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The Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company made an agreement with the Dominion Iron and Steel Company to become a new business. That new business was The British Empire Steel Company (BESCO). The goal was that by working together they would be a stronger business because it would make the process of making steel cheaper since that required a lot of coal which they could make themselves. When the new company began, workers were in a union and making good wages.
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The growth in coal mining in 1920-1921 continued. This year 9 more coal mines opened in the province. None of the coal mines that had opened before closed in this year.
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BESCO tried to cut wages by 33%. As a result, the workers at BESCO and their union decided to go on strike and stop working. They would have off and on strikes for the next 4 years because of this. Coal mining companies were losing business because people were switching from coal to oil to heat their homes.
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Coal miners in Cape Breton wanted to help and support the BESCO coal miners. To do this, they decided to stop working and go on strike to show their support. This also meant that the coal mines they worked in did not make money because people could not buy BESCO coal. The police arrested the leaders of the Cape Breton Coal miners union. This ended the strike.
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After more than 15 mines opened the previous year, 4 more coal mines opened throughout Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island. One of the mines that opened the year before also closed.
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The boom in coal mining continued. Between 1924 and 1925, another 8 mines opened in Nova Scotia. Most of these were small mines and some only opened for 1 year.
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The following poem was written by a coal miner and published in Maritime Labour Herald magazine: The mills shut down three months they say
It may be more but anyway
We're out of luck there'll be no pay
Now...how about the eats The family needs this and that
A pair of shoes, a shirt, a hat
We've not enough to feed a cat
And...how about the rent Thank God the company's alright
The dividend (profit) is safe and tight
The stockholder can sleep at night
Tho'....we feel rather blue -
Most of the coal miners did their shopping at stores owned by BESCO. To try and stop the strike, BESCO shut all of the stores down. This led to a huge fight at Wateford Lakes, Nova Scotia. In the fight, one of the police officers who worked for BESCO killed one of the coal miners, a man named William Davis.
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The government of Nova Scotia stepped in to work with BESCO and the union. They came to an agreement that kept wages at the level that they were in 1922. The 1922 wages were higher than wages were in 1920.
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After the strikes, the government of Canada decided to investigate the coal mining industry. One of their decisions was to put a lot of the blame for the situation on BESCO and not the union. The government decided that BESCO was not acting in a fair way with the coal miners or the union.
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BESCO had been losing money throughout the 1920s. As a result, they found that they could not stay in business and still make money. This led to BESCO going out of business entirely. All of their mines were bought by the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation.