Two Miners


Introduction

Fundamentally, there is very little difference between the two workers, one a hardrock miner in Sudbury, Canada, working for a large and wealthy, privately owned company, Inco (International Nickel), and the other one a miner in Sweden, working for a nationalized company, LKAB, in Kilruna, taken over by the government in 1957, but run “according to sound business principles”. Both do the dirty, hard labour in their respective societies, under conditions that create constant health hazards. Loss of hearing due to incredible noise (100-130 decibel), lung diseases (silicosis, lung cancer, and TB) due to diesel fumes and gases, and the permanent dust in the air they breathe, arthritis due to the dampness of the mines, broken backs due to the nature of the work, and mutilations and deaths in industrial accidents, are “ordinary” risks taken by these workers and their fellow miners. Both men are struggling to survive as persons under these conditions.

They are fighting the company at every point, its tyranny, its petty regulations and its blatant exploitation of their labour through time-study methods, increased demands for overtime and through its hard-core policy of keeping the wages down. They have to, however, deal with another obstacle as well: the union. The Canadian miner is active in the U.S.-dominated Steelworkers Union, where he is fighting to make it relevant to rank and filers, and is trying to wrest some of the control back to the men themselves from the hands of the long distance appointed and controlled, well-paid and secure union officials. He has had bitter experiences, which he recounts in detail in the interview, but he has not given up that particular struggle. The Swedish miner, on the other hand, looks at “his” union from the distance of the “ordinary joe”, who has, quietly, drawn his conclusions: “The company is better off with the union than without. Through the union the company can keep a check on the workers. It’s gone so far that when we have a problem, the company is the first one to say, ‘Get in touch with your local!’” He does not participate in the union, but like most workers cultivates a “passive resistance” to the system that oppresses him.

The interviews verify what we already know: that the labour unions by and large are but another dimension of the present capitalist rule, and are therefore a serious obstacle to social change. It has simply become more efficient and effective to have the leaders of the trade union movement socially responsible for maintaining discipline over the workers, to control them and to subdue them. Professional trade unionists do the job of enforcing the existing class relations with less overt violence than the company or the local capitalists.

Both men, although class conscious (aware of themselves as members of the working class) lack political consciousness (awareness of the historical role and the potential power of the working class). This lack of political perspective is a typical fate of working men and women in societies where the working class lacks a movement of its own and where political education of the working class has been virtually non-existent for decades, for the best of trade unionism can only foster trade union militancy among the workers. The Canadian miner, lacking political alternatives, buries himself in union activities within a union he is highly critical of, and a union which has successfully resisted any grass roots challenge. During the interview there are glimpses of him moving beyond trade unionism, pure and simple: the exploitation of labour and the exploitation of resources are so intertwined in mining and other industrial sectors of the economy, that Canadian independence and national survival can easily become class issues for this miner. The ownership of Canadian resources, Inco’s profiteering and the exploitation of the community, are no abstractions for him: they are political problems occurring in his daily existence as a worker.

The Swedish worker, lacking political direction, leads a private life and hopes, vaguely, for “changes”, although he thinks he is part of the “lost generation” of middle aged workers.

The first interview is by Daniel Drache and was originally prepared as a radio documentary. The second interview is by a Swedish writer, Sara Lidman, who compiled forty interviews with Swedish miners into a book, The Mine, which is to be translated and published by TRANSFORMATION. The book created an extraordinary controversy in Sweden when it was first published in 1968, simply because it documented, through the words of the workers themselves, the continuous, bottomless alienation of the worker from “his” society. Worker after worker testified – and this in that social-democratic dreamland, Sweden – that they were outsiders, whose life forces and health were perpetually eroded by their role in the class society they lived in. Workers, who as a rule are neither to be seen or heard, surfaced in this book and demanded attention.

Much of the response to the book on the part of the educated middle class was of the “Gee, I didn’t know they are just like us – they have feelings too”-variety, but the book’s greatest impact was to make the workers aware of themselves and of each other. As one worker said, in a letter to Sara Lidman: “I read the book as an exchange of letters between me and my fellow workers. We can never talk to each other, because of the noise and because some of us are deaf. It was some very true and beautiful letters, I think!”

Similar “letters” between all kinds of workers can easily be compiled and published in Canada and U.S., a correspondence which the intellectuals on this continent have to take upon themselves to facilitate.

The interview with the Swedish miner is translated by Rose-Marie Larrson. The photographs are from the original Swedish edition and are by Odd Uhrbom.




(2) How can you have solidarity?

I get up at six o'clock. I leave for work at ten to seven, and we take our cage underground at 7:29. We walk about a half-mile to the lunchroom when we get off at 2800 feet. Some of the boys usually have an orange, a cup of coffee. Some don’t have anything. Then the shift boss lines the men up and they start moving out. You put your tag on the end board and you go to work at your respective working places and you do whatever the job is.

Right now I’m a timberman on the level. I put up drift sets, repair timber and build shutes. Then you have people who are stope feeders and they are in charge of the stopes, where the muck is splashed and processed. You have drillers. And, of course, the stopes and the drillers combine to load up the blast and to ignite it and to blast it. Then you have tramming crews, who tram the muck, switchmen and motormen. And you have tramming bosses and shoot blasters and you have pipe fitters and tool fitters and steel sharpeners and shovellers and knippers. There's a great polyglot of different trades and classifications.

At 11:30 you have half an hour for lunch. 3:00 and 3:05, for our shift and the day shift, is quitting time. You go to the lunch room and take your tag and change it to the ‘out’. And you wait in the lunch room until the shift boss says, “O.K., fellas, let’s go.” and you parade out to the station, wait for the cage to come down and get on the cage. It’s something to see – the way the men are packed in. Thirty men in each cage! And you go to the surface, punch your card out, put your light away and you go in, change your clothes, have a shower and go home.

