Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

The Ohio-Pennsylvania Coal Strike of 1873

150 years ago

The Ohio-Pennsylvania

Coal Strike

of 1873

150 years ago coal workers in Ohio and Pennsylvania declared a strike in response to unacceptable wages. 7,500 brave miners answered the call of their class and took to the picket lines, they acted with militant bravery in their struggle. However the strike ended in failure after the capitalists used several dirty tricks to subvert the strike and thus the miners were forced back into the mines at the same wages. We must study the tricks the capitalists used in this action inorder to understand how to combat them.

The primary tactic of the bourgeoisie to break strikes, then and now, is using minority workers and the unemployed masses as strikebreakers. In the Ohio Pennsylvania strike The Capitalists mobilized the reserve army of unemployed Italian immigrants as strikebreakers. This is not far off how the capitalists exploit our immigrant comrades today. by using a carrot and stick approach, such as offering better wages or social postions and then threatening actions such as deportation and fascist violence the capitalist class attempts to pit immigrant workers against native ones. We must not let this happen, historically the working class movement in America has struggled to unite workers of separate racial, ethnic and national backgrounds, only the original CPUSA, prior to its Browderist revisionist decline, was able to unite the proletariat of all colors. The later parties were unable to unite the American proletariat and lead to various petty-bourgeoisie and semi-revolutionary groups such as the Black Panther Party and the American Indian 'ovement.

We must not let racial sentiment impede the class struggle, under the red flag and the world party of the proletariat we are all equal. The US section must strive to unify all American workers under the banner of the Comintern (SH).

American and foreign workers - a united class front of struggle against the exploitation of the capitalists !

Our united strike front against the strikebreaking front of the state, capitalists and reactionary trade union leaders !

Sources

1873 coal miners' strike

A 20% wage cut was at the heart of this coal miners' strike in the northeastern valleys of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Miners demanded a small pay increase per ton of coal, but their efforts ultimately failed. With thousands of miners on strike, mine owners hired African-American and Italian replacement workers, which sparked a violent backlash from the strikers. The employers' use of immigrant substitute workers meant that the miners were unable to successfully organize.

The coal miners' strike of 1873 was meant to be a firm protest against cuts in the already low wages in the Mahoning Valley. Unfortunately, although it lasted for eight months, it never achieved the desired goal. In fact, the practice by the rich mine owners to hire immigrants from Europe (including many Italians looking for any kind of employment) to replace the strikers forced the organised miners to return to work at the prevailing wages in order not to lose their jobs altogether. During the strike and also afterwards, there were violent episodes caused by increasing clashes and tensions between the strikers and their replacements, who were then dismissed once the unrest ended. This constituted the first documented 'wave' of arrivals of southern Italians in the Mahoning valley.

Miners in the Mahoning Valley declared a strike in response to the operators' decision to reduce wages by 20 percent. The Church Hill miners were the first who refused to accept the cut; they walked off the job on New Year's Day, 1873. A month later, the work stoppage remained solid with little sign of weakening. Anxious to gain the upper hand, coal operators recruited destitute Italian immigrants from New York City to break the miners' walkout.

Unlike subsequent generations of Italian immigrants, these first arrivals had no contacts or job offers in the United States. The penniless immigrants ended up at government expense in a large shelter on Ward's Island, on the grounds of an insane asylum. Shipload after shipload of economic refugees from Italy continued to arrive, overcrowding the holding facility. When the coal operators from the Mahoning Valley sent recruiters to tap this idle labor force, 200 Italians responded to their call between March and May of 1873. One group arrived in Coalburg, Hubbard Township, and the second, a few months later, in Church Hill, Liberty Township.

The settled population of mostly British and Welsh miners reacted violently to the newcomers whom they saw as foreigners threatening their jobs and way of life. Coal operators evicted strikers while giving lodgings to the Italians. In Church Hill, families of strikers lost their homes during a raging March blizzard. Soon after, miners torched properties belonging to the Church Hill Coal Company. Italian labor was keeping the coal pits open and coal miners were starving. By the end of May, it was obvious that the strike had failed. When miners agreed to work under the hated pay cuts, the operators fired the Italian substitutes.

Animosity lingered and anti-immigrant hatred reached a climax in Church Hill on July 27. An angry mob of coal miners and supporters set fire to a boarding house that lodged immigrants. The rioters then attacked boarders fleeing the burning structure. They managed to kill one, Giovanni Chiesa. Several rioters went to prison, but the words "scab" and "Italian" were spoken in the same sentence for many years.

In the days after the collapse of the strike, some Italians found work as general labor in the mines. The railroads employed others. Although most of the high-value coal was gone by 1880, the area's blast furnaces, limestone quarries and construction industries provided employment for Italian workmen, though often as contract labor under the thumb of an exploiting padrone, or labor boss.

The strikebreakers of 1873 were the first Italians to settle in the Mahoning Valley. They are our founding families. While records are sparse, a few Italian names from Church Hill's coal camp days have survived: Giovanni Chiesa aka John Church, Michele Leopardo (Lopardo?), Martino Cereghino, Gaetano Cangiano, Rocco Cupola, Francis Marron (Francesco Marrone?), and Salvator Girard (Salvatore Girardi?). In the following years, heavy industry created demand for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Thousands of Italians immigrated here to fill that need, despite their early exploitation in coal country. In the process, the newcomers created the large Italian American community of the Mahoning Valley.

It hardly seems possible that today's suburban Liberty Township could have witnessed such contention and upheaval. Thanks to contemporary press coverage of the Coal Miners' Strike of 1873, authors Joe Tucciarone and Ben Lariccia are able to document the arrival of the Mahoning Valley's first Italians in their unpublished study: "The Coalburg Italians: Coal, Immigration, and Labor Strife in Ohio's Mahoning Valley."