VI

LABOR TROUBLES IN PENNSYLVANIA.

ceases, which, together with his other charges, must be paid when work shall be resumed before he can draw any wages. This, together with other expenses next to be mentioned, serve largely to keep the miners in debt slavery, as so many Mexican peons. Mr. Arío Pardee, of Hazelton, a private operator, as well as a reputed millionaire and stockholder in railroads engaged in mining and carrying anthracite, with grim humor admitted to your committee that both the railroads and private operators prefer to let the miners occupy their houses so that rent can accumulate against them during a strike, lock-out, or shutdown. Said he (testimony, p. 569)

We can not undertake any general eviction. We expect a great many to go to work, and we are a good deal in the position of the old Quaker with his ox Golden. He got out of patience and said, "Go to hell, Golden;" but he said, "Come back again, for we can not do without thee." If we did that we would be in the position of the old Quaker.

Besides this, at most of the mines, especially in the Lehigh region, each miner or mine laborer who has a house for his family is charged and has the charge deducted from his wages for one ton of coal per month during the whole year, whether he uses the coal or not, for cooking and warming. It was proven that but very few families use that much coal any month in the year, and never in summer.

Another abuse existing at most of the mines is the practice of compelling miners to fill underground cars with coal of larger capacity than the size agreed upon. The excuse for this by the mine operator is to make up for wastage at the coal breaker, as well as for loss on account of slate rock which is always more or less mixed with the coal; "but a still more abominable practice, to make sure of deducting enough for slate, dirt, and light-loading is to dock every car so much. The man who determines the amount of this dockage represents the coal operator alone, the worker in the mine having no voice in it. One of the bitterest complaints of the miners is that they have no representative or means to guard against excessive dockage, and that the coal operators habitually and largely dock too much.

The testimony likewise shows that the coal operator (proprietor of the mine) invariably compels his miners to get their working outfit from him at an enormous profit to the operator, especially blasting powder. Wherever your committee went, in either the Schuykill or Lehigh regions, the grumbling was both loud and long against the overcharge for powder. It was alleged, and believed to be true, that the operators, who buy their powder cheaply at wholesale, as a rule charge the miner 100 per cent. or more advance.

However, perhaps the greatest outrage inflicted upon the workmen in and about the mines is the "pluck-me store" system of paying wages which is universal in the Lehigh region with but one or two honorable exceptions that came to the notice of your committee. Usually_every Lehigh coal operator keeps a general assortment store of whatever goods a laborer or miner wants, and by not letting him have any cash to trade elsewhere, practically compels him to buy at the operators' store upon the operators' own terms. It was likewise proven that at some of the Lehigh mines only particular peddlers of poultry and the like were allowed access to the miners' houses to trade. Several of the witnesses swore that from these and other causes when pay day arrives some of the men get no money at all, because in addition to extortion for necessaries the credit system at the store has tempted the miner to extravagance and by the time his store account, his house rent, his dockage, his powder bill, his fuel bill, his taxes (which must be retained by the employer ac

cording to law), his doctor's bill, and other charges have been deducted, no wages remain due. Two ex-members of the State legislature (Senafor Coxe, testimony, 597, and Representative Evans, 479), testified that within their personal knowledge several hard-working, sober miners. had toiled for years, or even a lifetime without having been able to draw a single dollar or but a few dollars in actual cash; a statement which seems borne out by a number of pay-day balance-sheets in the Lehigh region submitted to your committee and published in the testimony.

Two other causes aggravate the matter; one of which is that as a rule no miner knows what wages he is getting until pay-day comes, as wages in the anthracite regions are not regulated in any certain, simple, honest, straightforward manner, as elsewhere, but upon some hocuspocus varying principle said to depend on the price of coal at the mines. or at tide-water, either of which prices is made by the railroad to suit itself.

The other aggravating circumstance is, that many thousands of sur plus laborers are always kept on hand to underbid each other for employment, and thereby force the men to submit to whatever treatment the company may impose.

These and other abuses detailed in the testimony precipitated the great anthracite strike of 1887-'88. It began in September, 1887, in the Lehigh region, where the miners complained that life was unbearable. Por months previous they had been perfecting their labor organization for redress of grievances, and after mature deliberation among themselves, and consultation with the national organization of the Knights of Labor, presided over by Mr. Powderly, they resolved first to seek a correction of evils by arbitration, if possible, with the mine operators, and failing in that, to strike.

