Jef Keighley

Doug Miller 00:02

There we go. So, I’m Doug Miller. I’m here today on Zoom with Jef Keighley in British Columbia, Vancouver, I believe, and Jane Armstrong in Toronto to interview Jef about his history in the anti-apartheid movement and the union movement’s involvement in that on the West Coast.

And, with that, Jef, welcome. Nice to see you. Nice to meet you. I’m going to ask you that you’ve read our consent form, and that you’ve understood the conditions and you’re quite happy or consent to agree to them?

Jef Keighley

Absolutely. Yes.

Doug Miller

I always like talking to union guys, because that’s the least formal thing they ever signed in their lives. So, Jef, would you just perhaps give us a little personal background before we get into the union side of things because it would be nice for people to know just a little bit about where you’re from and your background before you got involved in activism and unionism.

Jef Keighley 01:07

I was born in Vancouver and moved to my parent’s house in Burnaby, at age two days, and I grew up on Burnaby Mountain. It was basically mostly British, unionized, trades people in that area. My father was a machinist. My mother was the daughter of a Finnish socialist and they left Finland after the Whites won that civil war. And they came out to Vancouver.

My grandfather was a salmon fisher and boat builder. And basically, I went to school and grew up in Burnaby. And then I went off to BCIT [British Columbia Institute of Technology], and took construction engineering and architecture.

One day there, I went to a lunchtime lecture by CUSO [Canadian University Service Overseas], who were interested in recruiting people, because they were moving away from simply educational staff and more into technically qualified people – and I got all their information. My wife at the time and I mulled it over, and we ended up going to Jamaica for two years, where I taught land surveying and building construction. And that’s where I really got heavily involved in the politics. I had arrived in Jamaica a month after Michael Manley got elected for the first time – a left, social democratic government. And they started, including many in the Black Power movement which had been rising and, all of a sudden, they were government. All of these people had been hyper-critical of

various things for very good reason. All of a sudden, they said “My god, we actually have to make the change. Now we have control!’.

And, as I mentioned to you, just before we got started, the very first law that Michael Manley’s government passed was to repeal the criminal sanction– this was 1972 – to repeal the criminal sanction on buying, selling, or possessing a book on evolution. If you had Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” in your house, that was a potential prison sentence for that. That changed a lot of things. The second thing he did was pass a law that required the black suit, white shirt and tie as mandatory dress in Parliament and said, “This is a government of the people that’s going to look like the people” and basically they adopted the shirt jacket. A short sleeved light cotton shirt worn outside of your pants. I was really getting sort of steeped in colonialist politics.

And then one day “Canadian Dimension” decided that they were going to provide a

three-month free subscription for three consecutive editions of “Canadian Dimension” for all CUSO volunteers, wherever they were in the world. I initially wondered who put my name on this list. But then I read it, and it just made enormous sense. And then I started looking forward to the second one when it arrived. And before I got halfway through the second edition, I took out a subscription mailer and sent it off so I could get the next, the fourth one and beyond, because it was only going to be the third one coming in for free.

And that, basically, began my exploration of doing a ton of reading and looking at the various books referenced in “Canadian Dimension”. And I did a ton of reading on progressive politics, political economy, and it sort of launched myself into a political arena. I had gone to Jamaica as a construction specialist; and I was going to go back to Canada at the end of two years; and I was going to become a big time-building

contractor. If you had a contract that said you got three screws per hinge and you wanted four, by god, you’re going to pay for that fourth screw.

By the time I got back to Canada that work didn’t interest me, and I thought that what I needed to do was to spend my life doing progressive political work.

I started that in Vancouver. For two years with CUSO, the intention of which was to see if returned CUSO volunteers could be drawn into to make the organization more member-driven. I came to understand that would not work as most were, on their return to Canada, getting on with their careers and lives. At the end of those two years, I recommended they abolish my job and use my salary to give seed money to various progressive grass roots groups around the province. And they took that advice.

I worked out of the IDERA, the International Development Education Resource Association centre in Vancouver, which was basically doing non-rhetorical social education throughout BC.

And then I ended up getting enamored with the Canadian union movement because they were doing great progressive stuff, grass roots democratic. I took a job at the Kenworth truck plant. And for reasons that are too long to go into, within five weeks I became a shop steward because I took up the union and took on the company in a rather dramatic way. And within two months of being there, I was the Assistant Chief Steward. The day I started at the truck plant, at the end of the day I went up to the union office and said, “I’ve just been hired, what needs doing?” And they sat me down, and I read the history. And I was very active in the trade union movement throughout Vancouver from that moment forward, a rank- and- file activist on the truck plant floor.

And then Cathy Walker, our Health and Safety Director, who later became the CAW [ Canadian Auto Workers] Health and Safety Director after our 1992 merger [with the CAW], was pregnant with her one and only child. I was asked if I would — I had got laid off in 1979, along with 179 other people – I was asked if I would come work for the union for six months to stand in for Cathy. And that six months turned into 25 years. It is the longest six months or my life!

Doug Miller 07:03

What a fascinating history. Thank you so much for that. And Ken, welcome to the show. Ken [Luckhardt] has joined us. Well from there, let’s talk, then, about you’ve gotten into the Union. And you’re part of that. How did you end up becoming aware of, involved in, anti-apartheid and union issues related to that part of the world?

Jef Keighley 07:34

Well, when I came back from Jamaica in 1974, I was in CUSO which was trying to encourage returned volunteers to become active on a regular basis. And so I was quite interested in that. And that put me in touch with IDERA. The CUSO office which located within IDERA. And as you and I were talking about earlier, CUSO was really strongly getting behind the anti-apartheid struggle.

