Mine Labour Research Articles

Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930

Book Review| July 01 2001 Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930 Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930, Roberto R. Calderón. Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2001) 20 (4): 105–106. https://doi.org/10.2307/27502759 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani; Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2001; 20 (4): 105–106. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/27502759 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2001 Immigration and Ethnic History Society2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930

Journal Article Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880–1930. By Roberto R. Calderon. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000. xx, 294 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-89096-884-5.) Get access Philip Mellinger Philip Mellinger El Paso, Texas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 1, June 2001, Pages 237–238, https://doi.org/10.2307/2675001 Published: 01 June 2001

Undermining Labour: The Rise of Sub-contracting in South African Gold Mines

The rapid growth of sub-contracting in South African mines has been virtually ignored to date in the mainstream research literature on mining and migrant labour. In part, this is a result of the tunnel vision of researchers; and in part it is because of the difficulties of research and access to the mines. This paper explores the growth and implications of sub-contracting in South African gold mines since 1990. It has three main objectives. The first is to document the dimensions and trends of sub-contracting operations in the industry. Secondly, the veracity of claims about the negative impact and implications of sub-contracting on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the working conditions of black miners is tested. Thirdly, the paper explores the perceptions of sub-contracting by workers themselves, many of whom are not, or are no longer, NUM members. Lesotho was chosen as the research field-site. A companion survey of ordinary miners in Lesotho in 1997 allows systematic comparison between regular and sub-contract workers. As this study shows, the conditions of employment under contractors are significantly worse than for regular miners. Sub-contracting has also been very damaging to the NUM. It produces new tensions within the union, between regular and sub-contract miners, and between union and ex-union members. Without a more informed understanding of what drives sub-contracting and an assessment of the real need for sub-contracting companies, it is unlikely that the NUM's attempts to regulate sub-contracting will bear fruit.

Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930

Journal Article Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880–1930 Get access Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880–1930. By Calderón Roberto R.. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000. xix + 294pp. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) Roberto M. Salmón Roberto M. Salmón University of Texas-Pan American Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 32, Issue 2, Summer 2001, Pages 237–238, https://doi.org/10.2307/3650783 Published: 01 May 2001

Mexican coal mining labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930

The years 1880 to 1930 mark the period in time in Texas' coal mining history known as the handloading era, during which the system of mining for coal by hand was both established and eliminated, giving way to a new era of advancing technologies and methods used in mines on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. The contributions of the large immigrant population who worked the mines, however, have long been overlooked by historians. Departing from the standard studies of Texas or mining which remain lodged within the nation-state, in Mexican Coal Mining Labor in Texas and Coahuila, 1880-1930, Roberto Calderon presents a transnational comparative framework for understanding the complex matrix of mining, investment capital, labor markets, railroad construction, and racial ideology in Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, during a period of economic growth and social disruption on both sides of the border. Placing industry within the political economy of both Mexico and the western United States, he presents an intriguing discussion of the establishment of the mines, the industrial and urban markets, and the life and work of workers and their response to changing conditions. With detailed research, he paints a vivid portrait of the industry at the time unlike any existing history. In so doing, Calderon revises the view that workers were careless and difficult to work with and documents their struggle for recognition and union organization. Using a rich array of archival, statistical, government, and periodical material, as well as personal accounts from those who lived the experience, Calderon brings a new approach to a subject usually only studied in terms of its geology. He also provides a specific demographic analysis of two important Texas border countries in coal production, Webb and Maverick, examining the influence of the immigrant labor population through such social variables as education, naturalization, literacy, and housing patterns. A final chapter details the workers' response to unions and the major labor actions that brought about changes in the general working conditions of the mines. Mexican Coal Mining Labor is an original contribution to the fields of Chicano and Borderlands history, Texas history, and labor history.

