The Price of Coal
Miners in Roslyn and Gilman strike against wage cuts, pointing to a race-to-the-bottom in labor costs driven by railroad contracts.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Roslyn, May 3: All work at the mines of the Northern Pacific Coal Company was suspended indefinitely tonight by order of management. This means an absolute suspension of business until a settlement is reached or the strikers are replaced. The whistle blew for work this morning, but no miners reported. The men are determined not to accept the 20 percent reduction, though a willingness to accept a 10 percent cut was expressed. A circular distributed in the city yesterday stated that in 1893, wages only averaged $35 a month; miners could not make a living if a 20 percent reduction were made. A miner at Gilman wrote to the editor: 'Time was when the man who had the best article and the best location was considered the strong man in business competition. Now, the man who can get men to work for the lowest sum with which they can keep body and soul together is the king of financiers.'
“Now the man who can get men to work for the lowest sum with which they can keep body and soul together is the king of financiers.”
This account captures the brutal logic of late-19th-century resource extraction, where labor costs were externalized to pay for railroad profit margins. The labor solidarity mentioned, including both white and Black miners, was an essential and sometimes overlooked part of the Pacific Northwest's mining history.
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