Defeat and Revival:

The Dispatcher, September 1995
Edited by HARVEY SCHWARTZ

GORDON WESTRAND

“The foreman would throw tokens out in the middle of the crowd. Whoever fought hardest to get them would work.”

I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1946. I’m President of the ILWU, Canadian Area, and I’m the son and the grandson of longshoremen. I grew up a couple or three block from the waterfront. We lived in the Hastings East area, which was a working class neighborhood. In those days Vancouver was not as big a port or city as it is now, and you lived close to the port.

I started longshoring in 1965. My family was mostly what my father, who is called Gordie like me, and my relatives would have called “soldiers.” They were always the first ones to take part in union activities, but none of them ever aspired to go into the union political system or into union offices. Yet in 1973 I started attending union executive board meetings to see how they worked. I became quite taken with the process, ran for executive board in 1974, barely lost, and won the next year. After that I held several positions. I became President of the Canadian Area in 1992.

Charles Westrand, my grandfather, started working in Hasting’s Mill of Vancouver in 1906 as a longshoreman loading lumber onto ships. His nickname was “Charlie the Fish”; coming from Sweden he was a very capable fisherman. He fished and went longshoring from 1906 on, and went through several waterfront strikes in the early part of the century and in the 1920s. He had several sons by the time the big strike happened in 1935.

My grandfather died in 1938 but my father and many in the family told stories about him. Longshore work in the early part of this century was very hard. It was lumber loading mostly—heavy fletchers [6″ lumber] and heavy timbers worked in very tight, confined areas. It was all hand stow.

In the late ’20s, when many docks started to appear in Vancouver, they had the shape-up way of dispatching. My father tells how his father used to go down to the Canadian Pacific Railway dock and a place called Pier H. The foreman or the straw boss would go out and pick those people he wanted in particular. Then he had a certain number of tokens, and he’d throw the tokens out in the middle of the crowd. The person who fought the hardest to get a token would end up becoming one of the workers for that day.

If you never got picked, or never got a token, you started running. If you ran hard enough you could get down to Ballentyne Pier in enough time for their pick and their shape-up system. So you were under total domination by the employer. This continued into the ’30s, and a desire for union control over dispatching became a major goal among the longshoremen by 1935.

In the ’35 strike, my aunt’s husband, Jack Kelly, used to do all the shoe repairs for the strikers. My grandfather would go out fishing all night and then he’d go picketing during the day. He had three sons who were on the picket line with him. My uncle Carl was a semi-professional boxer; he was what they called a young buck in those days, and there was what they called the goon squad. There were many incidents on the picket line where scabs were either beating up or abusing strikers. If the scabs were billeted off of the docks—and many times they were billeted right on the docks—my uncle Carl and sometimes other people would go around and repay those individuals for transgression against some of the union members.

In those days there were a lot of inter-relationships with the families. My grandfather would make sure that certain families got fish. Those families in turn would make sure that he got vegetables. But it was still tough times; the strike went on for six months. My father remembers going to bed hungry at night. Maybe fishing was bad, or the fish had to be sold for the rent. My grandmother would give all the younger kids a slice of bread and sprinkle it with sugar. That was supper. But she wouldn’t give it to the kids until just before they went to bed, so they went to bed with something in their stomachs.

My family was in the march that ended in the Battle of Ballentyne Pier on June 18, 1935, when the police fired tear gas at the strikers and charged them. My grandfather was clubbed down at least once. My uncle Carl was clubbed down and knocked unconscious four times. I got reassurances that each of the four times he left his mark with the police officers in question.

The Battle of Ballentyne Pier was a set-up. The strikers had been marching in an orderly way to confront the scabs who were going to work. When the strikers got down there they were not in a position to see that there were a large number of mounted police officers present. They also didn’t see that there were two 50 caliber machine guns placed on a flat deck, which was rolled out to confront the pickets.