I became introduced to and involved with a group of people around the IDERA that had formed SAAC, the Southern Africa Action Coalition. And turns out that we had a major conference in 1976, called “South Africa: A Time for Change”, which Ken and I have since discovered that we were both at the same conference, of about 125 people. Desmond Tutu was there, Alan Bozak, too. There were both the PAC [Pan African Congress] and ANC [African National Congress] present.

And I was thinking about it the other night, Ken. And I think I recall that I met this frizzy-haired guy, who was at a time stationed in Edmonton. And I think you were actually one of the resource people.

08:45

[Laughter as Ken Luckhardt removes hat to show no hair now]

Jef Keighley 08:48

So, basically, we got, I got, involved with the southern Africa anti-apartheid movement before I joined the trade union movement.

But because there was so much activity in and around the Vancouver and District Labor Council. It was a very progressive group that gave us connections between the citizen activist and labor activist.

It became like a seamless whole, so that we were all working on the same thing together, and then through the SAAC group we were organizing a whole series of Shops-ins. We would, basically, organize 30 to 40 people to go to the supermarket, and with an identified list of South African products load up their shopping carts with South African products, and then head off to the till. You’d fill it right up and then you head off to the cash register. And somebody at the front of the line would say [to the cashier], “This product is from South Africa, isn’t it?”

“ Oh, yes, it is.”

“What? Why it looks like all of this in my cart is from South Africa!”

And then somebody would say to the others in the long lines, “ Hey, have you checked your shopping carts? A lot of the stuff is from South Africa!”

And then people would say, “Oh my God, this is terrible!”

And everybody would walk out, leaving 30-40 shopping carts filled to the brim of South African products, and it would take hours and hours for the store to have to pay their staff to put it back on the shelf. And you just kept this up. And eventually some of the stores said, “Look, this is just too much trouble.” And so they would stop stoking South African products to avoid the headaches and extra labour costs.

And then, also through SAAC…. At the time, Dave Barrett and the NDP government got elected in 1972. And, sadly, I missed two of those three years because I was in Jamaica at the time. But we decided that we wanted to have South African wines delisted from the government liquor stores. And so we started a program. We got a little circular sticker [saying ban South African wines]. And we talked to the printers, and this is through SAAC. And they gave us stickers that had a particularly strong adhesive. And the idea was you’d go into the liquor store and you put this sticker over top of the South African label. And it was impossible to remove the sticker without destroying the label, rendering the bottle a non-saleable product.

And that, along with lobbying the B.C. NDP government of Dave Barrett, we got it all South African wines barred from BC Liquor stores. [After note: At the time there were no private liquor stores in BC, so banning SA wines from government liquor stores effectively banned them from BC period.]

I recall that my wife, Jill Wight, myself and my two daughters, were in the Commercial Drive liquor store. And at that time, they had display shelves, which were about 40 inches tall. And our two daughters, four and six years old at the time, they had their pockets stuffed full of these stickers. And we’d be standing there in the aisle, away from where the cashiers could see, who I don’t think really cared because it was just a job for them.

And we’d be thoughtfully perusing wine labels, and looking over the store, while in the

meantime at our two daughters, who were short and down below, were sticking all the stickers on the bottles. When they’d gotten every bottle they could get at, we’d sort of wander off, leave the store, and go off to some other store and do the same thing. So that was a part of my pre-union activity.

But then I became an activist within my own local, Local 14, which was the truck transportation local, from the Kenworth truck plant days. I became the editor of our union newsletter. And so we would do all sorts of stories about international affairs, including South Africa, and what was the anti-apartheid struggle. And so basically, we became we moved toward more organizing among the other progressive unions.

Many other unions including the Canadian Paper Workers Union. You also had the postal workers; you had CUPE [Canadian Union of Public Employees]; you had CAIMAW [Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical and Allied Workers]; and all the CCU [Confederation of Canadian Unions], the Carpenters, too. And, basically, we all came together around the Maritime Labor Center.

And we began to organize. It wasn’t too long before Ken and the others in the SACTU [South African Congress of Trade Unions] group out of Toronto, started to come across the country. You remember Doug Coward, he was very heavily involved in the SAAC group. He wasn’t a trade unionist at the time, although became one later. Basically, the SACTU focus was on activity within the trade unions and the general citizenry, whereas the SAAC group tended to be more citizen oriented. And because of that, SAAC didn’t really have the kind of staying power that SACTU had, because if you’re going to have long-term social action, you need to have an attachment to an organization that has a reason for existing beyond any particular campaign.

And trade unions have a reason to exist beyond the campaign because they have to look after the members, you know, 24 hours a day, year after year after year. And so the progressive trade unionists became very critical in making things happen. You know, you would need to have a poster done. You could go to a union meeting [and they] wouldn’t mind giving you a donation of $50 or $100. But that’s not a lot of money to do the work, but all of them – no kidding – would have to put that to a membership vote, l which takes time.

But you can go to the same trade union and say, “Can you do $500 of photocopying for us?”

They’d say “Sure.” They didn’t have to put that to a vote. They just did it. Right away. And so the trade unions were absolutely critical not only in getting the message out to people, but also in providing the practical financing that made it go ahead.

And then, when Ken Traynor did the tremendous research into all the South African products, he compiled the very best listing that was available. We were working with the ILWU in Vancouver. That’s the International Longshoreman Workers Union, which is the longshore union on the West Coast. It has always been very left and progressive, as opposed to the one on the East Coast. We also worked with the Canadian Brotherhood of Railway and Transport Workers. And Tommy McGrath and David Crane and people like that, who had been on strike in South Africa with the Canadian Seamen’s union, who brought their life experience back to Canadian trade unions.

