Johnstone reports on a seminal moment for what was long the largest and most important workers’ organization in the country. After World War One a series of mass, militant coal strikes fought against downsizing and retrenchment as the over-capitalized industry contracted in the early 1920s. In opposition to whole regions of the union, the John L. Lewis leadership of the U.M.W.A. negotiated the ‘Jacksonville Agreement’ with coal operators, effectively shutting down hundreds of smaller concerns and helping to consolidate the industry, with the loss of tens of thousands of jobs–and union members, but the promise of no more wage reductions for the life of the contract–three years. In response, dissidents within the U.M.W.A. built the Progressive Miners as the life of the Agreement saw various factions of the U.M.W.A. organize against the Lewis-Farrington leadership, exploding the union in a series of strikes and splits in 1927.

‘The Miners Must Fight’ by J.W. Johnstone from Labor Herald. Vol. 3 No. 2 April, 1924.

ALL over the country the miners are voting on the acceptance or rejection of the Jacksonville agreement, which extends the present agreement for three years. Official propaganda is busy predicting peace and plenty for the mine workers if they accept the three-year contract. Lewis is boasting of what a great achievement he has won without a fight; and at the same time the employers seem equally pleased. The truth of the matter is, as every intelligent miner knows, that when Lewis and the employers agree that a settlement is good, it is sure to turn out very bad for the men in the mines. This settlement is no exception. It was agreed upon between Lewis and the coal companies even before the Convention, and the trip to Jacksonville was merely to put up a sham-battle, away from where the rank and file could peek into the room where Lewis and his committee were fraternizing with the employers.

It is already apparent how the referendum will be put across by the officialdom. In addition to their control of the ballot counting, they have tried to prevent all gatherings which might have discussed the agreement from more than a local viewpoint, for fear of a movement getting under way to defeat the settlement. Thus the Illinois District Convention, scheduled for March 4th, was postponed until late in May. The reason given out was that Frank Farrington has been ill, and unable to prepare for the Convention. The real reason was that postponement helped to put across the Jacksonville double-cross without discussion on a convention floor.

The agreement is all in favor of the coal operators. Not a word has been said about the 6-hour day, although the shortening of the work-day is the most burning issue before the coal miners as a step to relieve unemployment. Division of work, a question that means bread and butter to the miners, played no part in the Jacksonville love-feast. Nationalization of the mines, increase in wages, the shorter day–all things that the miners have been demanding for years–were not even discussed by the officers of the union.

The miners in Illinois are already learning what the three year agreement means. Union mines are to be shut down, production thrown to non-union fields, a drastic “cleansing” of all militant union men from the industry, bringing back production to the union fields when all fighters have been eliminated and their places taken by slavish and broken men who will accept cuts in wages, loss of working rules that protect life and health, and the complete subjection of the union to the companies. That is the program of the mine owners. They think it will take three years to put it across entirely, three years in which the union is tied up with an agreement to prevent it from fighting, three years in which they can use the 200,000 “surplus” miners in the industry to break the organized power of the men who dig the coal for the country’s industries.

Using the Agreement for Bosses

Even in the past, while the miners still had the strike threat as a weapon, they found it almost impossible to enforce the agreement against the bosses although it was rigidly enforced against the miners. More and more it has become impossible to obtain redress of grievances through the District union machinery, as the policy of the U.M.W. of A. has become more and more a policy of cooperation with the mine owners.

The union machinery for the handling of grievances is slow, cumbersome, and anything but harmonious. Illinois is a well-organized district, standing at the head of the U.M.W. of A. but there also the same conditions prevail. The pit committee generally tries honestly to protect the workers in the mine, and to enforce the agreement. Very often they are supported in their efforts by the sub-district officials. But the companies have an appeal to the District Joint Group Board, which they almost always use, and there the decisions are generally tied up with red tape or reversed in favor of the company. Seldom indeed are the pit committees or sub-district officials able to enforce decisions against the companies.

If it were not for the militancy of the miners, the readiness of the pit committees to take up all grievances, and the presence of many militant sub-district officials, the miners would find themselves in the unique position of being 100% organized and yet working under “open shop” conditions. But as bad as the conditions are, they could yet, be much worse, and as long as the miners keep fighting and kicking the agreement cannot be completely ignored.

But even under the agreement the miners are subject to the most petty discrimination that accumulates into a crying grievance, now to be perpetuated for three years by extending the agreement without remedying it. The guarantee against dirty coal is one of the most abused sections of the agreement. The companies use fines against the miners as a regular tax upon them. In one mine alone in Illinois, in one pay, 130 men were fined for dirty coal. One miner reported that he had not had a black mark for seven months until he had a row with a pit boss; the next day he was fined $1 for dirty coal. By means of this practice a method of fines for anything and everything is carried on to terrorize the miners and make them submit to all conditions.

There is not another union in the country of any strength that allows its members to be fined wholesale in the manner that the coal operators are doing under the present agreement. With an average of but two work days per week, and already on the verge of poverty and overwhelmed with debts, the miners feel this system of fines as an intolerable abuse. Yet nothing was done at Jacksonville to relieve the situation.