Take our mine today. You’re walking in water most of the time up over your ankles. You hardly see an ankle boot anymore. They’re now knee rubber boots. The water’s pouring down on the men there. I think this has a lot to do with the severity of the back injuries (2-1) and the sickness, of course. It could be made better. There’s no doubt about it. Today men are being rushed much too fast. There was almost six to nine months before I was allowed to touch a machine. Now they’re in the mine a week or two weeks, and they’re drilling and handling powder. This is asking too much of anyone – particularly young people. When I was hired on I was thirty-five, and I had worked around where there was explosives. So I was familiar with them. The young fellows coming down there – they’re not. If you look back at ’68 and ’69, I think there were six people that were killed in Inco operations that didn’t have three months seniority. I think that this bears out my argument that they’re pushing the young men too fast. They’re not giving them enough time to get familiar, and to become safety conscious.

I found out one way to keep the foreman off your back. For a year and a half I was isolated in a dead-end drift in the 2800 foot level. No one was allowed to come in and work with me. If anyone was caught in there – even talking with me – they were chased out. For as much as two and three weeks I sat on my backside doing nothing. They knew it – but I was allowed out because of the Safety and Health stuff. I was told that if I quit sending letters to government officials and so forth, and if I think of my family and my health, then I can have a pretty good job. When the strike was settled and the word got around that I had resigned as the steward and as chairman of the Safety and Health, I was suddenly allowed the freedom of the level. Now I can go anywhere and I’m getting paid my rate. I’m gonna be quite frank – I’m rather enjoying it, because at last I’m being treated like a man again. I can associate with the men.

We have many people who refuse to work because they consider it an unsafe area or the conditions so deplorable. They get sent home, and when they come back they get penalties.

You’d be surprised how little work you really have to do if you work safe according to their rules and regulations. This used to be a very formidable weapon, particularly when it came to bargaining time. It used to shock me to hear the president of the union get up and say, “now remember, fellows, work safely“. But this would be only two or three months previous to our contract expiring. They should be pounding this at the men in every meeting, in their newspapers and in everything!

I believe that overtime is defeating our union, and probably most unions, because people allow things to go rather than put a grievance in. They are afraid they might not get called out for overtime. (2-2)

In many cases we have three and four levels in the mine that have no stewards at all, because most of the old stewards have given up (2-3) – you know management has ways of embarrassing you if you become too active and too forceful. So some guys quit rather than put up with this. Some were stewards for years. But there’s not enough protection for them and they get a dirty deal. And I guess as you get older you figure, “what the hell, what’s the use?” How can you have militancy if your men have all kinds of shackles on them – you can’t say this and you can't do that.

Let’s take an example. All the people who went through our picket lines this summer under the pretext that if we stopped any one or restricted it to a certain number, the provincial police would come in and there’d be trouble, and for the public image this would be bad. But the public doesn’t know that when those men were in there, they were doing blasting and drilling. They were telling us that no production was going on. Well how the hell did the ore passes all get full and the shutes filled? No ore was coming out of the mines, grant you. But this is why the company was able to say their production had stepped way past their expectations within three weeks after the strike was over, because, instead of having to wait and get everything going, the ore was in the passes and the shutes – my god, all we did was just as if we had never been on strike! It was just like a normal work day – we went back and we went to work.

Do they exploit us? Those resources actually belong to the Canadian people. They're our resources, and we’re fortunate enough to live in a country where they are. Now you take Sudbury. Think of the hundreds of millions, yes, billions of dollars that have come out of here, and then take a look at the city. It’s only a few years ago that we got rid of night soil collection. Many places have no side walks, many places have no paved roads. Now my god, to me there’s something wrong when a company can come in and take these resources out of our country and return nothing – except ravage the community and the district. I agree with the NDP more here than on a lot of things on their platform. I think that the company should be nationalized (2-4), that Canadians – just like I'm talking about the union, the working people should be starting to take control over the union – should have some say of where these resources go and of how much comes back into Canada, to build it up to the country it so rightly deserves to be.

The membership here feels so damn frustrated. Here we are working for a company that is making vast profits – there’s no use of kidding ourselves, vast profits – and we have to work fourteen years to get an extra week’s holiday. We get two weeks a year, but we don’t get an extra week until after working fifteen years.

Not being able to get pension at sixty regardless of seniority is creating a tremendous hardship on the men – forcing them to work until sixty-five, because they lose six per cent of their pension for each year that they quit early. My partner is going on sixty-two, and this poor old fellow has only twenty-eight years seniority. So he has to work until he is sixty-five. He was already to take his pension if there was no reduction. But who can afford to take a twenty-four per cent reduction? My good god, he can’t live on the full pension – so what’s him and his wife gonna live on?

It’s easy for someone sitting up in a plush office to say, “well, this man’s worked twenty-eight years for this company. He should have money in the bank and be financially fixed. He can enjoy these years and take his pension even though he takes his reduction.’ Believe me, this is not so. Many of these men do not live to get a pension, because they die before.

I believe that you’re going to see compulsory arbitration in Canada. The labour movement would really enjoy this in spite of all their screams and hollers, because this would let them off the hook. They would say, “well, what could we do? You can’t go off on strike because the government’s passed the compulsory arbitration.” The men would just have to sit there and accept what was handed down. I believe that some of these strikes are being called with that thought in mind – to eventually force the government to come up with compulsory arbitration.

