AMERICAN COAL WAR

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 17 March 1928, Page 11

AMERICAN COAL WAR

A REMARKABLE article in the “Man/Y Chester Guardian reveals a- coal sit-u----jrx ation in America which has surprised many people in Britain. The writer

“At a time when the coalfields of Great Britain provide a spectacle of extreme depression, those of the United States are scenes of the bitterest civil war. It may well, indeed, be doubted whether in the entire world of industry there is to he found any conflict, between capital and labour that, can he compared, in magnitude and ferocity, with > the hostilities now raging over the coalmining regions of Colorado, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. “For a long time past a state of war lias existed in the American coal industry. Not for a good many years has it been possible at any given moment to say that peace prevailed in the whole of the coal-producing States. There are mining areas of West Virginia in .which guerilla fighting is as customary and continuous as it was, or still is, in certain Balkan

valleys. “During the greater part, of the past year the coalminers throughout a vast area between Pennsylvania and Illinois have been idle. Their grievances appeared to be coming within sight, of a general and tolerable settlement, when hostilities broke out, or were renewed, with extraordinary rancour in the important coalfields of Colorado and. Western Pennsylvania. “In some respects these two regions present a striking contrast, to one another. But the} are alike in this, that, the companies, true to the tradition of American mining outside the anthracite coalfield, which is fully unionised are mainaining an implacable front, against the unions and making use of every available weapon, legal and other, for their destruction. “In Colorado . . . Mr John D. Rockefeller, jun.. declared that his company would not deal with the United Mine Workers on any terms. The hostilities of the past two months, which have been tnarked by violent skirmishes and many casualties, proved only too clearly that the enmity between employers and miners is undiminished

•‘We find ourselves in a different though no less barbaric world when we turn from Colorado to Western Pennsylvania, where the coal war exhibits certain features that are certainly not to be found anywhere in the world outside

MINEOWNERS AND WORKERS

FEATURES OF THE CONFLICT

tho United States. The mines of this area, and of all the coalfields covered by the United Mine Workers, have been since 1924 operated under the Jacksonville Agreement, relating to wages and other conditions. “Some months, ago one of the leading coal companies of Pittsburg resolved to treat the agreement as termniable at will, lhev made drastic cuts in wages and put an end to their relations with the union. Their example was followed by other companies, with the result, that, this portion of Western Pennsylvania became, as so often before, a land of merciless conflict, and organised terror. “The owners imported strike-beakers from the South. One estimate gives the number of these men as 175,000, a figure which seems to us incredible. The companies, again, increased the peculiar force of armed mine-guards known as the Coal and Iron Police, which, strangely enough, are commissioned by the State, though recruited and paid for by the mineowners.

“This special force is supplemented by the State Constabulary and also by a large body of deputy sheriffs, who, although, of course, nominally public servants, are partly in the pay of tiie companies and wholly at their service. Against all these guardians of the law, regular and irregular, the gravest charges are brought by the miners and their friends. They are accused of reckless shooting and bludgeoning and of brutally harrying the strikers in and out of their homes.

“Large numbers of the miners live in houses owned by the companies, and a policy of wholesale eviction is being carried out. The policy is most, effectually aided by the Law Courts, from which injunctions of the most drastic character are being obtained against individual miners as well as against the union.

“The judge of one Federal Court in the Pittsburg district has forbidden the use of union funds to pay the cost of appeals in eviction eases, while another court has ruled that, the relation of miners occupying company houses is the relation, not of tenant to landlord, but of servant, to master. In a word, the mineowners are able to mobilise the entire resources of capital and armed force, together with,those of the legal institutions of the Republic, for the avowed purpose of destroying the United Mine Workers.”