| This dissertation traces the work experience of the mine workers of the anthracite coal industry of northeastern Pennsylvania from the final three decades of the nineteenth century, during which several attempts to unionize the mines failed, to the industry-wide anthracite strikes of 1900 and 1902, which brought to a successful conclusion the United Mine Workers' drive for unionization. The correspondence of corporate executives shows that a pervasive philosophy of antiunionism characterized management's approach to labor relations. During the nonunion era, the state, rather than any labor organization, served as the most effective counterpoise to corporate power through its enactment of an extensive code of mining regulation. Nevertheless, mine workers still confronted a perilous workplace which, along with chronic underemployment and an utterly unsystematized congeries of work rules, combined to create a work experience fraught with insecurity. Payrolls and public documents show that few mine workers in the 1890s could feel confident of their ability to support their families.;The United Mine Workers proposed an industry-wide contract as the means to solve these problems, and effective organization as the prod to force the corporations to negotiate such a contract. However, the union succeeded in its organizing only in the wake of numerous wildcat strikes protesting the many manifestations of the paternalistic, individualized style of labor relations which had always characterized the industry. These walkouts built the solidarity responsible for the union's success in the strikes of 1900 and 1902. Nevertheless, while the union won substantial wage increases as a result of those strikes, its failure to force the corporations to negotiate a regularized system of work rules left the mine workers' quest for greater security fundamentally unfulfilled. |