Conciliation proceedings used to be so damnable slow. You’d go five and six months past the contract, and you’d be working. And there’d be this complete intense feeling within the men that the pot was boiling. Eventually somebody would say, “the hell with this – let’s walk out.” They used to get away with it, but then the law was changed. If a steward or anyone was involved, the company could fire him. Now the men are very, very careful. Here again, another weapon is being eroded from the men.

A good indication of what is happening to the union was in December. I was on the afternoon shift, so I went in on Thursday morning to attend the membership meeting, because – I think that I had one of the best attendance records, pretty near – I was informed that they couldn’t get sixty people out Wednesday night, so they couldn’t conduct the meeting. (2-6)

I’m quite disturbed, because I think that if the workers don’t do something, then they are going to lose complete control of their union, and and they are not going to have no say in nothing. Under Mine Mill – and I’m not the least bit hesitant about saying this – the stewards were more respected by the management and the men than they are today. They had more support from the men. Unity. The men really backed their stewards up, and the shift bosses were very careful about violating the contract, because they knew that there was a real unity and a good bunch of stewards. The Mine Mill stewards were very militant – there’s no doubt about this. (2-7) But slowly it’s deteriorated to the most sophisticated approach now. And I believe that this is eventually going to hurt the working men.

A good example of this was when we were told down in Toronto this summer: “we don’t care whether you sign this or not, because we are going to sign an agreement with Inco whether you like it or not.” Here you have a bunch of people elected by the membership to go down and do a bargain for them, and you are told by people appointed by someone to a job (2-8) – and I consider it a damn good job, well paid, a pretty cosy job – “we don’t care what you do, because when we sign this we’re gonna sign it whether you like it or not.”

I have heard this argued at conventions – about autonomy. I think this is hurting the NDP party, because I’ve heard men say, “what the hell’s going on? The NDP wants to nationalize the industry, but the international unions don’t want to become nationalized.” (2-9) So I think that this has a backlash there.

And you know about trusteeship. (2-10) If you go too deep they can just come in and put your local under trusteeship. Then you have no damn say at all – of what goes on in your union.

Somehow we have been – I don’t know what you could say – led up the garden path. We have become more sophisticated – no more of the old hammerin’ at the table and really getting down to where you talk to the working men and meet them on their own level. The establishment of your union is management oriented. There’s no damn doubt about it – take a look at the set-up! These people, as they brag, are not amateurs – they’re pros.

And I believe you have to go back into this.

The members got a real beating in ’58 and this hurt. Then in ’63, the first time the Steel union bargained for a contract, it’s a matter of record that the men took another beating because of the check-off. (2-11) But the men were quite willing to accept this kind of stuff. They said, “well, we gotta have the check-off, but we’ll get them in ’66.” Well, ’66 came, and I suppose that maybe we would have got something, but we didn’t. Unfortunately (2-12) we had a wildcat and it’s a matter of history that the company threatened to sue the union for god knows how many millions of dollars if the contract wasn’t signed by such and such a date. There was a whole bunch of men left sitting out in left field that could have been fired because of their activities. Again the membership gave in, appeased the establishment, and we didn’t get what we rightfully deserved. As a result, when we came to ’69 we were trying to catch up. This might have made our demands look bloated to a person on the outside, but they’re really not bloated at all. The members were so determined that this time they were going to get something. They knew the shortage of nickel. They knew the problems that were facing the governments and the management.

But the union officials had picked their people on the bargaining committee. (2-13) There’s no doubt about it. When we were down in Toronto at the Canadian Labour Congress Convention in 1968, I was invited into a room where there were several people from this locality. They had a list and they were picking the guys who they knew were going to make the bargaining committee. Now I believe that this was done so that they would know their people pretty well. This time they got crossed up with Marcel, a buddy of mine, and myself. They figured they had us in their hip pocket.

For the last eight or ten days of the contract negotiations we just sat down in the basement. Once in a while they came to tell us what they wanted to tell us. We were hearing from the staff men about people being kicked out in the streets, children with no shoes to go to school. Holy Christ, pretty near had to get the fire department and pump out the King Cole Room for all the tears being shed. Then we find out that everything, outside of a few cases, was fine up in Sudbury – they were absolutely marvellous up there, the women and everybody. This is the type of thing that they use. (2-14)

And they say that because of the size of the bargaining committee and because of our intelligence, that they are more capable of bargaining than we are.

They openly admitted that they had already agreed to the contracting out clause before they ever came back to us. Right after this, Mr. Sefton (2-15) and and Mr. Griffin from Pittsburgh (2-16) read off a bunch of figures and the proposed agreement. We objected to this very strongly and said that we wanted it down on paper where we could see it and assess it, because it was very important to us and all of the families in Sudbury. We came back from lunch and they had it down on paper. The first condition was that the committee had to be in unanimous agreement before the company would accept the proposals. (2-17) Number two, was that the company also had to have a majority to accept this cursed contracting out clause. (2-18) It ended up in a vote that was eleven to seven against. So then Mr. Sefton proposed that the elected members of the committee go into a room by themselves with no staff people and try to thrash it out. And another thing that’s quite amusing – I guess maybe that’s not the word, it’s quite astounding – is that everyone of those eighteen men, when we were all by ourselves with no establishment people there, had some fault to find with it. Some of the people were quite vehement in this. They pounded the table saying they just couldn’t take this thing back to the people after four months. The staff men came down and split the committees and took us upstairs and left Port Colbourne down. (2-19) They called the vote upstairs and, of course, it was tied six to six. I don’t know what took place between them and the company, but they signed and we came home.

