Carol Phillips

Doug Miller 00:00

And it’s now recording. So I’m Doug Miller here in Montreal with Carol Phillips with an S, Phillips.

Carol Phillips

That’s right.

Doug Miller

In Toronto, and Jane Armstrong also in Toronto and we’re about to do an interview with Carol about her experience in the anti-apartheid movement and all of the elements around that. So Carol, I’ve sent you the letter of consent. Have you read it? Do you agree with and understand what we’re –

Carol Phillips

I do, I do.

Doug Miller

And you have no problem that we’re recording this and we’re going to be using it? It’s not a, it’s going to be available to the public and to researchers and so on.

Carol Phillips

No, no problem at all.

Doug Miller 00:47

Okay, that’s wonderful. Could you just give us some brief background and who you are, where you’re from, what you did, and what you’re what you’re doing, and even now, well, I guess for it’s important.

Carol Phillips 01:02

To set out first of all that I worked at De Havilland aircraft in Downsview, where they built short take-off and landing planes. I was a union activist there in the office unit, and a militant there. I eventually became chair of the bargaining Committee. It was a really vibrant set of local unions, 112, and 673,

Doug Miller 01:35

For our listeners, those are local numbers for what union for?

Carol Phillips

CAW, at the UAW, at the time United Auto Workers, which went on to become Canadian Auto Workers, which is now Unifor.

Doug Miller

Oh, okay, wonderful.

Carol Phillips

So that was a bargaining unit that had never met a strike it didn’t like, you know, every three years we went on strike. We were very militant. We had shutdowns over health and safety, but we also had some political shutdowns if there were issues where we couldn’t get the attention of management through the regular channels, then we had walkouts on a fairly regular basis. So it was a really vibrant, active time in the trade union movement in the industrial sector, a sector that has unfortunately eroded so much since those days.

At the same time. So that was, that would have been the late 70s, early 80s, at the same time within the union, the UAW, there’s paid education leave program, where leadership was afforded the opportunity to do adult education courses that were practical for their uses as leadership, but also class based, that talked about class issues that an awful lot of us in the industrial sector as working class people had not really reflected on before, and so it helped us to put some of the struggles we were having at the local level in a much wider context, in a much broader context at that time.

Also I met members of the SACTU solidarity committee who were organizing in local unions throughout the trade union movement, but It felt as if, with particular access within the UAW organizing local committees at the local level to try and get workers interested in the anti-apartheid struggle with a class based analysis.

And I think that’s what was really important at the time, because the churches were doing a lot of it. The churches in Canada were an amazing part of the anti apartheid struggle during those days, but there was less of a class approach to it, not wanting to generalize too much and be unfair, but there was more of a small L liberal. Everybody knew, from our perspective, that Apartheid was so obviously wrong, so such an obvious injustice. Is that for progressive churches, of course, it was a unnatural.

SACTU took it a little bit further for some of those in the workplace in managing to connect that struggle to the struggles we were actually having in our own workplaces, so that while there is no way I would compare the repression or the power structure, I wouldn’t compare that between the two systems, Canada and South Africa, or, you know, our system and apartheid. I wouldn’t compare that, but it was a worker struggle. And that we could relate to, and SACTU did that very well. So that was, that was at the local level, SACTU started up in 19 the 1980s, and I think as a local 1980 I think in Toronto, I think as a local union person, I was involved fairly shortly after, when I met Ken Luckhardt at an education session in Port Elgin.

So Port Elgin played a very key role in educating a lot of Unionists about the struggle of the workers of South Africa, then a very key role. Yes, a very key role. I mean, it’s, it’s continued to play a key role in all sorts of ways, in terms of education, but that was key to those of us who were starting to get radicalized around South Africa.

Doug Miller

In your own personal evolution, had you any previous militant background or awareness of issues of race and class before you got involved in the union work at De Havilland and the UAW? Naturally, I had some, because I think you couldn’t be a consciously aware Canadian and not have heard of either the Indigenous struggles in Canada or the movements in the United States that were going on. But was I involved? No, not really.

Now, I do want to also disclose that I, as a young child, lived in South Africa. My father was skilled trades person in the UK, and of course, in those days, in the 50s, UK was a fairly impoverished place for working class people, and so he emigrated to the colonies. So first colony he emigrated to was South Africa. So I did possibly follow what was going on in South Africa a bit more closely than a fair number of people you know, the average person. However, having said that, did I know what to do? Did I know how to organize? Did I know where to put my distaste or outrage over it? Not really, not until SACTU offered that opportunity, in terms of being able to do that, that’s pretty powerful stuff.

