Strikebound Fleet

No winter gale ever tied up Nova Scotia's deep-sea fishing fleet so completely as the strike that held it in port last week when the fishing weather was fine. While the fleet's 30 schooners, trawlers and draggers lay at the docks, the walkout had spread from deep-sea crewmen (500 strong) to hundreds of sympathizing inshore fishermen. Soon it would force the closing of processing plants and fish-box factories, thus shut down the province's entire fishing industry.

The strike had started over money. Fish prices had skyrocketed and so had profits. Some boat owners, by union reckoning, were making as much as $300 on a shareholding of $500. But deep-sea crewmen, who got only about $1,000,000 (some $2,000 apiece) of a 1946 gross running between $5,000,000 and $6,000,000, wanted a fatter slice.

Something for Fishermen. To get it, most of them had joined the fingerling Fishermen's and Fish Handlers' Union. Three months ago the union demanded that the "lay" (split) of each voyage's net profit (i.e. net after deductions for various operating costs) be changed from the traditional 50-50 lay to 60% for crewmen, 40 for owners. Also demanded: a redivision of operating costs.

Lunenburg Sea Products, Ltd., the biggest fleet owner, readily agreed to the idea of the 60-40 lay, which would boost a crewman's average earnings by roughly $400 a year. But Lunenburg balked at paying certain small operating expenses (e.g. the maintenance of a medicine chest on each boat), and insisted that these come out of gross earnings before the lay.

Nothing for Reds. Actually, Lunenburg and the other owners were not much concerned with the relatively piddling sum involved. What concerned them was that a union run by a Red seemed to be getting too solid a footing in the industry. They had good reason to fear.

The boss of the Fishermen's Union, big, flabby, 265-lb. Harry C. Meade, is a Communist. A Canadian, "Bert" Meade ran away to sea at 16, turned up in the U.S. in 1937 as an organizer for the Red-hued National Maritime Union. He went back to Canada in 1944, soon became Atlantic vice president of the Canadian Seamen's Union. He also became executive board member in Nova Scotia of the Labor Progressive Party, Canada's Communist Party, of which his wife is provincial secretary. In due time, Bert Meade turned to organizing the fishermen, did a bang-up job.

Last week, apparently full of confidence in the discipline of his membership, Meade was in no mood to compromise on the minor points in dispute. Cried he: "[We] will fight to the bitter end."

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