The way the vote ratifying the contract was conducted: Only one side was allowed to project their story on the news media. The people who were opposed to signing the damn contract were only given five minutes to talk to the members. I defy any of them to try to explain what took place in four months in five minutes!

We didn’t get our raises on the 10th of July like we should have. This was real niggardly on the part of the company and real gutless on the part of the union (20) not to insist upon this. We’re not getting our life insurance and our sickness insurance paid in the first year. You’d probably find out each man was losing somewhere around $1,000 that was rightfully his.

If we really held firm this time, we could have made a breakthrough and had joint bargaining with Port Colborne here in Sudbury District once and for all.

I’ve always heard how tough Inco was. I don’t know how tough they are because I didn’t have a chance to find out. I found that some of our labour people were the ones that I had my trouble with and I think that a lot of the other people did.

Take a look at it. They’re appointed to a job and they tell the members what to do! Two of them sat here at my table, my wife was a witness to them – and Tony Sullivan was president at the time – and said Sullivan was gonna go. “We make presidents and we break ’em.” I mean, when you get this kind of stuff, can you have solidarity? I get sick to my stomach when I hear them singing this song anymore, “Solidarity Forever”. Where does it come from? Who is solid?

People aren’t stupid anymore – they’re beginning to smarten up. You’re getting some smart young boys coming to work – grade eleven, grade twelve education. If somebody wants to get them involved, I think they’d give those guys a rough time. But I think that the workers haven’t got much time.

I don’t think there’s any place in the union for people like Marcel and me any more. This may sound like a little bit of boasting your ego, but I don’t think so, because we’re more or less the old type where you argue and argue and when you start getting called names and getting brow beaten with words by people who are very capable of doing this, then we revert to the only thing we know – we revert to our fists. That’s the only way to put it. There’s no place for us anymore. That may be unfortunate, but this is how sophisticated it’s become.




(3) We would be so proud

There was a show on television recently about what it sounds like when people who have had their hearing damaged, listen to music. The whole musical scale turned into one big blur. You couldn’t hear the high notes, and the base notes sounded even worse. The music was sort of squashed together – the finest parts could not be heard at all.

That frightens me, so I buy rubber ear plugs at the drug store, even though it’s quite expensive in the long run.I don’t trust the fibre glass ones the company supplies. And it has only been in the last few years that I have had access to classical music. It might look rather funny to see a stereo set in one of these houses, but when I put some Mozart on and close my eyes, it's, well, I feel happy. It’s like being welcomed into a different world. And I know that there is so much more just waiting to be discovered there. So that’s why I don’t care what it costs as long as I can keep my hearing.

There was a time when I used to read a lot more, but my little girl gets so jealous of the books. She scratches me and carries on. And often when I’m just about to start reading a book, she says, “No, play Mota (Mozart)”. Well, and then I put on a symphony, and she dances. I guess I’ll be able to get back to the books when she starts going to school in a couple of years.

I suppose work in the mine used to be more physically exhausting. But the worker today is still at the bottom of society. He hasn’t got any more say now than he had before. Workers have come up with suggestions for improvements so many times, but regardless whether they are about production or about working conditions, we’re never listened to (3-1). That’s why we think it’s so ridiculous that the company has been paying a whole lot of money to this American consultant for working out a “management theory” which has already been in use for as long as anyone can remember. “A superior shall exercise his leadership in such a manner that a non-superior only has to follow orders”, is one basis of the thesis. Well, that means quite simply that the worker should keep his mouth shut – and it doesn’t make it any better if you call that “rules of the game”, “role division”, “co-operative decision making”, or what have you.

We’ll take an example, like soundproofing. What do we get for an answer if we complain? “Science has not found an answer yet. Science is working day and night. You have to be patient. Just use your fibre glass ear plugs and you’ll come to no harm.” And then you read in the papers how they can fly to the moon and keep the guys in the rocket ship totally soundproofed, and you watch television and see how they have managed to insulate prison walls so that the inmates can’t even tap messages to each other. There’s one place where science has been successful! Right?

I know a couple of guys who have figured out that it would cost something like $5,000 to soundproof the mill – just like in a shooting gallery, you see. Four-inch fibre-glass rugs against the concrete walls with chicken wire on top of it – it’s not really complicated at all. We could even do it ourselves if they gave us the material, and that would lower the noise level considerably. But the company can’t afford that. A worker’s eardrums don’t cost them a red cent, of course.

I’m a mill man right now. I work on the pump level and the dorr level, regulating the water. The dorr, the magnetite dorr – that’s a large tank that picks up the ore if there’s a stoppage in the filters somewhere. There are two pumps in the dorr that are supposed to pump the sludge back into the process, but these pumps are too small for the amount of sludge that keeps coming in, and in order to keep the dorr from overflowing we have to put in a pipe to the waste. One of the filter tenders brought this up at an information meeting, that there is always so much sludge in the magnetite dorr. And I was going to add my report about the dorr, but before we had a chance to go on, one of the engineers jumped up and said that it doesn’t matter since there are two pumps in the dorr which feed the sludge into the process again. And then it was tabled and another item came up so fast that it was impossible to get through to them that the pumps are too small, they don’t have the power to keep the pace.

We have been after the shift bosses about this many times and we know that they have probably tried to get something done about it. Somebody higher up is stalling and it’s just impossible for a worker to find out why something can’t be done about it.

What I mean is, we stand there year in and year out know that something like 20 tons of perfectly good sludge is being flushed out in the waste every working shift. It probably costs something like $12.00 a ton and that works out to something like $720.00 in twenty-four hours.

