Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Gold/Mining/Energy : Mining News of Note -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LoneClone who wrote (37531)	5/23/2009 4:11:47 PM
From: LoneClone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 194794

When miners were little more than slaves You think times are hard now? The author of a new book about the harsh lives of Canadian coal miners has news for you theglobeandmail.com John DeMont Friday, May. 15, 2009 03:12PM EDT Whenever I used to whine about how hard it was to write Coal Black Heart , my recently published history of coal mining, my wife, Lisa, had a quick reply: “Your grandfather went into the coal mines at 11, right?” Yes, I would whimper. “And you are complaining precisely why?” The woman had a point. Carpal-tunnel syndrome can be a bitch; don't let anyone tell you different. But when your grand-pappy spent half a century in a hole in the ground, it's really stretching things to think of some rigorous typing for Doubleday Canada as “toil.” A little context, you see, can be instructive. Which is why, as tough as times are for working folks these days, I some times find it useful to cast my mind back a century ago and consider how things were when my predecessors tried to hack out a meagre living in the colliery towns of Nova Scotia. The essence of the work hadn't changed much since my great, great, great, great grandfather first went underground in a coal pit in Lancashire, England. Four generations later – when little Jack Briers went into the Florence Colliery in Sydney Mines – boys young enough to believe in Santa Claus continued to make up a disturbingly high percentage of the work force. Children like my grandfather worked six days a week in the darkness of all darkness, amid choking coal dust and rats so big and numerous that they sounded like herds of sheep as they scuttled down the tunnels. That year (1906), 33 men died in Nova Scotia coal mines from rock falls, explosions and other accidents. That made it a relatively carnage-free 12 months; all told, more Nova Scotians died in the coal mines than on the battlefields of World War I – and that figure doesn't include the ones maimed, crippled and left old before their time by the conditions underground. No safety net in those days: the “friendly societies” – the closest thing to a pension plan in early 20th-century Nova Scotia coal towns – were dirt poor. Nova Scotia's Workmen's Compensation Act came along in 1915, but as a report for the federal Department of Mines pointed out a year later, it made “no provision for loss of earning power due to sickness, except in the rather obscure and debatable field of occupational diseases.” Doing the research for my book, I learned that life above ground was no picnic either. The coal companies– which owned the hovels where the miners and their families lived, the water they drank, the stores that sold the food they ate and the clothes they wore – got away with the worst kind of mustache-twirling villainy. When the miners went on strike for a living wage or some other basic necessity, the coal companies cut off their food and heat. Sometimes they evicted whole families in the middle of winter. When that didn't work, the companies brought in their hoods to bust some heads. On one occasion, their goons shot one miner through the arm and another in the stomach. Bill Davis, all 5 feet 2 inches of him, took one through the heart, leaving behind nine children and a wife pregnant with a tenth. The miners were on their own in those days. The courts almost always sided with the big money. The governments only intervened at the behest of the coal companies – as was the case in 1922 when the miners went on strike to resist a one-third wage cut ordered by the British Empire Steel Corporation. Soon, 1,200 federal troops were en route to Cape Breton. The province formed a special 1,000-man police force to go into the coalfields and patrol the mines. Canada's two destroyers, the Patriot and the Patrician, received orders to proceed to Sydney to render assistance. Mercifully, a bit of common sense prevailed and the order for naval aid was cancelled. So were requests to have airplanes from Dartmouth, N.S. deployed and to press British battleships in Newfoundland waters into service. You get the picture. I fully realize that this notion is of faint comfort to the laid-off Windsor auto worker or the jobless carpenter in British Columbia, but it's still worth remembering a time and place when good men were little more than indentured slaves. At the very least it will make you shut up – instead of feeling hard done by because your e-mail is down and you're too damn busy to make it to your Ashtanga yoga class. John DeMont's book Coal Black Heart: The Story of Coal and the Lives it Ruled, was published by Doubleday Canada in April.