Doug Miller 08:37

That’s amazing. So within the local union, you become an activist, you’re militant, you’re exposed to the SACTU committee. Where did it go from? From there?

Carol Phillips

Well, I also then would meet some staff with the UAW who were also supportive of the SACTU solidarity committee, and key among them who I remember is Pat Clancy. Pat Clancy, who was a staff rep out of Oshawa and an amazing organizer who took solidarity to a very practical level, really pushed on the issues of solidarity, as I recall as well.

Bob White was, would refer to what was happening under the apartheid system in South Africa, the need to solidarity at our council meetings, councils of local union leaders who would meet, he would give a report, and in that report, he would not only talk about issues of the Union itself, but he was a real internationalist, and he broadened his analysis to other struggles that were going on at the time, including South Africa.

Doug Miller 10:06

Those names Pat Clancy and Bob white come up frequently whenever we talk about the UAW and these struggles. And so we do appreciate any background you have that you would like to share about these kinds of people who are no longer with us to be interviewed?

Carol Phillips

Yeah, Pat Clancy was an interesting character, a very interesting character. You know, an awful lot of staff reps now, man, it’s so hard not to generalize and potentially insult somebody. And I’m going to try not to, because it’s not fair, but a lot of staff reps get on with their jobs very well. They organize the workers at the local level. They do terrific bargaining, they put together terrific collective agreements. But then, very often, they don’t take it any further than that. And then there are the few Pat Clancy among them who also gets involved in community issues, much broader than the Union itself, who practice what we call social unionism.

Doug Miller

Aha, there’s okay. That’s the concept.

Carol Phillips

Yes, and who understand that you can’t narrow it down. You can’t narrow down a struggle amongst workers to one sector, one workplace, one sector, one union, one country, that there is a class base for this struggle, and so they broaden it. Pat Clancy used to do that in the most wonderfully pragmatic way. He not only talked a good line, he also would take action. And although I’m not, certainly not the expert on it. He would, for an example, in negotiations with General Motors. He would raise issues of sanctions. He would raise issues of pension investments. He would raise those issues and expect them to be dealt with or addressed in exactly the same way as he would expect the company to be answerable for the hourly wage to him. He had that broader spectrum when, when he was talking about negotiations, that the one included the other, and then you had people like Sam Gindin, who was the research director, who I’m still very close to, who would come in and assist in putting together very detailed information to back up any of the claims we were making at the table, so it wasn’t just ideological.

Carol Phillips 13:12

You could also make the fact based evidence clear to companies and the consequences that there might be outside of just that bargaining table, should they not take action and they knew that if there was one thing that our union, and a lot of unions at the time, I don’t want to be too cavalier and say it was just our union, because there were a lot of unions at the time who would take on those kind of campaigns. So it wasn’t just within the union itself. It was a broader campaign, and the companies knew that. The companies knew that they couldn’t run from us if it could run from us at the bargaining table, but they had annoyed us enough that we’d catch them somewhere else.

Doug Miller 14:09

Cool. So cool. Well, so there you are. You’re at De Havilland. Did you have any particular actions that you can remember that involved the struggle? Not so much particular actions, because in 1982

Carol Phillips 14:26

Not so much particular actions, because in 1982, I went on to the staff of the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Doug Miller

82

Carol Phillips

In 82

Doug Miller

Oh, my goodness.

Carol Phillips 14:37

So from Toronto, I went straight from being an activist at the local level to the staff in Ottawa, where they had set up a woman’s Directorate. And I went there, I have a couple of interesting stories from those days as well. So the international work that was being done by the Canadian Labour Congress at that time, and I knew this from being an activist, was still pretty cold war based, and was very much in sync with whatever the federal government was doing at the time. There was a director of the International Department at that time named John Harker. I don’t know if his name has come up.

Doug Miller

Oh, yes.

Carol Phillips

Oh, has it? Okay. So John Harker –

Doug Miller

We don’t have to be shy anymore.

