Introduction

The Onset

The Chinese Strikebreakers

Imported Strikebreakers

Traitors

The Fallout

The Chinese Strikebreakers

Within a week of locking out the protesting employees, Canadian Collieries compelled its Chinese employees to agree to its terms. While the Chinese were opposed to their existing working conditions, they voted in favour of returning to work.⁴

Chinese immigrants in BC faced much discrimination at this time. Primarily young men seeking to earn money to support their families, they lived in meagre conditions and avoided frivolous spending - yet few of them could ever afford to return home. In Cumberland, they became indebted to the coal company, who paid their $500 head taxes* to enter the country.⁵

"Cumberland Chinatown, 1910" BCARS B-07606

Other miners resented these hard-working Chinese labourers who were willing to work for less money. These "foreigners" they insisted, stole jobs from white workers, and they would not spend most of the money they earned in the mining communities.⁶ As the Chinese had difficulty understanding English, white miners also believed they made dangerous employees because they could not read warning signs posted in the mines (in fact, few miners could understand these notices - even many of those that spoke English were illiterate). When an explosion at Nanaimo’s Number One mine killed 148 persons in 1887, whites believed the Chinese miners were responsible for this reason.⁷

"Nanaimo. Western Fuel Co. fire in the shaft, 1887." BCARS A-004409

Entrepreneurs capitalized on the indigent Chinese immigrants, despite people’s opposition to their employment. Individual contractors would hire them to mine sections of coal for very low wages, then sell the coal at a great profit.8 Dunsmuir and Sons, who owned mines in Cumberland, Ladysmith and Extension before Canadian Collieries purchased them in 1910, employed Chinese labourers for lower wages than others who performed the same tasks. Robert Dunsmuir refused to exclude them from working underground, even though workers’ associations considered them to be dangerous.9

By becoming strikebreakers, Chinese miners became objects of further discrimination. Just as Dunsmuir had employed them against others’ will, now Canadian Collieries used them to undermine the strike effort.

Unfortunately, most people in the communities probably did not see the Chinese workers as pawns manipulated by the coal company. The employment of Chinese labourers served to divert opposition away from the coal company, the true culprit of unsafe working conditions.

"Extension. Chinatown, CA. 1904" BCARS E-03032

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