The Great Depression Page 12

  With the Sydney steel mill closed and scores of families close to starvation, jobless men were ready to take desperate measures. One night at a meeting of the Unemployed Workers’ Association feeling ran so high that an ex-steel worker rose to move that everyone go home, get a gun, and march on city hall to demand an increase in relief. The motion was seconded and passed before the chairman, Dan MacKay, realized what was happening. “Good God!” said MacKay. “Did they know what they were voting for?” A debate followed; parliamentary procedure was invoked, and the motion was finally rescinded.

  It would not have been astonishing if it had passed, for relief that year did not provide bare subsistence, as George MacEachern, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed steelworker, discovered. MacEachern had been married in 1929. In 1930 he managed to get some pick-and-shovel work out of town, but by May 1931, when his first child was born, his savings were gone. To this moment he had not considered applying for relief – he’d always thought that was something for paupers. But now he swallowed his pride and went on the dole – the direct relief that R.B. Bennett opposed but that more and more communities like Sydney were dispensing in the absence of anything resembling public works. The family of three was given vouchers for just three dollars’ worth of groceries a week – nothing for rent, light, telephone, or fuel and, shockingly, nothing for milk. It would take a third of the family’s “income” just to provide milk for the new baby.

  MacEachern joined the Unemployed Workers’ Association and became an active executive, first as recording secretary and eventually as chairman. One of his first tasks was to sit on a committee to try to get milk for the children of the unemployed. One family of ten – the mother had tuberculosis – could afford only a pint of milk a day. They could get no more: the town council refused to help them and the Red Cross was out of funds. Yet because the farmers couldn’t afford to bring milk into the town, they were feeding it to the pigs.

  MacEachern found some people literally starving. One man who lived in a shack was so sick his friends asked the city health officer to investigate. They were told there was nothing wrong with the invalid that warm clothes and good food wouldn’t cure. True enough; on a dollar a week, his main fare was turnips. He died insane in the Dartmouth Mental Hospital.

  The death of an old man named Small at the local mission was put down by the superintendent to “malnutrition.” MacEachern’s friend Harry Morgan put it more bluntly. “He died of starvation and Christian sympathy,” he said. “That’s what killed him.” Others died of what MacEachern called “a wearing away process.” With their resistance lowered by malnutrition, they succumbed to the first disease that came along.

  When MacEachern became chairman of the union, he decided to canvass the local aldermen privately to try to get an increase in the relief payments. The man who represented MacEachern’s ward, Seymour Hines, agreed to sponsor such a motion at the next council meeting. But when Hines arrived and looked down at the front row filled with officials from the steel company, he knew the motion wouldn’t pass. “They didn’t speak,” MacEachern recalled later; “they didn’t have to.” In the discussion that followed, one alderman, Dan MacDonald, charged that the unemployed wanted “quail on toast.” Another declared that if a vote of the taxpayers was taken, all relief would dry up. Hines’s motion was defeated; only the mover and seconder voted for it.

  The union called a mass meeting in the Unemployed Workers’ Hall. Only a few council members attended. Alderman Hines again spoke in favour of an increase in relief. The next speaker, an alderman who had voted against the motion, broke down and cried. He admitted that although he was in favour of more relief and had promised to vote for it, his courage had failed when the vote was taken.

  This confession threw the meeting into such an uproar that MacEachern found he couldn’t keep order. MacDonald, the man who’d made the “quail on toast” remark, managed to slip out by a side door, but another councilman, who also tried to flee, had the sleeve of his jacket torn off. The next morning the police picked up some of those who had addressed the meeting and charged them with failure to pay their poll tax. The charges were not pressed; at the station they were simply warned against “stirring up trouble” – a wishful admonition, typical of those dark years, that suggests the gap of understanding between those in authority and those in want.

