THE RISE OF DEMOCRACY
The historians of the growth of democratic government in the coal
industry generally date the establishment of collective bargaining as a
permanent institution from 1898, when the operators of the Central
Competitive Field--Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois--in
a joint conference with the representatives of the United Mine Workers
of America entered into an agreement which with minor modifications was
periodically renewed from that time onward. From that year to 1922
operators and miners alike recognized the agreement in the Central
Competitive Field as basic to the agreements in all other fields and the
central competitive conference as the necessary prelude to all other
conferences. But it was President Roosevelt and the Anthracite Strike
Commission which he appointed that lifted human relationships within the
industry out of the limbo of frontier strife and periodic guerrilla
warfare and stamped them with the quasi-public character of a
self-governing constitutional democracy.
From the beginning, certain of the coal owners, notably those in
sections of West Virginia and Alabama, whose coking coals make them
economically subsidiary to the steel industry, have held strongly to the
autocratic powers and privileges which the conception of property
carried over from the pre-revolutionary monarchical days when the king
was generally recognized, _Dei gratia_, as the custodian of the national
hoard. But the Roosevelt Commission took the stand which has
increasingly won public acceptance, that autocracy in industry is
incompatible with democracy in the political state, and that they must
both rise or fall together. Forms may change, but it may be taken as
axiomatic that if democracy is the law determining the evolution of
political civilization,--if it is the condition of the full development
of the individual personality and the attainment of the good life and
human brotherhood,--it will survive and grow in industry as well as in
the political realm. It is from this principle of democratic evolution,
and not from the strikes and lock-outs and barterings over wages, hours,
and profits incidental to its development, that collective bargaining
and industrial democracy derive their fundamental significance.
In appointing the Commission "at the request both of the operators and
of the miners," President Roosevelt asked them not only to pass upon the
questions in controversy, but also "to establish the relations between
the employers and the wage workers in the anthracite fields on a just
and permanent basis."
In arbitrating the immediate questions in dispute,--questions of wages,
hours, and working conditions,--the Commission, even after months of
hearings at which hundreds of witnesses appeared, found themselves in
the usual predicament of arbitrators and the lay public in such
circumstances. The facts about the industry,--its capital investment,
its financial organization, its earnings and profits, the cost of living
in the district, the organization of work in the mines, the character of
the work, the skill which it required, and its attendant hazards,--had
never been scientifically determined. Then as now these essential facts
were held to lie within the sacred province of private business
enterprise and not within the legitimate scope of public inquiry and
revelation. In instance after instance, they found that statistics of
the kind presented were "rather too inexact for a satisfactory basis on
which to make precise calculations." On the demands of the miners and
the counter-demands of the operators, they were reluctantly constrained
to adopt the usual refuge of arbitration tribunals set up in an
emergency; they "split the difference." The miners, for example, asked
for a twenty per cent increase in their rate of wages; the Commission
granted them ten per cent. Other issues were not susceptible of such
definite arbitrament, but in general the Commission, striving to hold
the scales of justice even, followed the rule of fifty-fifty.
In presenting their award, the Commission, keenly aware of the almost
impossible burden which the absence of scientific knowledge with respect
to this basic industry placed upon them, declared that "all through
their investigations and deliberations the conviction had grown upon
them that if they could evoke and confirm a more genuine spirit of good
will, a more conciliatory disposition in the operators and their
employes in their relations toward one another, they would do a better
and more lasting work than any which mere rulings, however wise and
just, may accomplish." It was with this end in view that they set up a
scheme of constitutional democratic government within the industry.
Quotation is often dull, but nothing can take the place of direct
quotation in the case of a document of epoch-making importance. By way
of justifying their action the Commission declared that "in the days
when the employer had but a few employes, personal acquaintance and
direct contact of the employer and employe resulted in mutual knowledge
of the surrounding conditions and the desires of each. The development
of the employers into large corporations has rendered such personal
contact and acquaintance between the responsible employer and the
individual employe no longer possible in the old sense. The tendency
toward peace and good-fellowship which flows out of personal
acquaintance or direct contact should not, however, be lost through this
evolution of great combinations. There seems to be no medium through
which to preserve it, so natural and efficient as that of an
organization of employes governed by rules which represent the will of a
properly constituted majority of its members, and officered by members
selected for that purpose, and in whom authority to administer the rules
and affairs of the union and its members is vested."
The anthracite operators had conditioned their submission to the award
of the Commission by refusing to be drawn into a collective agreement
with the miners' national organization, the United Mine Workers of
America. The Commission got around this technicality by constituting the
anthracite district divisions of the union and the organized anthracite
operators the two houses of the anthracite parliament. The democratic
government which they set up is typical of the scheme of government
which now prevails through eighty per cent of the coal industry, and
which, while it is subject to the fluctuations characteristic of all
democratic institutions, may be taken as permanent in principle.
