The First Union
Group reaction by the anthracite miners to the reward system of the mining industry took the form of labor unions; and the success or failure of the unions depended primarily on their ability to come to terms with the mine workers’ environment.
Economic geography, ethnocentrism, and the industry’s form of work organization were serious obstacles to united action by the miners. The four anthracite fields were divided by lines of transportation into three geo-economic regions. The mine workers, who thought of the region’s welfare in the same terms as their own, were not inclined to cooperate with other regions. Ethnic tensions were so great that “[even] the less adroit of employers could play upon these race prejudices so effectively as to weaken the strongest union.”1 Finally, the organization of work contributed to tensions between work groups. Laborers, for example, were often at odds with miners; one disenchanted laborer asked: “When have the operators ever treated the miners so bad as the miners have treated their laborers at Ashley?”2
There were several integrative factors inherent in the industry, however, which tended somewhat to offset the disruptive forces—the piece-rate system, function mobility, low wages, and interdependence. Because of the piece-rate system, miners became adept at bargaining with management. Occupational animosities were softened by mobility up through the graded functional task groups. In the uniformly low wages all ethnic groups had something in common. Finally, the interdependence inherent in the functional organization of work made it imperative that any efforts to organize or to react collectively to management be on an industrywide basis rather than a trade basis.
The first united action by anthracite mine workers was taken in July 1842 when mine workers at Minersville spontaneously protested against the truck system, demanding higher wages. Arming themselves with clubs and other weapons, the disgruntled men marched to Pottsville in an attempt to close the mines around the town. When they reached Pottsville the strikers were confronted by the Orwigsburgh Blues, a militia company, and promptly disbanded without gaining any of their objectives.3 The ease with which the militia broke up the Minersville men’s protest demonstrated the need for organization.
In 1848 John Bates, an English Chartist, organized a union among the mine workers in Schuylkill County. Within a year the Bates Union had enrolled 5,000 members and felt strong enough to press its demands on the operators. During the summer of 1849 union members aimed for higher wages—$8 to $9 a week for miners, $6 for inside laborers, and $5.50 for outside laborers.
The members of the Bates Union devised a unique strategy for securing their objective. Blaming their low wages on an unstable market rather than their employers’ greed, they decided to raise coal prices. A strike could be used, they argued, to raise the price of coal by decreasing its supply. Meeting at Deer Park Farm on July 4, 1849, union members passed a strike resolution in the belief that “such a suspension is required for our own good, for the good of our employers and for the interests of the coal region generally.”4
The strike lasted three weeks and caused a decrease in the supply of coal on the Philadelphia market. But when the strikers returned to work, they found themselves locked out by the mine operators. The lock-out continued a few weeks until the growing number of orders forced the operators to compromise. Although somewhat successful, the union collapsed amid rumors that Bates had absconded with the union funds. The fate of the Bates Union proved so discouraging that mine workers in the Schuylkill region waited 11 years before attempting to reorganize.
Mine workers in the northern basin became active in 1853. That year the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company’s miners struck for a 2-1/2 cents per-ton increase in the piece rate. The short strike ended with the company promising to meet the men’s demand, but its success did not encourage imitation, and collective activity in the Wyoming-Lackawanna region ceased until the Civil War.
Inflation during the Civil War and the example of the American Miners’ Association, a union of soft coal miners, prompted anthracite mine workers to organize locally. An increased demand for coal and a dwindling labor supply made it possible for the new unions to be successful. A series of strikes pushed wages up to the point where some contract miners were earning $500 a month. In 1863 the miners in the Pittston area achieved a significant victory when they received formal recognition from the operators in the form of a written contract.5 Success apparently ensured the continued united action of the anthracite mine workers.
A series of disastrous strikes in 1865, however, temporarily impeded growth of unionism in the anthracite fields. On January 1, 1865 miners of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company began a strike which lasted until March 10, when they returned to work on the company’s terms. In the Wyoming region the Pennsylvania Coal Company announced a 20 percent wage cut, to which its employees responded by striking. The strike spread throughout the region as other operators lowered wages. As the strike grew in intensity, the Wyoming men appealed for support from the Schuylkill region miners, but local unions in the southern field rejected the request. With no outside help, the Wyoming strike collapsed.
