"The Dresden Story": Racism, Human Rights, and the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2001 by Ross Lambertson

CANADIAN HISTORIANS have usually ignored the role of organized labour in the post-war struggle for human rights. Bryan Palmer's survey textbook, which refers to most of the current labour historiography, contains no references at all. [1] There do exist a few published articles which link organized labour to the fight for female equality in the workplace, [2] and several other works on human rights touch upon the post-war activities of organized labour. [3] Yet the best sources of information are unpublished theses, primarily in areas other than history, such as political science or social work. [4]

This paper is one attempt to help redress this benign neglect. It demonstrates that organized labour was a central element of the post-war Canadian human-rights policy community. [5] It also shows that one of the key actors in this community was a body called the Canadian Jewish Labour Committee (JLC), the director of which, Kalmen Kaplansky, played a significant part in the struggle against racial and religious discrimination. [6] To illustrate this, the paper includes a case study of one of the major JLC successes -- the passage of the Ontario Fair Accommodation Practices Act and the struggle to apply it in the Ontario town of Dresden. [7]

The JLC was founded in 1936, an offshoot of the American Jewish Labor Committee (AJLC), a trade union umbrella group with roots in the Workmen's Circle, a radical left Jewish fraternal organization that had its origins in Eastern Europe. [8] At its peak it claimed about 50,000 members, coming largely from such Jewish-dominated trade unions as the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union (ACWU), and the United Cap, Hat and Millinery Workers Union (UCHMWU). [9]

The JLC was social democratic and anti-communist. In the early part of the century, most socialist Jews in Canada were members of the Workmen's Circle, but in the wake of the Russian Revolution the "left" communists began to move away from the "right" social democrats. By 1926 the two factions had split completely, with the communists leaving to create an organization called the Labour League and the social democrats remaining in the Workman's Circle. The latter continued to be the social and intellectual home of the JLC labour activists, while the former performed the same function for Jewish communists, even after it changed its name in 1945 to the United Jewish People's Order (UJPO). Over the years these two factions remained bitter rivals. [10]

Not surprisingly, the JLC had close ties with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a party that was social democratic on economic matters and liberal on human-rights. [11] For example, David Lewis, the CCF's first National Secretary, was the son of Morris Lewis, a Workman's Circle socialist, and for many years the Secretary of the JLC. Similarly, Maurice Silcoff, a vice-president of the JLC, was a CCF activist. [12]

During World War II, one of the most pressing issues for the Canadian Jewish community was refugee relief, especially assistance for those few Jews who had managed to escape the Nazi Holocaust. As the war began to draw to a close, however, Jewish activists began to shift from their short-term project of helping victims of foreign anti-Semitism to the longer-term goal of attacking domestic anti-Semitism. At the same time, they broadened their scope, viewing anti-Semitism as simply one part of a larger problem -- racial and religious prejudice. [13] In the words of an early JLC report, "Anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism, anti-Catholicism, anti-French or anti-English [sentiments] ... and union-smashing are all part of a single reactionary crusade of hatred and destruction."[14]

Consequently, by 1946 the JLC executive had appointed a national director to combat racial and religious prejudice within the trade union movement in Canada. Their choice, Kalmen Kaplansky, was Polish-born, fluent in Yiddish and English, a war veteran (with the rank of sergeant), a member of the International Typographical Union, Montreal vice-chair of the JLC, and a social democrat with strong ties to the Workmen's Circle and the CCF. [15] He was also, as it turned out, a skilful practitioner of the art of politics -- not just the politics of parties and governments, but also that of minority groups and trade unions.

Had Kaplansky attempted to gain trade union support fifty years earlier, no doubt he would have failed. Before the war, organized labour was usually governed 16 by the same racist values as the majority of Canadians. [16] As Canada industrialized, however, the conservative craft unions in Canada, primarily in the Trades and Labor Congress (TLc), came to be augmented by more progressive "industrial" trade unions, represented in Canada by the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). Much of Kaplansky's strongest support came from the leaders of major CCL trade unions, such as Charles Millard, Canadian Director of the United Steelworkers of America, and Fred Dowling, Canadian Director of the United Packinghouse Workers. [17]