there was, like in 1985 I believe, was $28 million worth of pulp, wood pulp being sent from Canada to South Africa. Now, if you're going to have a sanctions campaign that works, you have to know where everybody’s pulp was coming from which mills. So there are two unions in British Columbia at that time in the pulp industry. There's the pulp and paperworkers of Canada, which is affiliated with the CCU, and this Canadian paperwork union affiliated with the CLC. Now they didn't like each other. They could raid each other back and forth all the time about jurisdictions, but they both decided they didn't like apartheid, so they agreed to sponsor me to go to BC and go to every single town in BC that has a pulp mill. It's a lot, 20, 25, towns, over the course of a month, they would organize it. They would pay for it. I would do the travel.
And every place we go, we say, “Okay, now we'd like you to go check and see where your pulp gets sent. Where's it going? Is it going to South Africa? Where does it go?”. Now, you know, workers are smart. If they know that there's a reason to do something like that, they'll figure out a way to get the information. And they did. We ultimately figured out it was mostly around the Squamish area in Lower Mainland that the pulp that was being sent to South Africa was being produced.
But in the course of that, we got to know all those locals in both of those unions, and some of those meetings were five people in somebody's house on a Sunday evening. So we could speak to a convention of 1000 people or five people in somebody's basement. Same presentation, same film that we show. That's the way we did our work. That tour was very, very important for the sanctions campaign that Ken's going to talk about. So that's the way we did education work. That's how we got into the labor movement and anyone else wanting to work in the labor movement in future, on other issues, I suggested you start with a very good education program, get progressive leadership to invite you in and start at that point like we did, a lot will come from it. So that's where we got on the, on the education front. Methodology, we would bring SACTU people over as often as we could. Zola came that first trip. Zola came more times than once. People from the railway sector in South Africa came. These are all SACTU people.
Now, as we got into the 80s, it became more and more important for us to bring younger people who had just come out of the country, who could speak about the importance of the underground. Because it's easy for somebody like the CLC to say, “Ah, where's SACTU? They say they're underground. Where's the proof of it?”. That's exactly what the CLC did. They tried to say that SACTU didn't have a presence in South Africa. It was just people in exile.
So by bringing out young leaders of the new unions that were coming up in South Africa, they were able to come here and say, SACTU is crucial to our development, critical to know how to work those two levels of the labor movement. So that's what we did. Books, we sold “Organize or Starve”, T shirts, SACTU pins, we have as ways of financing our work. Nobody got paid to do this work, full time volunteer, as Brenda said, somebody in Tucson would work the other one wouldn't, the other work perspective. So that's how we financed our everyday life, the newsletter which you can put on the next slide. Frank. Frank's still there. Oh, Frank, okay, we would produce this newsletter every, let's say, month to six weeks.
And the purpose of the newsletter was to tell people, what if, what was going on in South Africa on the labor front, to explain any research connections we had discovered since the previous issue between Canada and South Africa, which leads us to the sanctions work, and then to also document the level of support that was growing for the SEC two solidarity committee.
So we did this every six weeks, and say, on average. Now this is long before the days of cell phones and computers. These go out by mail. We produced up to 4000 copies of an issue at the peak of our work. Every issue that went out, went out to an individual we had met, not somebody who gave us a mailing list people we had met at these educationals. So those that newsletter was then, how do you pay for this 3000 mailings? Where's our money? We don't have any money. We were worse off than craigen. Is the original appeal for workers, for the workers health and history project.
So we go to unions, especially the CAW, and ask them if they will cover the postage costs of us sending out this next issue. They often did. They commonly did. They seldom said no. I don't think they ever said no. Then we can go to other unions that maybe couldn't leverage other greater support, but they'd say, “Oh, we'll pay for that mailing. A few $100 we'll pay for that”, and then other unions will pay for other issues. So that's how we survived. Produce a newsletter, sell organizers, star, sell pins, sell decals that had the SACTU logo. That's how we survived, and that's how we did the work. Okay? Educates, education.
I'm going to stop there, and I'm going to turn now for a shorter period of time in fundraising picture, South Africa, the first non-racial trade union movement. Its leadership, its activists, have to go into exile in the 60s. So the person the goal then, is to rebuild an above ground, non-racial, progressive trade union federation. That was the role of the underground. Now the underground work is dangerous and it's costly. You don't reorganize everything when you're risking your life every single day by moving around in South Africa, doing things that the regime would love to know what you're doing, but they don't know.
How do you fund this? Well, again, as national secretary treasurer Zola wrote over the stack to strike fund campaign, our role as a mandated organization working for SACTU was to appeal to unions to help support the underground work in South Africa, we were shared by SACTU, not a single penny of what we raised in Canada would go for anything other than underground work. And we believe that, because we believe it's active, we were there by extension. So then you start going to unions in Canada that you already established these relationships with. You explain the strike fund. You explain what it's for. Now, any of you will know that financial accountability in the labor movement is quite important, especially at the local level. Many local unions will have limits as to how much they can give an organization as a donation. $25, $50 and they go over 50 and they have to change your pilot. So the common response we got from most of the unions, CNW, locals, around 50 bucks per month. I did the tally last night. You can go to that next slide, Frank,
Now the next one. There you go. Thanks. These are the local unions that contributed to the sector strike fund. A total of 338 separate labor organizations, be they local unions, regional councils, national offices, 338 separate labor bodies gave money to. The SACTU strike fund.
Beyond that, 82 of those 338, unions, or over 25% gave on a monthly basis, monthly monies coming to us, going to SACTU going to South Africa. Now, the politics here are pretty important for us to explain. Normally, if a union local gives money contribution for some campaign, they'll expect a receipt. They expect some accountability back to them, and they should their membership will demand that the decision be reflected by a receipt or by an explanation of how it was used.
Now we're talking about underground work in a country that's 1000s of miles away. We told local unions when it made the appeal, you will not get a receipt from South Korea and South in South Africa. You get a receipt from our office in Toronto. We get a receipt from London office, saying they received the money that we had sent over. And that's how it works. Don't ever expect a receipt from the SACTU consolidating committee from monies you give for underground work in South Africa. It won't be there the way you measure that. You know the only receipt you'll get is to see the movement in South Africa get stronger. That's how you measure the success of your solidarity. That's what we told working workers here, that's what they believed.
And so it was quite amazing, a passionate thing that we had going. There's a lot of passion in this work. We took South Africa home with us every night. We woke up with South Africa in the morning for eight years. Okay, 338, unions, 82, 82 of which came on a sustaining basis, a total of over $250,000 was raised by the SACTU solidarity committee for underground work in South Africa. Now, again, I think that stands pretty high in any level of solidarity work done on any issue outside of the country. We were out raising in terms of funds, money compared to the CLC, our national affairs department. That's why they were upset with us. We were out performing their work with their affiliates. So $250,000 we moved through London, down to South Africa, into South Africa.
That's I'm going to leave it at that. I'm sure if you have questions, you'll ask. I've taken too long and well over my time limit. We didn't just work in English speaking Canada. We had to work in Quebec. We found a very good comrade, and we found him on the streets of Toronto, Vince Greason, who was bilingual, did social justice work, had been doing that for a long time. Vince decided he would join us be a full time unpaid staff person to work on the Quebec front. So Vince couldn't make it tonight, because he's doing a similar zoom presentation on his social justice work in Quebec since today's executive already committee. So he did make a videotape of his reminiscences, his what he wants to tell you about the work we did in Quebec. So Frank, if you can, sorry. One more thing after the video, I will you'll get Ken Traynor who's going to talk about the amazing research that we did for sanctions. And I can't tell you how important that was to our work. We can coordinated all of that.
So I'm introducing Ken right now, because when Vince's video is over, it will then move over to Ken Traynor. So if you wonder why you need to keep a beard shaved closely to your chin, Vince Greason will show you why.
Ken Luckhardt 1:00:01
Obviously we're having some technical difficulties.
Host 1:00:23
Do we want to jump to Ken and the meantime, Frank can figure this out.
Ken Luckhardt 1:00:30
Let's do that. Okay, so here's Ken Traynor who was responsible for the research and the coordination of the sanctions work.
Ken Traynor 1:00:41
Great. Well, thanks. Thanks, Ken. I must admit, I'm kind of going down the memory lane along with them. It's amazing how much you forget over the years, even though you were living it pretty intensely in its time. As Ken mentioned, my chore was to spend my time trying to document the links with apartheid, Canadian links with apartheid. And it was, it was a really interesting kind of time.
