Communities Crafted in Danger: A Comparison of Miners’ Unions in the United States and Chile

By: Cullen Moran, Western Carolina University

 

           The industrial economies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries called for ever-increasing extractions of coal and metals. This growing demand necessitated exploitation of new sources of these raw materials, and mining companies sought to take advantage of large deposits of coal and metals in places ranging from Appalachia to South Africa, from New South Wales to Chile. Mining, which involved traveling underground to work in tight, enclosed spaces, frequently placed miners in danger. Despite the tremendous risks associated with mining, pay frequently lagged behind even the most basic needs of miners and their families. Combined with the incessant danger, the difficulty of making a living as a miner inspired the creation of what would become among the most militant labor unions in history. In the United States, Appalachia and Colorado became the sites of some of the most famous labor conflicts in American history during the early twentieth century. In both locations, miners came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, but the dangerous conditions and poor pay endemic to the mining industry united them in opposition to their employers. In Chile, copper mining dominated, but coal mining also formed a significant portion of the country’s mine workforce. While copper mining differed in many ways from coal mining, Chilean copper miners also faced poor pay and incessant danger on the job. American and Chilean miners, while living and working under different corporate and national regimes, both experienced state repression, and both organized in labor unions to fight for better pay, dignity, and decent working conditions. This essay will address the efforts to organize miners in the United States and Chile. For the American side of the comparison, this essay will primarily focus on coal mining in the United States until the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. This act guaranteed workers the right to form labor organizations to represent them in discussions with their employers. While the right to organize remained a contentious issue in succeeding decades, the significant bloodletting that defined labor strife in the coal industry before 1935 did not continue in most places. In contrast, Chilean miners faced different conditions for unionized miners in different eras, with the military regime formed by Augusto Pinochet representing a clear moment in Chilean history where labor unions faced state violence. Thus, this essay will analyze a broader timeframe when discussing the development and continuation of working-class consciousness among Chile’s miners.

            Miners in the United States, regardless of which coalfield they labored in, their ethnicity, or their relative skill, frequently struck to protest poor working conditions and pay, but they also went on strike to resist what they viewed as violations of their civil rights and liberties. In Life, Work, and Rebellion in the West Virginia Coalfields, David Corbin argues that West Virginia miners emphasized the limits on free speech and movement in company-owned towns in the demands they posed to coal operators. Corbin further argues that economic concerns, while important, paled in comparison to the resentment that miners felt when confronted with violence and censorship conducted by armed guards hired by wealthy coal operators.[1] While Corbin underemphasized miners’ concerns over wages, hours, rents, and prices in company stores, other historians have demonstrated that American coal miners unionized in part to secure civil rights and liberties. In Killing for Coal, Thomas Andrews identifies coal town repression as a key catalyst for the miners’ uprising in 1914 in the Colorado coalfields, and he argues that coal operators ironically abetted unionization through their repressive efforts to quash any pro-union sentiment among their workers. Although coal operators hoped that ethnic and racial diversity among the mine workforce would preclude any effective organization, miners worked together to restore civil rights and liberties.[2]

           Andrews offers a more nuanced study than Corbin, in that the former recognizes the primacy of economic concerns, but both correctly identify coal town repression as a significant source of miners’ discontent. Miners routinely argued that the denial of civil rights and liberties influenced their decisions to unionize. In 1931, during the Harlan County War between union members and coal operators in Harlan County, Kentucky, author Theodore Dreiser led a fact-finding commission to ascertain the causes of the violence. While the report the commission created has been accused of bias due to the commission’s connections to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), it did capture the thoughts and motivations of many Harlan County miners. One man, Henry Thornton, who when interviewed had lost his job as a miner and had taken a job at Kroger’s, claimed that he had initially not been interested in joining a labor union. However, after his employer fired him for attending a speech given by union organizers, which Thornton stridently claimed he did not attend, he joined the National Miners Union (NMU).[3] While Thornton, like other miners in Harlan County, had struggled economically through the early years of the Great Depression, coal operators’ infringements on freedom of speech and association angered him more than the material deprivation he faced.