Carol Phillips 15:41

John Harker had a very cold warrior approach to international solidarity. He was not afraid of calling Well, neither was anybody in the government at that time, to be fair to John, of calling Mandela a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organisation. And so the CLC international policy reflected that when I came there, one of the things I decided might be fun was to have my mail, which included the SACTU newsletter come to my office in Ottawa, which, of course, was in the same building as every other department in Ottawa. And believe it or not, after it came, shortly after it came, John Harker came to have a chat with me. Oh my goodness and say to me “Carol, I see you know you’re getting these internet this, this active solidarity committee newsletter. You do understand who these people are, don’t you?”. And I said, “Yeah, actually, I do”. Because, you know, part of this SACTU solidarity committee, he was, we debated for quite a while. He was horrified, and went back, because I had friends in the international department, he went back and he said, “we’re going to have to keep an eye on her. She’s from the Dan Benedict and SACTU Solidarity Committee School of International Affairs”. It was very funny.

The thing he didn’t appreciate was that Dennis McDermott had hired me. I had not been recommended by my union or my future good friend, Bob White for that position, I was branded as not a team player, therefore they didn’t think that Dennis McDermott should hire me. Dennis McDermott loved that kind of thing. He was an interested, interesting, much maligned character.

And so he hired me. And so when John Harker went to talk to Dennis about this potential communist in the women’s department who was attached to SACTU solidarity committee, Dennis just roared. Had me up there to tell me that John has been talking to him, and said, “you just carry on, sister, whatever it is you know that you’re doing that’s getting up his nose. I know the affiliates are clearly interested in a lot of what they’re doing, so you just carry on”.

And I did good for Dennis. That’s amazing. And you’re right. He’s a much maligned figure. Dennis comes out of the auto workers was Dennis was there prior to Bob white. Dennis was amazing in the civil rights movement in the United States. He marched with, he was supportive of and with Cesar Chavez, he was among the first leaders to not only support ideologically, but financially, the Farm Workers Union. He also was incredibly supportive of affirmative action, but he had a hard time applying affirmative action to women for a while. Affirmative action for him was race based, not gender based. So Dennis was a product of his time.

However, I would say that on the pendulum of where he moved things, he moved things, definitely to the progressive side. I never understood why Dennis tolerated John Harker. Never understood it whatsoever. Because if Dennis could find a way to circumvent John Harker, he did and so on a number of issues, but I never understood it.

Doug Miller 20:19

Well. His name comes up very frequently in the anti-apartheid discussions because of that particular cold warrior approach that you described. How did you feel working within that? Was it a frustration that you couldn’t did it squelch your capacities to talk about the struggle in the terms that you related to?

Carol Phillips

It certainly didn’t squelch mine. It didn’t move the CLC along, though, because my department was a women’s department, and at that time, the women’s department needed all the attention it could get,

because the trade union movement even more so than today was a real, very sexist and male dominated movement. So my energies then went from 1982 to 1984 while I was at the CLC. During that period, my energies went into women and advancing, advancing women into leadership roles so and maybe just before we leave that moment in that place,

Doug Miller 21:34

In terms of your evaluation of John Harkers role and the International Department of CLCs role, how did, how do you feel he impacted the movement of the anti-apartheid struggle in Canada?

Carol Phillips 21:50

I think at the beginning, it slowed down. However, I think that when SACTU came along at just the right time there, there was a need. People wanted a way to organize around anti-apartheid struggles within the Canadian Trade Union movement and SACTU while they were methodical in going to local union leaderships and also methodical in following progressive strings within movements. People were waiting for them, I don’t think that’s unfair to say. I don’t think that SACTU necessarily awakened a need that wasn’t there. I think they organized a need that was there so that, I think by 1989 the CLC was being pushed out of international department, was being pushed out of the International area by a lot of unions who were going their own way. It was a, and I specify 1989 because there was a resolution, I think, at the Ontario Federation of Labour Convention in 89 there was a resolution that says, “we want a made in Canada, Canadian union, international policy, not a made in Brussels, ICFTU International Policy”, and that passed overwhelmingly at the Ontario Federation of Labour. And it was really a clear message to the CLC that the affiliates were way ahead of them on a number of issues, including apartheid.

Doug Miller

And the OFL, of course, carried a lot of weight in that context. Sorry, sorry, Jane.

Jane Armstrong

Just that’s triggered another memory. I think a precursor to that convention in 89 was 86 maybe because it used to be once every three years. As I recall the OFL, maybe every two years. But there was a convention at the OFL where Cliff Pilkey was the president, Louis Lynn Kinsey the secretary treasurer. And there were a lot of resolutions around the anti-apartheid struggle and also calling for support for SACTU through the SACTU solidarity committee. And as I recall, the resolutions committee was recommending nonconcurrence because of the cold war. Her in CLC adherence. I remember Bob White, and just wondering whether you remember that Bob White getting to the, getting down from the podium as president, and getting to a mic on the floor and just delivering a barn burner of a speech, as he could basically saying, “Enough, this is the kind of support that we need to give”. And the resolution passed overwhelmingly. The whole nonconcurrence got reversed. It was quite extraordinary. Yeah, I think that was really a fundamental turning point again, you know, led by the CAW, I believe we had already split by that point in time.