The call for support for economic sanctions was there right from the beginning in our mandate and from sector and in our work that we did on a day to day basis, early on, some of the links were obvious. Ford Canada sending F150 truck kits to South Africa for assembly, or South African wines and liquor stores, or the outspan oranges in grocery stores. In 1982 there was news about, you know, 700 battle workers on strike in South Africa and the layoff of 320 workers at SKF, Barrington, Scarborough, which can mentioned, but it's interesting is that those connections to apartheid from corporate Canada also created opportunities for us to work with the, I am at SKF over the years, and The US CW at bat out in Frankfurt, Ontario, there was an early call out in our newsletter for information to help document the economic links with apartheid South Africa, and we began systematically researching those trade and investment links.
Our approach was modeled on one used by the British anti-apartheid movement. I had a copy of their book after a visit to London, we combed through reams of trade data to document the flow of goods. We researched the specifics of who was doing the trading. We calculated the number of jobs at risk at most, only 380 in total, and the strategic character, not of the imports. We spent hours writing it all up in an accessible form. The details are here. You know, you can check them out online. We've been able to set up the SAC and solidarity committee archive website where you can find all of those newsletters that we've been talking of. You can even get this on Google Books, if you can imagine, I won't bore you with all the details that we documented of all the trade, by province, by commodity and so on. If you're really keen, you can ask me questions later. Anyway, so we worked on finding interesting stories to tell and to identify targets so that people can get out and do stuff in solidarity. It took us three and a half years to get to publication.
Sorry, it took us three and a half years to get to publication. But as our knowledge grew, our opportunities to act did not have to wait for the book's publication. In January 1983 the UAW targeted 10 Canadian investors in South Africa to be removed from the Chrysler pension plan, and they later extended that demand to GM and Ford under patter bargain, our boycott fruits of apartheid campaign in late 1983 was based on in store surveys of major grocery chains. And then the retail food unions, RW, DSU and UFCW got involved, and they put forward demands to the major grocery store chains, liquor board unions in Saskatchewan, BC, Alberta, Ontario, all put forward demands to not handle South African products and cleared the shelves of South African wine and brandy.
Over the next few years in many of the provinces, workers from op London and district service workers, union CUPE, hospital workers and others, they were all combing through the kitchens and storerooms of hospitals, colleges and nursing homes across the country, looking for South African canned fruit and then making demands of their employers. We published “Trafficking in Apartheid” in January1985 with financial help from CUSO and Oxfam in Canada and the program to combat racism of the World Council of Churches, which was an important statement of support in and of itself, and once “Trafficking in Apartheid” was in print, no one could challenge us on the details, and that turned the issue into a straight up political fight. Which side are you on? That was the question we were always asking. And no Canadian government had ever supported a UN resolution calling for comprehensive economic sanctions against South Africa, despite the anti-apartheid rhetoric of successive Canadian governments. But now we had the information to call them out on that.
So Ken Luckhardt had the great idea one day to send a copy of “Trafficking in Apartheid” to Stephen Lewis, Canada's new ambassador to the UN who replied in September 1985 “I finally got around to reading “Trafficking in Apartheid”. I can't pass judgment on the central thesis, because obviously it's not my job to make policy, but I can say it's one of the most useful and effective compendiums of Canadian economic relations of Africa that I have seen gathered anywhere”.
So we love to tell that story in the press, at conferences and union halls. And if our data was good enough for Canada's top UN diplomat, it should be good enough for all Canadians. Again, the question was, which side are you on? So how did we get it done? So I like to call this my little piece. Oh to librarians, libraries and longshoremen. I spent a year and a half in the Toronto Library using their newspapers, their financial magazines, their indexes. I spent weeks in the excellent Statscan library up on St Clair East, among all the stats can paper and at the U of T library, before they began excluding the public to their collections, I used to dress up fancy to not be noticed in the library of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Toronto Port Authority Reading Room, kind of trying to, you know, look like a lawyer when you really want one.
My trade data charts were all handwritten and pencil before being manipulated and finally typed up into tables, no Excel spreadsheets yet. Back then, port data came from copies of the Vancouver Sun, New York Times, San Francisco Examiner, before I discovered the Shipping News, and there was always lots of questions for real, live librarians, those great CUPE members, about what were the best sources, or how to get the data I needed right down to corporate addresses and phone numbers, no corporate websites or Google searches.
