The Gazette, Montreal
May 17, 1919
The strike that is in progress in Winnipeg presents features, which merit serious consideration. The trouble, which was confined previously to the metal and building trades, has become general. From fifteen to twenty-five thousand employees have left their work, and all branches of commercial and industrial activities of the city are affected.
That would be sufficiently serious, but there is more. The post office employees, firemen, and street railway employees, telephone, power, and waterworks employees and yardmen and shopmen of the steam railways have walked out. Newspapers have been forced to suspend.
This means that not only has the business of the city been paralyzed, but the public services have been abandoned, and would be completely out of commission except for the action of volunteer citizens.
The Department of Labour at Ottawa has been appealed to, but the Minister of Labour has declared himself unable to act, because conciliation and arbitration have been rejected, and the workers refuse to respect the governing powers of their organizations.
The employers in the metal trades, according to the statement of Mayor Gray, of Winnipeg, have expressed their willingness to arbitrate, but the employees will not consent.
The situation as outlined illustrates in a very forcible manner the difficulty in the way of reaching what is called a better understanding between labour and capital.
In Winnipeg, labour seeks no better understanding. It has made its demands. It has declared a strike for the purpose of having those demands acceded to, whether they be just or otherwise. Arbitration has been refused, and now an attempt is being made by means of a general sympathetic strike to club employers into submission.
Thousands of men who are on strike who have no grievances of their own and do not pretend to have any grievances. (sic.) They are on strike for the purpose of “holding up the community” so that the workers in the trades originally affected will secure concessions which, it may be fairly inferred, they do not believe they could obtain through arbitration. To put the situation shortly, Winnipeg is fighting the One Big Union.
Organized labor in Canada as well as in the United States has recently, through many of its spokesmen, repudiated the principal of the One Big Union. They did so properly and wisely. But what is the use of rejecting the One Big Union in name and applying it in practice, as it is now being applied in Winnipeg? If the labor organizations of Winnipeg were members of the One Big Union, and were seeking to obtain better terms from the employers of Winnipeg, how else would they or could they go about it than by the means now being employed? They would do exactly what is being done now, and exactly what is being proposed by organized labor in Toronto as a means of realizing the claims of striking metal workers in that city.
It is apparent that the mayor and citizens of Winnipeg appreciate fully the real significance of this struggle, and are taking steps to protect the public interest. The question is not a to the merits of the claims put forward by the original strikers, but as to the means employed. The deliberate dislocation of commerce and paralysis of industry and transportation at the public expense is capable of description in very ugly words.
Whatever merit there may have been in the claims originally put forward, the strikers have put themselves out of court by refusing arbitration and resorting to force. The municipal authorities of the western city will be justified in employing drastic measures for the protection of the public interest against this outbreak of Bolshevism, for it is nothing else.
Probably a test of this sort was inevitable. It is unfortunate for Winnipeg that the test should be made there, but the situation having arisen must be met. In view of the general effect, which the outcomes of this struggle must have in other parts of Canada, the responsibility which rests upon Mayor Gray and his colleagues cannot be overstated.
-Converted to electronic format courtesy of Heather Hall