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1849 - Mine Workers

Deskilling, occupational hazards, economic insecurity, and managerial paternalism were among the major forces that led extractive workers to organize for self-protection. Increasingly, employees looked to collective strength, not individual virtue, as the way to overcome the imbalance of power between labor and capital. Coal workers first organized in the anthracite district of Pennsylvania in 1849, in opposition to low pay and high prices at the company store.

The first hardrock union emerged in the silver mines of the Comstock Lode of Nevada in 1863. Although both these efforts aborted, durable local foci of unionism emerged after 1870. In particular, the copper miners' organization in Butte, Montana, founded in 1878, grew into a formidable stronghold. By the turn of the century, this self-proclaimed Gibraltar of Unionism had more than 6,000 members, making it the largest local union in the US. In the extractive industry, the Knights of Labor planted seeds of organization in numerous mining and logging centers in the 1870s and 1880s.

Labor unrest accompanied the rise of large-scale enterprise, with conflict between skilled workers and managers a major aspect. Unskilled and semiskilled factory hands did not recede into the background. Like their counterparts in an earlier age of industrial development, they engaged in protest focused not on control of production but rather on the grievous conditions under which they worked. In the 1880s, for example, textile workers in both the North and the South struck for better pay and shorter hours under the banner of the Knights of Labor.

During the mid-1880s, the Knights of Labor swept tens of thousands of railway workers (officially, engineers, conductors and firemen were separately organized) into its ranks as its locals challenged some of the most powerful "robber barons" in the country. The 1885 strike began in Sedalia, Missouri, following wage cuts, increased hours, and the firing of members of the Knights. Knights assemblies representing shop workers successfully took on Jay Gould's Southwest rail system (including the Wabash, Missouri Pacific, and Missouri, Kansas and Texas railroads). In the end, they forced the robber baron to restore wages, bargain with the Order, reinstate discharged union activists, and promise no further discrimination against union members.

The impact of the Knights' victory was tremendous. Tens of thousands of workers in diverse industries and trades enrolled in the Order. The following year, however, a better-prepared Gould renewed the battle with different results. In Arkansas, 15 masked strike sympathizers commandeered and sidetracked a St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railroad train transporting perishable freight at the railroad's Fort Smith crossing, while others removed set screws from trains at the Baring Cross round-house, effectively removing them from operation. In East St. Louis, strikes engaged in mass demonstrations at freight houses and railroad yards.

Violence erupted on April 9 when between 1,000 and 1,500 strikers gathered on the east side of the city's bridge near the tracks of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad to monitor strikebreaking activities and to jeer strikebreakers. Charging at the crowd, 15 armed deputy sheriffs, "losing entire control over themselves, fired promiscuously right and left," in the words of the Louisville Commercial. "The crowd broke and ran in all directions uttering maledictions as they retreated. Curses deep and loud, mingled with the groans of the wounded and dying." The pursuing deputies fired as many as 200 shots at the fleeing crowd, hitting at least three. "The holocaust of blood" continued with a "brief and bloody struggle on the narrow trestle bridge over the Kahokia" before the deputies fled. In contrast to their 1885 victory, the Knights went down to bitter defeat in 1886.

Defense of workers' interests meant national, not merely local or regional, organization. Organizing on a broadly inclusive industrial basis was necessary in a time of craft dilution and peril, transcending the craft exclusiveness that prevailed under the American Federation of Labor. With the formation of the Granite Cutters' International Association in 1877, the first permanent national union arose in the extractive sector. In January 1890, representatives of Appalachian and Midwestern coal diggers met at City Hall in Columbus, Ohio, to establish the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA or UMW). Three years later, hardrock workers convened in Butte to organize the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The driving force in the new federation, the Butte Miners' Union became WFM Local 1 and allowed its hall to be used as the group's headquarters. In timber and petroleum, early attempts to forge national institutions failed.

The self-help initiatives of local and district mining unions encompassed ventures into workers' education. Local activists in the WFM organized socialist study groups and sponsored lectures by leading troublemakers. In District 2 of the UMW, John Brophy, developed his own extensive program of Labor Chautauquas and sent rank-and-file coal diggers to learn about labor organizing at the Brookwood Labor College near Katonah, New York.

Much of this education gave extractive workers awareness of their exploitation by employers and their potential to resist exploitation collectively. Indeed, conflict has characterized labor-management relations in extraction since the arrival of the corporation. Routine disputes over wages, hours, working conditions, and union rights escalated into violence. During the quarter century beginning in 1881, for example, coal mining had more strike activity than any other U.S. industry. Commonly concentrated in remote locales as "isolated masses," extractive laborers have provided the model for the classic formulation of the militant proletarian, highly predisposed to strike.

Many of these disputes are nationally significant. The strike in the anthracite mines of northeastern Pennsylvania during 1902-1903 was of historic importance in at least three ways. In terms of workdays lost, this stoppage for several months by more than 150,000 employees was the largest strike in the U.S. up to that time. Although the organization would experience many subsequent setbacks, the strike did establish the UMW as the representative of hard-coal workers, a role that continues to present.

In addition, the innovative mediating role of federal authorities in this dispute gave the first indication of the major changes in law and policy that unfolded under the New Deal. Unlike its simple duty as strikebreaker in the 19th century, this time the federal government intervened to find facts and to force a compromise settlement. The unprecedented protracted hearings of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission at the Lackawanna County Courthouse in Scranton captured the attention of the nation throughout the winter of 1902-1903. Although the commission's award gave the hardcoal workers modest advances — such as a one-hour reduction in work time to nine hours per day, not the eight-hour day they sought—this resolution was seen as a victory for unionism. Grateful miners placed a statue of UMW president John Mitchell in front of the Scranton courthouse.