Yet, a key breakthrough was information from down in the docks. Ken has talked about, you know, how we develop those kind of connections. Tom McGrath of the Seamen’s union was a key part of making sure that we got copies of those shipping manifests every month, and those were key for us to begin to understand what was going on. So he arranged for us through the LWU local in Vancouver to actually get down onto the docks.
I can still remember the day I got to, you know, go through the warehouses, jotting down everybody's name. You know, we began to understand the bulk trade of potash and lumber and sulfur and pulp. And if we heard Vince's piece, he talks about how the unions in Montreal helped us get into the warehouses there in the early morning hours around it, those connections were key.
So by 1985 we had an excellent understanding of trade with South Africa, of Canadian investment in South Africa, and we had contacts across the country with many of the unions who handled those goods. So we sponsored sanction workshops with the help of London and Toronto labor councils in May of 1985 which generated detailed action plans for follow up. OPSU seconded Brenda Wall, she's going to talk about that in a minute, to run a sanctions campaign within the union. We spoke at the SG you Saskatchewan Government Employees Union convention in Saskatchewan and then ran a sanctions workshop for Saskatchewan unions with their local South African solidarity committee.
And by September of 1985 we distributed over 2000 copies of “Trafficking in Apartheid” and the Canadian government finally, slowly began to talk of escalating sanctions. But if you remember those times, their first 12 actions were largely cosmetic and definitely did not have any teeth. So the struggle in South Africa was heating up. If you go through our newsletter at this time, you've got minor strikes, a state of emergency in South Africa called by the government of South Africa. And at the same time that fall, we had SACTU visits by Zola Zembe, which Ken has mentioned, coming to the founding convention of the CAW. They were interesting times, for sure.
So by January of 1986 there, in the formation of COSATU in South Africa, and heightened calls from sanctions, from SACTU for sanctions in support of South African workers, so we did more in labor council workshops in Ottawa and Hamilton, and then in early 1986 the sector solidarity committee put out a call to our union allies for a week of action against apartheid in Canada for the week of March, 8 to 15, and Canadian unions responded big time. So I can imagine that, you know, a number that people have seen in the audience there, you know, have been involved in some of these things.
So there were 30,000 members of the postal workers, the airline divisions of CW and the brotherhood of railway and airline clerks, telecommunication workers in BC, Communication Workers of Canada, the Longshoremen in Vancouver, they all took direct action. The postal workers and the major locals refused to sort South African mail. Airline reservation agents dropped calls for South African flights. Telephone workers did not collect calls to South Africa. You know, three shifts along Forman refused to unload the Nedlloyd Kembla that was in in Vancouver, holding it in port. In the food industry, UFCW put forward demands again to the major grocery chains to stop shelving South African products, and they bought 100,000 of our boycott South African product stickers to be plastered on South African goods on the shelf in BC, a joint pulp industry bargaining committee at PPWC in the western region of CPU, called on employers to stop using all the South African goods, stop trade to South Africa. Allow workers to refuse to handle South African products. 43 unions that we know about issued press releases supporting sanctions. Six rallies were held across the country.
And to top it all off, Alcan aluminum announced in March of 1986 it was going to divest its 24% interest in huliative aluminum in South Africa, after years of resisting calls from the task force on churches and corporate responsibility, KSL workers in Kitimat and the CSN in Quebec, it was a good month. There's no question about that.
So there's more solidarity than I can do justice to in these few minutes. So I urge you to spend some time, if you've got it, going through the newsletters we've posted on our SACTU solidarity committee archive page. We tried to document these actions as they were happening, and it's an impressive record of what was happening at that time, Canadian workers were willing and able to do in support their South African brothers and sisters.