The defeat of the unions, along with a growing manpower pool as soldiers returned home, encouraged the operators to adjust to the postwar recession by forcing down wages. The operators were successful; by 1867 wages had fallen below the 1857 level.
As wages rapidly declined mine workers reorganized in an attempt to protect the status quo. The most important new union was the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association of Saint Clair. Led by John Siney, an Irish immigrant who had formed the Brickmakers’ Association of Wigam, England, and encouraged by such well-known leaders as Jonathan Fincher, the W.B.A. enrolled 500 members within a month.
Initially limited to local interests, the various new unions’ only chance of succeeding depended on the operators not uniting. But in 1867 operators in the western middle basin formed the Mahanoy Valley and Locust Mountain Coal Association, and in the southern basin mine owners contemplated a firm combination. At the same time that the mine operators were organizing themselves into subregional associations, the local unions were unable to overcome petty jealousies and adopt a parallel movement. An outside stimulus was needed.
In 1868 the Pennsylvania legislature provided the stimulus by defining the legal workday as eight hours unless a contract for a longer day existed. Wage miners and laborers demanded the shorter day without a comparable reduction in wages. When operators in the Mahanoy Valley refused, a spontaneous strike broke out. Armed strikers carrying signs reading “Eight Hours” marched through the coal fields shutting down mines.
Mine workers in the Schuylkill and Lehigh regions responded to the call, but the strikers were unsuccessful in the Wyoming region. There the press argued that a strike would only benefit the Schuylkill region and urged mine workers to remain loyal to the area. But the men needed no prodding. Still smarting over the rejection of their request for aid by the Schuylkill miners in 1865, the Wyoming men informed the southern strikers that they would support them only if the Lehigh and Schuylkill regions organized larger unions.
Despite the Wyoming region’s lack of participation, the “Eight Hour” strike ended in August with a compromise. The operators granted a 10 percent increase in wages, and the men agreed to work the normal ten-hour day. Limited victory, however, did not diminish the force of the Wyoming men’s insistence on an organization with a wider base.
Meeting in Mahanoy City a week before the strike ended, the Eight Hour strikers decided to form countywide unions in Schuylkill, Carbon, Northumberland, and Luzerne Counties. Local unions in Schuylkill County met in Saint Clair on September 3rd and implemented the resolution by merging with the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association. On September 23rd the Northumberland County unions organized the W.B.A. of Northumberland County.6 In Carbon County the local unions had already moved toward a countywide organization before the strike; the new society, The Workingmen’s Beneficial and Benevolent Association, received its charter in October.7
Once the unions were organized on a county basis it was obvious that what was needed next was an association encompassing the entire industry. County delegates attended a convention in Providence, Pa. on November 7 and agreed to “organize the six counties in one organization.”8 But the Wyoming-Lackawanna men were hesitant to join the new unions. In December John Siney, president of the Schuylkill County W.B.A., tried to hasten a favorable decision by offering them control of the proposed union, but was unsuccessful.
Despite the rebuff, the new unions sent representatives to Hazleton on March 17, 1869, where the convention established the General Council of the Workingmen’s Associations of the Anthracite Coal Fields of Pennsylvania.9 The General Council defined W.B.A. policies and set the date for general strikes. No county organization, however, was bound by the General Council’s decisions. The County Executive Board governed the county unions, and the Executive Board could expel branches, set initiation fees, levy assessments, and bargain with mine operators at the county level. The county union consisted of districts which had their own officers and representation on the Executive Board; they were supreme in purely local matters. Individual mines within each district were formed into branches which could send delegates to the district convention; the branches were to take care of grievances within the mines. Since each superior body’s actions required a referendum from the subordinate organization, the General Council was a loose confederation in which power flowed only upward.10 The W.B.A., composed largely of and led by men with experience in English trade unions, followed its prototypes’ outlines. The W.B.A. sought to exclude nonunion workmen and to maintain a higher, standard wage.