  In Sydney, as elsewhere, the upper classes, such as they were, seemed totally divorced from the conditions of the destitute. MacEachern discovered that in court one day when a member of the union was charged with stealing coal and fined ten dollars. At that, the defence lawyer, George Morrison, cried out in horror. “In Heaven’s name,” he asked the judge, “where do you think the man is going to get the $10? I should think if he had $10 he wouldn’t bother stealing coal. He stole it because he didn’t have any money.” After some discussion, the magistrate dropped the sum to five dollars. Morrison explained that it would be just about as difficult for the accused to get five dollars as ten. The fine was dropped to three dollars and eventually to a simple payment of costs.

  In nearby Glace Bay, conditions were just as grim. Coal mining in the thirties was a form of serfdom. The miners could never move away because they were always in debt to the company store, “a jolly little system of perversion invented to overcome the inconvenience of anti-slavery laws,” in the words of Bill McNeil, who grew up there. Half a century after the Depression, McNeil, in a bitter indictment, wrote that the town was built on the cheap by companies that came in to savage the region’s natural resources.

  The local stores, churches, schools, and town council were all in thrall to “the Company” – Dominion Coal – which built the roads and the cheap houses, kept the miners in debt, and blacklisted those who tried to complain. “The Company’s immense influence extended not only to the local governing councils but also to the provincial and federal governments.…” McNeil, who was to become a CBC producer, wrote that “many children died during the Depression in Glace Bay. Nobody said they starved to death, but that was actually the reason.”

  The miners were a proud bunch, unwilling to accept a handout except as a last resort. In desperation some would sneak out to the local relief station, fearful that they would be seen, following a long and circuitous route of back alleys, sometimes hiding in the shadows for hours until they could claim their bit of lard, some sugar, flour, or bread. No one wanted to be seen “carrying the sack,” as the local phrase had it – a telltale bag containing relief supplies.

  Although there was coal everywhere in Glace Bay – in huge storage bins, in railway cars, and in seams that cropped out on the surface of the ground – people were invariably cold because the company police prevented them from taking it. By the end of the thirties, there wasn’t an available stick of wood left in town. Driftwood, picket fences, shingles, and clapboard, even telephone poles disappeared in the dead of night to prevent people from freezing to death. The company houses had no basements and no insulation. The walls were full of cracks. The floors were uncarpeted. The only furniture, other than a kitchen table, consisted of a few chairs and a couple of mattresses upstairs. Newspapers took the place of curtains.

  Appalling as conditions were in Cape Breton, those in the Souris coalfields of Southern Saskatchewan were worse. This was lignite country. The soft, dirty coal, mined in the vicinity of Bienfait, nine miles east of Estevan on the U.S. border, was sold domestically. Mining therefore was seasonal. Until the Depression, the miners earned a year-round living by working six months in summer as farm help. But now there was no work on the farms. The big coal companies were themselves teetering on the edge of insolvency, largely because they could not compete with the cheaper strip-mining techniques introduced to the area by the Truax-Traer firm. In the face of this threat, they cut the meagre wages even lower.

  The five largest companies, known as the Group, conspired to fix prices, control production limits, and handle labour problems. These were Bienfait Mines Limited, Crescent Collieries Limit
ed, Eastern Collieries of Bienfait Limited, Western Dominion Collieries Limited, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan Coal Limited, better known as M&S. Together with a sixth company, National Mines, where working conditions were better, they were called the Big Six.

  Before the Depression the average earnings in the Souris fields were only half those paid elsewhere in Saskatchewan and Alberta. By 1931 they had fallen by an additional 21 per cent. Some miners made as little as nine dollars a week; twenty-five was considered exceptional. Those working on a tonnage basis (twenty-five cents a ton, reduced from fifty-six cents) did better than those on straight hourly wages. But to scrape together a living these men had to work fourteen to sixteen hours a day, cooped up like moles from sunrise to sunset. They rarely saw daylight.