I've got a, I've got a couple of kind of more fun stories. One of them was we actually sat down in collaboration with the Investigations Division of Revenue Canada. But I think I'll save that we've been running on a bit. I'll save that story for the question period. If anybody really wants to hear it, they can ask me, and I'll maybe close on this one before I hand over to Brenda to say one of the, one of the creative kind of fun moments, was down in London, Ontario, where the UAW local Billy gimmel, the head of he was local 1520 down in London is he got up a group from his local Human Rights Committee. They went out on a Saturday morning. They filled up something like 40 to 45 carts of grocery carts full of South African products and so on. They slapped stickers on a bunch of other ones. The trooped up and formed a huge long lineup at the store. And then the, you know, Billy Gilmore up front stands there and says, “Oh, geez, these products are from South Africa, you know, call your manager. That's just not right. You know, this shouldn't be happening”. They went on it. It took them, you know, a few hours to clean up after that. We were told they took a day and a half to restock the goods kind of around it. But so it was a mix of strategic kinds of questions, and trying to force Alcan out of South Africa to actually having a bit of a fun on Saturday morning, but also harassing those guys and so on. So there's, you know, there's a ton of those kind of stories. Brenda's got a couple that she's going to tell you about now, but you've been very good to us with your time.
So I'm going to hand over now to Brenda to talk about some of those interesting examples from awesome thanks for your interest. Over to you, Brenda, Thanks,
Craig Heron (Host) 1:14:53
Ken, maybe we can put up the picture of “Trafficking in Apartheid” just as we end, that booklet that you produced and. Stephen Lewis was so, so complimentary about, yeah, the next slide. Sorry, Frank. In the meantime, I think Frank is going to try to get the video of Vince up again. And if not, if we have difficulties, we'll post it. They will post it. The Toronto workers history project will post it to the Facebook page if we can't get it, but we'll try again right now.
Vince Greason 1:15:36
Good evening. My name is Vincent Greason. I'm for, unfortunately, I can't be with you this evening because of prior commitments, but I did dress for the occasion. I'm wearing one of SACTU solidarity committee's T shirts, fundraising T shirts, which kept the committee financially in the black. This T shirt is more than 40 years old. I guess I'm a bit of a hoarder, but it is ironed, as you probably can see. I arrived at the SACTU solidarity committee having been fired by a South African from the Fred Victor mission, where I had been active in the CUPE organizing drive. Unfortunately, I was young and naive, and this one day short of my end of my probationary period, when the boss of, African boss told me that I probably didn't have a future with the organization, so I was sacked, but I met Ken Traynor a couple days later, through a common friend, and the next day, I met with Ken Traynor and Ken Luckhardt, probably the easiest interview I ever had, and started working at this act of solidarity committee where there was no probationary period.
So, I was there from 1983 to 1987 when the adventure came to an end. I did our work in Quebec in that period from 83 to 87 although there had been good work done by the committee before my arrival. And for that, I wish to salute Steve Benedict, an activist from CW 112 de Havilland, I think salute also Kathy was Anna was a freelance translator who had translated a number of the newsletters and educational material already by the time I arrived at SACTU including French version of “Trafficking in Apartheid”, the great research work by Ken Traynor.
So how do we work in Quebec? Well, unfortunately, we didn't have an office. So we had no presence on the ground in Quebec. Our office was obviously in Toronto. We had a small working group, working group made up of myself, Doug Miller, CUPE activist, a guy by the name of Eve from the CSN who, as it turned out, was a CSN activist, but also militant in one of the political organizations in Quebec so fairly quickly that wasn't a good fit, and the strategizing work of SACTU in Quebec was largely done by Doug Miller and myself.
Well, there were a network of people around us, people who helped us, doing research, helped us, producing materials, doing translation, wonderful woman from Burkina Faso, Marie, who did some excellent translating work for us for our original material that we produced, which was different from the material produced out of Toronto through Doug. We had contacts with some people who had done solidarity work in southern Africa. We had contact with the ANC unofficial representative in Quebec, Dan O'Mara, who's a prof at UQAM, was an expatriate ANC member. We had contacts with him. We worked with Dan Phillips the league de Noir.
