‘Sometimes Strikes are Sort of Like Some Wars’: Letters to Jack Munro During the 1986 Strike

Henry here- I’m back in the Archive, woo! It’s been a while since I contributed anything to the I.W.A. Archive blog. However, upon returning, I found these freshly archived letters so interesting that I had to write about them. This blog post builds on John Mountain’s December 2019 “Digging into History”, which provided background on

When a Woodworkers’ Union was at the Cutting Edge of Environmentalism, by Henry John

This blog post is based on findings discovered in the records of the International Woodworkers of America Local 1-217’s Vancouver office, currently housed in the Kaatza Station Museum’s IWA Archive in Lake Cowichan. For more information on this archive, follow this link or email hrljohn89@gmail.com. There was a day when forestry workers and environmentalists walked

“Digging into History: Health and Safety is a Basic Right!”, by John Mountain, Vol. 2 No. 2 (February, 2020)

Health and Safety is a Basic Right – Between 1983 and 1994, there were 290 fatalities in the forest industry. In 2005, former IWA President Jack Munro called the 41 fatalities recorded that year as “carnage in the woods”. There were more than 2.5 times more fatalities in 2005 than the previous year*. It’s no

“Digging into History: The 1986 Strike”, by John Mountain, Vol. 1 No. 11 (November, 2019)

These first few blog posts are backdated issues of John Mountain’s historical newsletter “Digging into History”. As of March 2020, John had been working on sorting the collection for over a year and a half, publishing a newsletter every month detailing his findings. The 1986 Strike – As many IWA members are digging in for