            Like its American counterpart, the Chilean labor movement has been the subject of much scholarly attention. Writing in 1976, Francisco Zapata S. argued that, “Since 1920, all Chilean administrations have been forced to recognize and make concessions to the power of the labor movement.”[4] He further argued that the Chilean labor movement lost some of its traditional independence during the government formed by Salvador Allende. By forming a closer relationship with a left-wing government more sympathetic and supportive of labor rights than its predecessors, labor leaders ironically diminished leftist voices within the labor movement. Zapata argues that this led to intense protests, some of which originated in attempts by the United States to destabilize what it viewed as a leftist government, as union members increasingly resented poor economic conditions and growing union centralization.[5]

             When Augusto Pinochet gained control over Chile following a military coup in 1973, he instituted policies that targeted labor unions as enemies of the state. In 1983, despite the official repression and threat of violence against strike actions, thousands of copper miners went on strike to protest the arrest of a prominent labor leader. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Hugo Estivales, vice president of the copper workers confederation, said about 80% of the 3,200 unionized workers on the day shift at El Salvador are on strike.”[6] This dedication to union activities, coming a decade into Pinochet’s infamously anti-leftist regime, demonstrates the continued importance of organized labor to miners’ interests in Chile. It also provides evidence of the measures of state violence that miners faced during Pinochet’s right-wing regime. In the United States during the early twentieth century, federal and state courts routinely applied legal pressure on labor unions. While the state did not threaten union members to the same degree in the United States that Pinochet’s government did in Chile, judges and politicians threatened jail time and even state violence to deter strikes and organizing drives. In, Law and Order Vs. the Miners, Richard Lunt argues that unionized miners became increasingly hostile to courts that they viewed as prejudiced in favor of their employers’ interests. When federal and state courts issued injunctions that practically forbade any organizing attempts, miners reacted with widespread strikes, threats of violence, and, occasionally, acts of violence directed against coal operators and the state structures that supported them.[7]

          Harry Orchard, a miner and occasional informant for Idaho mine operators, assassinated Frank Steunenberg, Idaho’s former governor and a perceived opponent of union interests, in 1905. This event capped a nearly fifteen-year long conflict between union members and mine operators in the state. As the Chicago Daily Tribune reported in 1908 after a lengthy trial in which juries acquitted multiple high-ranking members of the militant Western Federation of Miners (WFM), “The curtain has been rung down on the greatest tragedy in the industrial history of the western country…Its every act was marked by bloodshed-its every scene came to a climax with a sacrifice of life and destruction of property.”[8] The final paragraph of the article revealed the newspaper’s bias. Offering the suspected motivation behind Steunenberg’s assassination, the paper stated, “After years of rioting, Gov. Steunenberg in 1899 invoked the iron hand of military rule to stop the disturbances. Suspected men were imprisoned or driven out of the country.”[9] While the paper’s reference to “rioting” corroborated mine operators’ claim that they needed state support to resist unruly, revolutionary miners, it also lent affirmation to miners’ resentment of policies that severely limited miners’ civil rights and liberties. The governor’s willingness to imprison or deport people suspected of union activities, which the state government automatically coded as evidence of violent behavior, clashed with miners’ belief that they were entitled to freedom of speech and association as guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

          Labor organizations similarly met with state violence in Chile, even before Pinochet came to power. While Pinochet’s government increased pressure on labor organizations and threatened state violence to keep workers in line, earlier, democratically elected governments had also utilized arrests and violence to limit organized labor’s power. When the Chilean government arrested Clotario Blest, the president of the Central Organization of Chilean Workers, in 1954 for inciting violence, workers called a general strike in protest.[10] In 1970, a strike led to street violence between union members, students who supported them, and police. During the one-day strike, at least one person died as a result of the clashes.[11] Two years later, further strikes, caused by poor labor relations exacerbated by declining economic conditions in the wake of American sanctions against Salvador Allende’s ostensibly left-wing government, led to violence between police and strikers.[12]

