The perceived threat of Asian and South Asian individuals and communities driving "white labour" out was part of a moral panic that permeated the origins of the dominant settler labour movement in Vancouver.
When we consider anti-Asian head taxes, gendered immigration exclusion, internment, and complete migrant bans, dominant labour organizations and representatives supported and/or led many of these violent interventions – they were not just settler-state government impositions.
These examples, shown with hindsight, offer a clear perspective of racist exclusion and violence within labour.
But there are similar logics of violence and exclusion supported or treated neutrally by labour organizations today – especially as today's BC NDP shift rightward, and turn their focus to carceral expansion, particularly when it comes to use of public space. These forms of exclusion should have been more broadly resisted then, and cam be now.
Racist exclusion in Vancouver labour organizing from 1903 - 1928 through 12 clippings:
1) "Drive out white labour."
2) Multi-partisan meeting organizing for the Asiatic Exclusion League included representatives from the Dominion Trades Congress.
3) Province used headline, "Hindu Eclipse of the Brownie Moon" to describe recent immigration from the Indian subcontinent.
4) "White cooks stand by demand" for a "White City" in Vancouver hotels and restaurants.
5) The Trades and Labor Congress of Canada passing a motion to advocate for a ban on Japanese immigration.
6) Municipal campaign ad in Vancouver Daily World for members of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
7) Electoral parties of all stripes – including the Socialist candidate – running on Asiatic Exclusion in 1908.
8) Trades and Labour Congress passes resolution to advocate to government for "total exclusion of Hindus" in 1912.
9) A BC government bureaucrat arguing for migrant exclusion of people from India, stating he prefers "Sikhs" to "the general Hindu."
10) Trades and Labor council – which represents unions – blames unemployment rate on too many Asian people having jobs in 1921.
11) Some of the groups that made up BC's Asiatic Exclusion League in 1921.
12) A prominent Dominion Trades Council member standing behind Asian and South Asian exclusion in 1928 - stating it is part of the Council's history and that a reversal would be "suicidal" for labour.
