End of the Anthracite Coal Strike
THE ANTHRACITE STRIKE ENDS
AFTER five months of diplomacy and conference, an agreement has been reached between the hard-coal miners and operators. Final confirmation by a tri-district convention of the United Mine Workers remains to be secured, and almost surely will be before this is read.
The terms of this treaty are satisfactory to both the contracting parties; to the miners because they retain their old wage scale, will have plenty of work, and have had their way in that the agreement affects the whole hard-coal industry, pushes forward the date for new contracts to August 31, 1923, and rejects any outside arbitration; and to the operators because they can now easily sell all the coal they can put on the market at high prices-and they have duly warned consumers of a high price era by asking for a “mandate” (apparently by silent consent) approving the settlement on a high-price basis.
But how about the third party to this controversy-the silent bystander, upon whose shoulders the war cost is to be dumped? One estimate puts the cost of the strike at two billion dollars. The shortage of anthracite is about 40,000,000 tons. The resumption of actual coal production and distribution will be slow. It looks as if the consumer pays in two ways-in money and in discomfort. He is to get his coal on a hand-to-mouth basis, to use unfamiliar and undesirable substitutes, perhaps to endure actual suffering. Organized labor claims a great victory; the coal operators, hard and soft, see a fine selling season before them; neither side has made much of a pretense of caring for the public interest.
The time to make such a ruthless labor war impossible in the future is while indignation is still hot. Congress should push the legislation before it, so as not only to provide a fact-finding commission which should put the hidden things of the coal industry into the light and, if possible, curb profiteering at the expense of home and factory, but should also provide a permanent National Coal Commission. The last (with the important omission of the word “permanent”) is included in the terms of the strike settlement. Such a Commission should have effective powers, as should also the Railroad Labor Board. The lesson of this summer’s strike is that Governmental regulation must prevail if Government ownership is to be avoided.
Source: The Outlook, 13 September 1922
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