Rereading and Resistance

There is a particular photograph that comes to mind when the issue of black masculinity in South Africa is raised. It is a 1968 picture by Peter Magubane depicting more than a dozen black men, lined up and naked in what appears to be a dimly lit shower room. The photograph's caption states that the men are being inspected by a health official before being allowed to begin employment in farms and mines. Wenela is identified as a private organization in Johannesburg that recruits farm and mine labour in all the tribal areas.(1) The photograph intersects a number of discourses about social death and its consequent mourning, as well as sexuality, race, civility and other associated discourses that marked the second phase of intense colonial prohibitions in South Africa. Over the years this particular photograph has spurred a multitude of readings. These captions extend the historical and political relevance of photography and apartheid in South Africa, and suggest that the two cannot be kept separate (particularly if one understands the history and the politics of the construction of deviant peoples and subjectivities in colonialist, racist and sexist photographic discourses). In fact, as I came to later learn, one of the popular oral historical references informs that outside this particular room in which the photograph was taken, there was a signboard warning passersby of the presence of natives in a state of undress. My first reaction upon seeing this photograph, and reading the information about its nature and context, was a kind of cynical laughter. Of course this is not what the caption hoped to elicit - quite the contrary - even though some of those oral historical references that were later attached to it were indeed remembered with the same cynical laughter. In fact, the tone of Magubane's parenthetical statement in the caption, [s]ince we did this story in 1968, the men no longer have to strip like this, which is very offensive to Africans, establishes a serious political agenda for the photograph, and does not seem to anticipate a reading of the context different from that in which the photograph is read as a response to national crisis.(2) When I first read Looking for Trouble (1991), Kobena Mercer's rereading of Robert Mapplethorpe's black male nudes and semi-nudes, originally published in Transition, this photograph immediately sprung to mind. Although I generally accepted Mercer's argument, it was only later that I examined its implications. In the intervening years I had read Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953), Nadine Gordimer's An Occasion for Loving (1963), Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds (1986) and other books that deal with what most commentators refer to as the distortion of love relationships in apartheid South Africa. I sensed something terribly wrong with Mercer's rereading of what he identified as his initial misreading of Mapplethorpe's agenda in staging and photographing nude and semi-nude black men. Here was a critic, with an evidently sharp sense of irony and ambivalence, unnecessarily entangling himself in an of feeling, at precisely the moment he was claiming to shake himself of it. Concerning Mapplethorpe's Black Book, Mercer writes: When a friend lent me his copy of the book it circulated between us as an illicit and highly problematic object of desire. We were fascinated by the beautiful bodies and drawn in by the pleasure of looking as we went over the repertoire of images again and again. We wanted to look, but we didn't always find what we wanted to see. We were, of course, disturbed by the racial dimension of the imagery and, above all, angered by the aesthetic objectification that reduced these black male bodies to abstract visual things, silenced in their own right as subjects and serving only to enhance the name of the white gay male artist in the privileged world of art photography. In other words, we were stuck in an intransitive structure of feeling; caught out in a liminal experience of textual ambivalence. …

A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans

A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans. Directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson. 1995. 1/2 Video, Color. 59 min. Distributed by National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), 346 Ninth St., 2nd Fl., San Francisco, CA 94103. 16mm Film. $265. Video Rental: $75. Film Rental: $150. During final years of Korea's occupation by Japan, over 40,000 Koreans were sent-many forcibly conscripted-to work as laborers on southern Sakhalin Island, then a Japanese territory. When World War II came to an end, however, and all Sakhalin fell under Soviet rule, political circumstances prevented these displaced unfortunates from returning to their homeland, and their plight has since been largely ignored by outside world. A Forgotten People: The Sakhalin Koreans, a film written, directed and produced by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, devotes itself to allowing their moving story to be heard. The opening sequence pans slowly over attractive forested hillsides of Sakhalin, but beauty of land belies horror of stories recounted. As a plaintive soundtrack of classical Korean music sets a melancholy mood, encounter a litany of harrowing tales: interviewees describe how they were snatched from their families as young men and sent to a distant land to further imperial Japanese war effort. Their accounts tell of frequent beatings and appalling living conditions, marked by a meager diet, inadequate shelter, and intense cold; former mine laborers detail dangers of their work and attendant possibilities of disease, disfigurement, and death. The film captures recurrent use of animal similes in interviewees' self-presentation (e.g. the Japanese worked us like horses and oxen, we were like pigs in one room), and thus effectively evokes dehumanization they experienced: those sent to Sakhalin became, quite literally, beasts of burden. But editorial presentation suggests an even more fundamental effacement of their identities: we've become nameless souls, sighs one elderly gentleman. The title itself strikes a keynote which recurs several times: Koreans of Sakhalin see themselves as exiled from their homes and then abandoned by world. The voiceover narrative concurs, noting upon more than one occasion that no one remembered these people. The film highlights particularly an everpresent longing for land left behind. Again and again meet people struggling with burden of their memories: one miner's daughter describes nostalgically how she came from a village with a beautiful river and mountains, from which she was uprooted, and traveled with her family to a cold, cold country. For many, Korea becomes an idealized motherland of distant past seen in contrast to frozen land of their more recent lives. Although notion of han (often paraphrased as unrequited resentment or sorrow), so central to Korean popular discourse, is never invoked directly in production, both self-presentation of interviewees and narrative viewpoint are thoroughly informed by this concept. One Sakhalin resident relates a friend's deathbed words, which veritably burst with han:if you ever go back to Korea, tell everyone our story, story kept in our chests. In most cases self is presented first and foremost as an ethnic subject, and those interviewed often become, above all, exiled Koreans. …