But again, it was a huge pushback to John Harker. Do you ever recall any speculation that Harker basically was recommended by the federal government for that job, almost in a quid pro quo, if you want as an international affairs department, money from CIDA or any other government grants, here’s who has to be put in charge of International Affairs? There was a lot of speculation at the time, zero evidence.

Carol Phillips 26:32

Yeah, there was speculation, and there is no doubt that even if that wasn’t the case, the majority of the CLC had a large international department, much larger than their due space should have accounted for. But the reason they did is because they had CIDA money, who paid the wages of, I believe it may have been as many as eight out of 10 of the staff on the CLC international department at that time, of course, what that resulted in? And there were reports written afterwards, reports written on behalf of the CLC that are, you know, in the public domain, where they said, “So inevitably, if we were to continue to get CIDA money, then we had to put together projects that were within the area of importance to the federal government and which had a direction which complemented the federal government’s”. You know, those reports are in the public domain, so it’s not far fetched to say that they were really integrated with foreign affairs and with and that their funding was dependent on that kind of cooperation and that kind of integration. I’m not even sure they would these days, you know, deny it.

And as I said, there is one report that was written at the time because in in the Ford negotiations that I participated in, and would it have been late 80s, we put to I put on the table the demand for a social justice fund. And everybody you know, Bob laughed, Buzz Hargrove, who was there, laughed and said, “Oh my goodness. You mean you think we can get the employers to pay one cent per member into a fund in order to be able to train little revolutionaries all over the world? Oh sure, yes, yeah, okay, Carol, put that on the table. But you know, don’t hold your breath”.

Totally, coincidentally or not, there was a strike that year at Ford. There was a strike, and a short strike, and they sent in the big wigs from Detroit to say, “What the heck is going on, settle this?”. You know, on the big wigs from the company, I mean. And so they said, “”. And they went down the list, you know, “this, this, this, this, what’s this? One cent per hour per give it to them”. They said, get that off the table, as they do. And that resulted in the social justice fund of the of the CAW at the time.

As a result of that, the CLC had a fit, because we now had the steel workers with their own social justice fund, you know. And you had people like Judith Marshall there and progressive people on Southern Africa and the auto workers. So the CLC International Department was just saying, “oh my god, we’re losing control here, totally, even of projects that can be funded”. We formed a committee with the CLC to be able to push projects forward, and we had never ending debates about the implication of government funding and what that did to us, and what it meant in terms of the direction that international work within the trade union movement could take if we had to depend on them funding it.

So all of that is a long explanation to lead back to even though there’s no proof around. John Harker, clearly, there was undue direct influence in the direction of international policy within the CLC.

Doug Miller

Do you think that went to the extent that, for instance, the CLC wouldn’t support the sanctions campaigns or boycott campaigns?

Carol Phillips 31:04

I think inevitably it went there. And you know what? I like Jane’s comment, because it makes me it gives me something to lean on, and that is no proof. However, when you’re parroting the policies of the federal government, around sanctions, around the ANC being a terrorist organisation, around armed revolution, around etc., stands to reason that you didn’t necessarily come to that place all on your own, because it wasn’t because the affiliates were saying that. It’s like not the affiliates were saying sanctions. The affiliates were saying, you know, they, you got to pick up arms. If the other side is picking up arms. The affiliates were saying, you know, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

The affiliates and the activists within the trade union movement were clear about where they wanted to be, and it was not where the CLC was or the federal government. You know, the federal government got religion very late.

Doug Miller

That’s well put. Thank you so much for framing it like that and so well. So you really saw the SACTU and the anti-apartheid movement reaching a broad based membership and actually having an impact there.

Carol Phillips 32:41

Definitely, oh, no doubt about it. Absolutely no doubt about it. If it hadn’t been for the organizing within the SACTU committees, I really don’t think that the trade union movement would have moved as far as it did, as fast as it did, and I would be it’s just occurring to me now, as we’re thinking about it, I would also say that as a result of activists realizing that they could think on their own, they could analyze on their own. They could come to a critical point in that analysis on their own, without the CLC telling them what to think. They applied it to other issues. They applied it to Nicaragua. They applied it to Palestine. They applied it to a number of other issues where they were going up against their best instincts. They were going up again against a policy that the CLC had that didn’t reflect what they were thinking would be the right way to go. So I think the influence that they had was very important to generations of folks who said, “let’s put some critical analysis to this. Let’s see what else we can do, other than have to parrot what the CLC is telling us”.

