A Hard Man to Beat: The Story of Bill White: Labour Leader, Historian Shipyard Worker, Raconteur

by Howard White

Overview

Bill White (1905–2001) was an itinerant ranch hand and trapper, a member of the RCMP and an Arctic traveller, but he was best known for his work as the head of the Vancouver Labour Council and president of the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union, the largest local union in Canada in his time. It was a position he held for eleven straight years during WWII, the heyday of the West Coast shipbuilding industry. Known as "Bareknuckle Bill," White was fierce and unrelenting in his condemnation of the companies and governments that refused to treat their workers like human beings. He personally fought one of the first big right-to-work cases in BC history, all the way to the Privy Council of England.

From the scaffolds and docks of the shipyards to the battleground of the bargaining table, White's stories about the struggle for labour and human rights in Vancouver in the '40s and '50s make for harrowing and fascinating reading. A Hard Man to Beat not only covers all the major labour events of the period, but brings to life the personality of the man, Bill White, in his own colourful—and sometimes expletive-filled—language. Author Howard White spent years of intensive research and worked closely with Bill to create this oral history, which sold out its first printing in two days when it was first published in 1983.

A Hard Man to Beat is one of ten Vancouver 125 Legacy books, an initiative created by the City of Vancouver, the Office of Vancouver's Poet Laureate Brad Cran and the Association of Book Publishers of BC to bring back into print a collection of books to celebrate Vancouver's 125th anniversary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550175516
Publisher:	Harbour Publishing Company, Limited
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Edition description:	Reprint
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

Part 1 The Shipyards

1 They Never Admitted It was a Depression 19

2 Raining Red-Hot Rivets 28

3 Dirty Work and Dirty Money 41

4 Beefs 57

5 The Battleground of the Bargaining Table 72

6 Beyond the Union Hall 89

Part 2 The Compensation Board

7 Case By Case 109

8 I Get a Royal Commission-1949 118

Part 3 The Kuzych Case

9 Tools of Power 133

10 The Courts Get On Our Case 142

11 Trade Unionism in Trouble 155

12 The Law Lords 162

Part 4 The Party

13 The Militant Tradition 175

14 Canadian McCarthyism 185

15 How the West Was Lost 194

16 Cannibalism 200

17 Standing Alone 216

18 How It Ended 222

19 Old Labour Leaders 240

Index 252