The Life of Steve continued

   As communism vanished, some communists changed their views overnight. One man  had spent years denouncing the New Democratic Party. "It's just a bunch of right-wing social democrats," he said many times, often to N.D.P.'ers. Now he too joined the N.D.P.
    But Steve didn't leave. He stayed with communist party as it struggled to survive. Its membership in B.C. stood at barely 200 people. Its newspaper 'The Pacific Tribune' or 'The Trib' as it used to be called vanished. Meanwhile to compound the party's problems, the old line political parties tried to pass legislation that would forbid parties, like the communist party from taking part in federal or provincial parties.
    But the communist party did limp along, albeit in a very shrunken form.
    It started up a new paper called 'People's Voice'. It worked with other small parties to overturn the legislation that would have banned it, and other small parties from taking part in elections. And it met with other communist parties ariund the world to plan a new way forward towards socialism.
    "It was touch-and-go in the 1990's," Steve recalls. "But the party didn't go under. It's still around."





               Steve's Job
    
      It was a huge boiler room that squatted under a big building just outside Vancouver's city limits.
      Here Steve worked, sweated and toiled for over 15 years. "Sometimes it was dangerous there," Steve says. Sometimes the boiler gave off too much heat. Then Steve and his workmates had to turn the heat down quickly or the boiler room would blow up. Sometimes the pipes jammed up and they'd have to be unclogged.
    Once Steve nearly fell from a staircase onto the boiler room's concrete floor. But he didn't fall. If he had, he might have died.
    And heat, noise and dust clogged the air in the boiler room every day.
    Steve was now 65, then 70. He toiled on while most people retired or talked about retirement. But he hadn't saved much money and his medical expenses kept climbing.
    Most of his workmates were young men in their 30's or 40's. "They've bought big houses and run small businesses on the side," Steve observes. They lived lives worlds away from the class-conscious militants Steve had worked with when he was young. They laughed behind Steve'a back at his politics and his predictions. To them, he was an old fogey, a relic from another long ago era that they had never known. They often railed against the union, a union that had brought them many benefits.
     And the union leaders Steve met now, appalled him. They didn't seem to him to give a damn about organizing the unorganized. "They couldn't shine the shoes of the union leaders I used to know," he says.
    Steve had known men and women who had put their lives on the line, organizing unions in the 1930's and 1940's Some had gone to prison, others had been beaten by company goons. The present day union leaders sat in big plush offices, drove expensive cars, lived in huge homes, and vacationed all over the world. They earned upwards of $100,000 a year and more.
     Many of the workers in the unions lived similar lives - or wanted to.