Doug Miller 34:22

Tremendous, tremendous.

Carol Phillips 34:31

I did want to mention a couple of other things as well. In 1990 when Nelson Mandela went free, at last

within he went on that world tour shortly after, if you remember, it was February that Nelson Mandela walked free. For the next four months, he toured the world, and went out because he wanted to say thank you to organizations in around the world. He was, he was out there on behalf of the ANC. He came to Toronto, and one of the groups he wanted to meet with was the trade union movement. Of course, you know, Mulroney had him. Mulroney had him speak to the House of Commons, and that he was one of the few people who, as a non head of government, actually spoke to the House of Commons.

Mulroney was taken around, but he, his group, and he insisted he wanted to thank the churches in the trade union movement, so we had a round table with Nelson Mandela and Winnie at the time, and trade union leaders were there. There was about 10 of us, and Bob White dragged me along because I had been involved and he was so angry, Bob White. When we got to the table, and he looked around before Nelson Mandela came in, and he looked around, and he said to some of the trade union leaders who were there, “oh, so all of a sudden, Nelson Mandela is your hero. What happened? “.He’s not a terrorist anymore. He’s not, you know, like they were there in spite of the fact that they had held a totally opposite position to a lot of the progressive unions.

And he was absolutely livid that they were sitting there in spots that he thought rightfully anti-apartheid fighters should have been sitting in, not those heads of unions who had not supported the anti-apartheid movement or sanctions for all those years.

Doug Miller

Hey, Bob was quite a feisty character, wasn’t he?

Carol Phillips

Oh, I think that’s an understatement. Never didn’t speak his mind no matter who was there,

Doug Miller 37:13

Amazing. So you were able to see this evolution very, very close up in quite privileged positions there, I feel, oh, I feel incredibly privileged, incredibly privileged.

Carol Phillips 37:29

I feel, oh, I feel incredibly privileged, incredibly privileged. However, you know, if I think of it now, the trajectory of my radicalization on this issue began at the local level with SACTU solidarity committee, I mean, and the fact that we stayed in touch all the way through, the fact that they challenged power within the trade union movement as well, but through activists, I mean SACTU solidarity committee, Jane and Ken and Ken and Brenda did not have positions of power from which they could challenge the

trade union movement, it wouldn’t have made any difference.

But what they had was they had a conviction and a determination and the facts to share directly with workers and also a respect for the workers that they could figure this out without having to be told by the experts in Ottawa and the International Department what they should be thinking about this kind of issue.

So I ended up being privileged to be able to have a seat at a table and watch a lot of this happening, but my radicalization was what took me there, and that certainly started with the SACTU solidarity committee that took me right through to 1992 when I was back at the CLC. But I was back at the CLC with Bob White at the helm, and he was the president. I was there as assistant to the president of the Canadian Labour Congress. And his first trip in 1992 was to South Africa to meet leadership at the political level and at the local level, we met some fabulous Labour Council folks in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg and Durban Cape Town, and to do that, but also we had an incredible, close to two-hour meeting with Nelson Mandela in the Shell building at the time, and it was amazing. It was, you know, I don’t claim to have had anything profound, to have really said there, but it was amazing that after all this time, that’s where we were with Nelson Mandela back and ready to fight an election, a democratic election over the next two years

Doug Miller

Must have been a powerful moment.

Carol Phillips 40:47

Oh, incredibly powerful. And you know, probably as a lefty, you’re not supposed to say things like this, certainly, as a feminist lefty, you’re not supposed to say things like this. But there are people who say that not all of us are the same. And I don’t mean, you know, just in terms of wealth or intellect or whatever, but there are some people that have gone sort of an aura about them back in the old days, when you see these paintings of saints with these auras about them, and in that room, that’s how it felt being in there with Nelson Mandela at that time. Was, it really was being in the presence of greatness, not that he acted that way, because, as you hear from everybody, he was pretty humble and self-effacing. But what he wanted to do was to talk about two things, number one, about the importance of the anti-apartheid struggle internationally, especially in churches and unions,

Doug Miller 42:03

Not not, not surprising.