So it wasn’t just some academic talking about the need to do this. These are people who had brought their life experience with them. And they were stalwarts who had earned enormous respect. Tommy McGrath extracted more money out of shipping companies, for seamen who didn’t get paid than any other person on the planet.

And, as an aside, Cecil [insert name] I forget his last name. I think Ken knows him. But he tells me a story. One time we’re doing some SACTU work. And one night, Tommy phones him [Cecil] up, about 11 o’clock at night, and says, “What are you doing?” “I’m watching the news. Tommy says, “Good. I’ll be there in 20 minutes to pick you up.”

“What for?”

“There’s a ship in Vancouver, and they haven’t paid the ship’s crew $650,000.” Okay, so they go on board and Cecil’s got a weak stomach. And it’s almost all Indian food. And so Tommy basically tells the pilot to drop anchor at a specific berth. And when they arrive at the berth, Tommy says, “Drop anchor. That ship’s not going anywhere!” And because you can’t take the ship out of the harbour without a pilot, and the pilot’s not going to cross a CBRT picket line to get on the ship.

And so they’re sitting here for three days, demanding that they come up with the money. And eventually, on Day Three, a cutter comes out from the wharf bearing representatives of the shipping company who have a briefcase with $650,000 in $20 bills. They’re down in the galley, and the company guy comes down, and all the crew are sitting there. And he throws it on the table in the galley and says, “There’s your fucking money. And Tommy says, “Count it. He forced the guy to count $650,000 in $20 bills right there in front of the crew. And when he finished counting, he said, “You’re satisfied?” And Tommy says, “No, you’re short 20 bucks. Count it again …1”. So he reaches into his own pocket and says, “Here’s the fucking $20.”

That’s the kind of moxie that people like Tom had, so when Tommy said, “This is a struggle you support”, people who knew Tommy wouldn’t even question that. Tommy

says this is the struggle we’re supporting, so when Tommy said it, you supported the struggle (against apartheid).

We had enormously strong socialist roots throughout the trade union movement. And we capitalized on that. We’d talk with the longshore union –based on the work that Ken Traynor had done. We’d know when there’s a ship coming in, and we’d have the manifest ahead of time. And, you know, that the docks would start work at 6:30 in the morning and so the longshoremen would say, “Okay, you guys, make sure that you’re there at six o’clock in the morning.”

And you could get away with three or four or five people on the picket line. The guys would arrive for work and say “Whoa, there’s a picket line, we’re not crossing the picket line” and off they’d go. And they’d have the day off. And then the shipping companies would seize the pension contributions for the entire month. Then the longshore would go to court, and they would get the money back. But we did it, they did it, over and over again. And they did it because they were interested in solidarity, because, you know, as was everybody [on the West coast] because Vancouver is a coastal city. Workers had an enormous amount of travel experience and personal experience, more so than you’d find in an interior city.

19:16

Doug Miller: Yes, I think it’s important to point out to people who are listening to this in 2022, that a port wasn’t like it is today, where it’s all containers. Everything was hand loaded. So the port workers were a huge workforce that was very powerful as a result.

Jef Keighley 19:35

But you know, that even with containers, the same thing would happen today. If you bought in a container ship, and you put up a picket line that the union supported it and maybe there’s six containers that are containing the goods that you’re trying to have

boycotted. That terminal shuts down, and those six containers didn’t get unloaded. But the other 6,000 also didn’t get unloaded. So that creates an enormous amount of pressure. The shipping companies say, “We’re not shutting down the entire terminal here because you’re putting the goods through our port.” And so internally, from a greedy capitalist perspective, it starts to put pressure on the employers to say, “We better take some action here because if these people keep this up, we’re not going to shut down the movement of 6,000 containers because they’re objecting to six.”

Doug Miller 20:37

This is tremendous. So let’s move back to the SACTU Solidarity Committee, then. If I’m not mistaken, that would have been 1980/ 1981.

Jef Keighley 20:51

A bit later, 1983/1984, I’m guessing.

Ken Luckhardt 20:55

Jef, I met you when Zola Zembe was on tour in 1981. There was a meeting held by PPWC with Angus McPhee at their local, and you and Jill were both there. And that’s when Brenda [Wall] had joined Zola and I. I met you and Jill for the first time. That was 1981.

Doug Miller 21:25

Ken, can you now tell us what PPWC is?

Ken Luckhardt.

Pulp and Paper Workers of Canada. OK As part of the CCU, again, the Confederation of Canadian Unions. [PPWC} is part of what is an umbrella organization. Jef’s union was part of that as well. So at that time, they were two major confederations in Canada, the CLC [Canadian Labour Congress], and the CCU. And so I knew and that’s when we first met Jef, that was 1981.

And the stories you’re telling me about the Longshore Workers are so important to the history of that work in British Columbia, at one point after Ken did all that research [Trafficking in Apartheid, 1985], I did a lot of the legwork in B.C., and I stayed at your place all the time.

We established through Tommy McGrath, a connection with the ITF rep, the International Transport Workers, the people responsible for all the transportation unions internationally. Jerry McCullough was the ITF person in Vancouver. He and I went out for a cup of coffee and maybe a beer. And I explained to him what we’re trying to do.

And he promised me – and he lived up to the promise – that for every ship that would come in from South Africa – the Nedlloyd, three ships in that line – he would personally get the manifest of every item from South Africa that was on that ship. That was pretty important stuff.

Doug Miller

Oh, yeah, you bet.

Ken Luckhardt

We could then know where the pulp came from and where it was going. Because of all the stuff that Ken Traynor did – the research in the aggregate –we could now begin to identify products in their actual location, where it’s either produced in B.C. and sent to South Africa or came in from South Africa and where would go in B.C. That opened up doors we couldn’t imagine.

