This article, written in 1974 by Homer Butler, notates typical wages received by local coal miners and the effects of striking for higher wages on the miners and their families from just after the turn of the century to the depression.
“My father came home from the mines one day in the spring of 1910 wearing a pair of new elk hide shoes, and bearing the news that the miners were going out on strike. The shoes had cost $3 which was more than a day’s pay for a miner. They were the cheapest shoes available, not much good for rough work, but they would do for wear while hunting work to tide the family over during the strike which would last nobody knew how long.
Strikes always came in the spring in those days in the coal fields and during the summer months there wasn’t so much pressure on mine operators to agree to a new contract with the miners because demand for coal was light anyway.
William T. Poole, 1506 W. Copeland Street, who had entered the mines in 1907 at the age of 16, remembers the strike of 1910 and the wage scale of $2.56 a day for day workers and .45 cents a ton for men employed on a tonnage production basis.
Miners’ pay that year was at a lower rate than it had been in 1906 and 1907 when day workers received $2.70 and tonnage men .48 cents a ton. Following the 1910 strike, however, the men went back to work at the restored 1907 rate.
Wages in the mines inched slowly upward after that until 1919 when the daily scale reached $7.50 and the tonnage rate was $1.04.
There were more summertime strikes between 1910 and the World War I years when wages rose without work stoppage. In 1912, another walkout brought a pay increase of .14 cents a day, and the scale remained at $2.84 for day work and .52 cents an hour for tonnage workers until 1914 when tonnage producers received four cents a ton more.
In 1915, according to statistics prepared in 1933 by the late Mark Woodley, a former mine operator, miners’ pay went to $3 a day or .60 cents a ton. The scale remained at that figure in 1916, but the following year, the daily rate of pay jumped to $6 and the tonnage rate went up to .80 cents. In 1918, it went to $7.50 a day or $1.04 a ton at which it remained during the war and post war years until mine wages began a downward trend in 1927.
Maintaining the wage scale at its peak until 1927 was not accomplished by the men in the pits without exercising their strike muscle. One of the longest and bitterest strikes of their long struggle was in 1922 when mines were closed five months.
And the miners held out all summer in 1927 before agreeing to a contract extending from Nov. 1 that year until March 1, 1928. Besides the $7.50 basic minimum wage for day workers, the agreement provided for payment of $10.27 a day for men selected by the mine operators to run the new loading machines which were being installed in the pits. Men employed to shovel coal into the loading machines received $8.04.
The bitterest pill for the miners was to come after expiration of the brief contract in 1928 when for the first time since 1907 the miners finally accepted an agreement providing for a daily scale of $6.10 and a rate of .87 cents a ton for tonnage workers who obviously were on their way out in mines that were becoming mechanized.
That wage scale prevailed until 1932 when another reduction brought the daily rate to $5 and the tonnage rate to .64 cents. The lack of market for coal during the depression had stepped in to push aside both miners and operators as principals in collective bargaining.
There was little prospect then that coal would be in demand as it is today or that the daily wage of miners would be multiplied 8 to 10 times by 1974.
Miners who went out on strike in the days when they were struggling to attain a wage as high as $7.50 a day had to do a bit of belt-tightening to survive. Some found other jobs in the community temporarily. Some gardened extensively during the summer lay off. Others went elsewhere to find employment, some of them even entering non-union mines in Kentucky until the strike was over back home. And most were sustained by credit at the family grocery store.
Neighborhood grocers whose business depended upon miners’ trade when the men were working extended them credit when they were on strike. Most of them weathered the strike with their customers on trust, and eventually got their money.
Many miners regularly ran accounts at the Marion Supply Co., Schafer’s Grocery and the George Bruce store on East Main Street, Campbell Brothers on the square or one of more than a score of smaller grocery stores that dotted the community. The coming of a strike simply meant the extension of credit a few months farther than usual. When the men went back to work, payment in most cases was resumed.
William T. Poole recalls that payment after strikes was carried on under an arrangement by which the miner’s family made two payments each payday, one payment for groceries for current use, and another on the back account. Sometimes it took several months of installment paying to catch up.
Of course, not all accounts were collectible in full. An occasional merchant lost heavily, but Poole recalls one grocer’s philosophical response to a warning from a wholesale grocery salesman against extending credit.
“If it were not for the miners’ business when they’re working”, he said, “I wouldn’t be here anyway.”
Acceptance of contracts negotiated for them by their union leaders has not always been immediate at the hands of Illinois miners. In 1927, for instance, they held out long after miners in other states had gone to work, and were taking away Illinois markets.”
(Glances at Life, by Homer Butler, published in the Marion Daily Republican, November 16, 1974)