SIT-DOWN STRIKES

Opunake Times, 16 July 1937, Page 3

SIT-DOWN STRIKES

U.S.A. INFLUENCE CANADA CHECKS THREAT The announcement by the Premier of Ontario that he would cause the arrest of John I, Lewis, president of the dissident group of American trade unions, if he carried out his expressed intention to cross the border to reorganise Canadian unions on the model of the Committee of Industrial Organisation, which has recently called a succession of strikes, has been commended by almost the entire press of the Dominion. Six weeks after his statement, Lewis has not made any attempt to clear Canada. When the sit-down strike epidemic swept the United States, the Canadian Government decreed that such methods were illegal. When Lewis’!emissaries called a sit-down strike in the General Motors factory in Oshawa, Ontario, the provincial industrial dispute law was invoked. As head of the Department of Labour, the Premier acted as arbitrator and summarily closed the conferences until the American agitators had left Canada. The strike was amicably settled in two weeks, without a single breach of peace. Similar strikes

across the border were greeted with bombings, gunfire and tear gas. The Lewis’ faction denied the charge hurled at it in Canada that its activities were Communistic. Yet its workers in Windsor, Ontario, said : “When you are going to pull a sit-down you are not going to ask the Premier. Do lust like we did. We sat down and asked the Jjovernor what he was going to do about it. Don’t let the Premier scare you into submission, or some Supreme Court Judge. You only test these things out. Your written law - says there is no sit-down, but, if enough workers sit down, what would they do?” The pi ess of the United States hailed the action taken in Canada to call the agitators’ bluff. In terms of equal emphasis with those used by Canadian journals, American newspapers acclaimed a country whose leaders were determined to brook no law-break-ing. It was another expression of envy of British law triumphing where American law failed.