The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan.

In The Ashio Riot of 1907, Kazuo Nimura explains why the workers at the Ashio copper mine - Japan's largest mining concern and one of the largest such operations in the world - joined together for three days of rioting against the Furukawa Company in February 1907. Exploring an event in labour history unprecedented in the Japan of that time, Nimura uses this riot as a launching point to analyse the social, economic, and political structure of early industrial Japan. As such, The Ashio Riot of 1907 functions as a powerful critique of Japanese scholarly approaches to labour economics and social history. Arguing against the spontaneous resistance theory that has long dominated Japanese social history accounts, Nimura traces the labourers' unrest prior to the riots as well as the development of the event itself. Drawing from such varied sources as governmental records, media reports, and secret legal documents relating to the riot, Nimura discusses the active role of the metal mining workers' trade organization and the stance taken by mine labour bosses. He examines how technological development transformed labour-management relations and details the common characteristics of the labourers who were involved in the riot movement. In the course of this historical analysis, Nimura takes on some of the most influential critical perspectives on Japanese social and labour history. With a preface by Andrew Gordon and an introduction and prologue written especially for this translated edition, Nimura's prize-winning study - originally published in Japan - will interest scholars of labour history as well as Japanese social and intellectual history.

Costs of occupational lung disease in South African gold mining

Abstract This paper analyses the costs of gold mining related occupational lung disease to the mining industry, the state health services and the mine labour sending communities. The extent of the liability of unpaid occupational lung disease compensation is estimated. It is shown that there is a high prevalence of uncompensated occupational lung disease in ex-mine-workers and that much of the cost of this disease is being externalised from the industry. The total cost, both internalised and externalised, of gold mining related lung disease represents 6 per cent of the 1996 wage bill and 2.6 per cent of the gold mining industry's contribution to South Africa's GDP in 1996. Better information on costs is critical for planning profitable and safe gold mining and also for the planning and budgeting of health care services.

Crossing Boundaries: Mine Migrancy in a Democratic South Africa

This book highlights the fundamentally bounded character of mining and migrancy in South Africa by understanding the complexity and depth of the problem. The book consists mainly of edited papers presented at a conference on Transforming Mine Migrancy in the 1990s . The first section traces: the entrenched character of migrancy and the changes in the system and the history of mine migrancy and the erosion of the classical system of long-distance oscillating migration. The second section focuses on the living conditions of partners and wives with emphasis on the forms of accommodation. The third section explores the health implications of continued reliance on migrancy in the mining industry particularly job stress health and perceptions of migrant mine workers as well as the effect of tuberculosis on the mining industry. The fourth section discusses the developments in the rural source areas of migrant workers with emphasis on Malawian migrant labor and politics prospects of migrant mine labor in Mozambique employment patterns among Lesotho migrants and the macroeconomic statistical evidence from Lesotho. The fifth section deals with the economic causes of the experienced crisis and the responses at the center. The sixth and last chapter presents the future of mine migrancy in southern Africa the changes and potential role of Teba and mine migrancy in a democratic South Africa.

Application of Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring in Bijolia Mining Area of Rajasthan

Impact of raining Vindhyan Sandstone, at 3D centres spread over 617 sq kms, by Open cast method in Bijolia area, Rajasthan on the environment, both trataral and social, assessed ever a period of 20 years (1971-91), revealed that it had affected nearly 20 times the area of lease. The study was earried out using Multidate remote sensing date for 1984 and 1991 and topographical maps of 1971, for change detection in land use pattern with the increase in mining activity. Whereas area covered fey mining activity increased by 35.3 times in 20 years, the forest cover decreased by 46.3 per cent The dense forest decreased by 90 per cent and the land under agriculture decreased by 12 per cent Consequently the waste land increased by 67.4 per cent. Hydrologtcal regime was affected by way of blocking the channels and lowering of water table. Solid particulate matter (SPM) values in mining centres were found to be more than double the normal, leading to diseases related to tungs and liver such as Silieosis. Bronchitis, Asthama and T.B. Nearly 25 per cent of workers were found to suffer from one or the other disease. 50 per cent of mine workers suffer from malaria as a consequence of breeding mosquitoes in stagnant waters m mine pits and labour colonies Noise levels at the active zones like drilling, blasting and mine service stations range from 96 to 125 dB as against the permissible limit of 75 dB affecting health and mental facility of mine workers.