In its efforts to secure higher wages, the W.B.A. sought to cure what it considered the basic sickness of the anthracite industry—low prices resulting from overproduction. Analysis of the miners’ predicament by the Bates Union, plus their own experience in British coal mines, led W.B.A. leaders to conclude that the best way to get higher, standard wages was through the maintenance of coal prices. Labor sought an alliance with capital to increase coal prices and wages; the constitution of the Carbon County union proclaimed that one of the association’s objectives was “to make such arrangements as will enable the miner and laborer and operator to protect and promote their mutual interests.”11 The Summit Hill district of the union was more explicit: “the object of this society is to make such arrangements as will enable the operator and the miner to rule the coal market.”12
Business elements and small mine operators agreed with labor’s diagnosis of the problem, and encouraged such a policy. “If a strike must take place,” the Miners’ Journal editorialized on the eve of the Eight Hour strike, “this is the most desirable time when the trade is extremely dull.” The editor predicted that the strike, if it became industrywide, “must result in the raising of the price of coal.”13 Operators in Schuylkill County agreed with the editor and informed the union that it could accomplish its mission if it would dictate coal prices at the tidewater markets.
Such advice was heady stuff to the mine workers. At the March 17 meeting they resolved that since overproduction had glutted the market, the president of the General Council should order an industrywide strike. The strike would take place when four counties had confirmed the order and both operators and consumers had received a week’s notice.
In April 1869 the General Council tested its power by calling a strike for May 10. Unions in the Schuylkill and Lehigh region issued the strike call, and it appeared that, although they were not members of the General Council, the Wyoming men would join in the effort. The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western miners served notice of a strike on April 30, but for some unknown reason immediately postponed the strike. The action of the D.L.&W. miners caused the other unions in the northern region to vote against the strike at the last minute.
Not discouraged by the Wyoming men’s adverse decision, the General Council met in Hazleton on May 11 to plan strike strategy. The Council gave the county unions permission to resume work when the price of coal reached $5 a ton at Elizabethport, the distribution center for the Lehigh region, and $3 a ton at Port Carbon, the shipping point for the Schuylkill region. Each county union was free to set other conditions for a resumption of work in its area. To limit production after the strike, the General Council requested each contract miner to decrease his production by one car a day, or if he worked by the yard, to restrict his work accordingly.
The W.B.A., which wanted to cure the industry’s sickness by equalizing production with demand, adopted the “basis system” to achieve this important goal. The basis system was a sliding wage scale based on coal prices. By establishing a base coal price and wage schedule, it was intended that wages would increase as prices rose. Base wages would not be reduced if the price of coal fell below the base price; rather, the operator had the alternative of working at a large marginal loss or suspending work until the market readjusted. Any attempt to reduce wages would provoke a strike.
To be successful the basis system had to be implemented in all regions; therefore the W.B.A. vigorously tried to enlist the Wyoming men in the movement. By late May the northern miners had begun to reconsider their earlier position and in early June the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western miners voted to join the General Council and its strike, thereby making the Council an industrywide union.
It was more difficult to establish the basis system in the Wyoming region than in the Schuylkill or Lehigh regions. The small operators in the latter two acknowledged their inability to cope with the vicissitudes of the market, and urged labor to save them. The large corporations in Wyoming-Lackawanna, however, could regulate their market without the intervention of labor. Thomas Dickson, president of the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, summarized the attitude of the corporations when he remarked, “We are not prepared to take in new partners.”14
While the entrepreneurs in the Schuylkill and Lehigh regions gladly extended their hands to labor when labor proposed a partnership to regulate production, they found the conditions distasteful. The W.B.A., true to its English heritage, demanded a closed shop. The second and more important area of conflict was the union’s insistence on local committees. Under the local committee system, members presented grievances to a committee which investigated the claim. If the committee found the complaint valid, it would demand redress and, if refused, would order a strike.
