and Slovak, $76.68; South Italian, $69.11. There is 1. substantial difference between the Magyar and Slovaks, o the one hand, and the white Americans, on the other; their wages averaged about $3.00 a day. The earnings of the Italians were lower, but this may have been due to the fact that some of them did not work every day in the month.2

The conclusion of the Commission with regard to the Virginia and West Virginia coal fields is that "although it is not clear that the employment of the immigrant has reduced wages . . . it is obvious that if immigrant labor had not been available either a much higher wage would have been paid, more labor-saving devices used, or less development would have been possible."3 In other words, wages have not been reduced, but had there been no immigrants on hand, either wages would have been higher, or they would not have been higher. The conclusion is indisputable.

The Immigration Commission holds the recent immigrants responsible for the evils of the company houses and the company stores. It is the usual method of reasoning: the company house and the company store exist only because the recent immigrants "consent" to accept them. This is a consistent application of the theory of "freedom of contract": wages are low, because wage-earners "consent" to accept low wages; hours of labor are long, because laborers "consent" to work long hours; factories are unsanitary, because operatives "consent" to work in unsanitary factories. Every problem involved in the relation between labor and capital finds an easy solution in this philosophy.

The fact is that the real estate and the mercantile end of a mining company's business are often no less important, as sources of income, than the mine. There are mining companies whose sales of coal do not cover their operating

2 Ibid. Ibid., pp. 659, 666.

1 Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 6, p. 202. 3 Ibid., p. 223.

expenses, but the renting of houses to employees and the profits of the commissary store yield enough to pay dividends on the entire investment. This system is much older than immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe.

An item in the Pottsville Miners' Journal for January, 1850, states that there were 42,000 houses rented by the operators in the anthracite coal fields. From the earliest records of mining, operators have erected abodes for their employees, and the practice has been continued until very recent times among all the companies.1

Company houses are as usual in the South, where the white miners are mostly of old American stock, as in those fields where recent immigrants predominate.

The company store has also had a long history.

...

.. men worked In 1850, the laborer

The Pottsville Miners' Journal states that in 1848 for $3.50 a week and took that out in orders. . . . got from 60 cents to 65 cents a day and the miner from 80 cents to 90 cents. These were low wages but they were actually lower than the amounts specified, for the men were not paid in money. They had to take their earnings out in goods which made a difference of from 15 to 20 per cent against the wage-earner.2

Many and persistent attempts have been made to do away with this evil, all of which so far have come short of their object. It was an issue of the Bates strike of 1849. The Workingmen's Benevolent Association of 1868-75 attempted to remove it. It was one of the planks in the platform of the Knights of Labor who flourished in the Middle and Southern coal fields in 1886-88. And the labor organization which now flourishes in the anthracite coal fields has undertaken to correct this evil. What the employees could not do by labor unions their representatives have tried to do by legislative enactment. In June, 1881, a law was passed to enforce payment in lawful money of the United States or "any order or other paper whatsoever, redeemable for its face value in lawful money of the United States." This law was declared unconstitutional. . . . In June, 1891, another act was passed, making it unlawful for "any mining or manufacturing corporation of the commonwealth, or the officers or stockholders of any such corporation, to engage in or carry on any store known as company store."... Another attempt was made at the recommendation of an investigating committee in 1897 to abolish this evil. All these Peter Roberts: The Anthracite Coal Industry, p. 130.

• Ibid., p. 109.

legislative acts have come short of their objects. The company store still flourishes. . . . Their number is not as large as they once were; they are gradually dying out, but the institution dies hard.'

In West Virginia "every mining company has a company store, and the operatives are compelled to deal in the company store, because they are paid only once a month, but may between pay-days obtain trading scrip which is good only at the company stores." Nearly one half (46 per cent) of all mine workers in West Virginia are native white Americans, and only 30 per cent are immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.3 It is clear that the recent immigrant is no more responsible for the company store than the native American miner.

It is a fair conclusion from all available facts that the terms of employment in the coal mines at present are in no respect less favorable to the mine worker, and that the wages are higher, than in the past, when the bulk of the mine workers were native Americans or immigrants from Northern and Western Europe.