            Chilean coal miners proved just as willing as their American counterparts to strike, and they also often turned to radical labor unions. In 1947, the New York Times reported that communist-affiliated miners’ unions had called more than 15,000 Chilean coal miners out on strike.[13] Copper miners likewise demonstrated a willingness to strike. In 1960, miners at a mine owned by the American-based Anaconda Company went on strike, stalling production at what was then the largest and most productive copper mine in the world.[14] As Zapata argued, the Chilean labor movement had long contained two conflicting tendencies. One faction emphasized labor unions’ roles as negotiators for workers. This faction, which Zapata terms the economistic faction, focused on wages, benefits, and working conditions, rather than on any radical change to overall economic conditions or social relations. Another, explicitly influenced by Marxist and Leninist critiques of capitalism, provided a more radical push and often earned the support of many individual trade unionists. For instance, when the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile held its leadership election in 1972, more than thirty percent of the vote went to Communists, while another twenty-six percent went to Socialist candidates.[15]

            In both the United States and Chile, mining operations utilized non-local capital to extract raw materials. In 1952, the New York Times reported that, “About 12,000 miners and other employees in the copper mines of the Chugquicamata and Potrerillos workings of the United States-owned Anaconda Company went on strike for higher pay early today.”[16] In 1969, another mine owned by the Anaconda Company suffered a cave-in that buried nine Chilean copper miners. While four survived, the remaining five could not be rescued.[17] While the article in the Chicago Tribune describing this accident did not mention any specific anger aimed against foreign economic domination, a mine disaster in 1945 spurred anger against the American ambassador to Argentina. A poster in Buenos Aires connected Ambassador Spruille Braden with a disaster that had taken place in a Chilean copper mine.[18] The anger directed against foreign companies who owned mines in Latin America resembled that directed against companies from the Northeastern United States by miners in Appalachia, Colorado, Montana, and Michigan. When violence broke out in the Colorado coal fields in 1914, miners issued sharp condemnations directed at John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who owned the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Following the Ludlow Massacre and the subsequent violence committed by miners against company guards and National Guardsmen, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that Colorado women, “Told Mr. Rockefeller that if John L. Lawson, the miners’ leader now in jail on a life sentence, is guilty of murder, then he, Mr. Rockefeller, is equally guilty of the killing of men, women, and children during the long civil war.”[19]

            While both Chilean and American miners formed organizations that incorporated left-wing ideologies into their campaigns, American labor unions were more likely to draw on national and republican rhetoric than their Chilean counterparts. During its campaign in Colorado in 1903, the WFM created a poster that simply asked, “Is Colorado in America?” The poster depicted an American flag, but each stripe featured statements that condemned the harsh anti-union policies enacted by the governor of Colorado. With such statements as, “Martial Law Declared in Colorado!,” and “Free Press Throttled in Colorado!,” the poster condemned the Colorado state government and the industrialists it favored as anti-American.[20] The bottom of the poster stated that, “Every word inscribed upon the stripes of ‘Old Glory’ is the truth. If this flag is desecrated, the Republican governor of Colorado is responsible for the acts that profane the emblem of liberty.”[21] By specifically condemning what they viewed as an affront to the liberties and rights granted to miners by their status as Americans, the WFM drew on republican rhetoric that had served earlier generations of labor activists. They, like their predecessors, also deflected accusations of anti-Americanism hurled at them by industrialists, politicians, and newspaper editors. The Knights of Labor, a broad organization of both skilled and unskilled workers that had achieved prominence in American labor and politics in the 1870s and 1880s, argued for a transformation of the American economy, but they did so by praising the republican beliefs that they found in the Declaration of Independence. As Thomas Ware, an early labor historian, wrote about the Knights’ ideology, “Robert Owen, Brisbane, Evans, even Horace Greeley, would have felt themselves at home in this talk of a free society based on cooperative production, non-profit-making exchange of commodities, secular, scientific, and equal education, equal rights, and federalism.”[22] By employing republican rhetoric that, at least on the surface, did not significantly differ from that utilized by earlier generations of labor activists, the WFM sought to subvert accusations of radicalism, which mine operators and their allies increasingly used to discredit miners’ unions.