The operators viewed the closed shop and the local committee system as unwarranted interference with their managerial prerogatives. The Shamokin Coal Exchange, a local organization of mine operators, agreed not to resume work until the union agreed to “abandon or cease to claim that such [local] committees shall act, or be allowed to act, or be allowed to exert any influence whatever in the working management of our collieries.”15
The increase in coal prices averted a complete estrangement. In June 1869 the General Council announced that the strike had depleted the market, and gave the county unions permission to return to work. Eager to take advantage of high prices, management and labor tried to settle the major points of disagreement. They compromised on the closed shop issue; management agreed not to fire any union member without just cause, and labor promised not to insist on the discharging of “blacklegs” (strikebreakers). Both sides ignored the local committee issue. To implement the basis system, the union and operators selected a committee which would meet once a month to determine the average coal price from which wages would be determined. By June 16 the Schuylkill and Lehigh miners had returned to work.
While the Schuylkill and Lehigh mines reopened, the Wyoming strike continued. The General Council supported the strikers by levying a $1.25-per-month assessment on miners and $1 on laborers in the two southern regions. In July the large corporations tried to entice their men back to work with the promise of a contract rate of $1 per car. The Pittston men met on July 23 and voted to accept the Pittston operator’s offer. The united front in Wyoming would have been broken sooner had it not been for the miners’ wives, who stopped the back-to-work movement by throwing stones at the men as they walked to the mines.
Despite the support of the wives and the General Council, the strike collapsed under a demonstration of overwhelming power. Rumors of the hiring of Chinese strikebreakers spread. At least one company ordered strike leaders to vacate its houses. In Scranton a special police force and 350 volunteers, ostensibly there to keep the peace, overawed the strikers. Astonished at the display of power by the corporations, the miners returned to work on August 31 with higher wages but without the basis system.
The W.B.A. failed to achieve its main objective in the 1869 strike. The partnership labor sought with management in which to rule the coal market broke up in the face of opposition from the large corporations in the Wyoming region. Although individual operators in the two southern regions eagerly accepted labor’s proposal, the closed shop and local committee issues made the espousal precarious. Operators and unions accused each other of violating the closed shop compromise. Local committees embarrassed the union with incessant striking. Indeed, the Carbon County Executive Board found it necessary to levy a $100 fine on each member who struck without its permission. In Schuylkill County the local committee issue resulted in the arrest of one committee for conspiracy to restrain trade.
Some operators felt the base wage schedule was too high. Within weeks after the settlement of the strike the operators around Hazleton notified their men that they could not pay the new wages. The men responded with a second strike that lasted two months. By the end of 1869 the small operators were ready to wash their hands of labor.
In Schuylkill County the operators gained new strength in November 1869 when they combined their local trade associations into the Anthracite Board of Trade; they quickly reopened the wage question. The Board of Trade proposed a new wage schedule of $10.50 a week for miners, $8.50 for inside laborers, and $7.50 for outside laborers. The operators also demanded a 5 percent reduction in wages for every 25-cent decrease in coal prices below the $3-a-ton base until a maximum wage reduction of 20 percent was reached. The Schuylkill County Executive Board of the W.B.A. regarded the new proposals as a declaration of war, and in January 1870 called a strike.
The Schuylkill County strike was local; the other county unions remained working. Within Schuylkill County labor maintained a united front, but the operators did not; some members of the Anthracite Board of Trade agreed to maintain the 1869 schedule and the W.B.A. gave its men permission to return to work at those places.
Prodded by its more restive members, who were not disposed to see their competitors work while they remained idle, the Board of Trade offered a compromise solution on February 10 by proposing a $2.50 base price with a wage schedule of $12 a week for miners, $10 for inside laborers, $9 for outside laborers, and a 30 percent reduction in contract rates. Viewing the Board’s action as an omen of weakness, the union rejected the compromise proposal.
