The Miners' Fight for American Standards

The Miners' Fight for American Standards PDF Author: John Llewellyn Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Coal-miners
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Miners' Fight for American Standards

The Miners' Fight for American Standards PDF Author: John Llewellyn Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Coal-miners
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description


Killing for Coal

Killing for Coal PDF Author: Thomas G. Andrews
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674736680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

Get Book Here

Book Description
On a spring morning in 1914, in the stark foothills of southern Colorado, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado’s industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners’ families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the “Great Coalfield War.” In a sweeping story of transformation that begins in the coal beds and culminates with the deadliest strike in American history, Thomas Andrews illuminates the causes and consequences of the militancy that erupted in colliers’ strikes over the course of nearly half a century. He reveals a complex world shaped by the connected forces of land, labor, corporate industrialization, and workers’ resistance. Brilliantly conceived and written, this book takes the organic world as its starting point. The resulting elucidation of the coalfield wars goes far beyond traditional labor history. Considering issues of social and environmental justice in the context of an economy dependent on fossil fuel, Andrews makes a powerful case for rethinking the relationships that unite and divide workers, consumers, capitalists, and the natural world.

The American Federationist

The American Federationist PDF Author: William Green
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 764

Get Book Here

Book Description
Includes separately paged "Junior union section."

The Seamen's Journal

The Seamen's Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 788

Get Book Here

Book Description


Go to It, Miners!

Go to It, Miners! PDF Author: Trade Union Educational League (U.S.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Collective labor agreements
Languages : en
Pages : 1

Get Book Here

Book Description
On 1 April 1946, John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, called 400,000 bituminous coal miners out on strike for improved wages, health benefits, and safety regulations. By mid-May, the strike was crippling industrial production and threatened to end the economy's postwar recovery. President Truman seized the mines and ordered the strikers back to work. When the companies refused a settlement negotiated between the workers and government, Lewis took his men out of the pits on November 21st and ended the strike on December 7th. The government acceded to most UMW demands and the coal companies agreed to the bulk of Lewis's terms to regain their property.

Prologue

Prologue PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Archives
Languages : en
Pages : 614

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Miners of Windber

The Miners of Windber PDF Author: Mildred Beik
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271074582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1897 the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company founded Windber as a company town for its miners in the bituminous coal country of Pennsylvania. The Miners of Windber chronicles the coming of unionization to Windber, from the 1890s, when thousands of new immigrants flooded Pennsylvania in search of work, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the miners' rights to organize, join the United Mine Workers of America, and bargain collectively were recognized after years of bitter struggle. Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners and their families against the company, whose repressive policies encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture. Circumstance, if not principle, forced miners to embrace cultural pluralism in their fight for greater democracy, reforms of capitalism, and an inclusive, working-class, definition of what it meant to be an American. Beik draws on a wide variety of sources, including oral histories gathered from thirty-five of the oldest living immigrants in Windber, foreign-language newspapers, fraternal society collections, church manuscripts, public documents, union records, and census materials. The struggles of Windber's diverse working class undeniably mirror the efforts of working people everywhere to democratize the undemocratic America they knew. Their history suggests some of the possibilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses, of worker protest in the early twentieth century.

John L. Lewis

John L. Lewis PDF Author: Melvyn Dubofsky
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252012877
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
John L. Lewis (1880-1969), who ruled the United Mine Workers for four decades beginning in 1919, defied presidents, challenged Congress, and kept American political life in an uproar. Drawing upon previously untapped resources in the UMW archives and upon oral histories by major figures of the 1930s and 1940s, the authors have created a remarkable portrait of this 'self-made man' and his times. "This well-illustrated, engagingly-written volume deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the history of American labor in the twentieth century." -- Labor History

American Federationist

American Federationist PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor unions
Languages : en
Pages : 764

Get Book Here

Book Description


Black Coal Miners in America

Black Coal Miners in America PDF Author: Ronald L. Lewis
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the miners. Using this approach, Lewis finds five distractive systems of race relations. There was in the South before and after the Civil War a system of slavery and convict labor—an enforced servitude without legal compensation. This was succeeded by an exploitative system whereby the southern coal operators, using race as an excuse, paid lower wages to blacks and thus succeeded in depressing the entire wage scale. By contrast, in northern and midwestern mines, the pattern was to exclude blacks from the industry so that whites could control their jobs and their communities. In the central Appalachians, although blacks enjoyed greater social equality, the mine operators manipulated racial tensions to keep the work force divided and therefore weak. Finally, with the advent of mechanization, black laborers were displaced from the mines to such an extent that their presence in the coal fields in now nearly a thing of the past. By analyzing the ways race, class, and community shaped social relations in the coal fields, Black Coal Miners in America makes a major contribution to the understanding of regional, labor, social, and African-American history.