Again, because of its historical importance, the language of the
Commission calls for direct quotation. The Commission decreed: "That any
difficulty or disagreement arising under this award, either as to
interpretation or application, or in any way growing out of the
relations of the employers and employed, which can not be settled or
adjusted by consultation between the superintendent or manager of the
mine or mines and the miner or miners directly interested, or is of a
scope too large to be so settled or adjusted, shall be referred to a
permanent joint committee, to be called a board of conciliation, to
consist of six persons, appointed as hereinafter provided. That is to
say, if there shall be a division of the whole region into three
districts, in each of which there shall exist an organization
representing a majority of the mine workers of such district, one of
said board of conciliation shall be appointed by each of said
organizations, and three persons shall be appointed by the operators,
the operators in each of said districts appointing one person.
"The board of conciliation thus constituted shall take up and consider
any question referred to it as aforesaid, hearing both parties to the
controversy, and such evidence as may be laid before it by either party;
and any award made by a majority of such board of conciliation shall be
final and binding on all parties. If, however, the said board is unable
to decide any question submitted, or point related thereto, that
question or point shall be referred to an umpire, to be appointed, at
the request of said board, by one of the circuit judges of the third
judicial circuit of the United States, whose decision shall be final and
binding in the premises.
"The membership of said board shall at all times be kept complete,
either the operators or the miners' organizations having the right, at
any time when a controversy is not pending, to change their
representation thereon.
"At all hearings before said board the parties may be represented by
such person or persons as they may respectively select.
"No suspension of work shall take place, by lock-out or strike, pending
the adjudication of any matter so taken up for adjustment."
From the date of the Commission's award to 1919, when President Wilson
created a similar commission to avert a threatened break, the anthracite
operators and miners, who were invariably represented by the presidents
of the three district organizations of the United Mine Workers of
America, lived at peace under this constitution.
The machinery of constitutional government thus given public sanction in
the anthracite field is in its general outline and provisions typical of
the machinery which through joint conference and negotiation the
organized miners and operators have worked out throughout the greater
part of the bituminous fields. The miners act under the authority of
their national convention when it is in session and under the general
direction of their national president and executive board, acting under
laws devised by the national convention in the interval between the
national convention's biennial sessions. Within the limitations set by
the national laws of the organization, the four thousand local unions
and the twenty-seven district unions exercise a degree of local autonomy
analogous to the local autonomy of our cities, towns, counties, and
states. In fact the entire national organization is built up from the
mine committees at the individual mines, which, conjointly with the
representative of the management at the mine, are the courts of original
jurisdiction. As in the case of our states in relation to the federal
government, these local bodies reserve all authority that is not
specifically delegated to the national organization through its
constitution and the action of the national convention, the
representative national congress of the union. Unlike the President of
the United States, the president of the United Mine Workers has no power
to appoint and remove his cabinet--the National Executive Board--but
through his power over the national organizers and the other agents of
the national office, he is in a position to control the political
machinery of the organization. By virtue of its form of organization,
the miners' union has the virtues as well as the defects of our American
political organization, defects which are the price of self-government
and the educative processes of self-government.
Because of the compact nature of the anthracite field and its domination
by a small group of railroads, the operators of this field have acted in
concert for many decades. But until 1917, the coal owners of the country
had no national organization. In that year, for the purposes of
negotiation with the federal government relative to the controlled
production and price of bituminous coal, they organized the National
Coal Association. Unlike the miners' national organization, this
Association is not by its certificate of incorporation explicitly
concerned with the wage contract or industrial relations as such. Its
primary object is the "encouragement and fostering of the general
welfare of the coal-mining industry" as a business enterprise. It is,
however, acquiring many of the functions of the miners' union. In recent
controversies it has actively assisted the local operators' associations
in their dealings with their organized employes. And like the miners'
national organization it actively concerns itself with the protection
and advancement of the interests of its members in Congress and the
state legislatures. But the immense extent of the bituminous coal fields
and the highly competitive character of the industry, which has been
artificially maintained by the Sherman law, has prevented the compact
organization of the bituminous operators and has limited concerted
action, especially in matters affecting the labor contract, almost
entirely to local, state, and district associations. It is upon the
miners' organization that the operators largely rely to equalize
competitive conditions. For wages constitute the largest single item of
cost in coal production and it is only through the ability of the
miners' union to negotiate on a nation-wide basis that this burden can
be equalized for the thousands of competing operators.
The inability of the operators to achieve a national organization has
not only contributed to the overdevelopment of the industry with
consequences that became critically manifest during the war, but has
also greatly complicated the struggle of the miners to establish
collective negotiation and agreement on a national scale. In Illinois,
for example, there are three operators' associations which have been
organized to deal with labor. The oldest of these is the Illinois Coal
Operators' Association formed in 1897. During a wage controversy in 1910
the operators of the fifth and ninth Illinois districts broke away from
the parent body and formed an association of their own. In 1914, the
operators of the Springfield district organized the independent Central
Illinois Coal Operators' Association. Diversity of mining conditions in
the various sections of the Illinois coal field and the inability of the
operators to equalize competitive costs without the help of the miners
were responsible for these secessions. One of the objects enumerated in
the constitution of the Central Illinois Coal Operators' Association is
"to protect the interest of the members of this association in the
making of district, state, and interstate contracts with the United Mine
Workers, to the end that such members shall obtain scales, rates,
prices, conditions, and _such differentials_ from the basic rates as the
relative physical and other working conditions of the mines owned by
them entitle them to." An identical clause appears in the constitution
of the Coal Operators' Association of the fifth and ninth districts of
Illinois. In 1910 the operators in these two districts were paying seven
cents a ton more than other members of the parent association. They
seceded and entered into a separate agreement with the union in the hope
that the union would be able to abolish this unfavorable differential.
