A Little Bit Of Our Working-Class History

There is a great introduction to mine worker labor history in Pennsylvania over at the Marker Quest blog.

I hope that worker and labor history is your thing. If you know our history then you will be able to see where you fit in, you will be a participant in your own life and in the lives of others. If you don't know your history then you're more likely to be watching events and your life passing by.

Here's where the post over at the Marker Quest blog gets started. Please go over there and read the entire post.

His name was John Siney, and he was born in Queens County, Ireland, in 1831. When he was still quite young, his family's potato crop failed and they relocated to the community of Wigan in Lancashire, England. As a child, John worked as the bobbin boy in a cotton mill; as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a brickmaker. You can imagine, therefore, that from a very early age he was acquainted with the plight of the working man - which, in the 19th century, could be very grim indeed.

While living in Wigan, John helped to organize the Brickmakers' Assocation of Wigan, for which he served as president seven times. In 1863 he set sail for the United States, settling in the anthracite mining town of St. Clair in Schuylkill County; other immigrants from Wigan had settled in the same area, so he knew some of his neighbors right away. It was probably not the best time to be coming to America, what with that Civil War we had going on, but he found work first as a laborer and then as a miner. Mining was an industry that always needed more workers, and one of the few industries willing to hire immigrants, so getting a job wasn't hard. What was hard was getting a decent wage, and John joined his first strike in 1864, protesting for a pay raise.

The strike was successful - the mine bosses reluctantly raised the wages - but it came at a cost. Coal was a vital commodity for the Union in the ongoing war, and the strike threatened its supply, so public sentiment was not altogether in favor of the strikers. Worse, the success of the strike was short-lived; the war ended in 1865. Coal was necessary during the war because it powered naval ships and railroad engines, both of which were needed to transport soldiers and munitions, but with the cease-fire came a reduced need for either of those things. It was still an important resource, as coal had replaced wood as the primary means of providing homes with heat and light, but the demand during peacetime was not as great as it had been during wartime.