            Both Chile and the United States employed immigrant miners. In 1898, the Los Angeles Times published an article in which the paper’s correspondent, Frank Carpenter, reported on Chile’s efforts to attract immigrants, and he also discussed the links between immigration and Chilean copper mining interests.[23] While American historians have offered several valuable analyses of the causes and effects of immigration to the United States, Chile also experienced multiple significant waves of immigration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an article published in The Los Angeles Times in 1889, the author wrote, “We are apt to consider the inducements offered by the United States to immigrants as very liberal-and so they are-but Chile, the most enterprising country of South America, is now making bids for settlers which double discount anything that Uncle Sam has done in that line.[24] The article went on to list some of the inducements that Chile offered to attract potential immigrants. Not only did Chile offer new immigrants land, but the country also offered a monthly pension for a year, as well as materials and livestock to begin the process of erecting a homestead. The author stated that these policies had already attracted many immigrants, especially from the Mediterranean countries of Italy and Spain.[25] As late as 1930, the Chilean government continued to go beyond the United States in its efforts to attract immigrants. That year, the New York Times reported on a proposed bill, stating, “The proposed law calls for free support by the government of immigrants for ten days after their arrival, free transportation from the port to the place they select for permanent residence, aid in placing themselves in industry and loans up to 10,000 pesos from the Agricultural Colonization Bank of Chile.”[26] That this took place at the beginning of the Great Depression, a time when many countries, including the United States, sought to curtail immigration, demonstrates the degree to which the Chilean economy relied on immigration. For several decades, Chile followed the course taken earlier by the United States and sought to attract immigration through incentives that went beyond even those offered by the United States.

            However, while Chile supported immigration as a way to bolster its economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the country eventually became more hostile to mass immigration. The pressures to restrict immigration came from several different sectors, just as they did in the United States. For instance, in 1909, Chinese immigrants to Chile pressured their government in Beijing to curtail emigration to Chile after they faced harsh working conditions upon their arrival in the country.[27] While Chile went to great lengths to encourage immigration, immigrants did not necessarily enjoy the benefits they had been promised. Immigrant laborers faced similar dangers and discouragements in the United States and Chile, as they encountered poor pay and working conditions, nativism, and dashed expectations in both countries. Although Chile had remained committed to encouraging immigration during the early years of the Great Depression, the country resorted to a temporary total ban on immigration in 1939. A report published in the New York Times stated, “Following demands from many groups for the adoption of strict curbs on immigration because of the increase in political refugees, the Foreign Relations Minister has signed a decree suspending for a year the granting of immigration permits.”[28] The following year, six members of the Radical Party quit the Popular Front cabinet after a sharp disagreement over the issue of Jewish immigration to Chile.[29] Here, nativism combined with economic uncertainty to significantly turn public opinion against immigration, even as the emerging war in Europe, coupled with Adolf Hitler’s persecution of Jewish people, increased the need for migration from Europe.

            At first glance, the growing anti-immigrant rhetoric in Chile during the Great Depression would seem to pose a threat to workers’ cooperation in the mining industry. Just as they did in the United States, miners in Chile came from a wide variety of national and ethnic backgrounds. However, the continued strength and influence of the union movement during this period suggests that anti-immigrant rhetoric did not necessarily lead to overt hostility between the disparate ethnic groups that worked in Chile’s copper and coal mines. In the United States, labor unions provided some of the strongest support for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other legislation to limit immigration. As in Chile, opposition grew during economic downturns. In 1901, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the debate over whether to extend the Chinese Exclusion Act. The article stated, “Already the laboring organizations of the country are beginning to advocate the extension of the exclusion act.”[30] The debates over the act revealed the deep class resentments and conflicts existing between American laborers and their employers. At the same time that labor unions in California expressed their opposition to Chinese immigration, both through lobbying efforts and overt acts of violence against Chinese migrants, fruit growers, those who owned the large fruit plantations in California, strongly supported efforts to repeal the law.[31] Certainly, nativism and racism played a large role in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as in subsequent efforts to extend its ban on Chinese immigration. However, economic interests also exacerbated racism among working-class white Americans, including among European immigrants who also faced prejudice if not the same degree of violence committed against Chinese immigrants, and encouraged fruit growers and other capitalists, who were no less likely than their working-class employees to hold racist views, to support efforts to allow Chinese immigrants to enter the United States again.

