Miners worked together as a team. You had the head miner, who was a skilled
miner licensed by the state, and you had two helpers who worked with him. And
the miner, a lot of people don't realize this, paid his helper. So that in the
very structure of the industry there was a set-up that was beneficial to the
bosses in that the helpers' complaints were addressed to the miner and not to
the company.
Miners worked at a pace that was set by the nature of the market. If there was
a heavy demand for coal, miners could work as long as 10 and 12 hours a day.
If there was a light demand for coal, they worked five and six hours a day.
And they went into the mines and worked on their own, on their own time. They
worked, you know, not for wages, but they worked on the basis of how much they
produced. So they produced a certain amount of coal in a day. Say, in the
anthracite region there might finish their work at three and three-thirty in
the afternoon.
Miners usually worked straight through the year and their work schedule was key
to the production schedules of the mining companies that they worked for. So
if there was a heavy demand for coal, if there was an unusually harsh winter,
for example, in New York City, that's where a lot of the anthracite coal went,
for example, miners worked straight through and sometimes even on Christmas
day. Generally in coal mining you had a six-day week, with Sundays off.
The anthracite region in 1900 is the energy center of the country. And these
are the guys that get that coal out of the ground that powers the American
Industrial Revolution. And it's gotten out in a primitive and almost medieval
manner that's so much at variance with the modern age of technology. You
couldn't mine coal through some sort of automated Henry Ford assembly line
process. Coal was a cottage industry and these miners remained, in their
habits, customs and ideas and ideal, they remained throw-backs, in a sense.
They were individualistic and they went at their work in a very individualistic
manner, yet at the same time they had this sense of cooperation, this feeling
for one another. Miners, don't forget, didn't work for wages; they were paid by
the amount of coal they actually produced. And that was being lost as you
begin to have a salaried working force. Mining still remains a very
old-fashioned industry in the way miners go about their work. They control
their tools. They control their work place. They have an independent
intransigent spirit. They don't take orders very easily. They don't make good
husbands. They're primeval. They actually are and they're working with the
basic elements of the Earth, exactly, in these confined and exceedingly
dangerous places. And the work is almost heroic. It's the most dangerous job
in the world and it's been the most dangerous job in the world since the 12th
century.
From the very beginning, they bring the coal out and it's checked by the ton
and a miner had to come out with about 3300 pounds of coal, because there's
going to be a lot of rock in there. And if you've got 3300 pounds in your
cars, that as considered two thousand pounds of coal. That's what they
complained about, and that was a big issue in the strike of 1900, that they
were getting docked 1300 pounds and for loading all that rock and hauling it
out of the mine.
There's an impulse built into the industry that you want to get as much coal
out of that mine as you possibly can. So you start to take chances. And so
the burden is put on the miner and the incentive is put on the miner to go get
as much coal as you can. For example, in mining coal, miners used the coal
itself as pillars to hold up the ceiling, if you will, of the mine. But then
when it got to the point where there was no more coal in that particular breast
to work, they robbed the pillars. They started mining the pillars and the mine
collapsed around them as they worked. And many miners were caught in cave-ins
like that. And impelling factor, again, is trying to support your family,
trying to pull a decent wage out of that, and the incentives are there to go
after that coal wherever it is.
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