Contemporary industry and society have brought major changes to the economic and social life of the Indians of British Columbia. Most tribal cultures were built upon a simple small-scale base. The tribal band was typically small and closely knit with personal relationships; the individual's status and role were clearly defined, and his activities regulated by tradition. Hunting, fishing, and gathering supplied a livelihood. Equipment and techniques were generally simple and static. Most of the output was for the local community's own use: only a small fraction was bartered for the products of other groups.The new economic system and the way of life associated with it is almost the direct antithesis of the tribal system outlined above. Today the Indian is involved in a large-scale and increasingly complex system of production and distribution, characterized by dynamic, rapidly changing techniques, a steadily increasing use of automatic power-driven machinery, and a growing production for national or international markets rather than for local use. As worker or producer he has, with few exceptions, lost his direct ownership of, or control over, his means of production. Relationships, defined increasingly by the market rather than by custom, have become more impersonal.Comparatively few Indians have managed to derive full advantage from the new way of life. Tribal cultures have been disorganized or destroyed, and with them has gone the whole structure of role and status that made life meaningful for individuals. Indians have faced formidable difficulties in acquiring the economic incentives of the white man's culture, and the equipment and techniques with which to meet them. The result has been, in all too many cases, deterioration of morale, apathy, and economic dependency. Indians have become a marginal labour group in many areas: living on reservations, depending upon the government for a large part of their subsistence, and employed only casually in unskilled or menial jobs of a type that other workers avoid.

Among the multitude of unionized occupations that have been analysed by labour economists and others, fishing, for some reason or other, has received scant attention. Few articles and no books, as far as the authors are aware, have been written about unionism in the fishing industry of the United States. College text-books and surveys of labour rarely if ever mention the subject. Yet fishermen's unions in that country have been organized and active for more than a half century, and the International Fishermen and Allied Workers’ Union today is an important affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Their origins and history remain hidden in obscurity.Much the same situation exists in Canada. Some incidental attention has been paid, in regional surveys like that of the Dawson Commission published in 1944, to trade unions and co-operatives among fishermen in the Maritime Provinces. The far larger, more active, and more important fishermen's unions of British Columbia have been virtually ignored. The 1948 edition of Professor H. A. Logan's Trade Unions in Canada, for instance—by far the most thorough and authoritative survey of the organized labour movement in Canada to date—gives passing reference to the Canadian Fishermen's Union of Nova Scotia, but makes no mention whatever of the Deep Sea Fishermen's Union or of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, both of British Columbia. Yet these two organizations are, or should be, of considerable interest and importance to labour economists and other students of trade unionism. Their history reaches back through more than a half century of diverse organizational growth, numerous and sometimes violent strikes, and generally turbulent labour relations. Both unions are today affiliated with the Canadian Trades and Labor Congress. The U.F.A.W.U. has a membership of some 8,000 fishermen and allied workers and jurisdiction over several thousand more. It negotiates province-wide master agreements with employer associations, governing labour matters in all major branches of one of the most important primary industries in British Columbia. Over one special group of fishermen it shares jurisdiction with the much smaller organization, the D.S.F.U.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract