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

Labour/Le Travail, Spring, 2001 by Ross Lambertson

The story of Dresden helps illustrate the significant contribution of trade unionists, especially the JLC, to the Canadian post-war human rights struggle. [127] At the same time, it also demonstrates the importance of ethnic/religious cooperation. Jews, blacks, Anglo-Celts, and even Chinese Canadians played leading roles in the fight against racial discrimination in Dresden, and they in turn were supported by groups representing a broad spectrum of Canadians.

Does Dresden, however, tell us much about the inter-relationship of race and class? As David Roediger has noted, (American) labour historians in recent years have moved away "from dead end debates about whether to give priority to race or class identity," and have begun to struggle with "the difficult, rewarding task of showing how racial identity and class identity have shaped each other." [128] Yet at the same time, there is today a tendency to avoid overly-broad generalizations. As Thomas Sugrue has argued, "... we need to be attentive to the diversity of racial practices, from union to union, from workplace to workplace, and from community to community." [129]

In specific terms, the story of Dresden suggests that the human rights activists' success was the result of a unique concatenation of ideas about race and class -- a trans-class consensus that the interests of both workers and employers trumped racial divisions. Kalmen Kaplansky began with the notion that racial (and religious) discrimination hurt the working class (defined primarily as trade unionists), and argued that this split workers, playing into the hands of the "enemy" -- the employers. At the same time, Premier Frost not only believed that prejudice violated middle-class ideas about respectability, but also thought that it could threaten the interests of capital; discrimination could undermine his plans for Ontario's economic development. [130]

Moreover, Kaplansky and Frost saw class from a common anti-communist perspective, each believing that his own respective class interest could not be furthered by communism, either at the theoretical or political level. The Kaplansky view was social-democratic, or what some labour historians have called the "reformist" position, committed to the evolutionary growth of the welfare state while rejecting the radicalism of the communist Labour Progressive Party and its supporters. [131] Frost, for his part, was a reform liberal, believing that capitalism was worth saving by means of astute political tinkering and patching. Human rights legislation, therefore, was intended to help make the world safe for both socialist and liberal democracy.

Of course, Kaplansky and Frost were not the only actors in this story. Since their two viewpoints came to be widely shared, a human rights community made up of diverse class and racial components skilfully lobbied the Ontario government into passing and implementing a Fair Accommodation Practices Act.

Yet, we should be wary of assuming that trade union support for integration in Dresden signalled the arrival of a new age of trade union tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity. American labour historians specializing in race relations have begun to point out the complicated tensions between union leaders and rank-and-file members, as well as the differences between racism on the shop floor, in local communities, and in the voting booth. Progress at one level does not necessarily mean change in another venue. [132]