When the police charged they forced the strikers up Powell Street. There were signs in many windows there that said, “We support the strikers.” The police fired tear gas into these grocery stores and other buildings. The whole battle was uncalled-for; it was provoked by the police and the employers.

The strike was lost because of the scabs. In 1935 Canada was in the middle of a depression as the US was. People were willing to do despicable things to other people by taking their jobs and taking away their security, even though the strike itself had the support of the general public.

The strike was broken by the simple fact that the employer was able to keep his operation going. In the US during the big ’34 strike—in San Francisco especially—the longshoremen were able to stop the flow of cargo. In Canada, they were not able to do so. After the flow of cargo continued, the trike broke itself.

My grandfather, as many on the blacklist, got a phone call asking him to come back to the waterfront in 1938 when there was a lack of qualified longshoremen. He refused to return. Nobody in my family returned to the waterfront until after he died of cancer later that same year. My uncle George never returned to the waterfront. My father, who started longshoring after the war in 1947, had been a young man in 1935.

A lot of the things I heard from my family are not necessarily things that history would contain in news articles. I heard of the kinds of problems a regular striking family had; things like how do you feed the family? My father tells the story of how he’d go down to the butcher shop in ’35. In those days, liver was not something the butcher sold he gave it away. Usually he gave it to a person with a dog for dog food. It seems that that was the time my father and his brothers and sisters acquired a taste for liver.

Those are the kinds of stories I heard. This goes into my philosophy in regards to the ILWU and what the whole movement is about. What is important is the individual, “the soldier” out there who turns around and puts himself and his family in peril and through hell to better not only his conditions on the job, but also those of other workers. The thing I’m so proud of with my family is that my grandfather and three of his sons, at a time in history in Canada when it was unheard of to have a job, never mind to be striking against that job, made the kind of commitment they made, saying this is wrong and we are not going to stand for it. That is something to be proud of.

CRAIG H. PRITCHETT

“The move to join the ILWU basically arose out of a fight for a share of the work on the West Coast.”

I was born in 1924 in Westminster, just outside of Vancouver. I’m a fourth generation Canadian. My dad was a shingle weaver, a longtime union member and a founder and president of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA). So I knew intimately my dad’s connections with the building of the CIO and about his deportation from the US during the organizing days of the IWA. I was familiar with the name Harry Bridges long before I ever became a union activist in the longshoring industry.

In March 1944, the Vancouver longshoremen voted what had long been a company union into the ILWU. I was in the Canadian Army then, training to go overseas. They gave me a leave to come home, and I went to the inaugural meeting when they installed the charter of the ILWU in Vancouver, because there were a bunch of longshoremen there and I figured I’d get a drink! After the meeting they got to congregating and they said when I come home from overseas there was a job for me if I wanted to come down on the beach. So I took ’em up on it.

While the ILWU charter was installed in ’44, there were still a lot of people from ’35 there who had gone through picket lines. When I came in there were lots of young veteran coming in, but the old-timers who had controlled the union through the company union days still held office.

The old-time Vancouver longshoremen were initially anxious to get into the ILWU because the work petered off during the early war years. Most of them felt that by being with the ILWU you’d be with a whole coast-wide operation; they felt that shipping was mostly American shipping anyway. There wasn’t too much Canadian shipping then except for the Canadian Pacific Railway ships, which were blown out of the water in wartime.

So the move to join the ILWU basically arose out of a fight for a share of the work on the West Coast. By March 1944 deep-sea work had come damn near to a standstill. The Vancouver work force had dropped from 800 down to 200 to 400 men. When the old-timers agreed to join the ILWU they were desperate and lookin’ for anything. Soon the young veterans did move in there, though. So the transition to new officials was an ongoing thing which in the end wound up with a proper ILWU leadership.

JUNE 18, 1935: Police amass at Ballentyne Pier, left, before attacking union longshoremen (right) marching to protest hiring of scabs.