His organization rocked British Columbia with strikes, protests and an all-consuming fight against premier W.A.C. Bennett’s Social Credit government
Ray Haynes was a titan of the B.C. labour movement at a time when unions made so much news that the Vancouver Sun employed two full-time labour reporters. No one made more news than Mr. Haynes. As head of the B.C. Federation of Labour from 1966 to 1973, Mr. Haynes pushed, propelled and prodded the Federation into the most militant labour organization in North America.
None of it was easy. Union leaders were being regularly jailed or fined for defying court injunctions against picketing, and labour needed all the support it could muster. “I’d been on the job one day, and already 10 more people were in jail,” Mr. Haynes liked to recall. “It seemed you couldn’t sneeze or blow your nose on the picket line, or there’d be an injunction.” It became Mr. Haynes’s personal mission to get rid of them.
He also spent two rewarding years working on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry with commissioner Thomas Berger and several years as president of the B.C. NDP. “There wasn’t a social cause he didn’t care about,” said former B.C. attorney-general Colin Gabelmann, who worked for Mr. Haynes as the Federation’s legislative director, noting his strong, early espousal of environmental issues and the advancement of women within the labour movement.
That paid off at his next job as, of all things, a tea blender in the wholesale division of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Fed up with the low wages and poor working conditions, Mr. Haynes organized the place. In short order, he was a full-time organizer for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and eventually its international representative. The RWDSU was an old-style union that targeted smaller workforces, and Mr.
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