Loggers' Plight, The

DESCRIPTION: Landon Ladd comes to Newfoundland, forms a logger union, and calls a loggers' strike; some are thrown in jail. Premier Smallwood insists Ladd leave and that a new union be formed with Maxwell Lane to lead the way and come to terms with A.N.D.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1959 (Peacock)
KEYWORDS: strike lumbering labor-movement Canada
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
1959 - the [US-controlled] IWA (International Woodworkers of America [which split in 1987 into US and Canadian unions]) strikes the AND [Anglo-Newfoundland Development] company at Badger.
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Peacock, pp. 755-756, "The Loggers' Plight" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #9801
RECORDINGS:
Arthur Nicolle, "The Loggers' Plight" (on PeacockCDROM) [one verse only]
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The I. W. A. Strike" (subject of the I. W. A. Strike)
NOTES [1381 words]: The "on-ramp for K-12 school Web pages in Newfoundland and Labrador" site includes the background about the logging industry at Point Leamington and the strike.
"Throughout its history Point Leamington has been linked directly to the forest industry, and... many of the town's residents were -- and still are -- involved with logging camps and sawmill operations. Many men in the town and the surrounding communities worked at logging camps operated by... locals. The wood from these logging operations supplied the raw material needed to make newsprint by the AND Co. Paper Mill at Grand Falls.... Also, many of the locals operated sawmills within the Point Leamington area and employed many of the town's men.
"Over the years many men from Point Leamington were employed in the lumber woods and the seasonal trek to the logging camps in the fall and winter became a way of life.
"However, the wages and the living conditions in the early camps were far from adequate, and despite several attempts to improve those conditions, when the International Woodworkers of America (I.W.A.) arrived in the province in the late 1950's working conditions were still far from ideal.
"Although Landon Ladd's attempt at organizing the Nfld loggers into his union failed following the bitter strike of 1959, the Commission of Enquiry on the Logging Industry that followed in 1961 addressed the conditions of the camps, and this eventually led to improved conditions for loggers. Within a few years most of the recommendations of the Commission had been implemented, and many loggers attribute the improved working and living conditions in the logging camps (either directly or indirectly) to the I.W.A. strike of 1959."
Point Leamington, Grand Falls, and towns often mentioned in Newfoundland logging songs, like Badger -- originally Badger Brook -- and Bishops Falls are about 270 miles northwest of St John's on TC-1, not far from Bonavista Bay on the northeast coast.
The St. Mark's School site, in its biography of Newfoundland Premier Joseph Smallwood, states "On March 1959, a tragedy at the small town of Badger where striking loggers clashed with police officers. One member of the Newfoundland constabulary was clubbed and later died. Joey, who had opposed the strike and decertified the union a few days before, made him into a martyr. Joseph from then on consorted with corporate tycoons and devoted himself to large industrial endeavours like the Churchill Falls power project." St. Marks school is in King's Cove, Newfoundland, and serves grades K-12 for the northern section of the Bonavista Peninsula.
The IWA.CA site presents a view of the strike not in accord with the ballad. "In 1958, the Eastern Canadian Regional Council [of the IWA] organized loggers in Newfoundland and confronted the hostile government of Joey Smallwood who passed legislation decertifying and outlawing the IWA. In March 1959, battalions of RCMP marched on strikers in Badger, beating workers unconscious as women and children screamed. During the confrontation an officer was killed and a logger charged, later to be acquitted."
Peacock discusses the main characters of the ballad. "Landon Ladd is the local union representative sent in by the International Woodworkers of America to organize the loggers. Maxwell Lane is the head of the local union set up by Premier Smallwood to rid Newfoundland of alleged 'union gangsterism' emanating from the United States."
Peacock collected "The Loggers' Plight" at Rocky Harbour in July 1959. Rocky Harbour is on the northwest coast of Newfoundland. - BS
For more on the early history of AND, see the notes to "The Badger Drive."