The operators of the Lehigh Valley scorned even to recognize or communicate with the delegates sent by the Knights of Labor to discuss a compromise. Hence these delegates, as the accredited organ of the miners, submitted an ultimatum, and as the operators could not or would not accept it, the strike began and continued for seven or eight months, when most of the men gave up the unequal struggle and returned to work upon the old terms. While this Lehigh strike was going on another strike occurred in the month of January, 1888, in the Schuyl kill region, whose mines are owned or controlled, as before stated, almost entirely by the mammoth Reading Railroad Company. The miners, of that company struck because the authorities of the company would; not continue to pay the advance in wages of 8 per cent., or about 12 cents per ton, which it had been paying since the preceding September, and the railway employés of the carrying department of the Reading: Railroad also struck in December, 1857, either from sympathy with the striking miners or probably because the officials of the Reading road purposely provoked the strike, partly to have an excuse to put up the price of coal generally, and particularly in Philadelphia, partly to gets rid of supporting surplus laborers for a time both in the mines and ong the railway, and partly to crush labor organizations among their employés.

As already indicated, there are many suspicious facts, in truth almost satisfactory internal evidence, that the authorities of the Reading road deliberately brought about the strikes both among its miners and among its railway employés only after the Reading had mined all and trausported most of its full quota of coal as agreed upon by the anthra cite pool or board of trade. That such an agreement or allotment of production of coal existed in 1887 and 1888, and exists to-day, no one

can doubt who has heard the evidence or carefully examined the subject.

But the mining and carrying of anthracite by the same gigantic corporations not only wrongs the consumers everywhere by exacting a monopoly price; not only wrongs the miner by depriving him of good treatment and steady employment at fair wages; not only wrongs the stock-holders of the mining and carrying company itself, particularly in the case of the Reading Company, by preventing dividends on stock, as well as by involving the company in reckless speculation and bank. ruptcy, but also produces gross political abuses. While the economic abuses herein recited do not apply with equal force to some of the combined mining and carrying companies as they do to the Reading, inasmuch as they pay dividends to their stock-holders, while the Reading has not paid a dividend for twelve years, yet the political abuses apply equally to all; for they all plunder the public, they all stint and oppress the miner, and they all combine to dominate the State government in every department in the interest of corporations against the people.

There is, as before mentioned, a superabundance of labor throughout the anthracite regions. Tramps are to be seen on every hand; vagabond squads of Italians, Poles, and Huns, many of whom can not speak English, throng the mines to compete with Americans for work; hence the wages of miners tend downward all the time, while the price of anthracite moves upward, or at least remains at the monopoly figure which the seven joint carrying and mining companies have been exacting for it, of late years. The question will force itself, Why are the mines overrun by these ignorant pauper foreigners? How do they get there and by whose agency? Competition for employment is so fierce that wages in many occupations are but little above the starvation point, and when the superintendent of the Reading mines was asked by your committee upon what influence he relied to fetch the men back to work he replied, "Their necessities."

Nearly all this multitude of unemployed or poorly paid laborers are voters, and vast numbers of them must be cheaply purchasable or easily intimidated. The Reading Company alone has over 20,000 miners and about 15,000 railway employés in its service. Will these employés dare defy its behests at the ballot-box? The Pennsylvania Railroad and other carrying and mining companies have their swarms of employés also, too many of whom are but little better than political as well as industrial slaves.

In proof of this the railroad corporations by their irresistible influence first induced the State legislature to authorize common carriers to become miners also. In entering upon such a policy the corporations had to employ tens of thousands of laborers, most of whom live in the lowest scale of existence. It was the rule with these corporations to hire laborers from the poorest classes at scant wages; and it is readily seen that brute force must have been required to terrify them into subjection whenever they should be moved to strike or refuse to submit like angels to lockouts, which they sometimes did in the effort to obtain something above "starvation wages."

It naturally followed that these corporations again went to the legis lature to obtain a police power, which they and not the State should control, to be able to hold the miners and laborers in subjection. Accordingly every railroad in 1865, and every colliery, iron furnace, or rolling-mill in 1866, was granted by statute liberty to employ as many policemen as it saw fit, from among such persons as would obey its behests, and they were clothed with "all the authority of policemen in

the city of Philadelphia "—were paid such wages and armed with such weapons as the corporations determined-usually army revolvers, sometimes Winchester rifles, or both-and they were commissioned by the governor. His discretion was and is now the only limit upon the number of such policemen to be appointed; and it is believed that the gov ernor has seldom if ever refused to commission the number and particular persons asked for. They report to nobody but the heads of the corporations employing them, from whom they get their orders, and which they execute generally with a mailed hand. It struck some of your committee as a curious condition of affairs, while walking the streets of Hazelton and Shenandoah, two mining towns of several thousand inhabitants, that there were to be seen three different sets of policemen-one wearing a metallic shield engraved, "Borough Police," a second "Railway Police," and a third "Coal and Iron Police;" the two latter many times more numerous than the former.

