"We used to have a saying ... you threw your lunch pails in the air to take a strike vote. If they stayed up you worked. If they came down you were on strike."
Vancouver (18 Jan. 2006) - John Francis (Lofty) MacMillan, a giant of the Canadian labour movement, died in Vancouver on Sunday at the age of 88. He passed away peacefully at the Brock Fahrni Pavilion, a nursing home for veterans where he lived for the past two years.
Born July 26, 1917, in Port Hood, Cape Breton, MacMillan began his union career in the coal mines.
He served in the navy and spent a number of years in Saint John, N.B., where he walked the beat as a policeman and was elected a municipal councillor before going on to become one of the best-known union organizers of his day.
MacMillan's work in Atlantic Canada helped to pioneer the widespread organizing of public sector workers in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. He spent a number of years in Ottawa where he served as national director of organizing for the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
Effective as he was at his job there - CUPE tripled in size during his tenure - he was never fully comfortable as a manager in the union's national office. His heart was always in the field with the members.
Loved by the rank and file
Long after he retired, MacMillan remained an inspiration to rank and file unionists. It seemed that all he had to do was show up at a labour convention, and step to the microphone, for the hall to fill with cheers and applause.
When he was in his 80s, he turned what was supposed to be a few brief remarks into such an impassioned oration at a union convention in Corner Brook that he upstaged the entire event.
The CBC, which happened to be there, made his address the centrepiece of its coverage, broadcasting it across Newfoundland and Labrador.
He was given the nickname Lofty because of his height - he stood six-foot-six - but it as easily fit his reputation. He commanded respect wherever he went, his beloved wife Clara always at his side, and he never lost the common touch.
The lunch pail vote
He was fearless and colorful throughout his career, a non-drinker in a boozy profession, and a devout Catholic who could express himself with the best of them.
"We used to have a saying," he wrote of his coal mining days in his biography, The Boy from Port Hood. "You threw your lunch pails in the air to take a strike vote. If they stayed up you worked. If they came down you were on strike."
Bob Davidson, a CUPE representative in New Brunswick, said MacMillan brought a tough and principled approach to everything he did. "You know these people came up in a time when you had to fight for every inch you got," he recalled.
"He never retired. He continued with the causes," Davidson told the Telegraph-Journal in Saint John. "He was a tower of strength for the working people of Canada. His whole life was consumed by current events and issues that affect the working people."
MacMillan settled in Campbellton, N.B., when he retired in 1982 and fought for labour and human rights until late in his life.
He provided invaluable advice and encouragement to union leaders, including Davidson, during a tough province-wide strike against the government of Frank McKenna in 1992. The issue was the integrity of signed legal contracts and the union won the day.
Hospital food
In the mid-1990s, MacMillan called a news conference from his hospital bed in Saint John to challenge McKenna to eat the frozen, re-heated, privatized food that was being served to hospital patients.
"If you're going to a hospital in New Brunswick, buy yourself a lunch pail," he warned patients. "Everybody deserves a decent meal and when that isn't being provided in an institution such as this then there's no place for the McKennas and the rest of them in this society," he told reporters.
When he arrived in Vancouver, he asked a nurse at the home for a copy of her collective agreement. If she had any problems, he told her, he would be glad to help.
A memorial service will be held at Brock Fahrni Pavilion, Vancouver, on March 1 with final arrangements scheduled for late July at St. Peter's Parish in his boyhood home of Port Hood on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. NUPGE
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