In late April 1943, as allied troops drove the last German forces to the tip of Tunisia, U.S. coal miners launched an unprecedented wartime strike wave that would last more than six months. Standing against their employers, the federal government and both the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, several hundred thousand miners would threaten war production — and ultimately win concessions.
During the war, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration managed labor disputes through the National War Labor Board and a series of regional boards. Federal policies kept demands at bay, while the so-called Little Steel Formula limited wage increases to the purported cost of living. For the most part, the higher echelons of organized labor agreed to no-strike pledges to support the war effort; AFL and CIO members sat on Roosevelt’s labor board. Even the Communist Party told members to refrain from organizing strikes.
Nevertheless, local strikes — most often over wage concerns — hit nearly every industry during the war, including in Pittsburgh. Perhaps no union was more prepared to walk out than the United Mine Workers of America, headed by the larger-than-life John L. Lewis. Lewis had led the formation of the CIO in the 1930s, then pulled his half-million-strong union out of it in 1942. He had backed Roosevelt, then promptly endorsed his Republican challenger in 1940. He commanded tremendous loyalty: As a Coverdale miner told reporters in 1943, “John Lewis has the answer.”
“No contract, no work”
The miners had serious complaints. Food prices had increased far out of pace with wages, they said, and the cost of equipment — borne by the workers themselves — was too much to bear. They also didn’t receive so-called portal-to-portal pay, for the time spent traveling within the mine property. “Actual records show that the so-called ‘seven-hour day’ actually means an average of approximately eight and one half hours between the time a miner enters and when he leaves a coal mine,” the union said in a newspaper ad. “Even the mine operators do not dispute this fact. Yet the miners are paid for seven hours only.” With contracts expiring nationwide, they demanded portal-to-portal pay, company payment for equipment and $2-per-day raises — far beyond the level the government formula allowed.
As the May 1 contract deadline approached, UMWA officials declined to meet with federal negotiators. In the last days of April, local wildcat strikes (those carried out without official sanction) began ahead of schedule — 70 Pittsburgh-area mines were closed by April 28, the Sun-Telegraph reported. Sixty thousand men had already walked out. Lists of struck mines were posted daily, representing tens of thousands of tons of daily production. The loss of coal from the rich Western Pennsylvania fields threatened wartime steel production: Pittsburgh steel makers warned of a 75-percent output drop if the strike continued. The miners were unfazed. One Central Pennsylvania local wrote to Lewis: “No contract, no work. We are behind you 100 percent.”
On May 1, most of the nation’s coal miners — some 400,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 480,000 according to press reports — walked off. Roosevelt issued an order: The struck mines would be turned over immediately to the U.S. government, with the operators now working as managers on behalf of the Solid Fuels Administration for War. Maintenance crews raised the U.S. flag over the mines, while Roosevelt threatened to send the Army to force the men back to work. The reply: “You can’t dig coal with bayonets.”
Roosevelt addressed the nation May 2 in one of his fireside chats:
I want to make it clear that every American coal miner who has stopped mining coal — no matter how sincere his motives, no matter how legitimate he may believe his grievances to be, every idle miner directly and individually is obstructing our war effort. We have not yet won this war. We will win this war only as we produce and deliver our total American effort on the high seas and on the battle fronts. And that requires unrelenting, uninterrupted effort here on the home front.
A stopping of the coal supply, even for a short time, would involve a gamble with the lives of American soldiers and sailors and the future security of our whole people.
Running battles
Lewis and Roosevelt reached a temporary truce and work resumed May 4. But workers in the Pittsburgh-area fields remained militant. Hundreds walked out at a Jones & Laughlin mine in Washington County after finding $1 per day had been deducted from their pay for the late-April strikes while still under contract. Hundreds more walked off in eastern Ohio. The head of the Western Pennsylvania UMWA district said workers everywhere would walk off again May 18 if a deal wasn’t reached. Negotiations, threats and wildcat strikes continued through the month. In Waynesburg, a judge addressing new U.S. citizens said: “You are working for the United States government now and not the corporations, and when you strike you are striking not against the coal owners but against the flag which flies over the coal works and the country which it represents.”
