Rose from packing house worker to deputy labour minister
Regina (12 Sep. 2008) - Hub Elkin, a long-time Saskatchewan trade unionist, has died at age 92.
Elkin was among the most active, influential and longest-serving trade union leaders and industrial relations administrators in Saskatchewan history. Born on Feb. 11, 1916, he went to work in at a meat-packing company in Moose Jaw in 1934 and helped organize the workers, serving as president of the Packinghouse Employees Federal Union local at the plant.
In 1942, Elkin became a full-time union organizer and was instrumental in founding the first Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL), established by the former Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). He served as the first president of the SFL in 1944-45.
From 1945 to 1964 he was employed by the newly-formed Saskatchewan department of labour as a conciliation officer. Later he became executive officer of the Saskatchewan Labour Relations Board (SLRB) and served as deputy minister of labour from 1949 to 1964.
In 1963 he graduated with distinction from the Labour College of Canada, the trade union movement’s post-secondary training institute in Ottawa, and from 1964 to 1970 he was executive-secretary of the SFL, the most senior trade union staff person in the province.
In the 1970s Elkin was a union rep with CUPE and he also acted as an industrial relations advisor for the International Labour Organization in the Netherlands Antilles.
Throughout his life he was involved in political democratic-socialist causes, active in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the Council of Canadians (COC). In 2002 he revived a project to research and write a comprehensive history of working people and unions in Saskatchewan, work that took him more than two years to complete.
NUPGE
The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada's largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring that our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE
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