            Despite racism and nativism, American miners often achieved a degree of solidarity that would seem impossible at first glance. In Colorado, native-born white miners worked alongside African American miners, as well as immigrants from Mexico, Italy, the United Kingdom, Greece, Croatia, Russia, and Poland. While segregation was often the norm outside the mines, these different groups worked together underground and often ignored differences of race, religion, and ethnicity to provide aid to their fellow miners while on the job or in the aftermath of mine disasters. Miners emphasized spreading work evenly to ensure that each could get the work they needed to be able to provide for themselves and their families. When disaster struck, as it often did in both Colorado and in Appalachia, miners from disparate ethnic backgrounds banded together to save their fellow workers or recover their bodies.[32] This did not mean that miners forgot ethnic and racial prejudice. In Alabama, miners organized across racial lines, with African American and Southern white miners organizing under the banner of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to fight against the convict lease system and a pay scale that lagged behind even what miners received in the notoriously poorly paid central Appalachian coal fields. As Daniel Letwin demonstrates in The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, white and African American miners could band together, and even fight together, against the repression they both suffered, and both vigorously opposed the convict lease system, which primarily victimized African Americans but drove down the wages of all laborers. However, cooperation within the UMWA often still placed white people in the positions of power. Furthermore, cooperation did not end racial violence, as white miners still sometimes took part in violent actions against African Americans, including those who they ostensibly sought to organize with. This continued racial animosity on the part of Southern white miners limited attempts to unionize Alabama mines. However, organizing work still occurred, and the cooperation that did exist still conflicted with Jim Crow’s strident demand for near-total separation of white and African Americans in the South. Letwin describes a situation in which racial tension always existed just slightly beneath the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest conflict. This conflict could easily result in violence, especially as lynchings spread throughout the South during the 1890s and first few decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, the existence of interracial unionism, as challenging, unequal, and inconsistent as it was, demonstrated that racial and ethnic tensions did not necessarily preclude successful organizing attempts. While Alabama miners ultimately failed to overcome the political and economic power possessed by their employers, the UMWA successfully organized thousands of miners at several points during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[33]

            Physical danger dominated miners’ experiences, and miners in both Chile and the United States united around the shared experience of danger. However, the threat of workplace hazards extended beyond the dangers of rockfalls, explosions, and electrocution. While miners certainly encountered these hazards in their daily work lives, and their unions emphasized limiting them as a crucial condition of employment, lung diseases that could kill years or decades after a miner left the workforce also concerned miners in both the United States and Chile. When American coal mines began to mechanize, miners increasingly became exposed to high levels of coal dust. While earlier mines had been labor-intensive projects in which miners did much of the work themselves, mines after World War Two became more capital-intensive. With the increased presence of mechanical drills and mechanical loaders that could extract a much greater amount of coal than a miner could on their own, miners faced increasing amount of coal dust in the air they breathed while at work. By the 1960s, these changes had created a situation in which thousands of miners had contracted Coal Workers’ Pneumoconiosis, better known as black lung disease. At first, the UMWA did not recognize the dangers of black lung disease. This in part resulted from the union officials’, including long-time president John L. Lewis, desire to maintain close relationships with coal operators. By 1969, a rift between union leaders and the rank and file led to a massive wildcat strike, in which thousands of unionized coal miners went on strike without permission in order to draw attention to black lung disease.[34] While union officials and union members had disagreed over the importance of regulating coal dust and providing relief funds and medical care for those suffering from black lung disease, the rank and file unity on the issue demonstrated the degree to which shared danger inspired solidarity among coal miners.

            In Chile, the battle to regulate the mining industry and provide benefits to miners suffering from work-related lung diseases spanned four decades, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Angela Vergara argues that the process of gaining recognition of and benefits for silicosis, a lung disease common among those who have worked in both coal and metal mines, was as much a political as a medical question. Initially, as in the United States, miners faced significant evidentiary hurdles if they tried to gain access to compensation. They had to prove that their employer was at fault for their lung illnesses. If they could not, they had few state resources they could readily draw on. Beginning in the 1930, the Chilean labor movement argued vehemently for expanded protections and benefits for miners suffering from silicosis. Also, just as physicians sympathetic toward labor rights helped to raise awareness of black lung in the United States, Vergara argues that some Chilean physicians aided the labor movement’s efforts to improve safety procedures and benefits regimes for miners.[35]