DictNewfLabrador, p. 193, says that Harvey Alexander Landon Ladd was born in 1917 in Vancouver, and was a British Columbia labor organizer before joining the IWA in 1947 to lead its operations in eastern Canada. When Newfoundland joined Canada, it fell into his region. "The IWA had entered Newfoundland in 1956, when an organizing team had been sent to the province. A long inter-union battle had followed between the IWA, seeking to win the support of Newfoundland loggers, and a number of local unions, seeking to maintain the right they had established for themselves to represent the loggers' interests. In this struggle the IWA had been ably led by H. Landon Lad... A tough, experienced and determined unionist, schooled in the militant traditions of the west coast labour movement, Ladd had advanced the cause of the union on many fronts" (Hiller/Neary, p. 219).
In 1957, the lumbermen of Newfoundland's AND Company joined the IWA (DictNewfLabrador, p. 193). They struck against AND on December 31, 1958. This contributed to making 1959 "one of the most turbulent years in Newfoundland's troubled political history" (Hiller/Neary p. 219).
It is supremely ironic that Joey Smallwood, whose one big political idea was to have Newfoundland join Canada, called the IWA "outsiders" when they organized a strike in Newfoundland. "It [Landon's organizing of the strike] did strange things to Joey's soul" (Major, p. 418). "The strike proved long and bitter. On the company side there was a determination to keep out the IWA whose resources contrasted sharply with those of the local unions it was seeking to displace; on the union side victory was essential if the IWA was to maintain the foothold it has so painfully bought in the province" (Hiller/Neary, p. 219).
Major, p. 418, says that women were heavily involved in the strike -- a significant step forward for women's rights -- and that that upset Smallwood, too.
In February 1959, Smallwood radically altered things. "[T]he deadlock was finally broken when Smallwood sensationally intervened in the strike on the evening of 12 February in a highly emotional speech heard throughout the province. Accusing the IWA of lawlessness and of threatening the provincial economy, Smallwood called on the loggers to drive the union from Newfoundland. In language strikingly reminiscent of the nativism which had surfaced during other great confrontations between capital and labour in Canadian history, Smallwood characterized the IWA as a subversive outside influence incompatible with the Newfoundland way of life. 'How dare these outsiders,' he declared, come into this decent Christian Province and by such desperate, such terrible methods try to seize control of our Province's main industry'" (Hiller/Neary, p. 220). On February 23, Smallwood introduced a resolution condemning the IWA in the Newfoundland legislature (Hiller/Neary, p. 221). Major, p. 418 calls Smallwood's new rules "some of the most repressive labour legislation ever seen in Canada."
Smallwood would later call on the Canadian government to send in the Mounties, provoking a crisis in Canada's federal government (which eventually refused the request) and leading the head of the RCMP to resign (Hiller/Neary, p. 222).
Little wonder, with the Newfoundland government making such statements and acting in such a way, that the strikers clashed with the authorities; constable William Moss (1935-1959) was injured at Badger on March 10, 1959 and died on March 10 without regaining consciousness. (DictNewfLabrador, pp. 194, 236; Major, pp. 418-419, says that he was "the only member of the Newfoundland Constabulary to have ever lost his life in the line of duty"). Public opinion was now so strong against the strike that Ladd told the lumbermen to leave his union and join Smallwood's pet union the Newfoundland Brotherhood of Woodworkers (NBWW), which had been founded on March 25 by Smallwood's own government.
The NBWW was led by C. Max Lane, who was general secretary of the Newfoundland Foundation of Fishermen 1951-1961; he also kept the NBWW job until 1961, after which he became Smallwood's Minister of Public Works (DictNewfLabrador, p. 197). It all sounds very Communist to me: the government-run trade union replaced the actual independent trade union. But that's pretty typical of Smallwood, who went from supporter of the small man to petty tyrant in his quarter century in power. For another example, see "The Blow Below the Belt." The conflict arguably helped Smallwood's political position; it split the Newfoundland branch of the Progressive Conservatives (Hiller/Neary, pp. 222-223). - RBW
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