[quote=pri_dk]…I grew up in a coal mining town. In one area where we used to play in the “woods” there was the remains of an old wall and steel fence. At one time in the late 19th century, the mine-workers were not permitted to leave the town without permission. The entire town was fenced off and there was an armed guard at the gate. The reason that the mining company could “legally” treat employees like prisoners is because the employees were indebted to the company. The company paid them in “script” (private currency) that could only be used at the company store. The company didn’t pay employees enough to survive, but it would generously extend credit.[/quote]
My father grew up in NE Pennsylvania coal country, and his Austrian (Slavic) uncles worked in the mines at the time of the Lattimer Massacre, when miners were trying to unionize. You’re right about the “generous” credit policies of the company store, which unfortunately had prices that were 3 or 4 times the costs of higher-quality goods elsewhere. Miners also were not paid an hourly wage – pay was based on coal tonnage. Out of that, they had to pay for all their own tools and equipment, and a variety of bogus fees and charges, including an “Alien Tax” (even though many immigrant miners were American citizens), were assessed every week. When a miner went to the paymaster, he was informed of his coal tonnage and the amount to be paid for it; if there were errors (and, quite often, there were), a miner did not dare protest for fear that he would lose his job, or worse. Then the various charges, fees, and taxes were assessed, and payments for company house rent and “utilities”, and on the debts held by the company store and the company doctor were withheld. If there was ANYTHING left after that, it was paid to the miner in scrip. If a miner was injured on the job, he was thrown out of his job, and his family was evicted from the company house, but they were still liable for the “debts” to the coal company. If a miner died (on or off the job), his wife and children were evicted within 24 or 48 hours.
All in all, a pretty nasty existence. But, that being said, I do like the Tennessee Ernie Ford song.
[quote=pri_dk] The unions that rescued the miners and steelworkers eventually were the cause of their ultimate demise as workers demanded more and labor costs overwhelmed the industries.[/quote]
Saying that the unions caused the loss of jobs is simplistic and short-sighted. There is no question that many of the unions eventually had extremely poor leadership: either those who didn’t have the experience or intellect to realize the impact that labor costs could have on industry, or those who sought to exploit union resources, and negotiated unsustainable wages and benefits for union members as a way to stay in power. But given the human tendency toward greed, unionization is the only way that the average worker can hope to have decent and safe working conditions, a living wage, and freedom from overtly unfair or illegal employment practices.
I challenge anyone to explain to me how the conditions you and I mentioned above would have been banished, or why they won’t come back, in the absence of unions.
The problem is that people, for all their talk about “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”, really want someone to take care of them. So when a union president offers to do that, or a politician, people don’t question how that will be achieved or sustained, or what the short- or long-term effects will be. They just give the union official or the politician their vote.
So to paraphrase what you said elsewhere in your post, we don’t need to throw out the whole union system. We need to fix it.
And as for the labor costs “overwhelming” the industry, perhaps that’s industry’s fault. Unions have been around for a while now. And there were many decades during which industry did quite well dealing with union labor. The greatest growth of the United States automobile industry took place during a time in which they had to deal with unions. There’s a tendency to automatically believe the guys in suits when it comes to questions about how businesses are run. But the fact is that many of the largest and most-respected American businesses have had piss-poor management over the past several decades. Yes, there have been challenges that have arisen, but there have also been lucrative opportunities. The problem is that many companies grabbed the opportunities, but ignored the challenges, shoving them to the back of the closet so they wouldn’t have to be confronted by them. Until the closet became so full that the door burst open, and all of the challenges that had been avoided came spilling out.
Yes, labor costs, particularly retiree healthcare, have absolutely gone beyond levels that are sustainable. Excuse me, but WHO was at the contract negotiations WITH the unions for those pay and benefit levels?
The successful operation of a business is a cooperative effort between business owners/management and business labor. Business offers a level of pay. Workers can choose to take it and work, or reject it and strike. It’s at that point when a business has to determine whether it can live with idle workstations, and workers have to decide if they can deal with no money. The problem is that no one wants to tough things out, and that’s when they make deals with the devil.
[quote=pri_dk]Yeah, mountaintop removal sucks, but life in coal country was once far worse. Things got better – although mining was always brutal work – but now the underground mines are all gone (some of them are still burning and collapsing though!)
Today, without surface mining, there would be no economy at all. It’s a tough dilemma.[/quote]
You’re mixing up apples and oranges here.
Life is BETTER in coal country? Why don’t you go talk to the people who have lost their houses to flash floods, whose properties have been compromised by MTR mining pollutants, who can no longer fish and hunt to feed their families?
You’re referring to work conditions for coal miners: all 25,000 remaining in West Virginia. West Virginia has a population of 1.85 million people. That’s 1,847,000 WV residents who are NOT coal miners.
In case you missed the stats I posted, there were 65,000 mining jobs in WV in 1983. Since then, hundreds of peaks and millions of acres of forest have been destroyed, and the Appalachian watershed is a small fraction of what it was. Many rivers are now black sludge, or else they’ve completely disappeared from the landscape, buried under millions of tons of mining waste. Entire communities are now uninhabitable. Is all of that worth 65,000 mining jobs in a state of 1.85 million people.
Oh, wait. My bad. It’s 25,000 jobs. During a time in which destruction on a massive, far-reaching scale was taking place, all in the name of saving West Virginia’s thriving coal-mining industry, 35,000 jobs were LOST.
I hear the term “thinking out of the box” a lot. Here’s a true example of thinking out of the box: Maybe the coal mining industry in West Virginia should be shut down if the mine owners can’t make money at it the old-fashioned way, i.e. underground mining.
The fact is that they can. It’s just that the profits won’t be quite as lucrative. Just like they’re not as lucrative when the companies have to handle mine waste properly instead of dumping it directly into the rivers and streams.
Massey Energy and others like them are the ones that are being allowed to endanger the lives of millions of people in the interest of creating jobs. Yes, millions of people. Because the destruction of the Appalachian watershed means severely deleterious effects on rivers, lakes, and streams that feed from it for thousands of miles around: to the Chesapeake Bay on one side, and the Mississippi on the other. And the very real problem of no water far outweighs the problem of no coal.
Oh, yes, and the “job creators” of the West Virginia mining industry somehow managed to LOSE 35,000 jobs in 30 years. Over half of what relatively few jobs had been available.
You know, all the money that’s gone into “saving” West Virginia coal mining could have been spent on establishing 3 or 4 industries there. That’s not “thinking out of the box”. It’s just common sense.
