When 700 miners go on strike

“I went on strike several times when I was a miner. Each time, my mates and I would come up to the surface and form a picket line in front of the coal piles so that the coal couldn’t be loaded. The management would call in the gendarmes. And the gendarmes would arrive and throw us all out!

Well, this one time, at the José mine, we decided to go on strike—but this time, inside the mine! I stayed down there with my mates for 5 days!

Do you know how they tried to get us to come up again? It’ll make you laugh, because it makes me laugh every time I think about it! The management decided to send the gendarmes down into the mine. At that time the gendarmes were soldiers, and they had their orders. So they brought them into the yard in a truck, lined them up, and picked 32. ”You, you, and you! Stand forward, you’re going down the mine.”

You’d have thought they’d been told “You’re going to Vietnam!”—“What?.. Down the mine?.. What are we going to do down the mine, we’ve never even been in a mine before!”

“You’re going down the mine to bring up the miners who don’t want to come out.”

“Oh yeah?”

One put his hand up. “How many miners are there, sir?”

“700!!”

And there were just 32 gendarmes! Then another one put his hand up. “Are they armed?”

“Obviously. They’ve got axes and picks.” I can tell you, if it’d been me, I’d never have gone down!

When we saw the cage arrive at the bottom of the mine, that it was gendarmes… One look and we started to yell! Stay here, right! And what a racket we made! The cage opened, and just one got out—the Officer! He was furious! He pointed at us and said “We’ve come to send you back up!”

And there he was with his truncheon, shaking in his shoes! And the angry miners took their helmets and their coffee flasks and threw them at him! Splat, bang, wallop! And he dived back into the cage, they all went back up, and we never saw them again! I would never for a moment have imagined they'd send out 32 gendarmes to face 700 determined miners!''