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.