For example, we knew the pulp was being produced, sold, and sent to South Africa. There were a lot of pulp union plants in British Columbia, represented by different unions that were in the different federations that I spoke about a minute ago. So they didn’t like each other as two separate unions, as they were competing over the same general jurisdiction. But when it came to South Africa, both presidents, Angus McPhee – and I forget the other guy’s name in the CLC affiliate, agreed to send me on tour throughout the entire province to every pulp local in the province so that I could make a presentation, the one we made everywhere across the country, to all of the pulp local unions, to try to identify where the hell that pulp was being produced that went to South Africa.

So that’s the kind of information we could get because the longshore people gave us the manifests of stuff coming in or going out to South Africa. We even knew the names of white South African families who were moving to Vancouver. They were either going to Sydney, Australia, or they were going to Vancouver. They were going someplace where it was warm, like it was in Cape Town, where they had come from. We knew the addresses where those people were moving to in the Lower Mainland. We didn’t want that information, but we had it. So that’s the level of detail that the manifests generated. And people like Jef were instrumental in helping to coordinate that with the local labour movement in the Lower Mainland.

Doug Miller 24:48

So Jef, where are you now at this time, when you start running into contact with SACTU?

Jef Keighley 24:56

I guess by that time I was a national union representative with CAIMAW (Canadian Association of Industrial, Mechanical, and Allied Workers). I was responsible for a wide variety of manufacturing plants, all of our mines throughout British Columbia, and some service sector workers.

CAIMAW had been formed originally in Winnipeg out of the Griffin steel foundry there. And it was basically an all-militant, democratic, all-Canadian union who, amongst other things, gave proper representation for members set on eradicating American unions from Canada. When the… when CAIMAW was first started [in 1964] 75% of all Canadian workers belonged to American-based unions. And basically, in many circumstances, they were working hand in glove with the U.S. State Department. For instance, the United Steelworkers were taking the dues off Canadian steel workers and going to Washington

D.C. and successfully arguing that the United States should put tariffs on Canadian steel coming from Canadian steel plants. And with the dues members were paying they were getting rid of the [Canadian] jobs. I think we had 19 votes against the Steelworkers. And we had 19 victories. And the PPWC went after the [American] pulp sulfite union. Basically, we had a policy that we would never ever raid a Canadian union. Our rationale was that, if it’s in Canada, you have the capacity, so if you’re serious about making your union democratic, you have the capacity within our national boundaries to make that change. Whereas if you’re in the United States, or if you’re in an American union, there’s no chance that you’re going to have any impact or change on the American union’s constitution. And, you know, you’re having a huge chunk of your dues – the more levels of bureaucracy that you have to service, the fewer dollars that are available to deal with the members who paid the freight.

Bob White, for whom we were partly inspirational, was basically telling the UAW to get stuffed, and followed by creating the Canadian Auto Workers Union. By the time he got settled, after two or three years, he came to us and to the West Coast and said, “We would like you to consider joining the CAW. We want to make the CAW a national union.” We spent an entire two years going around talking to our members. Then we put it to a referendum vote. Overwhelmingly, on January 1, 1992, CAIMAW disappeared and merged into the Canadian Auto Workers, giving the CAW a base in the four Western provinces, a base that had never existed previously.

That led to virtually every other CCU union, one by one by one, joining in because CAIMAW had been the leading union within the CCU. Once they saw what we had done, and they asked us “Well, what do you think?”. “Well,” we said, “you know, it’s a big union that’s got lots of bureaucracy, but it’s heading in the right direction.”

We were at our 25th CAIMAW convention. We had a big celebration, and we were just on the verge. That’s where we made the decision, in Winnipeg. To celebrate, the union had booked one of the river boats, and we were going on a four-hour riverboat cruise. A friend of mine, also from my own local, said, “Well, what do you think about this idea of joining the CAW?”

I said, “You know, Roy, we have been like this little ship fighting the waves and going upstream because we wanted to get to a certain place where we have a Canadian union movement that was democratic and militant. And you know, the CAW, despite its flaws, is a much bigger ship. But it’s generally heading in the same direction. I think we ought to join that bigger ship.”

And he said, “You know, I think you’re right.” And so the membership vote was just overwhelming. And shortly after that, when we first sat down with Jim O’Neill, who was then the CAW Secretary-Treasurer, and he came out to see us shortly after the merger had gone through.

We in CAIMAW were involved in SACTU. If there was an international solidarity movement going on, we were there. I was heavily involved in the Chilean solidarity movement after the [1973] coup. And we said to Jimmy, “Look, we’ve been doing these things for years and years and years, like we’re right up front as a political organization on all this work, and domestically as well.”

His response was, “All right, we came to you because we liked what you’re doing. You were doing what you were doing in the name of CAIMAW. You’re now part of the CAW. You continue to do what you’re doing. But you’re now doing it in the name of the CAW. And if we’ve got a problem with that, we’ll come and talk to you. But if we don’t come and talk to you, we don’t have a problem.” And we just carried on.

Doug Miller 30:33

Wow, what a tremendous history of the CCU, and CAIMAW, and then the CAW, and how you collaborated. But if I could just take us back to SACTU again. In the early ‘80s, what was going on around that issue and those issues? You’ve had visits already, one from a South African trade unionist and Ken and Brenda.

Jef Keighley 31:00

Most of what had taken place up until the time we created the SACTU Solidarity Committee in Vancouver, which was basically modeled on what the SACTU folks had done in and around Toronto, had been a somewhat trade union movement, somewhat

citizen driven. It didn’t have the sort of the continuity that was necessary to put pressure on. Ken came out and suggested that we consider creating the Vancouver Solidarity, the Vancouver committee of SACTU. There were probably 10 or 15 progressive trade unionists gathered together, and we said, “Absolutely, that’s what we’re going to do.”

