Last Back: Folklore and the Telephone
Operators in the 1919 Vancouver
General Strike
ELAINE BERNARD

During

the research for the history of the Telecommunications
Workers Unions, women telephone operators from eighteen to eighty years of
age asked about "the strike where the men sold out the women" or about the
time "when the men forced us out on strike and then left us hanging on the
line." None of the operators could give an exact date of the strike, though
some were able to place it at the end of the First World War or in the early
1920s. No one could describe the issues which had led to the walkout by
operators.
Young operators had heard the story of the strike from older operators.
The story, handed down from operator to operator, became a legend. A
curious feature of this oral tradition is that the legend was unique to BC
Telephone's female operators. In other words, the only women who knew the
story were, or had once been, operators. The oldest male craftworkers, who
doubted the reported experience, repeated the legend as a result of friendly
associations with operators, since their own union tradition had not
formulated a competing version.
The limited information from the operator folklore and an interview
with a retired operator in her eighties helped identify the strike in question as
the 1919 Vancouver strike which was held in solidarity with the Winnipeg
General Strike. This strike and the role of the telephone operators and
craftworkers, after more than sixty years, is living history which has played an
important role in reflecting and, at times, moulding the operators'
consciousness in the workplace. Throughout the history of the union, the
folklore of this strike changed significantly with the evolution of industrial
relations and the transformations within the union.
How significant were the telephone operators in the 1919 Vancouver
General Strike? Their actions were inspirational according to the leading
Barb.i,ra K. Latham and Roberta J. Pazdro, Eds., Not Just Pin Money
Victoria: Camosun College, 1984

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Telephone Operators

British Columbia labour newspaper and organ of the BC Federation of
Labour, the B. C. Federationist. The following front page editorial appeared
in the Federationist, the day after the strike was called off.
The action of the telephone girls in responding to the
call for a general strike has placed them in a class by
themselves amongst women workers in this province.
With only a few backsliders, these girls have won the
admiration of all those who admire grit and working
class solidarity. That their action will be remembered
by the workers not only of this city, but by the workers
all over the continent for their loyalty, goes without
saying. If all the men had displayed the same spirit, the
strike could not have been finished with them carrying
on their fight against discrimination, after the general
strike was called off. The strike was called off as a
result of the telephone girls and electricians taking the
stand that they could fight the matter of
discrimination against the telephone operators alone.
This decision was arrived at on Wednesday night after
a three and a half hour meeting, at which a resolution
was passed urging the other organizations to return to
work, as they were of the opinion that Local 213 of the
Electrical Workers and the Telephone Operators
could fight the discrimination matter out themselves.
This was announced at the mass meeting held in the
Labor Temple on Thursday, and as a result the strike
was called off at 5 p.m. 1
Before discussing the folklore of the strike, a brief reconstruction of the
events of the strike is in order. On May 15, 1919, a General Strike in support
of metal workers began in Winnipeg. This strike fired the imagination of
workers across the country. As word of the strike reached· the nation,
messages of solidarity from unions and councils poured into Winnipeg.
Labour newspapers sent correspondents to Winnipeg, and messages from the
city's workers were read at Trades and Labour Council meetings in most
Canadian cities. Rallies and information meetings were called to explain the
strike and to demonstrate solidarity with the Winnipeg workers.
The General Strike alarmed the federal government. Since the 1917
Russian Revolution, the federal government feared a rise of Bolshevism in
western Canada because of radical unionism in the West during the First
World War and the widespread support of the Russian Revolution by west~rn
labour leaders. To the government, workers seemed to be assuming the power
of civic authorities. Because of the magnitude of the strike, the strike
committee in essence had the power to decide which services would cease and
which services would be continued in the city. Yet, the demands of the strike
and the actions of the strike committee were simple collective bargaining
goals. They were neither political nor insurrectionary.
The federal government did not take long to intervene in the Winnipeg
strike. Mounted Police and militia units with machine guns were sent to
Winnipeg. The federal government issued an ultimatum to the striking postal
workers who were federal employees, demanding that they return to work, or