The authority of the railway policemen extends over all the premises of the railroad throughout every county where the road runs and in the clerk's office of which his commission has been recorded. So, too, the authority of the coal and iron police is equally extensive, but with this difference-that the railway policemen are independent of any orders. save those of the railroad company; and it is doubtful even if the gov ernor, who may commission or refuse to commission a railway policeman, may afterwards give him an order or cancel his commission, although under the statute of 1866 he can revoke the commission of a coal and iron policeman.

Mr. Austin Corbin, president of the Reading Railroad Company, while under examination before your committee in February, 1888, admitted that his railroad had then in employ "probably 300" of these domineering policemen, and from reliable information the number of coal and iron policemen alone in commission last October was 412. These aggressive policemen tend to overawe not only the local civil police, but the people themselves. All these police are likewise made detectives by statute, and while exercising the latter office they are not required to wear their badge or metallic shield, which serves more or less to destroy all coufidence in social intercourse among the population of the mining regions, who are harried on every side by spies and informers, which latter instantly may become clubbing policemen. The only riot that occurred during the great and prolonged strikes which your committee was appointed to investigate was needlessly provoked at Shenandoah, as the testimony clearly shows, by the railroad and coal and iron police. And the chief of that police during this riot added as many ruffians as be pleased to club the people at $2 a day, and hired them himself without applying to the governor for that purpose. In a boastful manner he admitted this to your committee on the witness stand, and appeared to feel that he had more authority than the executive at Harrisburg.

From the cautions and anxious manner in which some of the wit nesses testified, and from the bated breath in which they privately disclosed their wrongs, and from the subdued appearance of the population generally, there was a forcible reminder to an intelligent man of the status of affairs in Russia or of other despotisms.

Everybody recognizes that there must be an abundance of policemen in and about the mines, furnaces, and rolling-mills where there are ig norant, vicious, and turbulent elements to be held in control; but your committee condemns the principle and policy of a police power under any other than civil authority. There ought to be a concentration of

On the 9th of February, 1888, the Speaker announced the followingnamed members as the select committee authorized by the foregoing resolution:

G. D. Tillman, of South Carolina; W. J. Stone, of Missouri; J. Logan Chipman, of Michigan; John A. Anderson, of Kansas; and A. X. Parker, of New York.

On February 10, 1888, the following additional resolutions were introduced by Mr. Anderson, of Kansas, and adopted by the House:

Resolved, That a sum not to exceed $5,000, sufficient to pay the expenses of the special committee of the House appointed to investigate the extent, causes, and effect upon interstate commerce of the continued failure of the Reading Railroad Company to transport such commerce, etc., shall be immediately available and payable out of the contingent fund of the House on the order of the chairman and one member of said committee, in sums not exceeding $1,000 at one time; and all vouchers for any such expenditures shall be likewise certified to by the chairman and one member of the committee.

Resolved, That said special committee be authorized to employ a clerk.

The committee proceeded at once to organize and get to work. Testimony was first taken at Washington, and then at Philadelphia, Pottsville, Shenandoah, and Hazelton, in Pennsylvania; and after returning to Washington, one witness-Hon. Eckley B. Coxe, of Drifton, Pa.whose evidence was deemed very important, was summoned to the National Capital and a whole day spent in his examination. Three entire days were consumed in taking testimony at Washington and eight whole days were occupied in examining witnesses in Pennsylvania. Thirty-seven witnesses were carefully questioned and cross-ques tioned and six of them were recalled for further questioning, besides which a good deal of germane documentary and statistical evidence was procured.

The provisions of the resolution creating the committee are very comprehensive and imposed three onerous duties upon it:

First.-To investigate forthwith the extent, causes, and effect upon interstate commerce of the continued failure by the Reading Railroad Company to transport such

commerce.

Second. To investigate the difficulties existing in the Schuylkill and Lehigh anthracite regions of Pennsylvania between the corporations and individuals mining coal and the miners, and to further investigate all the facts in relation to the matter. Third. To report the same to the House with such recommendations as the committee may agree upon [and also] to report to the House by bill or otherwise, for consideration at any time such legislation as is necessary to secure to the public the regular and complete execution by a railroad company of its obligation to serve as a common carrier of interstate commerce.

The testimony taken by the committee is here with submitted in full.. After careful investigation and reflection your committee is unanimously of the opinion that most of the recent labor troubles in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania arise from the railroads in that section being permitted to mine as well as transport coal.

"The evils which result from such inconsistent joint business are many and grievous. All classes of the community are injured by it. A coal operator disconnected with coal transportation will naturally put out all the coal he can at a reasonable profit, which tends to cheapen the article to the public. So, too, a coal carrier having no connection with mining will seek to move all the coal he can at a fair profit, which operates to keep coal at a just price to the consumer, whose interests should be paramount to all others. But the functions of coal extracting and coal carrying when blended in the same person or corporation are antagonistic to the interest of both the coal consumer and the coal operator, where the latter has no transportation facilities under his own control, because the man who combines the double business of