Class formation and union politics: The Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers of America, 1880-1910.

Abstract

This thesis traces the origins of divergent union politics among American metal miners and coal miners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas the Western Federation of Miners, representing western metal miners, embraced socialism and syndicalism, the United Mine Workers of America, representing eastern coal miners, advocated moderate reform. The research is designed to hold constant features of the industrial environment commonly thought to predict working-class politics. By comparing workers in analogous industries, the research illuminates sociological and historical processes that are often obscured by different labor processes, technologies, and occupational hazards. The study relies on archival materials, newspapers, union and employer records, government reports, and secondary sources to reconstruct the formation and political evolution of mining unions. The study finds that a centralized product market coupled with autonomous working-class communities and powerful local unions heightened class polarization in the West. In the East, by contrast, a decentralized, competitive product market coupled with employer-dominated communities and accommodating union traditions facilitated cooperative trade-union agreements. In addition, the study finds that contrasting political histories in conjunction with greater economic dependence on the mining industry in the West contributed to closer alliances between employers and government officials in the West than in the East. These alliances facilitated more consistent and vigorous government repression of metal mining strikes than was true of coal mining strikes. Finally, the study finds that collective bargaining strategies in the coal mining industry resulted in cooperative relations between employers and miners and restrained union politics. In the West, both metal miners and their employers were reluctant to engage in collective bargaining. The study draws the literatures on social movements, economic and political development, social history, and institutional labor history into an analysis of the conditions under which metal miners and coal miners formed their distinctive unions.