Rumors of a pending general strike encouraged the Schuylkill miners to believe they could bring the Board of Trade to its knees. The general strike was not to be a sympathy strike—its objective was to raise the price of coal. The coal region’s newspapers bluntly described the issue involved in the strike: “As the understood object of this strike, if it shall really take place, is to advance the price of coal, and is to keep up wages at the mines, there is no knowing how widely it may extend or how long it will continue.”16 With the exception of the Wyoming corporations and Schuylkill County operators, the area would have welcomed a strike if it had become general. But as each county union ordered its men on strike at its leisure, the community became alarmed. The Shamokin Herald mournfully asked, “What remedy have we then in case the strike is not general?” But there was no need to fear that the strike would not be industrywide, for, “if the thirty thousand miners in Pennsylvania are true to themselves and each other, they will regulate the price of coal without the aid of operators and railroad companies.”17
But the miners were not “true to themselves and each other”; the Wyoming men refused to support the strike. Angered over the betrayal, the General Council met in Tamaqua and severed all connections with the “men of the three large companies.”18 The delegates from lower Luzerne County voted against their northern brethren because regional and not county loyalties counted. Its solidarity shattered, the General Council authorized a resumption of work whenever the county unions attained the 1869 base wage schedule.
The operators, however, would not have a resumption. Seventy-six Lehigh and Schuylkill region operators meeting in Pottsville agreed to support the Anthracite Board of Trade, vowing to close down their mines on April 2 if the unions did not accept the $2.50 basis.
During April the Schuylkill County men gained allies, which made the strike more effective. Workmen on the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad’s lateral lines struck when the company reduced their wages. The railroaders became so violent that the Reading refused to haul coal unless the coal owners provided their own protection. The small operators could not afford to hire guards and were therefore unable to ship coal. Experiencing a combined coal strike, lock-out, and railroad strike, Schuylkill County had to import coal over the main line of the Reading for its own use.
As the strike became more intense business elements in the region sought a resumption of work by becoming alternately patronizing and vituperative toward the miners. The Miners’ Journal appealed to the regional loyalty of the miners, asking them to return to work so “our operators can go into the market and make sales before the other regions secure their customers.”19 When the strikers failed to respond, the Journal tried to sow discord by raising the issue of nationality. It reported that the union was “composed almost exclusively of adopted citizens.”20 Undaunted by pleas or sneers, the Executive Board remained firmly committed to the strike.
By late May it appeared as if the Wyoming men were about to rejoin the flock. Still refusing to join the strike, the Archbald district assessed each miner $3 and each laborer $2 a month to support the Lehigh and Schuylkill strikers. The Hyde Park men gave the southern miners a brief glimmer of hope when they walked out in June to protest the firing of two men. The Hyde Park miners quickly settled the issue, but the Wyoming men reassessed their position relative to the southern strike. In late June they agreed to divide their work with “the brothers now out on strike in Schuylkill and elsewhere” by taking an extra man in each breast.21
The share-the-work plan came at an opportune moment; the strike was beginning to exhaust the miners’ resources. Hard pressed, the miners first turned to the independent merchants for credit. The merchants, hoping to strike a blow against the company store, responded generously. But some strikers still found it difficult to make both ends meet.