Sure, you could say that this is peanuts compared to the total company turnover. Only they are so anxious to scrimp and save in other ways. All that waste costs us several men’s wages, and at the same time they’re always complaining about the high cost of labour and ask for “understanding” every time they “find themselves forced to lay off some of their labour force.”

I was only a couple of months old when she died of TB, my mother, that is. They had already seven older children. My parents were only seventeen when they got married and then they had one child every year. And it became impossible for my father to keep us, so we were sent out to different foster homes. I ended up with an elderly childless couple in a village outside Gallivare. They belonged to a fundamentalist sect and were very strict. For instance, on Sundays at the village prayer meeting the kids were usually let out after the regular text was read from the prayer book – they didn’t have to listen to the interpretations, which could take up to four hours altogether. I used to sit with my dad on the men’s side, but then my foster mother would take my mittens and my hat and keep them with her on the women’s side to prevent me from going outside. And I can remember how I used to hear the other kids playing and carrying on out there in the snow.

Actually, I think that they would have liked to be kind to me if they only had had the courage – particularly my dad. But that’s their religion, you know – this spirit of intolerance. Human nature was thought of as some kind of dirt that you had to keep on scrubbing off.

Sometimes I think that the employers’ view of the workers comes straight out of those old prayer books. We lived right by a small lake and when the ice was clear in the winter you could skate and ride a sleigh out there. Well, I wasn’t allowed to go out and play – especially not on Sundays, when I was absolutely forbidden to. I remember one Sunday afternoon I was standing at the window looking at how the other kids were running around out there on the ice. Then my foster mother came up and hit me across the face so my nose started bleeding. And she said, “You’ve got no business standing around staring at those sinful goings on.” And then she ordered me out to get some snow to clean the blood off the floor – I guess I might have been seven or eight years old then.

I have another memory from those times. I was taking home firewood on my sled, and I was freezing because I had holes in my boots and I didn’t have any warm clothes. Then a man and a woman came up to me and asked me if I was cold. I became terrified because I thought these people must have come to take me away. And I couldn’t think of anything worse – to have to move. I’d much rather stay where I was even though it was bad, than have to go into something completely unknown. So I let go of the sled and went up on the porch and started brushing off the snow. Then the lady from the Children’s Aid said, “for Heaven’s sake, dear, it’s not that important, just go inside!” And I thought that if my foster mother starts making a big fuss now about me tracking the snow in, then maybe they will take me away. But she didn’t – she was real nice to me and gave me a big piece of bread and butter. And I kept myself real close to her and watched those other two carefully until they left.

They used to beat children a lot in those days. But I know that my foster father only beat me when the old woman egged him on and drove him to it. Because when we were by ourselves, the old man and me, he was always real nice to me. If I came up with an idea, at work, for instance – even if it was a crazy one – he always used to say, “sure, let’s try it out.” Secretly he was a good pal.

But one time he almost killed me. They used to hold a great big meeting every fall, those fundamentalists. First of all they went to the meetings and afterwards they went out to eat. So the old people didn’t have time to keep an eye on the children and the young people the way they usually did. And I was over at the other end of the village with a friend. But when it started to get late I got worried and told Harry, my buddy, that we’d better get on home. On our way we rode past my foster father on our bicycles. It was so dark he couldn’t see me, but I could hear from the way he was breathing that he was furious. And when I got home my foster mother said, “just you wait until your dad gets home, because now you’ve really got him going.” But I knew of course exactly what had been going on before I got home. She was the one that would keep egging him on and say: “You must go and get that foster son of yours, where he wallows in sin.” And the old man would say, “Oh I don’t think he’s doing anything bad, he’s probably all right.” And so on. But when he came home this time he was completely wild and I did get a real bad beating. But I couldn’t hate him for it, since I knew what lay behind it all.

I’ve a pretty violent temper myself, but I’ve made up my mind not to let my little girl go through the same things I did. (The little two year old is doing everything to interrupt the interview and get all of her father’s attention. His patience and respect for her is real.)

It was pretty tough in school for an outsider like myself. You always got to hear that you didn’t have a real dad. But luckily I grew to be pretty big, so they didn’t dare jump me too often. But it was tough anyway, always being called “foster child”, “orphan” and things like that. One time when I was around fourteen I went to a fair in Malmberget. I had made some money at a forest job, so I could pay for the bus ticket. Our village was about 50 miles outide of town.

I ran into some of my relatives at the fair, who said, “your dad is here. He’s working in Harspranget and he’s got a room here in Malmberget.” And they called me on the loud-speaker, “Samuel, Samuel. Come to the information stand. Your father is waiting.”

So I went there and my heart was pounding. And there were a lot of people there. But he was the one who recognized me – he told me he knew me right away from the way I looked – so he stepped out of the crowd and came up to me and said, “Hi! I’m your dad”

After that we didn’t stay long at the fair ground – we went to his place. And he said, “Would it be all right if you stayed here until tomorrow?”

So we were together all that day.

But we didn’t get much talking done. We were kind of fascinated with each other – and shy – perhaps we wanted to comfort each other... He had been condemned by everyone in his home town for sending his children away, but what else could he have done? An unskilled worker with eight small children! All my sisters and brothers have always defended him, but it doesn’t help. He’s still very awkward with us.

I’ve met all my sisters and brothers, except two, they live in different parts of the country now. I have the same quiet feelings for them as I had when I met my father. There seems to be a special kind of feeling between us, a feeling of belonging. But is it kinship or imagination that makes you feel that way?

