Miners' Miseries

In West Virginia are 112,000 coal miners. One-third of them are unemployed. Another one-third work only two or three days per week. For each ton of coal they mine they get 28-c-. They work ten to twelve hours, earn from $2.60 to $4 per day. They live in company-owned shacks, without heat or light. Their rent is $10 per month. The companies charge them $1.50 per ton for fuel coal. They never see any U. S. cash. The companies pay them with company scrip, metal tokens good only at company stores. At these stores a 75-c- sack of flour costs 90-c- in scrip. A 30-c- public cinema costs 45-c- in scrip. The mine families subsist on potatoes, bread, beans, oleomargarine. Once or twice a week they have sowbelly. Because the companies will not let them keep cows, fresh milk even for babies is unknown. When miners die, the companies charge for their burial, and the oldest son inherits his father's debt to the company. Most of these people are hungry. Some of them are starving and half-naked. The Red Cross gives them no aid. . .

Such was the picture of misery and destitution which one-legged Brand A. Scott, vice president of the West Virginia Mine Workers' Union, last week set before a special Senate committee initiating an inquiry into unemployment insurance. Witness Scott declared that West Virginia miners work under "yellow-dog" contracts which prohibit their joining a labor union on pain of dismissal. Against him, he said, were pending 121 court injunctions to bar him from unionizing in West Virginia coal fields. Said he: "These people live under a state of terrorism. This is forced labor, . . . We want work at an American wage or unemployment insurance benefits on an American standard."

Impressed, the Senate committee forwarded a transcript of the Scott testimony to the Red Cross. Next day Miner Scott repeated his story in person at Red Cross headquarters. There he was told by Vice Chairman James L. Fieser that Red Cross policy is against relief for unemployment growing out of industrial troubles, that Red Cross relief is reserved for natural disasters.

Last month 100 jobless miners from the barren little coal settlement of Pity-Me, Ohio, marched seven miles to Pomeroy. There in Common Pleas Court they declared their women and children were naked and starving. The Red Cross, they said, had refused to give them any relief. They asked legal permission to go out upon the Pomeroy streets and beg for pennies. This request was denied.

The Pity-Me episode prompted Seidreid Ameringer ("Siegfried"), 35-year-old circulation manager of the Oklahoma City Leader, a Labor weekly, to write:

"The mining communities of America might attract attention by changing their names to ones suitable to their conditions. We suggest the following: Bare Creek, Empty Dinner Pail, Starving Children, Ragtown, Tattered Clothes, Hooverhit, Jobless, Empty Belly, Depression, Moaning Widows, Too-Weak-to-Weep, Turnip-greens, Nogrub, Patches, Mounting Debts, Sunken Eyes, Hollow Cheeks, Hungry Guts, Rickets, Scurvy, Pellagra, Last

Hope, Forgotten, Slavery, Siberia, Ruin, Desolation, Plutoville."

Last week a new gold rush developed in the deserted Arizona mining town of Vulture.

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