Miners without unions: Work and labor relations in West Virginia's smokeless coalfields, 1873--1935

This study examines the history of three mining districts in southern West Virginia, known collectively as the smokeless coalfields for their high-quality, relatively smoke-free coals. The study's focus is the smokeless coalfields' non-union miners and their families, their courage against adversity and their efforts to achieve justice in a competitive and dangerous world of work. The study's key contribution is the attention it gives to the powerful market forces that circumscribed the actions of coal operators, miners, and the union. It shows how the volatile coal market threatened the livelihoods of miners, compelling their employers to regulate coal output by adjusting the number of days that the miners could work. Unable to negotiate collectively to improve their conditions, these non-union miners and their families moved from mine to mine in search of better work opportunities. The study recovers the story of these miners coping courageously with hardships caused by the fluctuating market. Through the first decade of the twentieth century, these miners (like miners elsewhere in West Virginia) failed to gain union recognition through the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Operators feared the union would bring their businesses under the control of northern coal producers who had by 1898 reached accord with the UMWA on a mechanism for negotiating wages and for "managing" competition in the industry. Viewing all unionists as pawns of their northern rivals, the smokeless coal operators used industrial spies to drive union members out of their fields. Only for a brief interlude before the New Deal---between 1913 and 1919, when market and political forces aligned favorably---were the miners able to establish their union. But their organization collapsed following World War I and would not be re-established until the New Deal when the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act helped swell the UMWA membership to half-a-million strong. Yet the gains of smokeless coal miners were fleeting. The UMWA's high-wage structure encouraged the operators to mechanize their work processes, drastically reduce their labor force, shift production to predominantly non-union western states, and switch to surface mining technologies. The once thriving smokeless coalfields are now distant memory.