When I was around seventeen or eighteen, the constant nagging and quarreling around the house got to be too much for me, so I left home. If I hadn’t run away, my foster mother would have made a total wreck out of me – I don’t think I could have survived. She always said that I was no good and that I would never amount to anything. So I thought I’d rather starve than sit around waiting for more of her abuse. And it was a good thing I made that decision, because that’s what I had to do for some time – starve.

I had all kinds of odd jobs the first few years – in a saw mill that went bankrupt, a month or so at LKAB, a couple of weeks in a dairy and so on. And the times I was out of work were horrible. Those were the times when you had to go begging for a meal on credit, every day, and you had to keep on telling them that, sure, you would get a job soon and pay what you owed them. And the same routine with the landlady; just one more night, then money for bed and board. Everything seemed like one big creditor. And when you finally did get a job you were always made to feel that they gave it to you only out of the kindness of their hearts – only because you were in such a bad shape and they were such good people. Right? Finally I got steady employment at the LKAB.

My first job was to start driving a raise.

That’s when you stand in a small cave, 6.5 by 6.5 feet, and drill straight up with a jackleg with the leg off. And it gets so goddamn dirty in there, and the water keeps pouring down on you all the time. The first day you have to hold – as well as aim – the machine by hand. The water runs down your arms and neck and you get totally black.

And you have to finish drilling that round and blast. If you don’t, the whole day's pay is gone (3-2), and you just can’t do it at a normal work speed.

My arms became hard as rocks for a while before the cramps let go – that is, my underams, because I had to hold the drill like that. This job usually lasted a couple of weeks before we had to start driving a raise somewhere else. And when we got more space we could put the leg on the machine so we didn’t have to hold it in our hands, and that was much easier. But it was still tough going and it was cramped in there all the time. When you are driving a raise you always work by yourself. It got to be like a house in there after a while. We got around with pinholes and ladders.

I only lasted a couple of years in that outfit and after that was all over, I worked at different things. There are many dangerous jobs in the mine. I came close to getting killed a couple of times. The working places are mostly lonely places. When I was working in the hauling they ran over a guy with ore cars. The next day when we came back to the place where he’d been run over, there was blood and brain matter left lying in the ditch. And that was a guy we used to know, we used to work together. I was familiar with his voice and his way of kidding, and so on.

One year seven men were killed in the mine where I was working. Whenever we got a message that someone had been killed we always got up and left the job, we just left. Of course the management didn’t like that, but they couldn’t order us to stay on a day like that.

The closest I myself have been to a fatal accident was one time when we were working a series of small stopes that were one next to the other. And then there is a slusher in each stope. And when you’ve got hardbreaking rock, then you have to drill and blast over and over again. So we used to drill a hole, put in some powder, and walk out into the main stope and listen to it blow and then go back again. And we never thought of the risk. We’d only be real goddamn mad because we hit hardbreaking rock and it was hard to break enough tons of it to keep up the day's pay.

Well, I had just drilled a hole as usual – right close to the opening of the stope – and I put in some powder and dragged my feet out into the main stope, and then I heard something blow. And for once in my life I was careful. I stepped up on the mucking floor, about half a yard above ground and looked inside and then I saw that the hole was still there and that there was smoke coming out of it. So I just threw myself backwards, and at the same moment it blew up in there, and stones and gravel went flying out. Half a second after I had got out of the way. It was my friend’s powder that had gone off and I had thought it was mine.

After that I went out into the main stope and felt a bit shaky for a while. But then I thought, “hell, I’m all right, whatever happened”, and went back to work.

But later that night the real fear came. I broke out in a cold sweat thinking about how goddamn close it had been. But this friend of mine I just mentioned was crushed to death by a train one year later.

I did mucking for three or four years. The men were always transferred without them asking for it. From working outside to the mucking was a change for the worse, but from the drilling to the mill was a change for the better. Now I work three shifts and I’ve got one Sunday off a month.

During the week when you’re on night shift you walk around like a zombie. You sit around yawning in the daytime thinking you ought to get some sleep. But if you go to bed, you can’t sleep anyway. And at night you’d better not sit down anywhere, because the work gets heavier if you relax and doze off. Besides, it isn’t allowed. And the shift bosses run around checking that we aren’t sleeping. Before they didn’t use to care that much. We used to be able to watch the floors for each other and to take turns so that people could get a couple of hours sleep. But they discovered that. And they economized so that now so that now one man gets two floors to watch. “It has become evident during the night shift that one man can easily handle two floors”, is what they said.

Sure, it works out all right if the the machines don’t get too clogged up. But if they do, it takes longer to straighten things out. And then of course the cleaning up areas are twice as big.

That’s another thing; to keep us awake they have put the clean-up crew on the night shift. If things were arranged according to a human being’s natural rhythm, then it would be better to do the clean-up during the morning or afternoon shift. And the night shift could concentrate on watching the machines, and watch for each other an hour or two.

On the other hand, it’s almost better if you’re up and around the whole time. Cause if do sit down in some warm corner, then you don’t dare to relax, because the temptation to fall asleep gets so damned big you think you’d rather die than get up than start shovelling sludge or flush the floor.

We don’t earn extra money for the graveyard shift (3-3). But the shift bosses do. And I don’t think that’s fair. The night shift is just as miserable for a guy that shovels sludge as it is for the boss.

We are always told how the shift bosses have to carry all the responsibility and that’s why they get such privileges. But if there’s any trouble anywhere then we’re the ones that have to get up and fix it. The shift bosses don’t do a damn thing except check on us and write their reports. If a shifter isn’t working a shift, everything always goes well anyway. But if a worker is absent then they've got to have a replacement for him. So who’s more important for the production?

