This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(September 2015) |
The British Columbia Maritime Employers Association is an association representing the interests of member companies in industrial relations on Vancouver's and other British Columbian seaports.
The BCMEA currently consists of sixty-seven member companies with commercial interests based on the waterfronts of Vancouver and other seaports in British Columbia. The BCMEA is the Employer Association of companies that employ longshoremen, who in turn are represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to bargain with the BCMEA on their behalf. In addition to collective bargaining, the BCMEA handles everyday labour matters, such as administering the collective agreement, payroll services, discipline, and grievance and arbitration hearings on behalf of its members.
Formed after World War I to handle the rapidly growing commercial traffic on the waterfront, it was originally called the Shipping Federation of British Columbia, comprising shipping, railway and container companies, as well as terminal and storage operators.
The Shipping Federation was established during what Canadian historians have called the Canadian Labour Revolt in the period following World War I, which peaked in Canada with the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. the Employers felt they needed to band together, not only because port operations were becoming increasingly complex, but as a bulwark against unionism generally, and union militancy in particular. Vancouver hosted the first Canadian General Strike in Canada in 1918 following the police killing of union leader, Ginger Goodwin. The following year a longer and more extensive general strike was called by the Trades and Labour Council in sympathy with the strike in Winnipeg. Longshoremen were among the first to walk out, but were quickly replaced by strikebreakers who were mainly university and high school students.
By the time the next strike erupted on Vancouver's waterfront, the Shipping Federation had adopted an even more rigidly anti-union policy, influenced by its recent association with counterparts in the United States, who were following what had been dubbed the American Plan. It then set out to break the union completely and establish a company union. Again, it recruited strikebreakers both as replacement workers and as special constables. The CPR's ocean liner, the Empress of Japan, was used to house strikebreakers for the duration of the strike. The strike was quickly brought to an end after the Federation took over the duties of despatching work gangs from the union and refused to negotiate with the union, the International Longshoremen's Association. It established the Vancouver and District Waterfront Workers' Association to replace the ILA as a company union.
Almost a decade of peace followed the 1923 strike. It was not a lasting peace however, and in 1933 the Shipping Federation discovered that not only had the union been transformed by Communist Party organizers into a militant union, but also that agitators were planning a general strike for the province to begin on Vancouver's waterfront in 1935.
Communists were active both on the waterfront and in the government relief camps for the unemployed, as well as several other industries, organizing workers into unions affiliated with the Communist trade union umbrella, the Workers' Unity League. During this era, the Comintern, or Communist International in Moscow was prescribing a policy of dual unionism. The Shipping Federation was thus centrally positioned during what was effectively another Red Scare in 1935.
The general strike never happened in 1935, and striking relief camp workers left the city shortly after the waterfront strike finally was called for the On-to-Ottawa Trek. Technically it was a lock-out. The union voted to take back control of despatching work gangs because discrimination, blacklisting, and the arbitrary allocation of work had long been a major grievance for longshoremen. According to the most recent contract however, the Federation was to handle dispatching, and therefore treated the union's action as a breach of contract.
The 1935 strike had seeped into the political realm much more extensively than the 1923 strike had. The civic administration of Mayor Gerry McGeer, along with his chief constable, Colonel Foster had joined with the Shipping Federation to defeat the Communist threat. The Communists had been planning to merge the waterfront and relief camp strike, and hopefully other industrial workers into a general strike. Although these various groups of worker's were willingly under Communist leadership, they primarily were pursuing resolution to their own workplace grievances, not a proletarian revolution.
The strike peaked with the July 18, 1935 Battle of Ballantyne Pier, where the police clashed with strikers and their supporters who had attempted to march down to the harbour. Three levels of police were on hand, plus a plethora of special constables, organized in part by the Shipping Federation's Citizens' League of British Columbia, a vigilante group it funded to fight the strike and generate anti-strike/anticommunist propaganda. Again, the strike was broken, and the union replaced with a company union.
The Communists shifted away from the dual unionism strategy and dissolved the Workers' Union League. Agitators now put their organizing energy behind the CIO industrial union movement. The Shipping Federation stepped back from it overt anticommunism, but continued to fund a variation of the Citizens' League, the Industrial Association of British Columbia under the leadership of Colonel C. E. Edgett, former police chief, prison warden, and leading local anticommunist polemicist. Nevertheless, workers managed to establish and sustain an independent union under Harry Bridges's new International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) that still exists today.
A dockworker is a waterfront manual laborer who loads and unloads ships.
The Australian waterfront dispute of 1998 was an event in Australian industrial relations history, in which the Patrick Corporation undertook a restructuring of their operations for the purpose of dismissing their workforce. The restructuring by Patrick Corporation was later ruled illegal by Australian courts. The dispute involved Patrick Corporation terminating the employment of its workforce and locking out the workers of the workplace after the restructuring had taken place, with many of these workers members of the dominant Maritime Union of Australia. The resulting dismissal and locking out of their unionised workforce was supported and backed by the Australian Liberal/National Coalition Government.
The 1934 West Coast waterfront strike lasted 83 days, and began on May 9, 1934, when longshoremen in every US West Coast port walked out. Organized by the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), the strike peaked with the death of two workers on "Bloody Thursday" and the subsequent San Francisco General Strike, which stopped all work in the major port city for four days and led ultimately to the settlement of the West Coast Longshoremen's Strike.