The Barriers to Proletarianization: Bolivian Mine Labour, 1826–1918

Labour history in Latin America has, to a great degree, followed the models set by the rich historiography in Europe and North America. Other than a justifiable concern with the peculiarities in production for export of primary goods, much of the Latin American historiography suggests that the process of labour formation was rather similar to that of the North Atlantic economies, only lagging behind, as did industrialization in this region of the world. However, this was not the case. The export orientation of the mining industry and its peripheral location in the world economy introduced certain modifications not found in the North Atlantic economies. The vagaries of the mining industry, exacerbated by the severe swings in raw material prices, created conditions which hindered proletarianization and modified the consciousness of the mine workers.

Labour and Gold in Fiji

Glossary Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Making and managing a monopoly 1930-50 2. Mobilising mine labour 1934-50: who, why and how? 3. Employment and earnings 4. Life and work on the frontier 1934-50 5. Labour resistance and conflict 1935-50 6. Difficult years: coping and copping it 1950-70 Epilogue Appendices References.

‘Money with Dignity’: Migrants, Minelords and the Cultural Politics of the South African Gold Standard Crisis, 1920–33

This paper takes as its point of departure a simple fact that has gone largely unnoticed in the historical and ethnographic literature of migrant mine labour: prior to 1933 mineworkers were paid in gold. It is argued that the ideas and practices associated with the control and transmission of metallic money were at the heart of the experience of migrant labour before the crisis and formed a major part of the self-definition of migrant gold miners during the 1920s. Moreover, both the practices and ideas of African mineworkers were reciprocally linked to the global political struggles taking place over the gold standard. From the First World War to the Christmas of 1932, the South African and Imperial states and mining capital were involved in a controversy over the form of the South African and international money supplies. Whilst in appearance an abstract and mysterious debate, the contest over the form of the money supply laid the foundations for a system of value that penetrated into the daily lives and politics of many southern Africans. Chief amongst these were hundreds of thousands of migrant mine-workers. Following from this, the paper posits a re-interpretation of the gold standard crisis. The turning point that coincided with the new year of 1933 was not merely an economic change; it constituted a major transformation of the form, value, velocity and politics of money throughout Southern Africa. Coincidently, the crisis was an economic and cultural transition for the mining industry itself and marked a dramatic re-definition of the terms of economic conflict between workers and managers. Finally, this paper calls for a new periodization of capitalist development in Southern Africa that meshes together the cultural and economic dimensions of historical processes in a manner that foregrounds the experience of the African working class.

The condition of mine labour in Turkey: injuries to miners in Zonguldak, 1942–90

There are few students of development and modernization who would deny a concern with quality of life, but industrial injury remains a neglected indicator of this. It is an indicator which exists for the Zonguldak coalfield in Turkey by virtue of very detailed records, often handwritten, a complete set of which goes back to 1942. Accordingly, it is this year that marks the starting point for our enquiry, between which time and its end point in 1990 these miners experienced a quarter of a million injuries. An attempt to account for such human suffering requires no apology. But beyond this concern a further question arises: can the rise and fall of injuries over time be related to changes in the nature of the political economy? In the advanced capitalist societies much commentary on the liberalization of economic policy suggests that such a relationship is to be expected and there is some empirical evidence to support this.' But what is the relation in the Turkish case? The article deals with injuries and not with health (adverse effects on which can take much longer to emerge). Zonguldak, which is in north-west Turkey, bordering the Black Sea, has been the country's sole source of hard coal since the middle of the nineteenth

Migrant Mine labour from Mozambique: Employment prospects and policy options in the 1990s

(1995). Migrant Mine labour from Mozambique: Employment prospects and policy options in the 1990s. Journal of Contemporary African Studies: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 91-120.