  The company’s deductions could actually leave a worker in debt. The miners had to buy their own slickers and boots – boots that cost five dollars a pair and lasted barely a month in the ankle-deep water. Each man paid a dollar and a half a month for the company doctor plus an extra fee in cash for a visit to him. They paid for powder, they paid for squibs, they paid for carbon for their lamps, they paid for sharpening their shovels and picks. At the M&S mine, they paid fifty cents to use the bath house and three-quarters of a cent a gallon for water delivery.

  These sums added up. An experienced miner, for instance, could make a $3.60 keg of black powder last long enough to mine twenty-five tons, for which he was paid $6.25. A less experienced man, who managed only ten tons, could find himself permanently in debt. All were regularly cheated on their tonnage. When they were paid for mining a ton, it was always a long ton – 2,240 pounds. But when they bought a ton of coal they got only a short ton – 2,000 pounds. The weighing system was crooked and the scales inaccurate. Although most ore cars carried at least three tons of coal, the men were never paid for more than two tons a carload.

  Nor were they paid for any work they did apart from the coal they mined. Besides being dangerous, a cave-in cost them, not the company, money. Harry Hesketh, working with his son for Bienfait Mines, lost half a day’s work when a cross-piece broke, dumping two and a half feet of clay on the floor of the mine. When he asked for recompense for cleaning it up, he was told, “We don’t pay anybody for anything like that.”

  Pete Gembey, who worked for Western Dominion, toiled for sixty hours and was paid for twenty because he’d spent most of his time fixing a piece of machinery that had broken down. Some men had to work for an hour and a half just getting rid of water before they could start mining coal. They also had to lay track and repair it for no extra pay.

  They didn’t dare complain. In the five mines of the Group there were no grievance committees. Plenty of hungry men stood ready to take the places of those who had the temerity to question the system. Anyone who complained was told bluntly to pack up his tools and get out.

  John Billis, working for Eastern Collieries, had been standing for ten hours in two feet of water when he was told he had to work overtime to fill an order. He’d been loading coal all day and was dead tired, but his boss warned him, “If you go home you don’t come back any more.” His fellow miner, Wilbur Enmark, who suffered a broken leg after a cave-in, complained about the company’s meagre compensation for injury. Ed Pierce, the mine manager, told him to take what he’d been offered or he’d get a damned sight less. When Enmark had the audacity to hire a lawyer, Pierce told him he’d be blacklisted. “I will chase you out of the country!” he said. Enmark had no work for a year.

  When its weigh scales broke down, Bienfait Mines took it upon itself to guess at the amounts. The miners objected and refused to go underground. When Harry Hesketh was sent to explain the situation to the mine manager, he was summarily fired.

  Working conditions in the mines were ghastly. In the Crescent mine, Martin Day worked continually in water that often rose to the mid-calf. Day was paid not by the ton but at the rate of a dollar a linear foot. Under good conditions he could clear seven dollars a day. But when the water was bad it took two days to make that quota. Naked electrical wires added to the hazard; Day, a Scottish-born miner, had never seen uncovered wires before.

  The air was always bad, often heavy with smoke from blasting. The “black damp” – air from an old shaft thick with carbon dioxide – was so dense that in Bienfait Mines the fan was unable to move it. When the men tried to light their lamps, the black damp would snuff them out. In twenty-eight years in that mine Harry Hesketh had never seen any instrument taken down to test the air. The black damp had no odour. It could only be detected when the lamps flickered out. By that time the men could be overcome from lack of oxygen.

  The Mine Act was never completely enforced, as one mine inspector told a royal commission that later uncovered these conditions. Yet the deep-seam operators were never prosecuted. John R. Brodie, vice-president of Bienfait Mines, was to swear that he considered the conditions excellent. “I do not think,” he said, “there is anything in Western Canada to surpass it.… There are very few hazards as compared with other operations in other parts of western Canada.”

