The Great Depression (16 page)

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 Bienfait 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.

No labour union wanted to touch the Souris fields. The United Mine Workers of America had tried in 1907. The owners refused to negotiate, fired all who joined the union, and formed a protective association to dismiss or blacklist all future union militants. When, in 1915, the UMWA tried again, the owners locked out the miners and had them fined and prosecuted under wartime regulations.

In 1920 the Souris miners applied to the first of the “vertical” unions – the One Big Union, as it was called. Out came an organizer from Calgary, P.M. Christophers. He was immediately kidnapped by a seven-man vigilante committee that included a provincial police corporal, hustled out of town, and warned he’d be tarred and feathered if he returned. All seven vigilantes were acquitted of wrongdoing. The police were then brought in to protect mine properties, three dozen militants lost their jobs, and would-be union men were threatened with rent increases and loss of credit.

Thus when the miners in the summer of 1931 asked for help from the Trades and Labour Congress and the All-Canadian Congress of Labour, they got no response. As a last resort they turned to the Workers’ Unity League and its new affiliate, the Mine Workers’ Union of Canada, which had broken away from
its international parent, the UMWA. (The story was a familiar one: the American-run union had not cared enough about its Alberta branch to give it any help.)

On August 25, the new union’s president, James Sloan, a short, grey-eyed Scot, arrived in Estevan and held an organizational meeting. Six hundred miners joined the union, allowing Sloan to boast that he had a “100 per cent sign up of mine employees of the coal fields.”

The fact that any union, and a communist-led union at that, could so quickly have signed up a majority of the miners suggests that the limits of despair had been truly reached. The problem of organization was a daunting one. The prospective members were living on company property under the eyes of company security guards. Many couldn’t write or speak English. Boatloads of Slavs and Swedes had been imported in the late 1920s to do most of the menial work for the lowest possible wages, making it easy for the companies to cut the miners’ pay after 1928. It was in their interests to play up ethnic divisions: the British-born got the best jobs; the bosses were English, Irish, or Scots. As Howard Babcock, a company cook, was later to testify, they “tried to compete with each other, trying to get the most work out of the foreign miner.” They did their best, he said, “to keep the animosity between the two groups at fever pitch all the time.…”

Most of the men who rushed to join the union in spite of these divide-and-conquer tactics didn’t care about political affiliation. They simply wanted a better deal. The mine owners, however, seized on a heaven-sent issue and used it as an excuse to refuse to negotiate with the “Red Union.” The Big Six sent a message to Sloan: “We will not meet with you or any representative of an organization such as yours which, by your own statement, boasts a direct connection with the ‘entire Workers’ Unity League and the Red Internationale of Soviet Russia.’ ” In response, the union voted to cease work at midnight September 7 unless the mine owners met with their representatives.

In the light of the tragedy that followed, it’s important to note that the community remained calm as the deadline approached. Sergeant William Mulhall, the resident Mounted Policeman in the district, reported on September 5 that there was “no immediate cause for alarm.” The rugged Mulhall was not a man to panic. He was close to retirement, with twenty-three years’ service
in the Police; he had fought in the Boer War with the Royal Scots Fusiliers and had joined the South African Constabulary under the legendary Sam Steele before coming to Canada. He had considerable sympathy for the miners and advised his superiors that “our investigation must be carried out with care and patience.…”

It was the mine owners, not the union, who were predicting violence and urging that more police be rushed to Estevan. Mulhall believed they wanted a strike. The ringleader was Charles Morfit, consulting engineer for Western Dominion Collieries at Taylorton. Morfit, an American, had given the company some bad advice that had caused serious losses. As Mulhall pointed out, “if the plant is forced to close down through strike conditions, it will form a loophole of escape … without exciting severe criticism from the investors.…”

Mulhall reported that most of the miners weren’t in favour of communism but thought they’d had unjust treatment and needed a leader to air their grievances. “If these had been adjusted,” he wrote, “the present situation would have been avoided.” Meanwhile there was no reason to expect any violence or destruction of property.

Two days later, on September 7, a second Mounted Policeman, Detective Constable G.A. Sincennes, arrived from Regina and confirmed Mulhall’s appreciation of the situation. He attended a union meeting, “orderly in every manner,” in which Sloan counselled against violence in order to retain the sympathy of the community. Sincennes believed the miners would abide by that advice.