The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker’: Medical Research and the Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903–36

In 1903 the South African mining industry began recruiting African labor from Central Africa in order to shore up their labor supplies. From the outset, Central African recruitment was problematic, for Central African mine workers died at very high rates. The primary source of Central African mortality was pneumonia. In response to this high mortality the Union government threatened to close down Central African recruitment, a threat which they carried out in 1913. From 1911 to 1933, the mining industry fought to maintain, and then after 1913 to regain access to Central African labor. Of central importance in this struggle were efforts to develop a vaccine against pneumonia. While the mine medical community failed to produce an effective vaccine against pneumonia, the Chamber of Mines successfully employed the promise of a vaccine eventually to regain access to Central African Labor in 1934. The mines achieved this goal by controlling the terrain of discourse on the health of Central African workers, directing attention away from the unhealthy conditions of mine labor and toward the imagined cultural and biological peculiarities of these workers. In doing so the mines constructed a new social category, ‘tropical workers’ or ‘tropicals’. The paper explores the political, economic and intellectual environment within which this cultural construction was created and employed.

The Creation of Identity: Colonial Society in Bolivia and Tanzania

Many colonial regimes appropriate traditional symbols of power to enhance authority. In many cases this appropriation results in the hardening of more transitory political divisions among subject people into ethnic, national, or tribal ones. Colonialism often, in essence, creates different identities for subject peoples. For example, the East India Company (E.I.C.) and royal colonial government in India manipulated caste and religion to carry out a policy of divide and rule. Moreover, the E.I.C. and later the Raj attempted to create a European-style landed elite that could promote development of agriculture, maintain social control in the countryside and, perhaps most important, collect taxes owed to the government. The Raj attempted to place the structures of power that evolved within the framework of the symbols of Moghul legitimacy, going so far as to create a hybrid traditional style of architecture used in many public buildings that mixed elements from both Hindu and Muslim buildings. In South Africa, colonial legislation, as seen in the process begun by the Glen Gray Act of 1894, resulted in the proletarianization of the African population by creating tribal reservations without enough resources to support all the people often arbitrarily defined as members of a particular tribe. And, as seen in studies of mine labor, coloniallegislation also defined a distinctive legal status for workers.

Blacks in the Diaspora

The history of foreign relations between Europe and Africa in the four centuries before colonization is the history of slavery and violence, linking up with the story of Africans in the diaspora today. The exploratory activities of men like Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci led to European occupation of lands like Mexico, the West Indies, and the Americas and the decimation of indigenous people. The decimination process resulted in an acute shortage of labor in the numerous mines and plantations producing sugar and coffee, which were highly prized in Europe. The Portuguese solved this labor shortage by beginning to import Africans from Africa. The sugar barons of England then moved to sponsor British merchants in the big inhuman business that was to last over 400 years, carrying away healthy and strong Africans (especially those 15-35 years old) to build the pillars of Europe's prosperity while totally ignoring or suppressing all protests. Thus in 1775, Lord Dartmouth, then British secretary of state for the colonies, speaking of Europeans' capturing, selling, and buying Africans, said, We cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage in any traffic so beneficial to the nation (Davidson, 1971). African rulers who opposed the European activities were forcefully replaced with quislings, and African communities that refused to supply Africans were attacked or threatened with destruction by European warships. For example, in 1843, French plunderers threatened the Efik people

“Our Suffering with the Taxco Tribute”: Involuntary Mine Labor and Indigenous Society in Central New Spain

A L T H O U G H Spanish invaders of Mesoamerica were seeking gold, it was silver that made New Spain a populous central area of colonialism. Large-scale silver extraction began after 1550, and, by end of sixteenth century, bullion (some of it gold but most silver) represented 8o percent of early Mexico's total exports. The industry would have its ups and downs, but by independence colony had produced 300 million marks of silver, equivalent to about two and a half billion ounces.' While best known and most thoroughly studied source of this precious metal is Mexican North, New Spain also had significant silver mining centers at its heart. Important among them was Taxco, usually ranked fourth or fifth in overall output; in 1590 its refiners used more mercury than their counterparts anywhere else, including Zacatecas. It was in Taxco that celebrated don Jose de la Borda, known in eighteenth century as the first miner of world, made his fortune at Chontalpa, a silver mine that produced over two million pesos during its most productive years in eighteenth century.2 Unlike northern Mexican mines, Taxco was located in a thickly