Carol Phillips

But also about his hopes for a free South Africa and his hopes for the workers of South Africa, something that maybe if you ever do another broadcast on these kind of issues, has been hugely betrayed, in my mind, betrayed by some of the people we actually met during that 1990 tour, 1992 tour. But that’s a whole other issue, and doesn’t take away at all from the anti-apartheid struggle. Well, I would like to go over some of those reflections before we finish today, but I would like to take you back to your work when you were with the Women’s Committee at the CLC, because.

Doug Miller 43:02

Well, not because, but I’m interested to have a reflection on the anti-apartheid movement itself in terms of its integration of women and, for that matter, indigenous peoples and people of colour. Did you feel the anti-apartheid movement was reaching out broadly in that sense, or involving people?

Carol Phillips 43:27

It has to be relative, and it has to be based on the times. I would say the anti-apartheid movement was more consciously reaching out than any other part of the mainstream left at the time, certainly more so than the trade union movement. You know, the reckoning in the women’s movement came a little bit late in terms of integration and not integration, but in terms of diversity within the women’s movement.

But I think that because of who SACTU was, because of the struggle, then you’re more consciously aware of what was missing in these pieces, what was missing in committees, in outreach, in those, obvious places where we did not have enough diversity and enough representation, and that we weren’t reflecting enough so I’m not the best person to speak to on that, but certainly that would have been my on reflection. That would have been my observation.

Doug Miller 45:00

I think you were well situated, though, to look at it. I Also, what about other components? You’ve talked a lot about the unions, of course, that’s your experience. And you’ve mentioned the churches. Did you have much collaboration with the other elements? Components, active groups as well?

Carol Phillips 45:23

Not me directly. No, I know that as coalitions, it was, it was a time when broader coalitions were starting to form around issues, and it was for me, anyway, the beginning of an understanding, excuse me, that the trade union way was not the only way. That was because I was being radicalized as a feminist and in a number of other ways, that there were other organizations that had just as much to offer and had different approaches to how they offered them, but that joining together was the only way to build any kind of critical mass.

Doug Miller 46:26

You obviously grew a lot, and you’ve spoken about that. Can you reflect a bit on that, that evolution and that impact on you, the anti-apartheid movement had on you?

Carol Phillips 46:42

When you’re forced to critically analyze anything, and we were forced to do that a lot within SACTU. And not just within SACTU, it was also within the anti-apartheid movement, in around Israel and Palestine as well, when you’re forced to look for inconsistencies and you’re forced to look for contradictions, then you’re bound to grow and you can always, I always feel confident in looking at a situation, if I do a number of things, I figure out what the contradictions are there. I also figure out who my allies are, or allies would naturally be, and who’s on the other side.

And I also try and figure out what’s missing from the picture, whether it’s you know, in anti-racism, in feminism, in a number of other issues, who’s missing from the picture and a lot of those kind of skills were the were the kind of skills that were being encouraged in the paid education leave movement within the unions. I also think they’re the kind of things that as you become aware of the situation, as you become conscious of what’s going on, and especially in your 20s, you know, I not to take away from any of us who are still active.

Your 20s is a pretty exciting time when whole worlds are opening up to you, whole areas of opportunities to look for allies around issues where you’re angry, you can either stay by yourself and be angry, or you can find allies and try and figure out if there are actions that you can take. And I guess that’s what I meant when I said earlier that a number of us were angry about a number of issues, and then one of them was South Africa, and then the SACTU solidarity committee came along and gave us an opportunity to help to build a movement, an opportunity that was really needed.

And there are so many areas now where you kind of wish that, or you hope because maybe it’s happening, and I don’t know enough to know, but you hope that some of the methods, some of the skills, some of the outreach that happened around the SACTU solidarity committee is also out there happening around other social issues, whether it’s anti racism, whether it’s the environment, a number of issues that they’re applying some of those same lessons in order to build a broad based movement. Sometimes there’s too much emphasis on lobbying those that are in power, rather than just shaking the foundations of some of those structures that are in power and I think just some of those lessons can come from SACTU.

Doug Miller

That’s a powerful message there. On another note, we often ask people if they have any mementos, any t shirts or pamphlets or pictures or whatever that that date back to that period. And do you have anything still in your possession?

Carol Phillips 51:07

Unfortunately, no, I have my vanity photos. You know, of photos with Mandela. But other than that, no, but you know, it’s interesting the other night, when you had the get together of the SACTU solidarity committee, and somebody held up the newsletter. I immediately recognized it, and I thought I used to add so many of those. I used to have so many t-shirts, you know. But unfortunately, they’re gone. So I hope Jane, you and folks will be able to get some of those together.