We then started working more closely with Ken Traynor, Ken Luckchardt, Brenda, and Jane [Armstrong], less so Vince [Greason], because he had a different bailiwick at the time. We started organizing, and we started doing education. We’d go around to the various unions, the union meetings, and talk about it. We’d be helping them get to make ongoing commitments to finance the SACTU Committee because, we said, “This is a long struggle. And it’s great if you give $100 once in a while but a hell of a lot better if you give $75 a month or whatever you could afford.” And more and more unions were basically coming on board, and they would pass a motion, so that every month the cheque would go off to Toronto to keep the work going.

Then we started organizing a series of benefits. I think we had the first benefit in 1986 and [it was so well attended that] we couldn’t get everybody into the Maritime Labour Centre. The second one we did, it was held May 8, 1987. We had a real great lineup. The total Gospel Choir out of Seattle came up. We had a huge program lined up. Back in those days, people drank a lot more when they went out than they do now, so that helped raise the money. At the end of the night, I was the chair of the SACTU Committee in Vancouver, we had paid all of our people, you know, a nominal gratuity or honorarium, really paid all of our expenses.

On Sunday morning, my two daughters, who had been the label stickers on the wine bottles, got to count the money. They were just overjoyed. We had raised more than

$12,000 that night. That was the high point. I think the third benefit we had was in

September of 1989. We did almost as well, but by that time people were a little bit more sensible about how much they imbibed. It was a $4,000 night. We were probably just as lucky that there were no RCMP hanging around the Maritime Centre, nabbing people when they went home because you can’t make that kind of money drinking tea.

Doug Miller 34:17

No, no, the bar bill is really a good one.

Jef Keighley 34:21

We made solidarity work not only pointed and political, but fun! I mean years later, when the SACTU work had sort of fallen by the wayside because of the success of putting apartheid to bed, we started the anti-war movement in Vancouver. After the Americans went into Iraq, we had a big benefit to do that. The biggest moneymaker was when we put together a box of wine as a raffle. We made about $900 off the raffle. Every single bottle of that wine came from a country that did not endorse the U.S. coalition going into Iraq. This was a solidarity case of wine. And people bought it like crazy.

So we’re just using creative ideas to get people together. As Rosa said, “If I can’t dance, I do not want to be part of your movement.” And we took that to heart. We made solidarity work meaningful and fun. And people’s friendships were built on that. I still have friends today that the only reason I met them was because of the international solidarity work that we’d been doing at that time.

Doug Miller 35:47

And in terms of your union, and its commitment to SACTU in the anti-apartheid work, how would you define that relationship to a union, which is about negotiations and collective agreements?

Jef Keighley 36:04

Well, with the CAW, both Kens [Traynor and Luckhardt], Jane, and Brenda had done really good work with Bob White. Bob White was a brilliant guy. The CAW, once they left the UAW [International] and became a Canadian union, they became one of the leading lights. We created the CAW Social Solidarity Fund, and SACTU work and solidarity work was a big chunk of that. We weren’t successful in every collective bargaining session, but it became an obligation –of every union [local] and every national rep – that they were to bargain as much money as possible for the Solidarity Fund.

Our entire membership, whether or not they’d been successful in getting the company to go with it, had in their own way been part and parcel of proving that, yes, this is a valid thing to put on the table. If it’s 10 cents, 15 cents, 25 cents, whatever they’re able to get, everybody would understand that’s money that otherwise could have gone to their wages, but that they collectively decided to put it to international solidarity work.

Then, when Mandela’s election was coming up in 1994, thankfully, on Ken [Luckhardt’s] recommendation, the trade union movement around the world had been asked to supply teams to go into South Africa to do violence monitoring six or seven weeks in advance of the actual election. Ken put forward my name. And I led a joint CAW/CUPE [Canadian Union of Public Employees] delegation into South Africa. We went from Johannesburg down to Durban. We ended up in Inkatha territory with an ANC [African National Congress] guy, and we went into the Thousand Hills area.

And we took a bunch of Mandela election posters. That was just one of the greatest things of my life was to be [Jef pauses overcome with emotion]. At the Durban city hall, in the plaza, every lamp post, had a Mandela poster ahead of the election, and we took a

stack of them into the Thousand Hills to deliver them to the principal of an elementary school in that area. And we went in there, the whole of the five of us, three CAW people and two other people. And we had to put the posters face down in the back. So when we got stopped in traffic, people couldn’t look into the car and identify ANC. We delivered the posters to the ANC contact, the school principal. And then we went to see the chief in an adjacent area, and he wasn’t home. And so we waited and we looked, but we thankfully ran into him on the road. He’d just come back from a meeting with the Inkatha chief across the dried up river wadi.

And the Inkatha chief wasn’t particularly loyal to Inkatha, but the difference was that the ANC by policy would only support one of the wives but Inkatha would support several wives so as a result of Inkatha providing support for his several wives he was ‘loyal’ to Inkatha but he cared more for his ANC neighbours and he said to the ANC chief “You’d better get your people out of there. There are three busloads of armed Inkatha people coming in here next week, and then intend to kill everybody that they can find”.

So, we had a quick meeting with the ANC chief. He said, “I can’t stay, I got to get people out of here. And we’re going to, we’re going to send them over the hills and, with the expectation that all the houses would be burned and, but it was least going to save the people.” And so I said, “Is there anything we can do?” And he said the only thing that will save us is if the army comes in. And I said, ‘Do you trust the white South African army?’ And he says no, but they, they will have to document stuff so thoroughly, that if the Army’s here Inkatha won’t dare to come in.

