CANADA: Joey v. Jimmy

In Newfoundland, where Premier Joey Smallwood is renowned as one of labor’s best friends, one of labor’s worst friends got a toe hold almost surreptitiously. Jimmy Hoffa and his racket-ridden International Brotherhood of Teamsters quietly set up two locals with 1,200 members. Alarmed, Smallwood last week bounced into the provincial legislature to denounce Hoffa & Co. as “pimps, panderers, white slavers, murderers, embezzlers, extortionists and dope peddlers.” The legislators speedily responded with a sledgehammer law: the provincial government can now dissolve any local upon evidence that a “substantial number” of its union officers have been convicted of “heinous crimes.”

At the other end of Canada, labor unions were also about to get some lumps. In British Columbia, where strike-prone unions accounted for 17% of all man-days lost in Canada last year, the ruling Social Credit party introduced a bill that would make unions legal entities subject to civil suits for damages resulting from strikes. The proposed law would also ban sympathy picket lines, blacklisting of companies, boycotts of goods turned out by nonunion labor.