So we had a network outside of the labor movement, but our primary focus was obviously in the labor movement, we did a lot of educational work. We didn't manage to get a lot of work in terms of small local union workshops, but we worked an awful lot, surprising amount, with local leadership. So just to give you a couple of examples, with the FTQ Federation Quebec, which is affiliate. It's like the OFL in Ontario. Did you affiliate to the CLC? We worked a lot with CUPE, the hospital council, for example, with their leadership. We did at least two sessions of the paid education leave with CAW Quebec and Luckhardt. Will talk about the work at Port Elgin. We did the same thing in Quebec, met with the Montreal region of postal workers. Completely fortuitous chance meeting in Quebec City with the Montreal representative during the rotating postal strike. I was on the picket line and started talking to this guy, and it turns out he was in, involved in the Montreal Regional Council, and so generated some work out of that, generally speaking, our work with theFTQ, the unions, knew about the SACTU solidarity committee because of the work that had been done by the rest of the committee and the rest of the country. 40% 40% of workers in Quebec are members of unions affiliated the fdq. 30% are affiliated to the conference, you know, CSN. CSN has a membership entirely parallel to the FTQ. CSN has hospital workers, have grocery store workers, transport drivers, public transit workers, daycare workers, sejp teachers, forestry workers, CSN organizes public workers and private workers, both with the CSN, we didn't do a lot of work, but we did really strategic work. Again, just to give you a couple of examples, we met with a half day a half day education session with some 100 delegates at the Conseil de Montreal. Consecentral is like the Labor Council in Toronto did a full day workshop on anti apartheid, the struggle with the Conseil central de Quebec.
Those two meetings with the Conseil, I'm sure were behind the invitation, which was sent by the CSN nationally to the SACTU representative in Canada to speak at the conseil confederal in Chicago me in 1987 several months before the end of our adventure, where several 100 delegates were addressed on the issues racism in South Africa. And I'm sure that meeting at the Conseil confederal grew out of the fact that we had done good educational work with a broad base of leadership within the Conseil in Montreal and in Quebec City, but also the SACTU representative in Canada had worked for Q it Rio Tinto now Q it in South Africa before he had to flee. The vice president of the CSN nationally was Jose Valois, who had been the president of the Q it local in Sorel, Quebec, where Q it has a huge factory. So knowing that sector representative had worked at Q it, I contacted people in the CSN to see the possibility of setting up a meeting with Roger Valois, which happened, a good meeting. The two talked about their Q it experience. Several months later comes this meeting with the Conseil confederal. So we worked strategically with the CSN at the local levels, with local leadership and at the national level, and it got some work. We translated a lot of material. We did a fair amount of educational work.
This is the week of action, which certainly can we'll talk to you about. So we produce, we produce our own little Caye work which is adapted to Quebec. So our material was adapted to the Quebec situation. Tried to make links with Quebec unions in the context where some are CSN, some are FTQ, to produce our own material, which is really interesting.
Now, this is a labor history video, so we have to talk about buttons. Have to talk about buttons as a part of labor history, the cultural dimension of workers, all the buttons that we wear of our different struggles. I'm proud to say I produced absolutely the worst button in the history of the labor movement in Canada. So I'm out of popular education background. The political message on the button was really clear, boycotts, boycott South African products. But as a popular educator, I want to be more specific, what South African products so how about oranges and cans of peaches? So produce a button, “boycott South African products” and have a picture of oranges and peaches to illustrate what you mean.
So with a cell phone, you can take a wonderful clear picture of a can of peaches and an orange, and you can control the light. You can have jpg , and you can put your jpg right onto your little button blueprint, and you've got an amazing button instantly. But in 1987, 1986 there weren't cell phones or photocopiers, and so I put can of peaches on the photocopy window with an orange, and I pushed a button, and I had an instant photocopy in black and white, which illustrated. Uh, lie down. There is the absolute worst button. Great concept, clear. But you know, as Marx said, philosophers to date have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it, and nothing was changed by that button, I guarantee you, but I mentioned the button also for a more serious reason. If you look at that button, and if you look at this button, which was the SACTU button, when I showed this button back at the office, apart from Snickers, people immediately noticed that there was no union bug. Didn't do it in a union shop. Well, I did it in a union shop, but it was a CSN union shop. The CSN wasn't involved in the bug campaign, which is a CLC AFL CIO campaign.
So research, and I'll close on that. I've gone a little bit over. Ken Traynor was responsible for the research, extraordinary work. We helped a little bit in Quebec. Luckhardt had made contact with the longshoreman's associations on the West Coast. Somehow the longshoremen in Quebec, in local 1675 became interested in the South African question. And we would get calls from the Longshoreman's Union at the Port of Montreal saying “there's a ship leaving for South Africa, or there's a ship arriving from South Africa”. Three or four times this happened. So I would take it was a coat. So I would take the night train, leave Toronto, get into Montreal. 530 in the morning, Doug would meet me at the train station. By 615 630 I was at the Port of Montreal, and the gate was unlocked, left open, no security guards around. So I could go in from 630 until about 730, 8 o'clock, without any worries of being bothered by a boss or security guards. And I would wander around pier 57k Saint concept in Montreal, which was a hangar about the size of two football fields, with my little notebook and my pen, and I would take notes from the different piles of all of the material, as I would find the area where the boat had loaded its stuff, either to go to or come from South Africa, I'd take notes of the names of who it was going to, where it was from, and added that to Ken's research.
