Decline of Labor Unionism in Mining
Decreased faith in the UMW to support the rights of the miners caused many to leave the union. Coal demand was curbed by competition from other energy sources. The main cause of the decline in the union during the 1920s and 1930s was the introduction of more efficient and easily produced machines into the coal mines. In previous years, less than 41% of coal was cut by the machines. However by 1930, 81% was being cut by the machines and now there were machines that could also surface mine and load the coal into the trucks. With more machines that could do the same labor, unemployment in the mines grew and wages were cut back. As the problems grew, many people did not believe that the UMW could ever become as powerful as it was before the start of the war. The decline in the union began in the 1920s and continued through the 1930s. Slowly the membership of the UMWA grew back up in numbers.
Read more about this topic: United Mine Workers
Famous quotes containing the words decline of, decline, labor, unionism and/or mining:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time.”
—Luis Buñuel (1900–1983)
“Such is the labor which the American Congress exists to protect,—honest, manly toil,—honest as the day is long,—that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet,—which all men respect and have consecrated; one of the sacred band, doing the needful but irksome drudgery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What is Virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)