We beetled it back to Durban. And I got on the phone with Bob White and CLC and the international trade union federation, and Lloyd Axworthy [then Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs] who was then a major factor in there, and basically started raising hell and the telegrams started flying back and forth. And the military did come in, and it avoided the intended massacre. But when I got

back to Canada, I got a report that the principal that we had delivered the posters to had been macheted to death, because he was distributing the Mandela posters.

Doug Miller 41:34

Holy Jesus. That’s a really tough one. So there we are. SACTU is being promoted on the West Coast, and you have a committee going. The labor union [CAW] was also working very hard to promote [anti-apartheid?] within the labor movement – SACTU. There were divisions at certain levels, particularly from the CLC. And how did you read all of that from the West Coast, where you were sitting?

Jef Keighley 42:16

Well, anybody who understood, who was active on the West Coast, who knew how the conservative CLC unions worked. Every one of the conservative CLC unions have a lot of good people; it’s just that the leadership weren’t necessarily particularly good. So we were able to [do solidarity work] because we had developed such a track record of being credible, and of having success that all sorts of locals, [affiliates of] American unions – unions that basically could care less about the South African issue – they would nevertheless would pick up the issue within their own local, even if they weren’t getting support at their national [or international] level. And so we were able to perform a leadership function because of our established track record.

We were up in the Pacific Northwest where the Kitimat smelter is, with CASAW, the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers. And they were part of the Confederation of Canadian Unions. They were very active. And John Jensen from the Carpenters was really active. John Jensen, when I first met him – he’s a great socialist – sat down with me in a cafe when I first met him, he says, “Now look,” he says, “I don’t have a lot of time to waste with people who aren’t [honest], that I don’t trust. He said,

“I’m not one of those guys who wants to get a better share of the bakery. I want to own the fucking bakery. If you’re one of the guys who wants to own the bakery, then fine.” [We got along better than fine!]

In the Pacific Northwest [of BC] CASAW was part of the CCU and therefore was a rival to the CLC. And the CLC leadership at the time, and I think it was probably under Shirley Carr, forbade the Northwest or the Labor Council – the Terrace and District Labor Council – from having anything to do with the CCU and CASAW in particular.

But the smelter didn’t work without CASAW; they were the union in town. And so the activists [inside both the CLC and the CCU] decided that they were going to form the Pacific Northwest Labor Council, and it would be open to all unions and basically told the CLC, “Go fuck yourself! If you have a problem with it, you aren’t getting dues from anybody.” And so the CLC basically shut their mouths because they weren’t going to risk not getting dues from all the CLC affiliates who took that position who said “Workers are going to fight together with workers. And we’re going to do this, and we don’t give a shit what the CLC in Ottawa has to say.”

And to a certain extent that sentiment existed for lots of the CLC affiliated unions, particularly all the Canadian unions, not only Canadian unions that were affiliated to the CLC, but also to some of the better locals of the American unions. So they basically said, “We know who’s doing the work, we know who to trust. And we don’t really care if the National [or international] Union has a policy that doesn’t support this, we are going to support this [SACTU work]. And it’s our union dues at the local level. They said these are our union dues. If you have a problem with that, you know, they didn’t quite get to doing the Pacific Northwest thing.” He said, “Well, we’ll stop sending you any money.” But basically, the CLC was made to look the other way, because they couldn’t risk the internal divisions that would be caused if they tried to force the issue. But that was based on courageous individuals who had a political commitment and just moving forward with the work.

Doug Miller 46:07

Jane, did you want to get in here?

Jane Armstrong 46:10

Oh, no, it’s just, you know, I remember all sorts of tales, as you talk. Some of these stories I’d never heard before and others I had. I was wondering about what interaction you might have had with the Vancouver District Labor Council. I think Marion Pollack might have been the[vice] president of the Labor Council and then later…

Jef Keighley 46:36

Yeah, she was. John Fitzpatrick was the president for many years, and he was terrific. He was a great supporter of SACTU and the solidarity work going on. And then Marion, who was an absolute gem of a leader within the postal union, she also did an amazingly great job as president in the Vancouver District Labor Council. And again, it was Vancouver District Labor Council was the home of the progressives.

Doug Miller 47:06

Ken, do I see you waving?

Ken Luckhardt 47:08

Yeah, a couple things. This has been great. Just things you may have forgotten Jef, and I wanted to add to this videotape here. When the sanctions movement was getting strengthened, we were encouraging workers to take actions at the workplace. The local community in Vancouver organized a very successful sanctions conference.

And at that conference, we invited Leo Robinson, who was the main activist in San Francisco with the ILWU Longshore Workers Union in the States, well known in labor

history as being probably one of the most important anti-apartheid activists in the United States. So Leo came to Vancouver for the conference that the local committee in Vancouver had organized. It was a tremendous success and a further inspiration to unions in the Lower Mainland to take actions at their own workplaces in support of all sorts of sanctions. That’s one point I wanted to mention.

Also you mentioned John Jensen. He was critical for the work up in the Northwest, Prince Rupert, Terrace and Kitimat. And before he died – recently – he had written his own memoirs, now published as a book. I forget the title of it, but everyone should try to get a copy of John Jensen’s memoirs. It’s fantastic. He talks about the stories that you’re talking about Jef.

And finally, I just want to mention that when we do this work across the country, it wasn’t just going to a meeting, it was also, ‘where are you going to sleep?’ You know, I probably made – I’ve forgotten how many trips to B.C., four or five a year – I would stay for two or three weeks, usually in the Vancouver area. And I would stay at Jef’s house. So his family and they would put me up, looked after me, found me a place to live, to be with his daughters, with his dog, Tanya, I think that was her name. Okay, so that was part of it. So the solidarity is more than just arranging meetings and just doing things like that: it’s being able to go somewhere trusted, and be accommodated as part of the work. So the Vancouver committee, and all the people involved were very, very instrumental in the development of this SACTU work across the country. That’s all I wanted to add.

