Welsh Americans by Ronald L. Lewis

Author:Ronald L. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Although this Welshman was complaining for the benefit of his compatriots who might be planning to work in American mines, the letter demonstrates the inequities of the system. Rather than improve the opportunities for advancement, the miners marshaled a political campaign for legislation to protect their privileged position. In 1889 they finally succeeded in persuading the Pennsylvania legislature to incorporate a certification requirement for miners in the Mine Safety Act. To be certified, the miner had to prove that he had worked two years as a miner’s laborer, and was required to pass an examination demonstrating his technical expertise to a board of nine skilled miners. In 1895 an attempt to repeal the law providing for the certification of miners was introduced in the Pennsylvania legislature on grounds that the law did not work as intended. Rather than keep out unskilled laborers, it deterred skilled British miners who would not work the required two years as a laborer in order to obtain a certificate. The bill did not pass, but did point to an undesirable, and unintended, consequence of the reform.31

Experience was presumed to be the determinant of qualifications, but the concentration of the Irish in the laborer classification well into the 1880s cannot be explained by inexperience when they had been in America for decades. It is more likely that Welsh miners, managers, and operators sought to protect Welsh control of the craft and camouflaged it with stereotypes about Irish suitability only for unskilled labor. The linkage between ethnicity and occupational status constructed in South Wales became a deepening fault line between Welsh miners and Irish laborers in the American coalfields.

Since job classification was drawn along ethnic lines, the privileged position of the Welsh further magnified ethnic differences and diminished the common bond between all mineworkers. In 1871, an Irishman, “J. C.” of Pittston, Pennsylvania, formerly a laborer in Hyde Park, described how he came to the conclusion that the Welsh miners were, in his words, “tyrannical”:

When I worked in Hyde Park, I was not only obliged to do my own work but the greater part of that miner that hired me. It was John or Pat or Jacob or Hans “give me the drill, the scraper, the needle, the wedge; go get some tamping and then help me tamp the hole.” This I was expected to do after drilling four out of five feet of hole, while we poor devils innocently believed him to be preparing a cartridge to be put in the hole that we had to drill, and when there was enough coal cut, no matter how hard or how long the labourer had to work, Mr. Welshman put on his coat and went home to enjoy himself in the bosom of his family, cultivate his mind if he felt so disposed or engage in any other amusement. And we get a nominal one-third of the sum total, whilst we performed nine-tenths of the sum total of work.32

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