i STEAM COAL - Clpdigital.org

dom to the common weal, to be of the highest
importance to the future of the country as a
method of reaching harmonious relations between
capital and labor.
THE BITUMINOUS AGREEMENTS.
In no great field of industrial activity, enlisting
billions of capital and employing a vast army of
men, is there a more signal example of benefit
to the general social welfare than in the operation
of the trade agreements between the bituminous
operators' associations of Western Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and the wage earners
organized as the United States Mine Workers of
America. These agreements would be impossible
did not each of tne parties to the contracts recognize
that the exercise of individual liberty must
be made to accord with the interests of society as
a whole.
These agreements are formed biennially at a
convention composed of representatives of the
operators' associations and of the organized mine
workers. The agreements are worked out in detail
and by localities. Upon them rests the stability
of the production, transportation and marketing
of fuel. Only their existence and the
fidelity to their obligations of the wage earners
themselves prevented the immeasurable disaster
of a strike of the bituminous workers in 1902,
simultaneously with the anthracite strike. Only
the recognition of the mutual advantages of these
agreements led the operators to propose a compromise
scale at the convention of 1904, and led
the miners to accept, by a referendum vote that
compromise, although it involved a reduction of
wages. The appreciation of the value of these
agreements could have no more convincing evidence
than their withstanding this dual test—
that the associated employers should propose a
reduction far less than they believed to be warranted
by the conditions of trade then existing,
and that the mine workers should accept a share
of the burden of decreased profits due to adverse
market conditions.
Now, who are the parties to these agreements,
whose value I have but cursorily indicated? On
the one side, they are the organized operators of
four states, on the other, the organized mine
workers. But they are individual operators,
whether in business as persons, firms or corporations.
They cannot form themselves into the four
state associations without some sacrifice of their
individual liberty to do as they please with their
own properties. The owner of one mine, producing
coal of a peculiar quality, or enjoying special
facilities of transportation, or having measures
worked with particular economy of labor, might
find temporary advantage in refusing to enter
into an association with other operators that
THE COAL TRADE BULLETIN. 31
would destroy or lessen these fortuitous advantages
in competition. But looking beyond his
immediate, temporary personal advantage, he surveys
the whole range of the industry and extends
his prospect over a period of a year or two
years. He takes into consideration the superior
advantage in the long run of being assured a
steady market, of the absorption of a reasonably
continuous output, and of the opportunity to enter
a joint agreement that will enable him to
calculate with some assurance of certainty the
great factor of labor cost entering into his production
and sales.
In case the operator is a corporation, its officers
carry into this joint agreement the waiving also
of the individual liberty of its shareholders.
This statement applies, indeed, to the business
transacted by all corporations. The confusion
that would arise, should every individual shareholder
demand the exercise of individual liberty
of judgment as to every act by and on behalf of
a corporation, is Indescribable. Indeed, it is
plain that in the modern business world no transactions
between corporations or between corporations
and persons would be possible unless shareholders
waived their individual liberties of action
and entrusted them in block to directors and
executives.
MUTUAL CONCESSIONS AND RISKS.
But to return to the interstate bituminous
agreements. The other party to them is the union
of mine workers, as represented in the interstate
convention. According to the theory of
individual liberty, every mine worker in the
bituminous field of the four states concerned has
the right to sell his labor to the owner of the
mine where he works, upon such terms of wages,
hours and conditions as he pleases. He surrenders
that right when he joins the union, in order
that he may share in the advantages of a collective
contract, even at the risk that errors may
lie made in that contract that will work during
its term to his disadvantage. The employer
makes a similar surrender and takes a corresponding
risk. It is conceivable that in some
cases local conditions may make the union scale
less than the individual mine worker might be
able to exact from an individual employer. It is
equally conceivable that in some cases other local
conditions might make it possible for an individual
operator to impose the acceptance of a
lower scale than that agreed upon between the
association operators and the miners for that district.
But both the miner and the operator have
learned by experience that there is a larger and
a more permanent advantage in the subordination
of individual liberty to joint agreement
through the chosen representatives of their two
organizations.