The operators sought to take advantage of the fact that their workers were ill prepared to weather a prolonged strike by trying to starve them out. As the operators probed the ability of union to support a strike, they discovered what they thought was the miners’ Achilles heel. How clever of the miners and laborers to pretend they allowed dead work (work which produced no coal) because they had the operators’ welfare at heart. This ruse had worked in 1869, but now the operators refused to be fooled. On May 16 the Board of Trade advised its members that:
Complaints are made about the large number of men employed about the collieries doing dead work, amounting, it is admitted, to twenty percent of those usually employed, thus enabling the men to prolong this contest. In order, therefore, that it may be short, sharp, and decisive, it is earnestly recommended that all dead work cease after Wednesday the eighteenth instant.22
Pursuing its starvation campaign, the Board of Trade tried to close all working mines. Two days before it forbade dead work, the Board of Trade expelled the Philadelphia Coal Company for resuming on the 1869 basis. The Reading aided the Board by increasing its freight rates for coal by 20 percent and discontinued all drawbacks.23 The railroad promised that it would rescind the increase and restore the drawbacks after a general resumption of work “upon any satisfactory basis of wages.”24
Not dismayed by the power arrayed against it, the W.B.A. introduced new issues into the strike. It announced that it would concede a 20 percent reduction in wages if the operators granted the eight-hour day. The union also called for a more equitable difference between the contract rates and the wages of other mine employees. In taking the position that a new balance in wages should be secured, the W.B.A. never lost sight of its major goal—limitation of production. It would allow the contract miner an average daily wage of $3 with a 25-cent-per-day bonus if he worked in an especially wet or dangerous place. To police its ruling the union would instruct each miner to give his pay docket to his branch or district officers and pay everything over the allowed average into the district treasury. To further limit production, the contract miner could not make up a lost day. The union also ruled that the contract miner could no longer pay his laborer directly; hereafter the company would pay the laborer and deduct the amount from the contract miner’s wages. The introduction of the eight-hour day was an effort to gain a bargaining point and was soon dropped.
Neither the operators nor the union enjoyed the prospects of a drawn-out strike as long as the Wyoming region worked. Both, therefore, were eager to find a face-saving device that would end the strike. Benjamin B. Thomas, a mine operator, came from Philadelphia and talked to John Siney. Shortly after his return he visited Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and asked him to act as mediator. Gowen accepted the commission and both parties accepted his good offices. Gowen’s efforts resulted in a compromise: the basis remained at $3 but wages would be reduced when the price of coal fell under $3 a ton until it reached a floor of $2 a ton. The Board of Trade rejected the “Gowen Compromise” on the grounds that it was “an unfair adjustment of the wages in question in favor of the men giving them more than they are entitled to.”25
Benjamin Thomas, however, forced the Board of Trade to reconsider its action by resuming work on the terms of the “Gowen Compromise.” The Board of Trade rescinded its earlier decision and met with union officials on July 28 to write the compromise into a contract. An important clause in the contract bound the operators to uphold the W.B.A.’s “equality resolution.” The clause provided graduated reductions in the contract miner’s pay, ranging from 10 percent if he should earn more than $100 but less than $125 a month, to 40 percent if he should earn more than $200 in a month.
The contract did not bring peace to the Schuylkill and Lehigh regions. The Northumberland County organization rejected the “Gowen Compromise” and remained on strike until October 1, when it agreed to the “Shamokin Compromise.” The “Shamokin Compromise” retained the 1869 basis, with a sliding scale of 25 percent which could go below the basis as well as above. In the Hazleton area the employees of A. Pardee Brothers began a month-long strike in September because the firm employed nonunion men. Schuylkill County workers changed their opinion of the “Gowen Compromise” when they received their first pay and found 8-1/2 percent deducted because the price of coal had fallen below $3 a ton. Talk of a strike aroused John Siney to write an open letter advising the men to refrain from such thinking. The men followed Siney’s advice and did not strike, although wages fell by 24-3/4 percent by December.
The 1870 strike seriously weakened the W.B.A. Both the leaders and the rank-and-file realized that the goal of a regulated market was beyond their reach if one region remained working. The Wyoming region’s failure to strike and the subsequent bitter feelings made a general strike improbable. Indeed, it was questionable if the General Council could enforce its will on the Schuylkill region. In Dauphin County the union disbanded during the strike. The Shamokin area men bolted from the Northumberland County W.B.A. and created an independent organization which represented the employees of 21 collieries. Inside the regular union, adherence to the “equality resolution” left many contract miners restive.
The actions of the Reading during the strike were an external threat to the union. The coal carriers appeared quite capable, and willing, to regulate production by increasing freight rates. If it proved possible for the railroads and the small operators to agree on a suitable policy of market regulation, the W.B.A. would be of no value to the operators, who would move to crush the union. As the union leaders surveyed the lessons derived from the strike, a change in policy seemed forthcoming.