United Brotherhood of Railway Employees
The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was determined to break the UBRE and provoked a major strike in Vancouver in 1903.
[1] At first, membership was limited to a small number of fairly skilled Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) workers without a union, including yardmen, bridgemen and some classes of track repairer.
The UBRE was low profile in its early years, but in 1901 they started to organize the low-paid CPR freight handlers and clerks in Winnipeg.
[5] George Estes, of Roseburg, Oregon, was chosen as the chairman of this railway general grievance committee, which served as the direct forerunner of the UBRE.
[5] Estes' UBRE was founded to create a union that would "bring all classes of actual railway employees in closer contact with each other, for their mutual benefit and improvement."
The less skilled laborers, track maintenance crews and freight handlers had worse conditions and no representation.
[6] After the AF of L rebuttal, the UBRE moved to the left and start to negotiate with the American Labor Union (ALU), a recently founded rival to the AFL associated with the Socialist Party of America.
"[4] Gompers told the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) he viewed the UBRE as "inimical to the interests of the working people everywhere.
[10] In May 1902 The Voice, a labor newspaper in Winnipeg, optimistically said that the new union would "foster education and dispel ignorance, raise wages and lower expenses, shorten hours and lengthen life, increase independence and decrease dependence.
[11] In May 1902 the machinists of the Canadian National Railway went on strike in Winnipeg for higher wages and union recognition.
[12] Estes arrived in Winnipeg on 9 June 1902, and at a public meeting two days later announced that the UBRE was going to launch a drive to organize on the CNR, and "carry through the movement for higher wages which was recently begun by the machinists of the road."
[13] The CNR brought in strikebreakers, but now had to deal with the brotherhoods, who had held back from supporting the UBRE but were now threatening to strike.
[14] The outcome was an agreement on 15 July 1902 in which the brotherhoods gained recognition from the CNR, while the UBRE strikers were left without jobs.
[18] The CPR managed to subvert Harold V. Poore, the main organizer of the UBRE, with a combination of bribery and blackmail.
[19] From January to April 1903, when he died of scarlet fever, Poore gave the CPR copies of all the UBRE's confidential correspondence.
[23] The real motive of the coal strike was to gain recognition of the WFM and to stop dismissals of miners for belonging to a union.
[25] Joseph Watson, head of the Vancouver boilermakers local, ordered his members not to join sympathy strikes and agitated against the UBRE, ALU and socialists in the press and in public meetings.
[24] The socialist journalist George Weston Wrigley claimed that some of the crafts union members "scabbed" on the striking Freight Handlers and Office Employees.
"[27] In mid-April Frank Rogers, a well-known labor leader, was shot during an argument between strikers and CPR agents, and later died.
[29] Pettipiece wrote of the CPR's use of spies and secret police that, "nowhere else in the British Empire would such a condition be possible, and it has seldom been equalled anywhere in the long and painful history of the tragedy of labor.
On 27 June 1903 a majority of strikers agreed to accept the CPR terms and the UBRE declared the strike ended.
[31] 600 members of several different unions had walked out in support of the UBRE freight handlers and clerks, in British Columbia's "first great sympathy strike".
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) held its founding convention in June 1905, at which it reported that the UBRE had just 2,087 members.
