What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining by Keith Dix

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY ANI) CULTURE Book Reviews 163 devoted more attention to the history of company towns from the perspective of those who worked and lived in them. Daniel A. Cornford Dr. Cornford is associate editor of the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire, was published by Temple University Press. He is currently working on a study of welfare capitalism in the extractive industries between the 1920s and 1950s. What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining. By Keith Dix. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 258; illustrations, tables, notes, index. $29.95. This book chronicles the mechanization of American underground bituminous coal mining during the 1920s and 1930s from the perspective of the workers. Although Keith Dix denies that he has a Luddite agenda (p. ix), the approach of the analysis is of the kind that is likely to lead to a Luddite conclusion. Considerable attention is devoted to demonstrating how mechanization contributed to reduc­ ing the workers’, and conversely increasing the employers’, control of the work and the workplace, to reducing or eliminating the value of preexisting worker skills, to reducing the level of employment in the industry, and to exposing the miners to new risks of injury and death. At best, mechanization is presented as an unfortunate cost-cutting device needed to prevent an even greater reduction in the size (presumably measured in terms of employment) of the industry. There is no appreciation of the fact that mechanization allowed at least some miners to receive substantially higher wages while most of those displaced had the opportunity of moving (granted at a substan­ tial personal cost) to other locales and other occupations. Thus the author is implacably hostile to John L. Lewis and his high wage policy which was designed to do just that. There is even less sense that mechanization of this industry had beneficial social consequences in the form of lower (real) prices for bituminous coal and the millions of products whose manufacture, directly or indirectly, utilized bitumi­ nous coal. The point of my criticism, of course, is not that the costs to the workers that are emphasized by the author were not real, or that they were trivial. Rather, it is the one-sided nature of the presentation to which I am reacting. Not only did the miners gain in their role as direct and indirect consumers of coal, but, more important, as consumers they simultaneously were benefiting from the mechaniza­ tion of many, many other industries and processes. Although they might have gained from a lack of mechanization of coal mining (as well as a ban on the mechanization of the production of competing fuels and/or improvements in methods of fuel conservation), they certainly 164 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE would have been net losers if all other industries also had been prevented from mechanizing. Workers in a particular industry are quite likely to lose from mechanization and productivity growth in their own industry (American and European farmers are a striking example), but they still are likely to benefit from productivity growth in general. These benefits will certainly accrue to them as consumers and, quite possibly, also in the form of new and better employment opportunities. If these benefits of mechanization are ignored, there is very little industrial technological change indeed that will pass muster. The author’s more general ideological bent is well demonstrated by the following: “In hindsight, there is little doubt that the tremendous social costs of unemployment and excess capacity, which were un­ avoidable under the existing market conditions, could have been avoided with a modicum of central economic planning and coordina­ tion that the UMWA progressives proposed. Public ownership and democratic control might well have stabilized production, allowed the rational deployment of new machinery, and at the same time estab­ lished a decision-making system in which workers’jobs and job rights would have been secured” (p. 160). Frankly, I am flabbergasted by this assertion. I certainly find no convincing evidence for it in the book. Perhaps it is based on the author’s observations of the British experience with coal mine...