Doug Miller 49:27

That’s wonderful. Thank you. Jef?

Jef Keighley

The ILWU, the Longshoremen on the West Coast of Canada and the United States, were unique in that they were progressive on both sides of the border. But it started out and was an American Union. But they constitutionally and politically and practically gave full autonomy to the Canadian organization. And so they were never under the thumb of State Department policies. Because they were basically progressives in charge there on both sides.

Our house was the SACTU hotel and then later the COSATU hotel and, and the ANC hotel. Peter Mahlangu, who I know had some problems down the line. But he was coming to stay in our place quite regularly. We were going out to a major public meeting at the Britannia Centre just off Commercial Drive in Vancouver. And I was chairing the meeting. And he was a terrific speaker in the sense that he could, he can, speak right off the cuff. And I’m sitting down – we’re just finishing up dinner– but getting ready to go out, and I’m making some notes. And he said then, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m just making some notes for tonight’s meeting.” He said, “Well, don’t you know what you want to say?”.

I said, “Yeah, I know what I want to say. And I’m just going to get my notes together.”

And he said, “Jesus Christ, if we were running around South Africa with our notes tucked in our back pocket, we’d all be dead.”

And he was a tremendous speaker. When we moved out to Port Moody, Peter was at our house. He’d been there for several weeks. And my older daughter, Kristen, had to do a show and tell. She was 12 years old at the time, in elementary school. She had to do a show and tell. What to do? So she said, “Peter, can I take you to school as my show and tell?” And he said, “Sure.” And she talked with her teacher, who said, “Sure”. And she took Peter to school as a show and tell. And they assembled the entire school in the auditorium. And he spent an hour talking to all of the kids about the anti-apartheid struggle, about South Africa. And it was just mesmerizing.

And years later, she ended up with a racist prick of a teacher. There was a First Nations kid in the class., I can’t remember the kid’s name. And he’d done really well on an assignment. And the teacher stands and picks out the kid – let’s call the kid Bobby, and says “Look at Bobby. He got an A! And he’s Indian!”. And there had been all sorts of other things coming up [about the teacher]. We were there for a parent-teacher interview. And it was one of the ones where you bring your kid along. And they’d had world maps all around the bulletin boards, which the kids had been colouring. And I walked around, and every country in the world was labeled, except for Africa. There were no countries labeled in Africa. And it was whitespace. And they had covered all the rest of it [world map].

I said to the teacher, “Ross, do you have any reason why all of these maps have labeled every other country except those in Africa? Not one of them has a label, not one of them is coloured.” And he says, “You know, in Africa, they have all got names like Huba Guba Juba.” And Kirsten, who was 12 years old, she sits there, she goes, “Mr. I think his name was Wilson [incorrect] – Mr. Wilson, I have friends from South Africa. And none of them have names like Huba Guba Juba.” And I said to him, “Ross, have you ever considered a career in real estate?”. And we went home. My wife is a teacher, and they have a code of conduct; you cannot criticize a teacher unless you’ve dealt with that teacher face to face. And she couldn’t do that as a B.C.T.F [B.C. Teachers Federation] colleague.

But a couple of days later, I made arrangements. I went in and met with the principal and I said, “Look, this guy you’ve got here is a complete racist.” I went through the examples, and I said, “Here’s the deal. If you get rid of him, you’ll be able to do it quietly. But I assure you, if I set out to get rid of him, it won’t be done quietly.” And that was in the afternoon. And the next day, I was on my way to work at the union office about an hour before school started, and saw the principal and his car in the parking lot , and that was the last day he was at that school. Unfortunately, like the Catholic Church, they shuffled him off to do damage elsewhere.

But it was that –that South African consciousness, and my kids were growing up with it. That’s how they were living their lives.

Doug Miller 55:18

You put it into their DNA.

Jane Armstrong 55:23

What does that lead to?

I guess, another question, to what degree do you think the anti- apartheid work in the 80s made a difference to unions going forward into the 90s? In terms of building Black and Aboriginal caucuses, in terms of changing what was basically systemic racism within the union movement? Did you see some of those same people who had been key activists being able to move forward with that kind of work? Over the 90s?

Jef Keighley 56:03

I would say yes. It was no question that South Africa was amongst the most egregious example that you could look at for in terms of discrimination. And only the willfully naive could ignore that. So that helped all sorts of people, myself included, see far lesser examples of discrimination and racism, but which had been of the same ilk, in the same path. And I think back then. I was the director of B.C.’s CCU labor schools. And one of the exercises that I put forward was very largely helped along and inspired by the South

Africa anti-apartheid work I’d done.

I wrote a one-page outline, called “Sam Stone’s Dilemma.” It was a little story about Sam Stone, whose family used to fish on the Fraser River, up in the Caribou. But then the railway had cut them off, and the highway came in and prevented them from doing various things. They told him he couldn’t do these various things. And so I would have the whole group break into groups of five or six people. And I wanted them to come up with an action plan as to what Sam should do.

And so they all worked together, and it takes about half an hour, and they come back, and they were going to organize boycotts, they were going to say, “We’re going to put a picket line across the railway,” or “They’re going to stop traffic”, all sorts of militant things. And it was a wonderful exercise, and then we’d break for lunch. And people would still be talking about Sam’s Dilemma, and after lunch, I’d sit back and say, “Oh, shit, I’m really sorry. I forgot one detail about Sam Stone. And the people who looked up and I said, Sam Stone is native. And all of a sudden people would look around the room and think “wow, all the things we were advocating is exactly what First Nations people are up against”.