The International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) is a North American labor union representing longshore workers along the East Coast of the United States and Canada, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, Puerto Rico, and inland waterways; on the West Coast, the dominant union is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The ILA has approximately 200 local affiliates in port cities in these areas.
The Port of Vancouver was a port located in and round Vancouver. It was the largest port in Canada, the largest in the Pacific Northwest, and the largest port on the West Coast of North America by metric tons of total cargo, with 76.5 million metric tons. The port amalgamated with the Fraser River Port Authority and the North Fraser Port Authority in 2008 to form Port Metro Vancouver, which has now adopted the Port of Vancouver name.
The Port of Montreal is a cruise and transshipment point. It is located on the St. Lawrence River in Montreal, Québec, Canada. The port operates as an international container port. It services Toronto, the rest of Central Canada, the Midwestern United States, and the Northeastern United States. Though found on the Saint Lawrence Seaway, it is some 1,600 miles (2,600 km) inland from the Atlantic Ocean and it is on the shortest direct route between the North American Midwest and Europe or the Mediterranean.
Major-General William Wasbrough Foster, CMG, DSO, VD was a noted mountaineer, Conservative Party politician, businessman, and chief constable in British Columbia, Canada, in addition to his distinguished military career. Foster was elected to the BC Legislature in a 1913 byelection. He was defeated for re-election in the 1916, 1924, and 1933 provincial elections.
The Battle of Ballantyne Pier occurred in Ballantyne Pier during a docker's strike in Vancouver, British Columbia, in June 1935.
The Vancouver and District Waterfront Association was the union for longshoremen working on Vancouver's waterfront between 1923 and 1935. It was established as a company union by the Shipping Federation of British Columbia after it defeated a strike and broke the local of the International Longshoremen's Association that previously represented the longshoremen.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest port in Canada and the fourth largest in North America by tonnes of cargo, facilitating trade between Canada and more than 170 world economies. The port is managed by the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, which was created in 2008 as an amalgamation of the former Port of Vancouver, the North Fraser Port Authority, and the Fraser River Port Authority. It is the principal authority for shipping and port-related land and sea use in the Metro Vancouver region.
Daniel Joseph Keefe was a founder and the first president of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), a trade union representing waterside workers in Canada and the United States of America.
Dockworkers in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century often coordinated their unionization efforts across racial lines. The nature of that coordination has led some scholars to conclude that the seeming interracial union activity was in fact biracial: a well-organized plan of parallel concerted activity with coordination and support between the groups, but with a clear divide along racial lines.
The Waterfront Workers History Project is a program of the University of Washington, which serves to document the history of workers and unions active on the ports, inland waterways, fisheries, canneries, and other waterfront industries of the western United States and Canada, specifically, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia. In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects, and sponsored by the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, the Project is a collective effort to organize and present historical data covering significant events from 1894 to the current day.
The Mechanization and Modernization (M&M) Agreement of 1960 was an agreement reached by California longshoremen unions: International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA), and the Pacific Maritime Association. This agreement applied to workers on the Pacific Coast of the United States, the West Coast of Canada, and Hawaii. The original agreement was contracted for five years and would be in effect until July 1, 1966.
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii, and in British Columbia, Canada; on the East Coast, the dominant union is the International Longshoremen's Association. The union was established in 1937 after the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, a three-month-long strike that culminated in a four-day general strike in San Francisco, California, and the Bay Area. It disaffiliated from the AFL–CIO on August 30, 2013.
The 1923 San Pedro maritime strike was, at the time, the biggest challenge to the dominance of the open shop culture of Los Angeles, California until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s.
The Portland Waterfront strike of 1922 was a labor strike conducted by the International Longshoremen's Association which took place in Portland, Oregon from late April to late June 1922. The strike was ineffective at closing down the Port of Portland due to strikebreakers, and on June 22 the strike ended with the employers dictating terms.
The Waterside Workers' Federation of Australia (WWF) was an Australian trade union that existed from 1902 to 1993. After a period of negotiations between other Australian maritime unions, it was federated in 1902 and first federally registered in 1907; its first general president was Billy Hughes.
In the late 1870s, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh communities on the North Shore of Burrard Inlet experienced an increase of physical and economic encroachment from the expansion of neighbouring Vancouver. Faced with urbanization and industrialization around reserve lands, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh traditional economies became increasingly marginalized, while government-imposed laws increasingly restricted Native fishing, hunting, and access to land and waters for subsistence. In response, these communities increasingly turned to participating in the wage-labor economy.
The 2023 British Columbia port strike was a 13-day strike from 1 July to 13 July, with over 7,400 striking workers freezing up to $10 billion of trade in Vancouver, British Columbia–Canada's busiest port. On 4 August, a deal drafted by a federal mediator between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the British Columbia Maritime Employers Association (BCMEA) was accepted. The 13-day strike began on 1 July and prevented the movement of cargo at thirty 30 port terminals and other sites in the province with over 7,400 workers on strike over wages, pensions, "contracting and automation". The trade disruption amounted to approximately $500 million daily, according to Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CME).