Labor Laws No Longer Enforced

The fine system is also used to prevent the enforcement of mine inspection laws. At Marissa, Illinois, recently the miners refused to work until the mine was inspected according to law. When this was refused the mine was laid idle for a day. The coal operator demanded that the pit committee place a fine upon those who refused to go down, but the committee refused. The operator appealed the case to the Joint Group Board, which upheld the operator. Fishwick, vice-president of District 12, U.M.W. of A., rendered the decision which fined each miner $3., and stated that it was an emergency and the miners were wrong for refusing to work. When a high official of the Union levies fines upon the men who pay his salary, because they demand the enforcement of a State law, what can be expected will be done with an agreement which has hundreds of loopholes for the operators?

The present working agreement and wage scale is an insult to the memory of the militants who fought and died to establish the U.M.W. of A. It is an insult that is resented by the militant members who today want to carry on the great work of the Miners’ Union. But the U.M.W of A. is today in the hands of men who, instead of battling against the operators, turn all their guns against the progressives in their own ranks; it is under the control of Lewis, Farrington & Co., who use their high office to put into effect the will of the coal operators.

The right to hire and fire is vested exclusively in the operator by the present agreement. This is being used systematically to root out of the industry the militant members of the miners’ union, to blacklist them, and replace them with “card men” whose organization can be smashed when the opportune moment arrives. A long, long story could be written about how this clause has been used against the miners who dare stand up for their rights. For years the demand has been going up from the local unions to limit this right to hire and fire, to put some check upon the companies, to protect the union fighters. But nothing is done. Instead the miners are now asked to renew the present agreement for three years with this condition unchanged.

Unemployment and Debt

It had long been a mystery to me how the miners were continuing to exist on two days work per week, the average time in the Illinois field, and in travelling through District 12, I made inquiries about it. It was hard to get an answer except, “Oh, we get by somehow.” One night I insisted that my question be answered, and bit by bit it finally came out. They are all in debt, to the grocer, the butcher, the doctor, the landlord, to relatives, and to the world generally. Some had been in debt for years and had given up hope of getting out. When a miner dies the family inherits the debt and continues the hopeless struggle.

While we were discussing this, a whistle blew. As if by command the conversation ceased. Something has happened at the mine, I thought; but the miners shrugged their shoulders, and remarking that it was the south mine, continued the conversation. Shortly another whistle blew, and again the conversation abruptly ceased. This time it was the east mine. I never saw men so interested in a whistle before. On inquiry I found that three blasts of the whistle meant “Come to work in the morning,” while that one note had been saying “No work for you tomorrow.” It was a silent tragedy to watch the men become almost rigid at the first sound of the whistle, and although they covered their disappointment by resuming the conversation again, one understood what they felt when each night the whistle carried the message, “No work for you tomorrow.”

A terrifying poverty is slowly enveloping the miner. He gets into debt, and if he has a family there is no hope of getting out again for years to come. The operators capitalize even this poverty; the miner, hard-pressed, draws some of his wages before pay day, and receives a note, negotiable only at a certain store for merchandise at 10% discount, half of which is returned to the operator. More unemployment, more debt, more slavery, more hopelessness. Gradually and inexorably the mine operators, assisted by John L. Lewis and the union administration, draw the cord tighter around the neck of the union miners of America.

The present three-year agreement proposal means to give the operators a free hand to crush the miners’ union with the weight of the 200,000 miners in the industry that the capitalist management of the mines does not need except to break the union. Lewis has no program whatever, except to deliver the Union up to this wholesale slaughter. He has rejected the six-hour day, which would relieve the situation. He has abandoned field after field to the non-union operators. He has stopped all serious efforts to extend the organization to the unorganized coal fields. And now he proposes, as a great achievement, to sign a contract that continues this choking, crushing process for three years.

The mine owners and the capitalist press are jubilant. Here is a labor leader to their liking. Just what the miners get out of it to be rejoiced over is hard to see. The 200,000 “surplus” miners who are to be slaughtered in the operators’ warfare against the miners’ own organization are left helpless. Who is to go, and who stay? How are the operators to be prevented from using them to smash the union? Where are the miners who leave the industry to go? Lewis has no answer; he is interested only in giving the bosses a three-year free hand.

The unemployed miners cannot go to the farms. There are more farmers being driven from the land to the city than miners from the mines. They cannot go to the cities, for there already more than a million unemployed are being swelled by the farmers escaping from their mortgages. They cannot go back into the mines, because the operators, using the 8-hour day and the non-union fields, have no place for them. John L. Lewis, with all the power of the U.M.W. of A. in his hands, gives them no answer except a contemptuous sentence of elimination from the industry.

The Miners Must Fight

If the U.M.W. of A. is to escape destruction in this dilemma, there is but one course: To fight! To accept the three-year agreement now means to abandon all hope of relief until the operators have had time to smash the Union. A great campaign of organization, the launching of a mass Farmer-Labor Party, demands that the mines be taken out of private hands, unemployment eliminated, and decent living conditions established, is the only program that holds out hope to the American miners.

A united and solid organization of all the miners, employed and unemployed, in the fields now unorganized as well as the union fields, in a great campaign for higher wages, the six-hour day, and nationalization of the mines: these, with the readiness to fight, are the needs of the miners.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborherald/v3n02-apr-1924.pdf