Coal Country

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store....~"Sixteen Tons"

The wealth and prosperity of America owes a great deal to coal mining, much of which historically has taken place in Pennsylvania. Having grown up watching shows like Roots, I was made deeply aware of the full range of injustices associated with slavery and racial prejudice towards those of African descent. The injustices suffered by people of European descent in the coal mines was not emphasized much at all during the course of my education. It was not until I married a Pennsylvanian and moved north that I really began to hear the horror stories of the company store and of the unsafe and unhealthy conditions under which even children were compelled to work. The Slavic, Slovak, Irish, and Welsh immigrants came willingly to America, looking for employment; they could not be bought and sold. However, the mining system in many ways was a form of indentured servitude. As one Pennsylvania historical website describes:

Operators tightly controlled most mines and patch towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They had power over families’ personal lives to a degree not found in most other Pennsylvania communities. They typically controlled employment, housing, local government officials, and most businesses in coal patches, as well as private police that patrolled towns. Operators also reduced wages to meet growing competition for shrinking markets, particularly during the 1920s. Most employers saw workers as a production cost to be cut as well as controlled. When miners went on strike or tried to organize unions, operators fought back hard by firing workers, bringing in strikebreakers to replace them, using private police to protect mine property and strikebreakers, and evicting miners and their families from company housing.

The working conditions were extremely hazardous, because of the two big engineering problems in mining coal underground:

• A system to drain water from the mine
• A system to ventilate the mine and to provide fresh air to the miners. A special problem in coal mines was the methane (a gas) that sometimes accompanied coal, and which could--and too often did--catch fire and explode.
  

Young boys often had to work to help feed their families, in conditions which were not healthy or safe even for adults. Workers were not given wages, but were paid in scrip. The scrip could only be used at a store owned by the mining company, who controlled the prices so that the workers would end up in debt just in order to eat and clothe themselves.

The Irish coal miners who came over after the Great Famine rebelled against the unfair treatment and there were some violent incidents, made famous by the film The Molly Maguires.

The injustices towards coal miners continued in Pennsylvania and other states into the twentieth century, long after slavery had been abolished elsewhere.

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