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lose their jobs. The postal workers who voted to ignore the ultimatum were
fired. This action provoked a series of sympathetic strikes in support of the
Winnipeg workers.
Like labour across the country, Vancouver workers were alarmed by the
federal government's intervention in the Winnipeg situation. At the May 23
meeting of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, the executive was
empowered with the authority to call a general strike in case of military
intervention in Winnipeg. When word came to Vancouver of the firing of the
postal workers, the executive issued a call for a vote on a general sympathetic
strike.
At this time, the telephone craftworkers (the men) were members of the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local 213, a craft
union in the electric trade which included, aside from the telephone
craftworkers, electricians working for the street railway, for the local power
companies, and for a few construction companies. The operators at the
telephone company had been organized a year before into IBEWLocal77A.
This operators' local had been formed as a result of a North American
organizing drive initiatied by the international. Significantly, the craft union
wanted women operators who were non-craftworkers to be organized into a
separate department of the international union, rather than into existing
industrial locals. 2
On June 1, the male telephone craftworkers in Local 213 held a special
meeting at which they voted down the motion to participate in the general
strike: 156 in favour to 176 against. As the numbers indicate, the local was
divided on the issue. A subsequent meeting of the local reversed the defeat so
the electricians agreed to go on strike. It is not known if the operators held a
vote on the General Strike issue, nor what the results were. 3
In many ways, the strike in Vancouver was far more radical than the
precipitous strike in Winnipeg. In Winnipeg, unionists were marching in
solidarity with their co-workers who were engaged in a struggle with the local
captains of industry. The Vancouver strike was remarkable because it was in
support of workers who lived over one thousand miles away. Also, the strike
demands of the Vancouver workers were political: they were addressed to the
government, not to employers. The seven strike demands called for
reinstatement of the Winnipeg postal workers and immediate settlement of
their grievances, guarantees of the right of collective bargaining, pensions for
soldiers and their dependents, compensation for veterans' overseas service,
nationalization of all food storage plants and the enactment of legislation to
provide for the six-hour day in all industries where unemployment was
prevalent.4
The Vancouver General Sympathetic Strike started on June 3, 1919, but
the strike took almost a week to build up momentum. Some of the first to
respond to the strike call were the shipyard and waterfront workers, who shut
down Vancouver's waterfront on the first day of the strike. The
Typographical Union voted in favour of joining the protest, but the numbers
in favour did not constitute the two-thirds majority required by the union's
constitution to take strike action. As a compromise, the members remained at
work, but they set up a committee "to ensure the publication of the strikers'