            While the official responses of union leaders to miners’ concerns over lung diseases differed in the United States and Chile, rank and file miners in both countries united around the need to regulate safety in the mining industry and provide compensation for those miners afflicted with work-related lung diseases. The differences between labor leaders’ official responses offers a clue into the fundamental differences that existed between union leadership in the United States and Chile. As Zapata argued, the Chilean labor movement divided over whether unions should focus on limited gains in wages and working conditions or on a wholesale effort to transform the economic, social, and political systems that supported industrial capitalism. This debate existed in the United States as well, but as demonstrated by the large degree of support that existed among Chilean workers for the Communist and Socialist Parties, the more transformative side of the argument received a larger hearing in Chile than in the United States. While such unions as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and WFM included many members that supported socialism and revolution as a solution to workers’ needs and discontent, those unions never achieved the numbers boasted by the UMWA. The UMWA did include some labor organizers that supported more transformative change, but their demands, including nationalization of the mines and much more aggressive organizing work geared toward social change, were minimized by such leaders as John L. Lewis.[36] The more militant, or at least more leftist, bent of the Chilean labor movement ensured that miners’ concerns would be at the forefront of labor union agendas. In contrast to the United States, where miners had to organize in opposition to national political leadership, union leadership, and their employers, miners in Chile enjoyed the support of their union leaders, who in turn placed pressure on the Popular Front governments that ruled Chile between 1938 and 1952 and included support from both the Socialist and Communist Parties. While this role in government did not ensure full enforcement of workers’ protections, rank and file miners in Chile could act with a greater degree of confidence in their leaders than their American counterparts could.[37]

            American coal miners and Chilean copper miners both faced danger, repression, and the ever-present threat of lung diseases as a result of their work. Both workforces included large numbers of immigrant laborers, who worked alongside non-immigrants in both mining environments and in labor unions. Both featured efforts to organize miners across ethnic and racial lines, even as old prejudices threatened to undercut organizing efforts. In both cases, miners sometimes ignored prejudice, without necessarily overcoming it, to fight against workplace abuses, poor safety conditions, and low pay. In both cases, the ever-present realities of their dangerous occupations, alongside the repressive tactics employed by mine operators in both Chile and the United States, contributed significantly to the interracial and inter-ethnic efforts to unionize. Also, both groups of miners chafed under the dominance of non-locals over the mine industry, with capitalists from the northeastern United States primarily dominating the coal industry regardless of region within the United States and capitalists from the United States providing much of the financing for the copper industry in Chile, especially after the United States overtook the United Kingdom as a primary source of global capital after 1900.

However, a few key differences separated the experiences of American miners from those of their Chilean counterparts. While leftist political philosophies inspired some miners in both Appalachia and the western United States, the economistic focus of major American labor unions inhibited the spread of socialist and communist doctrines. By contrast, Chilean miners, and the Chilean labor movement as a whole, proved far more willing to embrace leftist political philosophy. Many American miners, including members of the relatively militant and radical WFM, utilized rhetoric that drew on the labor republicanism employed by textile and shoe workers a century prior. While Chile also had its own republican history and institutions, American miners proved more willing to embrace republicanism as a justification for their activities. Also, while miners in both countries suffered from state repression, Chilean miners had to grapple with the military regime imposed by Augusto Pinochet after 1973. This added brutality to the legal restrictions imposed on labor unions in both the United States and Chile. While American miners frequently faced violence, much of it occurred due to cooperation between mine operators and local or state governments, rather than through a calculated program of repression initiated by the national government. Furthermore, while miners in the United States ultimately obtained the right to unionize by allying themselves with the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and largely maintained that right, albeit with far less government support during Republican administrations, Chilean unions faced more political instability, especially during Pinochet’s regime.

            This essay has addressed the similarities and differences that existed between miners’ organizing efforts in the United States and Chile. Due to differing political circumstances and timeframes of immigration and industrial development, this essay has primarily focused on American miners prior to 1935 and Chilean miners between 1920 and 1980. These differing and lengthy timeframes correspond to differing conditions in the two countries, especially as relates to the transnational processes of capital mobility, labor organizing, and immigration. The issues discussed in this essay were not unique to the United States and Chile. Immigration and international capitalism continue to play significant roles in the global economy, even as mining has become a far more capital-intensive industry over the past century. Likewise, labor organizing, including across lines of ethnicity, race, gender, and religion, has taken place across national boundaries, and it will continue to do so as corporations become less tied to specific countries. This essay has provided a brief discussion of these global processes by comparing unionization within similar industries in two countries. Other historians have addressed the global processes of capitalism, immigration, and unionization, and they should continue these analyses to further understand the relationships between immigration and unionization, as well as the roles that poor pay, poor labor-capital relationships, and, especially, workplace hazards play in interracial and inter-ethnic unionism.