The union succeeded only in reducing the differential to four cents.
While these three associations compete with one another for terms with
the miners' union within their own state, they cooperate in their common
effort to secure from the miners terms that will place them at a
competitive advantage as against operators in other states. This rivalry
among the operators makes the diplomatic problem of the union's national
officers a very difficult one and when groups of operators, like those
in certain counties of West Virginia and Alabama, refuse to deal with
the union at all and impose cut-rate wage scales upon their unorganized
employes as a basis for cutting the price of coal in the limited market,
the industry is thrown into confusion bordering upon anarchy. The
operators in the organized fields hold the union responsible for its
failure to organize the anti-union fields and so to equalize competitive
conditions. Many of them decide that their only remedy is to break with
the union and through individual bargaining with their employes when
the labor market is overstocked force down wages and working conditions
to the level of the anti-union fields. The organized miners are thus
compelled to fight for their organization and the maintenance of their
dearly won standard of living. Strikes and lockouts temporarily take the
place of the orderly processes of joint negotiation, conciliation, and
collective agreement as in the spring of 1922.
The processes of conflict and cooperation through which government in
industry, as in the state, evolves, are as truly cosmic processes as
those through which the coal measures themselves were created, with the
humanly significant difference that the processes of social evolution
are, within certain limits, controllable by the will of man. The policy
of democratic peoples and therefore of their governments is to allow the
maximum freedom of development to government within industry compatible
with the comfort and economic security of the community as a whole.
Where the security of the community is threatened, the government tends
to intervene as President Roosevelt did in the case of the anthracite
controversy. And while the traditional bias of government and the
law,--the bias which they inherited from the feudal society which
existed when the industrial revolution began,--favors the owners of
property to which a special sanctity still adheres, public opinion among
peoples devoted to democracy in the political state increasingly tends
to assert itself in favor of democracy in industry, and more especially
such basic industries as the railroads and coal. It is for this reason
that it is logical to assume that the point of view toward collective
bargaining, expressed by President Roosevelt's Commission and
incorporated into the social creeds of most of the Christian
denominations, will ultimately prevail. And since collective bargaining
and the orderly processes of government initiated by the joint labor
contracts are the historical foundations of democracy in industry, it is
also reasonable to infer that collective bargaining will increasingly
become the rule in industrial relations.
But there are large issues of momentous public concern which do not come
within the scope of collective bargaining. Rule 15 in the standard
agreement between the operators and the miners in the bituminous fields
of central Pennsylvania specifically forbids the miners to concern
themselves in any way with the problems of management and the technical
equipment and organization of the mines. Because of the great abundance
of coal, the industry had been developed by overexpansion and wasteful
skimming rather than by the application of scientific methods to the
mining of the best coal and its efficient utilization. Not only is one
ton of coal left irrecoverably underground for every ton brought to the
surface, but less than one-half of the economic value of coal is
utilized by our primitive methods of consumption. In a time when it is
possible to transform coal into gas and electricity at the mine and
transport its fuel and power cheaply by pipe and wire, thirty per cent
of our entire coal production is used for transportation by steam
engines that harness up only from nine to twelve per cent of the energy
in a ton of coal in a way that will actually pull a train--and a third
of all the freight tonnage carried by the railroads is coal. Moreover
our modern chemical industries, such as the dye industry, are based upon
the substances contained in bituminous coal, most of which are wasted in
our customary methods of consumption. These facts impose an immense
burden of needless cost upon the consumer, and draw into the
overexpanded coal industry tens of thousands of miners in excess of
efficient requirements. The owners are therefore subject to wide
fluctuations in the price of their product, the miners are the victims
of intermittent and irregular employment with consequent uncertainty of
earnings, and the public ultimately foots the bill, which, as has
already been pointed out, Mr. F. G. Tryon of the U. S. Geological Survey
calculates at one million dollars for each working day paid in
unofficial and needless taxation, and the miners, by the terms of the
collective agreement are explicitly debarred from all participation in
the solution of these problems of management.
As a remedy, bituminous operators have proposed that they shall be
relieved of the restrictions of the Sherman law, so that they may
combine to limit production and regulate distribution and prices as the
anthracite owners have succeeded in doing. The miners, by resolution of
their national convention, have proposed a policy of public ownership
and democratic administration, the entrusting of the technical
regulation and development of the mines to engineers appointed by the
government and the administration of labor relations by a democratic
tribunal composed of representatives of the technical management, the
public, and the miners. The effectiveness of either policy would be
contingent upon the application to the mines and their product of the
scientific knowledge which has been rapidly accumulating during the last
decade and very little of which is now applied to the industry. The
character of the political reconstruction of the industry, which public
necessity must sooner or later compel, will be largely determined by the
outcome of the impending technical revolution in the production and
utilization of coal.