Jane Armstrong 51:45

Interesting that you mentioned that because mostly none of us have anything either. You know, we’ve all downsized. I still have the little lapel pin back twos that we sold, and that is all that I have kept as a memento. And I have a photograph of Zola Zembe Speaking at the founding convention of the UAW Canada, our first convention before we went to CAW, right, you know, and a couple of other, as you call them, vanity photographs. Yeah, we’re hoping we can get the word out.

Doug Miller

But yes, we’re gathering, we’re gathering it.

Jane Armstrong 52:37

And I want to go back to a point that you made that I think is very important where you responded to Doug asking the question about, you know, the broader outreach in terms of anti-racism into indigenous communities, etc., and you’re absolutely right. You have to situate it in the context of what was happening in the 80s and the basically systemic racism amongst employers as to who they hired and where. We do know that black workers got hired in the foundries, for example, around St Catharines, but and in steel works and in healthcare, not at all unlike today.

But I think one thing that we were able to do is we brought a lot of young black trade unionists who had been leaders like Toz Miller Bota in the Ford strike in South Africa where he had to leave the country or probably face imprisonment. We brought him in the early years, and Pat Clancy took him on a tour of the Ford plant. I’m sure he just told management, we’re going in. Normally, very difficult to get anybody from the outside in on the plant floor. But you know, he came Sipo Puchana, Toza Miller, Maketa, who was a miner, there were just so many, but we ended up taking them to places where I don’t think the membership, had ever met a black trade union leader, and these were young people and articulate and militant fighting incredible repression at great personal cost to so many.

And I think that had a lasting impact, as the Union also worked through internally having to push forward black leadership. And you talked about Port Elgin, you know, eventually we had programs for giving black leadership training from all the locals across Canada in a in a safe, comfortable space. And I think all of those things did make a difference, particularly in the late 80s and the early 90s, when a lot of that work got more seriously, undertaken by the union.

Carol Phillips 55:31

Yeah, yeah. Very good.

Doug Miller 55:35

Well, then, boy, this is this has been amazing, and I would really like to return to, okay, what do you think now 30 years later, was the effect of all our work? And just a general feeling now about what’s happened both Canada and South Africa for that matter.

Carol Phillips 56:01

All right, I looked at a few photographs from the 1992 visit, and there were a couple of folks in there that I recognized who had been leadership in the trade unions at that time, Johnny Copelyn, who was the head of the textile union, and Marcel Golding, who was the Research Director for the National Union of mine workers. And we met with both of them, and they spoke, as so many did, so passionately about justice for workers, and today they’re both multi-millionaires, both completely entrenched in the capitalist corporate sector.

And what I always have trouble getting my head around is, how do you leave a lifetime of struggle like that so far behind? And I think that for an awful lot of the working class in South Africa, life is just as hard. The injustices are just as hard. You know they still are not properly served by their system. So while I know that, that there is no comparison there was, there has been progress on some areas like health care, apparently. I still am always set back on my heels as a progressive, because I don’t understand how that kind of betrayal can happen. So that’s a bit of a downer.

Maybe it’s covid brain that is causing this. I don’t know, but, I mean, I also know Mozambique from many years of work in Mozambique and same kind of things you know are unfortunately happening there. So like here, making change for workers continues to be very, very hard, and the system that we thought, and I’ll take that back, the system that we still all live under, whether it’s In South Africa or Canada or the United States or many other countries, is still very, very tough on workers.

Doug Miller 59:31

Wow. Thank you. I guess we framed this in terms of anti-apartheid. So it came about that. We talked about South Africa a lot, but our view, and as Jerry Kaplan was involved mostly with Zimbabwe early on, included that whole anti colonial struggle and the struggles of the frontline states to because they were impacted so much by it. Can you speak a little bit about your Mozambique implication?

Carol Phillips 1:00:10

Well, I was late to Mozambique. Do you know Frank Luce?

Doug Miller 1:00:16

I don’t. Personally, I believe Jane is –

Carol Phillips

Okay, because Frank is a fascinating character, and has not only been involved in Angola, Mozambique, he’s been intimately involved. I mean, he helped them, assisted them both in putting together the labour legislation. The came post-colonial, when I first he was on the staff of the CAW when I first went to Mozambique on behalf of the social justice fund, the international department in the CA w at the time, and he accompanied me, and believe it or not, he was people came up to him and said, “Frankie LucE, I haven’t seen you for ages”, you know, because he had been so involved. So I think on Mozambique Angola, some of those post-colonial struggles, he would be a much better person than me to speak to. I can only speak to the work our Union did, assisting on land mine removal, which was pretty far from this.

