12,000 men (documentary film)
Directed by Martin Duckworth, 1978. National Film Board of Canada.
Link to description of video.
This documentary film brings together on-site interviews, photographs, video footage, newspaper clippings, sketches, and other ephemera to bring to life again the Cape Breton labour disputes of the 1920s. Many of the miners, their wives and other witnesses, in their 70s and 80s at the time the documentary was shot, are informally interviewed throughout the documentary at the site of the protest march in New Waterford, and in their homes throughout Cape Breton. This choice by the documentarist allows us to understand the perspectives of the workers and their families at the time and reveals that they still possess a keen working class consciousness and understanding of capitalist exploitation. On a more human level, they recount what it was like to be a miner: they were hyper aware of the risks and dangers of their work, they were for the most part independent workers, possessed a heightened sense of fairness, and were distrustful of supervisors and management. The video footage of police brutality on a Sunday in the summer of 1923 is particularly hard to watch, as the officers literally attack families, including women, on their way home from church. In some of the footage, 3 or 4 male police officers swarm a protesting women, using their batons.
These eyewitness accounts of the events in the 1920s are all tinged with a sense that the difficulties, the suffering and the violence were not in vain. The former miners acknowledge that in the end they negotiated a 10% reduction in wages versus the 65% reduction that BESCO proposed, but the greatest gain for them seems to be immaterial: they've gained a sense of personhood and autonomy that comes from freedom from oppression and exploitation.
Link to description of video.
This documentary film brings together on-site interviews, photographs, video footage, newspaper clippings, sketches, and other ephemera to bring to life again the Cape Breton labour disputes of the 1920s. Many of the miners, their wives and other witnesses, in their 70s and 80s at the time the documentary was shot, are informally interviewed throughout the documentary at the site of the protest march in New Waterford, and in their homes throughout Cape Breton. This choice by the documentarist allows us to understand the perspectives of the workers and their families at the time and reveals that they still possess a keen working class consciousness and understanding of capitalist exploitation. On a more human level, they recount what it was like to be a miner: they were hyper aware of the risks and dangers of their work, they were for the most part independent workers, possessed a heightened sense of fairness, and were distrustful of supervisors and management. The video footage of police brutality on a Sunday in the summer of 1923 is particularly hard to watch, as the officers literally attack families, including women, on their way home from church. In some of the footage, 3 or 4 male police officers swarm a protesting women, using their batons.
These eyewitness accounts of the events in the 1920s are all tinged with a sense that the difficulties, the suffering and the violence were not in vain. The former miners acknowledge that in the end they negotiated a 10% reduction in wages versus the 65% reduction that BESCO proposed, but the greatest gain for them seems to be immaterial: they've gained a sense of personhood and autonomy that comes from freedom from oppression and exploitation.