 

[1] David Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the West Virginia Coalfields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880-1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 29-52.

[2] Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 96-121.

[3] Theodore Dreiser, et al., Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields Prepared by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 189-196.

[4] Francisco Zapata S., “The Chilean Labor Movement under Salvador Allende: 1970-1973,” Latin American Perspectives, Winter, 1976, Vol. 3, No. 1, Imperialism and the Working Class in Latin America (Winter, 1976), 85-97.

[5] Zapata S, “The Chilean Labor Movement Under Salvador Allende,” 85-97.

[6] “Chile’s Miners Start Strike to Protest Union Chief’s Arrest,” Los Angeles Times, 17 June, 1983.

[7] Richard D. Lunt, Law and Order Vs. the Miners: West Virginia, 1907-1933 (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1979), 61-90.

[8] “Curtain Falls on Tragedy,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 January, 1908.

[9] “Curtain Falls on Tragedy,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 January, 1908.

[10] “Chile’s Troubles with Labor Grow,” New York Times, 15 May, 1954.

[11] “Chile Strike Erupts into Violence; 1 Dead,” Chicago Tribune, 9 July, 1970.

[12] “New Chile Violence,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October, 1972.

[13] “Chile Miners’ Strike Begins,” New York Times, 4 October, 1947.

[14] “Copper Miners Strike in Chile,” New York Times, 3 October, 1960.

[15] 1972 “Los sindicatos en la etapa de transici6n,” Mexico: Seminario sobre Movimientos Labor-

 ales en Am6rica Latina, ICIS-FLASCO, November 8-13, Quoted in, Zapata S., “The Chilean Labor Movement Under Salvador Allende.”

[16] “Chile Strike Ends as Another Begins: President Settles Dispute in Nitrates- U.S. Defense Hit by Copper Mine Walkout,” New York Times, 26 April, 1952.

[17] “4 Rescued, 5 Missing in Chile Cave-In,” Chicago Tribune, 2 July, 1969.

[18] “Argentine Poster Vilifies U.S. Envoy,” New York Times, 20 July, 1945.

[19] “Union Side of Mine War Told to Rockefeller: He Denies Responsibility for Tragedy at Ludlow; Hears Story from Women,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 September, 1915.

[20] Western Federation of Miners, “Is Colorado in America?,” Denver Public Library, Denver, Colorado, C331.892822 W525is 1902

[21] Western Federation of Miners, “Is Colorado in America?”

[22] Thomas J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States: A Study in Democracy (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 309.

[23] Frank G. Carpenter, “The Back Woods of Chile: How Southern Chile is Being Opened up to Settlement; Chilean Immigrants and the Government; Money in Mines,” Los Angeles Times, 16 October, 1898.

[24] “Chile’s Bid for Immigration,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April, 1889.

[25] “Chile’s Bid for Immigration,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April, 1889.

[26] “To Foster Immigration in Chile,” New York Times, 19 January, 1930.

[27] “Chinese in Danger: Those at Iquique Ask Peking to Stop Immigration to Chile,” New York Times, 7 August, 1909.

[28] “Chile Bars All Immigration,” New York Times, 5 May, 1939.

[29] “6 Quit Chile’s Cabinet in Row on Immigration,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 8 February, 1940.

[30] “Want to Extend Exclusion Law: Labor Unions Seeking Renewal of Geary Chinese Act for Ten Years More,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 June, 1901.

[31] “Fruit Growers Score Unions: Convention asks Congress to Let Orientals Come,” Los Angeles Times, 5 December, 1907.

[32] Andrews, Killing for Coal, 147-153.

[33] Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1-7.

[34] Curtis Seltzer, Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985), 89-107.

[35] Angela Vergara, “The Recognition of Silicosis: Labor Unions and Physicians in the Chilean Copper Industry, 1930s-1960s,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Winter 2005, Vol. 79, No. 4 (Winter 2005), 723-748.

[36] Seltzer, Fire in the Hole, 22, 44.

[37] Vergara, “The Recognition of Silicosis,” 737-743.