In late May, the War Labor Board attempted a compromise, leaving out a wage hike and letting operators resolve the portal-to-portal issue themselves. It didn’t work. The miners launched a second official strike on June 1, prompting new threats from Roosevelt. Officials floated ideas including drafting miners into the Army, sending in soldiers with mine experience and singling out immigrant workers for punishment.
The hit-and run fighting continued through June in what one paper called a “regular fortnightly crisis.” The federal board upheld its earlier orders, prompting a third strike on June 21. Calls for tougher intervention grew, leading Congress to pass the War Labor Disputes Act (or Smith-Connally Act) in late June. The act would expand government power to seize struck industries and ramp up punishment for wartime strikers. Unions protested, and the miners threatened worse if Roosevelt didn’t veto the bill. He did, but Congress quickly overrode his veto.
Winter approaching
The repeated strikes were taking their toll. U.S. Steel subsidiaries closed blast furnaces for lack of coke. “We are using coal as fast as it is produced,” a spokesman for another company warned. Threats that Lewis could be arrested under the new federal law didn’t deter workers. “If the bill goes into effect and John L. Lewis is arrested and jailed, that won’t do any good, for there are still 500,000 miners who will refuse to go to work,” the UMWA local president at a Belle Vernon mine told reporters. “It is the same as a few weeks ago. No contract, no work.” Their wives joined the threat. “We join in with our men,” one woman told the Sun-Telegraph. “If the jails are not large enough for all the men, they better start building bigger ones.”
Officials and columnists made every effort to shame the miners into compliance. From Roosevelt’s chats to editorial pages, stories of soldiers’ and sailors’ bravery were contrasted with the miners’ supposed selfishness. Miners said they sympathized — many stressed to reporters that they didn’t want to strike — but few returned to work. Only nonunion mines or those represented by a small AFL affiliate stayed on the job. Even truces and back-to-work orders weren’t enough for Pittsburgh miners, tens of thousands of whom stayed off the job in defiance of even Lewis’s requests. By the end of June, federal officials were already warning of wintertime rationing for households.
Federal repression ramped up in the summer. Prosecutors said they were monitoring mine leaders for Smith-Connally Act violations; the Trotskyist magazine Labor Action called a Pittsburgh grand jury investigation “a deliberate insult to the entire labor movement and working class of the country.” Talks continued into the fall, with Lewis keeping up the $2 demand even as the government turned mines back over to private control. By late October, with a Nov. 1 deadline approaching, UMWA locals warned of a “general walkout” and Roosevelt threatened additional action. “It might go to the extreme of army occupation and operation of the mines, with troops protecting the men who want to work,” a Pittsburgh Press writer said. “This would mean a fight to the finish between government authority and union leaders bold enough to try to organize resistance.”
An agreement
On Nov. 1, UMWA launched its fourth official strike of the year, with some 110,000 Western Pennsylvania miners stopping work. Roosevelt again seized the mines amid talk of nationwide electricity cuts and anthracite anti-hoarding measures. Within two days, the miners and the federal government reached an agreement. Miners would effectively get $1.75 of the demanded $2 raise, with a 9-hour day including an unpaid 15-minute lunch (the short lunch led press wags to label it the “dyspepsia contract”). Workers would be paid for an assumed 45 minutes of portal-to-portal time, with increases kicking in after the first 40 hours in a week.
By the end of 1943, the miners had reached tentative deals with most of the private operators — still working for the U.S. government — to continue with similar agreements. Federal officials agreed to pay workers a lump sum of back pay for their past travel time, and by summer 1944 most mines were back in private hands. The Solid Fuels Administration for War, which had twice managed the mines, would survive until 1947. Sporadic strikes would continue, too: In August 1944, for example, thousands of Western Pennsylvania miners struck for union membership for supervisory workers. But nothing would match the scale of the 1943 strike wave that shook the war industry to its core.