  The working conditions below ground that Brodie described so lyrically were matched by the living conditions on the surface. The transients in the burgeoning urban jungles were no worse off than the families jammed into the tar-paper shacks that the companies constructed among the mountains of slag for their employees. In this grassless and treeless world, there was no comfort. When the district sanitary officer was finally ordered to inspect 113 of these shanties in the late fall, he found 53 cold, 43 leaky, 52 dirty, 25 overcrowded, and all in need of repair. Only two companies provided showers for their miners. Four made no provision whatever for sanitation.

  John Harris and his family lived in a two-room shack without a basement built on a slope. The company provided neither furniture nor storm door and windows. Wind blew the snow through the window frames; rain poured down through the roof, which the company refused to repair. During a storm, the family moved their beds up the slope and put out pans and pails to catch the water.

  The Baryluk family of eleven lived in a one-bedroom shack protected from the elements by only two inches of wood. Sleeping two or three to a bed in this overcrowded hovel, they found themselves stepping onto a floor thick with snow in the winter mornings. Yet they and others found it better to live in the company shacks because by doing so they were recognized as permanent employees and thus guaranteed work.

  The worst off were the foreign workers, some of whom existed in shacks made from empty dynamite boxes. These pig-sties often had only three walls of wood, the fourth being the hillside itself. Pete Gembey’s first house was in “shack valley” in Taylorton. “It was in a ravine right up against the big hill. They dug a square hole and they put boards on it and they slapped on a roof.… The roof was tar paper and partly covered with dirt.… You couldn’t keep it clean.… The boards … they would dry up and cracks would form, about half an inch or so. Some boards had knot holes and sometimes a snake would crawl through.…”

  Single men were crammed into bunkhouses, two to a bug-infested bed. For that and electric light they were charged $1.30 a day and had to provide their own bedding. If they didn’t use the company bunkhouse, they paid a weekly “fine” of one dollar.

  The foremen who lived on the mine property were better housed. The mine managers lived comfortably in Estevan, where they had electric light and running water. The absentee owners lived in luxury in Calgary, Winnipeg, and New York City.

  The companies squeezed their workers in every possible way. All put pressure on their employees to use the company store, but M&S went further: it insisted. As Fred Booth, a machinist’s helper, explained, he had no choice anyway. “I am always in hole to the company.… It was Hobson’s choice for me.…” Even if the company had allowed him to go into Bienfait and buy provisions more cheaply, he didn’t have a car and he didn’t have the cash. He got credit at the company store but paid through the nose. For groceries that would have cost him three dollars in B
ienfait he was charged six by the company. As a result, many miners got pay envelopes containing only a note showing an increasing debt.

  At the M&S mine, the manager, Alex “Happy” Wilson, went to great lengths to prevent his employees from shopping outside the fenced-in compound. Peter Boruk’s mail-order parcel from Eaton’s was broken into and the contents hurled at him as the timekeeper chased him from the office. Mrs. Francis Gray was warned: “If you’re going to get stuff from Eaton’s you will have to leave camp.” Her parcels, too, were opened.

  Pedlars and farmers were banned from the mine premises, but some of the women would steal across to the briquet plant just outside the compound to bargain with the locals for eggs and meat. When Wilson drove by, they would throw the produce into a nearby ditch to avoid being caught. Others sneaked into Estevan for some illicit shopping to return thirty pounds heavier, their purchases hung from their waists under billowing skirts. M&S even got its pound of flesh when John Slenka’s cow wandered off: the company fined him ten dollars. When he tried to buy hay from a farmer at five dollars a load, they stopped him. Company hay went for six dollars and was so rotten the cows wouldn’t eat it.

  Is it surprising, then, that with these conditions, and with further pay cuts in the offing, the miners in the Souris fields should start to talk about forming a union? It wouldn’t be easy; these men and their predecessors had been trying and failing to organize for more than twenty-five years. But now they were more desperate than they had ever been, and thus the stage was set for one of the bloodiest confrontations in Canadian labour history.

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