Union Zindabad! — South Asian Canadian Labour History in British Columbia

In January 1912, IWW members and their supporters staged “free-speech” rallies in Vancouver and were arrested by
City police.
D-06368, Royal BC Museum and Archives.
to the IWW Strike funds” at the IWW Hall in
Vancouver in 1912.” 9
The Socialist Party’s newspaper The Western
Clarion shot back with a column, signed “H.R.”
who is assumed to be Husain Rahim, the South
Asian radical who was connected to the Party.
“With regard to Oriental competition with the
White man in the province we can take but one
position on the question, and that is economic. So
long as the White capitalist goes to China, Japan
and India and exploits labor on a 10-cent a day
wage, the commodities produced that that labor
will enter into the market in competition with
the product of the White worker, and this pious
protest against the admittance of Oriental labor
in the name of the White worker is the usual
hypocritical cant of the capitalist class, who never
allow racial considerations to stand in the way of
satisfying their love for lucre.” 10
There is little evidence the IWW was successful
in recruiting many South Asians to its ranks in BC.
Its beliefs were, however, a radical challenge to the
conservative established labour movement. 11
9 Agnes Laut, “Am I my brother’s keeper? A study of British Columbia’s labor & Oriental problems”, (Toronto: Saturday
Night, 1913), 24. https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0056403
10 “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” The Western Clarion, March 29, 1913, 3.
11 For more information on the link between the IWW and early Indian nationalists, particularly Ghadarites see: Seema Sohi,
“Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in the Transnational Western U.S.-Canadian Borderlands”, in The Journal of
American History: 2011, 424.
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