We wait for each other at the punch clock – that is, we’re not supposed to stay on the job until we’re replaced. But we wait at the punch clock. If the guy’s who’s supposed to replace you doesn’t show up for some reason you can’t go home. You have to report to the office that there is no replacement, and if they don't have anybody there to put in his place, you have to do overtime.

I have made up in my mind not to do any overtime (3-4). During the last three years I have done one shift overtime and that’s all. They ask me all the time and they have even threatened to give me a warning, so I guess I’ll be laid off one day because of it. You see, it’s a break of discipline to refuse to do overtime, so the company “has the right” to fire people for that.

First you slug day and night. And then you’re supposed to do overtime! Only to exist. If they take away our free time, too, then you might as well pack up.

Besides, when you know how many unemployed men live here in Norrbotten – why can’t they let them get a job instead of squeezing every last drop out of us workers?

I make roughly $400 a month if I do all the regular shifts. Then there’s tax, union dues and support for an older child I have. Last month I cleared $136. That’s supposed to be enough for food and clothes for my fiancee – we live together – and our little girl and myself.

My fiancee used to work in an office before we had the baby. After that she hasn’t been able to find a job. She is away right now, looking for work. She’s been trying for about a year, but it’s hopeless. Manpower has advised her to move south, and sure, she’s probably got more of a chance there – but then what would I do?

The company is better off with the union than without. Through the union the company can keep a check on the workers. It’s gone so far that when we have a problem, the company is the first to say “get in touch with your local”.

If there’s a conflict between the company and the workers the union will of course step in. And sure, it has happened that they have been able to keep someone from being fired – at least for a couple of months. But if the company really wants to fire a guy they will watch every move he makes. As soon as he does anything wrong, he’ll get one warning after another and one day he’s gone.

The rules in general are very difficult to follow to the letter and nobody asks you to, either – on a regular day. But if they want to get rid of a guy – in the name of “normal procedure” – well, all they have to do is pick a rule. The list of reasons for disciplinary actions is endless.

I have constant stomach pains. And sometimes I take a day off because of them. And sometimes I skip a day out of pure boredom. I haven’t been blacklisted yet, as far as I know. There are guys who have taken fewer days off than I who have been fired. But I have been threatened with many warnings many times. I was called up to the doctor because of this absence. And he was very understanding, I must admit. But then he said that probably you are in the wrong place. That could have been because I mentioned this thing about classical music when he asked me what I did in my spare time. The intellectuals are always so “pleasantly surprised” if a worker wants to listen to anything else other than country and western. So the doctor told me I ought to be doing different kind of work. And that was of course a nice thing to say to me, on a personal basis. But it was nevertheless an idiotic way of putting it. I am no better than anybody else. If I could escape from these machines, then somebody else would have to take my place. And what other person is the “right man” for that? I don't know any such inferior being.

We can’t keep running away one by one and say, “I am too sensitive, I was meant for something better.” We have to stay and see to it that the inhuman work is made human. We must be allowed more freedom at work. And left to work more independently. Now we are treated like they used to treat children in the old days. They break us down.

Just think how we could work together! Everybody would feel and share responsibility. And we would be very proud of ourselves – in a good way.

The big problem today is that the worker doesn’t want to admit that he is a worker, he doesn’t want to become part of the working class of the world. Instead he usually dreams two dreams. One is to win the sweepstakes. The other is to become established as one of those who are oppressing the workers; to make it as an individual. What a mistake!

I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about Vietnam. And once you’ve understood what’s going on there, you can see the pattern – about what’s going on in Gabora Bassa as well (3-5).

Before you would hear all kinds of horrible things in the mine. For example, people would say, quite seriously, that it’s just fine that the Americans are dropping a few bombs here and there. The world’s getting too overpopulated anyway. Let the bastards starve. There are too many of them. And they aren’t like us.

I happen to think that Swedish workers wouldn’t say things like that if the newspapers didn’t present things the way they do. But when there is a great big tear-jerking story at least once a week about overpopulation as the greatest threat to the world, what do you expect people to think?

But lately I’ve started to get tough. I’ve begun to shoot my mouth off. You can make a comparison, I say, that if we as northerners and miners complain that we are worse off than the rest of Sweden, then the other parts of the country might as well say, “let those goddamn Laps starve to death, it doesn’t change a thing no matter what we do for them, they’re just a load on our backs.”

You see what I mean? If we are indifferent to other people then we can’t be expected to be treated as people either.

This move towards socialism has come to some kind of halt. Now there are groups in the thirties that were quite active, but now that we have reached a certain level of affluence, everybody is going after their own personal interest. That’s what we often talk about on the job. Is it merely hunger, starvation, that brings us together? And then after we have satisfied the need for food, we don’t give a damn for each other but start running after personal status. It is depressing that workers can think along these lines.

I think there will be a change soon.

But we who are the middle-aged today are a lost generation, wouldn’t you say?



How can you have solidarity? - Footnotes

(2-1) This appears to refer to the fact that back injuries, obtained from hard physical labour, have a hard time healing in the damp mines.

(2-2) Overtime pay was originally introduced as a penalty to the companies, so they couldn’t afford it. Consequently they would have to hire more labour and would have been forced to pay higher wages, rather than to demand extra hours from the men. Business unionism has changed the situation in that overtime ceases to be a penalty to the company and becomes instead an incentive to workers. This is possible when overtime pay is made attractive enough, i.e. low enough for the company.

(2-3) An important point here is, what happened when the “old stewards” gave up. Wasn’t there anybody to continue? Had the union – both Mine Mill and Steelworkers – failed to train secondary leadership? Or had both of them turned off the younger generation of workers?

