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Labour + Industry

Plenty of Fight Left in Jim Sinclair

Resigning but hardly resigned, the BC Fed president scrapped for 'all working people.'

Tom Sandborn 10 Oct 2014TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn has covered labour and health policy news for the Tyee for over a decade. He currently files opinion columns on those beats and welcomes feedback and suggestions at [email protected].

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BC Fed President Jim Sinclair: 'I may take a short rest, but there will never be any shortage of battles for working people. I’ll be there.'

Jim Sinclair, the amiable, lanky trade union journalist and officer who has led the BC Federation of Labour for the last 15 years, announced today that he will not run for re-election when the Federation meets next month for its 56th annual convention. However, the decision doesn't seem to reflect any diminished enthusiasm for the labour struggles to which he has devoted his adult life.

"I walked my first picket line when I was 17," Sinclair told me yesterday. "In the future, I'll go wherever there is a good fight to be had. I may take a short rest, but there will never be any shortage of battles for working people. I'll be there."

Sinclair was born in Toronto in 1954. He was a high school student when he walked that first picket line, supporting a mainly immigrant female workforce at the Texpack textile factory in Brantford, where the workers were fighting for a first union contract in 1971. He still remembers the chaotic situation he encountered when he arrived at the picket at 6:00 in the morning.

"There were scabs and pickets and supporters and lots of cops," he said, "and at least one picketer was run over. I learned a lot on that line."

By 1979 Sinclair had moved to B.C. and was a reporter for the Nelson Daily News, where he said he had some direct opportunity to see the way that newspaper owners could try to influence news coverage and skew it in an anti-union direction.

From 1982 until 1991, Sinclair worked for the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, serving as a negotiator, a health and safety director, staff representative and editor of the union newspaper. In 1991 he was elected Second Vice President , and served UFAWU in that capacity until 1999, when he was elected president of the BC Fed.

While at UFAWU, Sinclair edited and contributed to Crossing the Line, a collection of critical essays about the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In addition to his union work and editorial efforts, Sinclair has also served on the boards of BC Hydro and the Vancouver Richmond Health Authority.

The last 12 of the 15 years Sinclair served as Fed president have seen the province governed by a BC Liberal government that has been notoriously anti-union, and Sinclair has poured much of his energy into encouraging workers to support the NDP, a party he views as more likely to give working people a fair deal.

"I am glad the Fed has been more involved in democracy during my term. I have always urged workers to vote in their own interests," he said. "We need to be more involved in democracy."

The former journalist Sinclair was key to the creation of The Tyee in 2003, marshalling labour-affiliated investment in the publication after years of frustration at perceived bias in B.C.'s corporate media against labour unions, and seeing the need for a news site that held power accountable with a clear commitment to social justice.

A voice for 'all working people'

"What I am proudest of in my years at the Fed," Sinclair said, "is how widely respected we have been as a voice speaking for all working people, whether they belong to a union or not. The fundamental question for labour unions is 'Who are you going to represent?' I've always said we need to represent the interests of all working people."

On that point, Sinclair's record is clear, and impressive. As a labour reporter for most of the years of his tenure, I have seen him time and time again speak out eloquently on behalf of farm workers, young shift workers at gas stations, temporary foreign workers, unorganized young workers and others who have often been viewed as outside the "house of labour."

For example, when dealing with issues of temporary foreign workers, Sinclair has repeatedly emphasized that his objection is not to the workers themselves, but to the way that temporary status has been used to keep them vulnerable and easily exploited. He has argued not to exclude foreign workers, but to bring them into Canada with a status that will allow them to stay, and allow them to exercise rights like freedom of association and collective bargaining.

In making that argument, and in supporting the demands of immigrant farm workers for better wages and working conditions, Sinclair has done much to correct a strain of racism that has too often in the past appeared in Canadian unions and their responses to the arrival of new workers from offshore.

His work to demand better safety protections for the typically young and poor workers on night shifts at all night gas stations is another example of Sinclair putting principle ahead of the traditional practices of traditional "business unionism," which has too often valued dues income and the security of the already organized membership over justice for the unorganized. In my view, this set of principled stands has been one of Sinclair's most impressive legacies.

Sinclair has had his critics, particularly those on the left of the labour movement who have seen his decisions to discourage the momentum toward a general strike in 2004 and 2005 in B.C. as major strategic errors, and I have been sympathetic to the argument that those decisions represented lost opportunities for labour.

Nevertheless, in balance, Jim Sinclair has provided organized labour in this province with highly competent and principled leadership for a decade and a half and whoever succeeds him at the Fed will have big shoes to fill. (More on the succession in an ensuing column.)

Sinclair has shrugged away suggestions his next move might be to run for office with a joke. ''Not at this point,' he said cautiously," he told a Province reporter. But he added: "I'm 60, I'm young. I have enough energy left to take on another challenge in my life."

I asked him what advice he would have for his successor. True to form, Sinclair said he would urge the next president to recognize what it means to represent working people.

"It is a big honour. Working people deserve respect and we have to demand that respect."  [Tyee]

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