Cape Breton Coal Strike of 1981 - Miners' Unions in Nova Scotia

Miners' Unions in Nova Scotia

Coal miners in Nova Scotia were first organized by the Provincial Workmen's Association (PWA) in 1897. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) attempted to organize the miners and supplant the PWA in 1908. The two unions fought for control, but in 1917 joined forces and formed the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia. The Amalgamated affiliated fully with UMWA a year later. Miners were represented continuously by UMWA over the next 80 years.

Strikes during this period were exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, major work stoppages occurred in 1920s. In 1920, the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO) took ownership of all gold, silver and coal mines in Nova Scotia. UMWA and BESCO had an extremely adversarial relationship. After BESCO slashed wages by a third in 1922, 12,000 outraged union members struck. Twelve hundred cavalry troops were sent to Cape Breton to keep order, and machine gun nests were set up to protection BESCO property. After eight months, BESCO agreed to cut wages by only 18 percent—an agreement neither side was very happy with. During a steelworkers' strike in the summer of 1923, mounted provincial police attacked a crowd of women and children on July 1, 1923. The miners' union struck in protest. Federal troops were called in to break both strikes. Six months later, when the miners' contract expired, BESCO proposed wage cuts totaling 20 percent. The union struck again, and a new contract restoring the wage cut was reached in April 1924. Then on March 6, 1925, UMWA struck again, this time to win a wage increase to restore income to its 1922 levels. Twelve thousand miners walked out. BESCO police began terrorizing citizens in mining towns throughout the province, charging even small groups of people on horseback and beating anyone they caught. BESCO, which owned most of the electrical utilities and grocery stores in the mining towns, cut off credit. By June, thousands of families were on the verge of starvation. On June 11, approximately 3,000 men and boys gathered in the town of New Waterford and marched on the city's BESCO-owned power plant, determined to restore water and power service to their homes. The strikers and their supporters were confronted by 100 mounted, armed police. In what became known as the "Battle of Waterford Lake", the crowd attacked. Several policemen fired into the crowd, hitting three. Gilbert Watson and Michael O'Handley were wounded, but William Davis died from a bullet in the heart. Several days of rioting followed, and more than 2,000 Canadian Army soldiers were sent to the province on July 16, 1925, to restore order. It was the second-largest domestic use of military force in Canadian history (only the use of the Army during the North-West Rebellion in 1885 was larger). In the 1925 provincial election, Edgar Nelson Rhodes, a Conservative, was elected Premier of Nova Scotia. Rhodes quickly negotiated a temporary settlement of the strike under which a Royal Commission would investigate the dispute. A tentative settlement on the union's terms was reached in August. Despite a brief resumption of strike activity on August 5, the strike ended on August 9, 1925.

The strike broke BESCO. The company was reorganized, and emerged in 1927 as the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation. Technological innovation, the difficulty of mining coal (coal in Nova Scotia was increasingly mined from veins under the sea floor), and the availability of natural gas (piped in from oil fields in the West) led to rapid decreases in the amount of coal mined as well as the number of miners. The economic viability of the Nova Scotia mines declined significantly. In 1967, the Parliament of Canada nationalized the Cape Breton mines. The Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO), a public company owned by the Government of Canada, took ownership of the mines.