The ability of the wage-earner to influence the terms of employment in large-scale industry finds full expression only in collective bargaining. The history of labor unions in the bituminous coal-mining industry, according to the Immigration Commission's version, has been a constant struggle on the part of the English-speaking mine workers to organize the Southern and Eastern Europeans and to hold them in line.

In the Pennsylvania bituminous mining area the entire period from 1870 to 1894 was marked by a series of labor dissensions and strikes, each of which left the labor organizations in a weaker condition than did its predecessor, for the reason that the older employees, who were the leaders in the movement for higher wages and better working conditions, finding themselves unable to control the conditions imposed by the increasing employment of recent immigrants, and finally realizing that it

Peter Roberts: The Anthracite Coal Industry, pp. 129-130. • Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 7, p. 201. • Ibid., p. 161.

was impossible to control the incoming supply of immigrant labor, abandoned the Pennsylvania mines and sought similar employment in other bituminous localities where the pressure of competition of recent immigrants was not so strong. . . Practically, the same situation with the same results was experienced in the mines of West Virginia. Recent immigrants did not enter the mines of that State in large numbers... until after the year 1890. The competition was soon felt, however, and the significance of their presence revealed by the strikes which occurred in the Fairmont, Elk Garden, and other fields in the years 1894 and 1895. Natives and older immigrant employees left the mines, as they had done in Pennsylvania, thus creating vacancies which were filled by the employment of additional numbers of recent immigrants, who reduced the strength of the labor organizations. The rapid expansion of the mining operations after 1894 also brought into the mining fields a constantly growing number of Southern and Eastern Europeans, who completely inundated the older employees and unconsciously, but effectually, demoralized the labor unions and put a stop to any efforts toward organization. . . . [In the Middle West] during the past ten years . . . although the labor unions have largely maintained their strength, conditions have changed and the preservation of the standards of the organization has been a matter of the greatest difficulty. Mining operations have undergone a great expansion, and recourse has been had to races of recent immigration in greater and greater numbers. These newcomers have entered the labor organizations principally because they have considered it a necessary step preliminary to securing work in the mines, and not because they have had any sympathy or interest in the labor-union program. They have also manifested comparatively little activity in its behalf.

The preceding summary abounds in errors of fact which produce a distorted view of the history of trade-unionism in the bituminous coal-mining industry. The cardinal fact of that history is that so long as the English-speaking mine workers were in the majority, their organizations were ephemeral and their strikes mostly unsuccessful; it is only since the Southern and Eastern Europeans have become an important factor in the coal mines that the miners' organization has gained strength. The growth of the United Mine Workers of America appears from Table 130 next following. Whereas in 1890 scarcely 15 per cent of all mine workers in the United States were affiliated with • Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 1, p. 535.

labor unions, in 1904 the proportion of organized mine workers exceeded one half of the total number employed.1 Since 1898 terms of employment in the bituminous coal mines are periodically agreed upon between conferees of the conventions of organized mine operators and organized mine workers, holding sessions after the fashion of two houses of an industrial parliament.

TABLE 130.

MEMBERSHIP OF THE UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, 1890-1904.

The Industrial Commission says in a survey of the history of the miners' unions up to the end of the past century:

Labor organization among the coal miners has passed through extraordinary vicissitudes. The Welsh, Scotch, English, and Irish miners were well organized and maintained high wages, but in 1875, not owing to the presence of immigrants, but as a result of a strike against a falling market, their organization was entirely broken and their wages greatly reduced. Not until 1897, in the bituminous field, and 1900, in the anthracite field, was a reorganization effected, this time not of the original British stock alone, but also of the mixed nationalities from Southern and Eastern Europe. . . . While there have been serious problems in the organization of mixed nationalities, an equally serious problem which has confronted the organization of these immigrants has been the competition of the unorganized Americans of native stock. This was fully shown in the experience of the miners prior to 1897, when their organizations in Northern Illinois were defeated by the native Americans in Southern Illinois. In the first mining district of Illinois the per cent of Americans is only eleven, and in the seventh, in the Southern part of the State, it is eighty. Yet, it was these American miners in the thick and more easily mined veins of the Southern section

'Frank Julian Warne: The Coal Mine Workers, pp. 120, 206, 212, 218. Ibid., pp. 117, 120, 212, 218.

2