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Telephone Operators

views and [to prevent] -deliberate misrepresentation ... under penalty of
cessation of work." By the second week of the strike, the Typographical
Union decided to call a five-day suspension of the Vancouver Daily Sun for its
biased editorials against the strike. The Vancouver Province was also closed
for a day, when the printers refused to set anti-strike advertisements. 5
An important union which did not join the strike at first was the Street
Railway Workers' Union. Its members voted against participation, but they
reversed this position within a few days to join the walkout on June 5. The
walkout by the Street Railway Workers brought the first countermeasure of
the strike. In an attempt to lessen the effectiveness of the city transportation
workers' strike, City Council rescinded the anti-jitney bylaw, thereby
allowing others to operate these small passenger-carrying motor vehicles. The
strike committee responded to Council's attempted strikebreaking action by
calling out the unionized city employees. The widening strike action resulted
in City Council's issuing an ultimatum demanding that all civic employees
report back to work or be fired. 6 Once again the strike committee responded
to City Council's action with a threat of further strike action. If Council did
not reinstate the anti-jitney bylaw, and promise not to take disciplinary action
against the city employees, the telephone operators would be called out on
strike.
Earlier, the strike committee had exempted some unions from the strike,
in order to avoid criticism that it had unsurped the role of the city
government. Emergency services such as firemen, policemen, milk deliveries,
and hospital deliveries were all exempted. The telephone service was included
in the list of exemptions, so neither the operators nor the craftworkers at BC
Telephone were called out at the beginning of the strike. However, when
Council refused to be moved, the union telephone operators were asked to
join the sympathetic strike. On the morning of June 13, about 325 telephone
operators and operator supervisors joined the strike. At Seymour, the major
Vancouver toll exchange, the total toll staff on the first morning of the strike
consisted of the chief operator, one supervisor, two toll operators, and the
traffic engineer. As the women of the outlying telephone offices were called
out they left locking the doors and throwing the keys through the windows. 7
The walkout of the telephone operators, the last offensive action by the strike
committee, marked the peak of the strike. The strike committee had lost the
initiative. It was forced to stop making demands on the Dominion
government and instead defend the workers out on strike, and seek a method
for returning them to work without victimization.
With the first walkout of the sympathetic strike, anti-strike forces also
started to organize. On June I 0, a group of "concerned citizens" dedicated to
maintaining "law and order," formed the Vancouver Citizens' League. The
Citizens' League published an anti-strike paper and bought space in the
Vancouver dailies to place advertisements against the strike. The Citizens'
League spent much of its time recruiting strikebreakers, first for the jitney
service and then for the telephone company.
The telephone company claimed that through its own efforts and those
of the Citizens' League, seventy-six strikebreakers were eventually employed
at the telephone offices. These were either middle-class women doing

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From the Strike Bulletin, Vancouver, June 1919.

volunteer strikebreaking, or ex-operators, who were no doubt attracted by
the generous pay offered for strikebreaking. 8
As the strike extended from days into weeks, the financial situation of the
telephone operators became acute. The tiny financial resources of the local
were depleted within a short time. The Operators' local had no strike fund, so
most operators were left to work out their own arrangements for rent and
board. A fund set up for the operators received donations from the wealthier
unions, but there was only money for the needier operators. 9
By the third week, the Strike began to seriously deteriorate throughout
the city because of widespread fear of victimization. On June 19, the CPR
workers voted to return to work. The following day, about a third of the
striking city employees abandoned the strike. Over the next few days, groups
of woodworkers, teamsters and brewery workers started back. Just when
dwindling support was bringing the strike to a close, word came to Vancouver
of the arrest of the Winnipeg strike leaders, and then of"Bloody Saturday,"
the violent confrontation in Winnipeg between the Mounted Police and strike
supporters. News of these events kept the Vancouver strike alive. Victoria
joined the sympathetic strike on June 23. But the momentum was short-lived.
Winnipeg ended its General Strike on June 26; Victoria went back to work a
day later.