So those things melded together. And those kinds of exercises that people go through and said, “We really got to start rethinking how we do things.” And they would carry those stories back to the plants. That would help. I mean when I was in the truck plant, the Kenworth truck plant, we had an old machinists’ local union that we killed there and knocked them out. And the company was real assholes. And they had a provision in the collective agreement that the company had the right to veto what the union put up on the union bulletin boards. So when we wanted to put something up on the boards, right, and not everybody read the bulletin board. And maybe the bulletin covered four or five different issues, we would make sure that we put something on there that just pissed the company off like crazy. And they would demand that we take down the bulletin, [but they had to put in a grievance before we might take it down].

And because the entire plant had heard the company wanted to take down the bulletin, absolutely 100% of the people went to read every single one of the four or five articles in there. And only one of the articles was there to piss the company off because we knew that got the attention of 100% of the people. And we knew stuff, whether it was on South Africa, whatever. And so the next time around, when we said at the bargaining table, “No, it’s our bulletin board. Fuck yourself. You don’t have any control over what we put on the bulletin board.” The company realized they’d been duped once too many times. So maybe they ought to give up, and did.

Doug Miller 59:59

It’s amazing the different places and how, some very big and some very small, how some kind of action takes place. I’m going to turn back to Ken and to Jane. And there are issues to cover that you think perhaps we haven’t quite looked at yet?

Ken Luckhardt 1:00:21

Not really, I mean, I think that Jef’s already given the correct impression of how many people were involved in B.C. B.C. had a very strong, progressive labour history. So that all the unions that supported us back in Eastern Canada had their locals in Vancouver as well, the postal workers, CUPE, et cetera. They then were ready to join a committee in Vancouver, which Jef and others helped to organize. So I think it was just organic growth, and good politics, and a commitment from a lot of people to do good work, fundraising, research, checking out your own plants. Are there connections that we don’t know about? It was great. Leaders, you need leadership, and people like Jef, Susan Stout, and others were instrumental. And now Jef is going to help us find some of those activists who are still alive in Vancouver in B.C., to also interview through your work.

Jane Armstrong 1:01:19

Do you have much recollection of the week of action in March of 1986 that we had called for. And it was basically airline workers refusing to handle phone calls, postal workers refusing to handle mail. Do you have much recollection of that week at all? In Vancouver?

Jef Keighley 1:01:43

Not in, not in great detail. But there were lots. The Hospital Employees Union [HEU] was another progressive group. And used a lot of the bulk food products coming out of South Africa [in hospitals and care facilities]. There was a lot of identification of [South African] products in government institutions. In prisons, any place where you’re doing bulk cooking, a lot of that was from low-cost Black labour, a product which made it financially attractive to major institutions to do bulk purchases.

And the various unions involved in the B.C. Government Employees Union were involved in some of their prison work to bring that out. And, of course, the airlines, as you’ve mentioned, because that’s where you came out of. So yeah, there was a lot of that work. The postal workers had been doing a lot. Some of the places, there wasn’t lots.

Most of the workplaces there wasn’t something that you could actually focus on. It was more of a matter of getting information out. They would read the bulletins on the board or newsletters talking about what was going on and why it was going on, even if there wasn’t something that was immediate to their work situation that they could do about it. But where it was, they were hearing enough stories that when they could see five or six or seven or eight different kinds of workplaces that could take action, (could decide that) we’re taking action. And that sends the message that this is a legitimate form of political organizing, even if you’re not particularly involved in it. Because who knows next time, it may be something that you could do in your workplace, whether it’s goods with South Africa or some other issue?

But it basically sent a message, and the education work that had gone on. And that by that time, the B.C. Fed (B.C. Federation of Labour) was actually doing some fairly decent stuff. And they weren’t entirely on board with the myopic view of the CLC. I mean, as Ken said, it was a more progressive labour movement in B.C., but that also meant that the B.C. Fed was on the left hand side of the spectrum within the CLC as well, and they were doing more work than they had previously done and, and credit should go to them as well.

I should mention as well that weekend, one of the Nedlloyd ships came into port in Vancouver. And in addition to the documentation which we always got, the longshore people refused for three days to touch those goods.

Doug Miller 1:04:35

Wow. That’s powerful stuff. Well, I think we’ve spent a rather good hour or so here. And I want to thank you, Jef, very much and, and we certainly will be back to you. There’s many other avenues to explore your connection to some of the things that is of interest to the project. One of the issues with the anti-apartheid is that we have lost a number of our comrades over the years. And so any stories you can think of that tell the story as you did with Tom McGrath and others, that those are those are, I think, part of the history that that could be missing on this. Those of us who remember them, tell them so, so we can meet again. But for the moment, I want to thank you and unless there’s anything else for the moment. Did you think of anything we missed?

Ken Luckhardt 1:05:33

Okay, I can’t believe you guys don’t know each other for all these years. What was that? I can’t believe you never met each other Doug, Jef. I don’t think over the years, I mean, I would have thought you’d cross paths with a lot of miles

Jef Keighley 1:05:44

A lot of miles between here and there.

Doug Miller 1:05:48

My directional poles point to Southern Africa. So I rarely go westwards and I think I’ve been to B.C. twice in my life now.

Jef Keighley 1:05:58

I’m 72. And I’ve yet to drive across the country.

Doug Miller 1:06:02

I managed that once. Let me turn the recording off. But before I do, I’ll just say thank you, and then we can chat as much as you want. So I want to thank you, Jef, very much for contributing like this. If you ever think of other issues to bring up or ideas to propose about this same history, we’d be happy to reconnect and re redo this and again, thank you. And thanks to Ken and Jane for being here with us. Great contribution.