(2-4) The miner is wrong here. The NDP does not call for the nationalization of the large companies already in existence. Also, for a comparison, the Swedish miner interviewed works for a nationalized company, and experiences the same alienation. Nationalization alone is not a solution – it has to be combined integrally with workers’ control.

(2-5) The worker refers here to labour brass.

(2-6) Sixty people constitute a quorum for a membership meeting of Local 6500. This local has a membership of more than 16,000 members.

(2-7) The question to be raised here is: how did Mine Mill then lose to the Steelworkers if it was so militant and in touch with the workers? How did it lose its membship support sufficiently for the Steel to be successful in its raid? It is not enough to talk about the omnipotence of Steel and its underhanded methods (including red-baiting), which no doubt also existed; there must have been serious flaws in Mine Mill as well, in order for Steel to make inroads. This question cannot be answered in a footnote; a separate study is needed to provide the answer.

(2-8) The “jobs” in question are those held by full-time union officials of the United Steelworkers. Starting salary for an “international representative” is in the range of $11,000. These professionals virtually control all aspects of union life.

(2-9) Another study is needed on the influence on the NDP by the three large “international unions”, the Steelworkers, Canadian Food and Allied Workers and the Autoworkers.

(2-10) The head office of a union can impose trusteeship on a local for a variety of reasons, from serious financial mismanagement to too much militancy.

(2-11) Business unionism had introduced the checkoffs, i.e. the automatic deduction from the miner’s paycheck through the company. Although winning the checkoff right was considered by the union as a recognition of the strength of the union, the automatic checkoff also tends to make the union removed from the rank and file, since money keeps coming whether the workers are satisfied with the union or not.

(2-12) The 1966 Wildcat had dire effects on the Union’s bargaining position with the company. Steel was not strong enough nor were its officials willing to protect the leaders of the wildcat. Without union protection its leaders were fired. Because Inco was able to take disciplinary action against the wildcat, it put Local 6500 on the defensive in the ensuing negotiations. Strategically the wildcat backfired and in that sense the miner in the interview meant it was “unfortuante”.

(2-13) The Bargaining Committee is elected by the rank and file. In theory it represents the men directly in negotiations and is designed to involve the workers through their representatives in bargaining with the company. Present at negotiations along with the Committee are the permanent staff members and other officers of the union. In practice, the Bargaining Committee plays a minimal role in contract talks. The bulk of the negotiating is carried on between the “international” reps, company officals and the the Government appointed arbiter, a supposedly “neutral” representative of the bourgeois state. Despite this, the Bargaining Committee remains the symbol of democratic control by the rank and file. Those who serve on it as this militant did, find the experience frustrating.

(2-14) The staff wanted to create the impression that the strike was causing tremendous hardships for the workers, and they therefore better settle the strike.

(2-15) Larry Sefton is the Canadian director of District 6 of the United Steelworkers. He has held this position for more than twenty years. The director is elected to the post; however it is not a rank and file office. It is held by a permanent staff member of the “international” union.

(2-16) Despite the claim of autonomy, Canadian Steelworkers do not negotiate their own contracts. The American union sends its offical representative to oversee the bargaining for its Canadian local.

(2-17) Normal negotiating procedure consists of the Bargaining Committee approving any proposals before they are submitted to Inco. In the instance referred to the procedure was reversed. Sefton and Griffin wanted to end the strike. Having reached agreement with Inco, they submitted their compromise to the men to rubberstamp their decision. They knew that the majority of the men on the Bargaining Committee were prepared to to keep the strike going for another three or four weeks in order to win the battle over benefits and contracting out. In effect, Sefton et al settled with the company and then presented it to the men as a foregone conclusion. This process is a commonplace one in many unions.

(2-18) In recent years Inco has hired construction firms to build new shafts and do maintenance work at its installations. The contracting out clause allows Inco to hire construction firms to build new shafts and do maintenance work at its installations. The contracting out clause allows Inco to hire construction firms to do work in the mines either with non-union labour or labour not covered by the Steel contract. Some 3,000 jobs within Inco are being let out under the contracting out clause. The men are particularly embittered because it allows Dravco, one of the major firms involved, to introduce non-union working conditions which include longer hours, higher bonuses and poor safety conditions. The men believe that the contracting out clause is an attack on the prinicple of industrial unionism. Under the protection of this clause Inco now contracts out to work in the area of production.

(2-19) 1969 marked the first time that the Port Colborne and Sudbury locals under Steel overcame their differences and entered into joint negotiations with Inco. The splitting of the Committee destroyed the work that went into building a new basis of unity between the two locals. The Port Colborne committee opposed Sefton’s compromise. On the other hand, it is quite clear that the staff men can only wield their influence as long as the rank and file members are themselves politically uneducated and divided. A politically conscious group of workers would have resisted the attempt to split them.

(2-20) Again, this refers to the labour brass.


We would be so proud - Footnotes

(3-1) This worker’s position all through the interview is one of asking to be listened to, to be allowed to participate in the management of production. He does not even once raise the issue of the ownership of means of production and workers’ control, which indicates a lack of working class political consciousness. The worker is not to be blamed for the shortcoming of the Swedish left.

(3-2) The miner will receive his “basic wage”, but will not be entitled to the “incentive pay”, which under these circumstances makes up most of his pay.

(3-3) In Canada, miners get paid extra for unpopular shifts.

(3-4) The question of overtime is the same in Sweden as it is in Canada. The social-democratic trade union movement has permitted the companies to make overtime demands on the workers, instead of making overtime prohibitively expensive for the industry.

(3-5) Gabora Bassa refers to a location in Portuguese dominated Mozambique.



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