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Telephone Operators

The Vancouver strike, focusing on the demand for no victimization,
continued for a week after the Winnipeg strike. The demand was aimed
primarily at the city government. A third of the city's striking employees had
successfully returned to their jobs, but the strike committee wanted formal
assurance that the rest could return. As the days wore on, groups of workers
negotiated their own "back to work" agreements, bypassing the strike
committee. On June 30, the remaining striking civic employees returned to
work.
By the beginning of July, the strike committee decided to try to formally
end the rapidly disintegrating sympathy strike. But there remained one group
of strikers who were still having difficulty negotiating a no-victimization
return to work: the telephone operators. The telephone company would
rehire returning operators, but it demoted the striking supervisors to ensure
that only anti-union strikebreakers would be in supervisory positions. The
women would not return under those terms, so they decided to stay on strike
and fight the company's attempted victimization of the striking supervisors.
At a meeting of the operators and craftsmen from the telephone company, the
members decided to release the rest of the labour movement from continuing
the strike with the telephone workers. On July 3, 1919, one month after it had
started, the Vancouver Sympathetic Strike was officially ended.
The telephone workers, though, were still on strike. The operators
continued their fight with the company for almost two weeks after the end of
the strike. By mid-July, the union was forced back on essentially company
terms. The company agreed to take back all the employees without
discrimination, but senior operators and supervisors were reduced to
operators. A few of the supervisors were to be reinstated to their senior
positions within thirty days, and the remaining supervisors were to be first in
line for vacant supervisory positions. The men returned to work on July 15;
the women returned to work a day later, July 16. 10
Over the next two years the operators' local was deserted by the
operators until it finaly disappeared. The abandonment of the operators in
their fight against victimization was a serious blow for the local, but it was not
necessarily the terminal one. In the following two years the male local burst
apart due to internal rifts between the telephone craftworkers and the other
electricians, and a major battle between the international union and the
Vancouver local. In this atmosphere, there was no time for fence-mending
with the operators. Their local was gone but not forgotten.
Folklore or oral traditions in the workplace are always history with a
moral. Acquired knowledge, some of which may be false, is handed down to
upcoming generations. The story of this strike has been used to illustrate three
very different "morals" reflecting different conditions and consciousness
amongst the operators. First, in the years between 1920 and 1940, after the
destruction of the union, it was used to show how the women were used as
"canon fodder'' in a labour dispute in which they did not have a stake. As well,
it was used to reinforce company paternalism. Older workers told new
employees that in spite of the "damage" done to the company by the strike, the
company was a good, forgiving, company since it gave the workers back their
jobs. Second, in the years between 1940 and 1960, with the formation of a

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company dominated union, the Federation of Telephone Workers emphasis
shifted to undermine the dependability of the male craftworkers who,
having placed the women's jobs in jeopardy, abandoned them in their
struggle against victimization. The moral of the lesson was still that strikes
were futile, but the added twist was against international unions like the
IBEW. Sympathy strikes were a disease of international unions, or so the
story went, when the telephone workers were being courted for affiliation by
two international unions. What is particularly ironic about this version is that
the IBEW was very much opposed to the Vancouver electrical workers
joining the general strike. Much of the trouble experienced by the local, for
many years after the strike, was a direct result of punitive actions by the
international against the local for striking.
Third, in the years between 1960 and 1970, the story changed again. This
time the story was told as proof that the women were as militant as the men at
the telephone company. This period reflected the militant transformation of
the union: the first strike in fifty years took place in 1969. The lesson to be
learned was not that strikes were futile, but that successful strikes needed
complete solidarity between craft, clerical and operating staff. All must strike;
all must return to work together.
With the new growth of militancy among the telecommunications
workers and with a new interest in their own history, 11 which has been
published and circulated to all members of the union, there is a new
interpretation of the old folklore. Today, the general strike is cited as a proud
example of the operators' militant tradition. A unique and militant group of
organized female workers won the distinction of being the last back to work at
the end of the country-wide wave of sympathy strikes. However, for over sixty
years, the folklore of the "1919 betrayal" was a barrier to solidarity between
craftworkers and operators. The events and the subsequent folklore of the
1919 strike underline the power of folklore not only to reflect worker
consciousness, but also to mould it.

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Footnotes
B. C. Federationist, "General strike called off at 5 pm Thursday," July 4, 1919: 1.
Elaine Bernard, The Long Distance Feeling: A History of the
Telecommunications Workers Union, (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1982) and
Michael A. Mulcaire, The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
(Washington, D.C.: publisher unknown, 1923).
3. Live Wire, IBEW 213, November 9, 1951: 24.
4. B.C. Federationist, May 30, 191().
5. Ibid., June 6, 1919.
6. Ibid., June 13, 1919.
7. B.C. Telephone Historical Record, Chapter 1919 (g): 1-3.
8. Vancouver Citizen, No. 1, June 16, 1919, UBC Special Collections.
9. Interview with Leona Copeland, November 10, 1981.
IO. Department of Labour, Canada, Trade Disputes Record, strike file 19 (285),
Public Archives of Canada, RG 27 2338.
11. See note 2, above.
1.
2.