But of course, within the work, you had to learn about the struggle, and you had to learn about the politics and RENAMO and Frelimo and the revolutionary war. You know, so many of the things that happen in southern Africa have the same roots of, you know, CIA, United States, undermining revolutionary movements, causing splits. So many of them have those, those kind of roots that are there, and how those have managed to live on, and the legacy from those roots is quite frightening, quite frightening, because there are so many similarities in so many of the Southern African countries where you tried to mix a revolution with subsequently, you know, capitalism and the way that those revolutionary movements were undermined has a lot of commonality throughout the region.

Doug Miller 1:02:55

Amazing, amazing. Well, Jane, do you have anything else you’d like to bring up?

Jane Armstrong 1:03:04

Not that I can think of. Although, Carol, do you remember when Mandela came and there were all those school children who, yeah, into the baseball was that later on with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, or was it?

Carol Phillips 1:03:31

Yeah, I was on, I was on the board of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Subsequently, okay, raising money for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund in South Africa. But that was there were 40,000 school children came to the Rogers Centre. Now, whatever it was back then, I don’t know, 40,000 that came down to greet Nelson Mandela. And what was just incredible about it was that that was a whole other generation whose teachers had prepared them for the event by explaining who he was and what apartheid had been, something that they would not have known about. And to me, that was almost, you know, the most important thing about the event was that it was in the curriculum for a while and certainly should be in the curriculum going forward. I don’t know if it is.

I do know that my granddaughter, who is 17, now, one of my grandchildren. I was talking to her lately about apartheid, and she didn’t know really about apartheid. It’s not in the curriculum. It’s not taught, and it really should be.

The second most important thing about that event, and you know what I’m going to say, Jane, is that the premier, Mike Harris came on stage and 40,000 school children booed. It was wonderful, 40,000 because we were into a huge fight with Mike Harris, and they just they’d heard from their parents, they’d heard from their teachers. They did not like this man.

Jane Armstrong

Part of the reason I asked that was about exactly what you brought out about school curriculums, and when you mentioned your granddaughter, my son’s partner, who has a master’s from OISE in education, didn’t know what apartheid was, right. He knew of Nelson Mandela, and she knew there was racism in South Africa, and that was the extent of it. And to me, part of the motivation of trying to put together the history of what happened in the 1980s is formed by two events. One is learning that there are a lot of young people who don’t know anything about it in conjunction with the rise up of Black Lives Matter, and I’m thinking, wow, you know, there’s this gap here that isn’t in the education system. As far as I know, it’s been dropped entirely out of the curriculum unless some teacher particularly wants to do a unit on it or something.

So I think that’s one aspect of why some of this material has to be brought together, and we have to work at reaching out to school boards and teachers unions to say this has to be taught. This history cannot be forgotten.

Carol Phillips 1:06:59

And I think also Jane, the benefit from it. And, you know, I don’t want to get no, I don’t want to say that either. I was going to say I don’t want to get too political. But what else is there? The benefit from it is, I think that for a lot of kids, if they knew about apartheid, they would and understood how it was such an appalling system, and how it was allowed to go on for so long. They would then find contradictions around the world for systems in other countries that you know we’re making excuses for, like Israel and Palestine, and they would and understanding as much as they can about where we have been and what we’ve tolerated can lead to asking questions about contradictions and so I think there, there’s a real benefit in that way too.

Doug Miller 1:08:05

Wow, pretty powerful stuff. And I’m, I guess I was going to ask if you had any last reflections, but I think we’re doing that, aren’t we? Okay, well, listen, if that’s the case, and you have anything else to say, please feel free otherwise. I Wow. What a tremendous reflection, what a tremendous insight. I must say that for this project, the Canadian anti-apartheid activist project, we every story is so unique and special and powerful. People really live this in an amazing way. So I want to thank you very much, Carol.

Carol Phillips 1:08:53

Thank you guys for doing this, boy, pulling this all together, all these people. I’m really looking forward to seeing the final project, because the product, because, as you say, there must be incredible stories out there. I listened to Brenda. That’s why I wanted to hear you, too, Jane. But I listened to Brenda give a bit of a summary of the things that they had been through. And even though I knew some of it, it’s just so powerful when it’s from the person who lived.

Doug Miller 1:09:26

Exactly, exactly. Well, I thank you again. I’m going to turn the record button off because it’s going to take the poor old zoom couple of days.