On one occasion we actually got I picked it up from the Longshoreman's union office in a brown envelope, a manifest from a ship and a manifest gives detailed itemization of addresses where it's going to, who it's come from, itemized list of all of the commodities on the boat. Invaluable, absolutely invaluable material that Ken could use to further his research.
The other thing that I recall is that I believe it was during one of these visits that we stumbled upon clothing, clothing that was, actually had a little ticket saying, made in Lesotho. The only thing in the clothing that was made in Lesotho was the ticket, which said, made in Lesotho, because the garments themselves were strictly from South Africa. I believe it was in one of those little forays, surreptitiously, in the early morning that we happened upon that pile of clothing. To conclude, work in Quebec was modest. I think we helped to move things forward. Modestly bears witness to the fact that the SACTU solidarity committee, right from the beginning, had the political smarts to know that if it wanted to be a national committee and have national impact, work had to be done in Quebec, and to do work in Quebec, you have to adapt, you have to translate, and you have to be flexible enough to realize that things need to be done a little bit differently to make things move forward in Quebec. So Chapo to the committee, thank you for your attention. I'm sorry I went a bit over. Have a good evening, and I'm sorry I can't be with you.
Host 1:29:28
Okay, thanks, Vince. Hope he can join us a bit later, although we're running a bit behind time. So I'm going to be very fast, very quick with my final piece, which is just really a snapshot of a campaign in Toronto. As Ken said, we had workshops, sanctions workshops, Ken Traynor said, all over the country, and the one in Toronto, we had 75 trade unionists at the workshop.
And afterwards, various unions decided to take actions, and then the week of our action was the year after in 86, so in 1985 OPSEU decided to take on a campaign. And there were four parts to the campaign. I was an OPSU member, so I've seconded for six weeks. The first part was to try to get rid of the all the products South African products in the workplaces, there were huge amounts of cans of fruit, institution size cans, huge ones this size, like you've never seen, and other products in the workplaces, in the hospitals, in the psychiatric institutions, colleges and jails. So that was one part of the campaign. The second was to pressure the Peterson Liberal government to make Ontario an apartheid free zone. The third was to attack the pension plans and try to get them to divest workers money from the corporations that were complicit with apartheid. The fourth area was fundraising and OPSU was very involved in that, as many locals were, and Ken talked about that.
So I want to just focus on one brief campaign. One campaign, briefly, I should say, in at the Don jail, O'Brien Hyman, I think Frank has a photograph of O'Brien that he can put up at this time. Sadly, O'Brien passed away a few years ago, and O'Brien had heard SACTU speakers out in Kitimat. BC was when he was a member of the Casa Canadian Association of smelter and allied workers working for Alcan. And he was fired up then, and when he moved to Ontario, he became a member at the Don jail, became president of the local and all I want to say is that he was very instrumental in getting rid of the South African products out of the Don jail.
He, along with his co workers and the inmates in the jail, he took me through the jail. It was an intimidating experience, frightening really, with doors clanging behind you all the way until we got to the cells where the inmates were actually so keen to challenge management. So with the workers and the clients, inmates of the jails, we got rid of the South African products at that workplace. The Peterson government eventually decided that they would, yes, have a ban on South African products in the institutions and ministries. The pension plan. Plans didn't move, and we had a great example of a fundraising event where a member of ops who stood up in at the convention and said, I think we should give sack to $5,000 a year until it's no longer necessary. And that was in place until Mandela became president of South Africa.
So that just what O'Brien and the workers at the Don Jail did is just one snapshot of the way that Canadian workers took this on. They were ripe for downing tools and taking up the call for international working-class solidarity, and it was a historic time throughout that decade. And I'm going to ask Jane to finish off and talk about what was happening in the late 80s, at the end of the 1980s in southern Africa and in Canada. Thanks very much.
