Senator BRUCE. What form do these casualties assume?

Mr. LEWIS. Do you mean the manner of the death and injuries? Senator BRUCE. Yes; the nature of the injuries and how they are caused.

Mr. LEWIS. Caused by gas explosions, burning by gas, powder explosion, miss-shots that explode prematurely or later, falls of slate, falling down shafts, caught in equipment machinery underground; a manifold number of ways. Explosions levy the greatest toll in the industry.

Senator GOODING. Mr. Lewis, have you any information regarding the percentage of accidents and deaths in any other industry as compared with the coal industry?

Mr. LEWIS. Yes, Senator. I think without any question that the percentage in the coal industry is greater than that in any other industry. I understand that the Bureau of Mines employs in its private computation this sort of a formula: For every man killed they figure that 14 are injured. So if the industry kills 2,500 men in a year, the number of injuries would approximate fourteen times that much in the industry. That is the bituminous industry and not the anthracite.

Senator COUZENS. You spoke of the fluctuation in the number of miners. Where are these additional men augmented from that take the place of the men who are moved out of the industry in strikes, etc.?

Mr. LEWIS. For instance, in western Pennsylvania they gather up men from every known place. They go into the cotton belts of the South and bring in negro labor. They go into the unemployment centers of the country and gather up men and bring them in there. They are not efficient but they are the means to an end in a strikebreaking program and they do count as men employed.

Senator GOODING. We found in some cases quite a number of farmers and farmers' boys employed in the mines in Pennsylvania. Mr. LEWIS. I do not doubt that that is entirely true, Senator. They draw upon the local farm community for any casual labor that might be available and draft them into the industry if possible. But they ship vast numbers of them from every known point in the country where they are available, without regard to their qualifications or ability. Most of these men engaged in the preliminaries of breaking a strike do not remain long. They are promptly weeded out after the strike is broken and more efficient men are put in their place. They are simply the instrumentalities of crushing the union, and some of them learn a little about the coal industry. The great majority of them do not. The casualties among them are very heavy. They butcher them up like sheep in those mines because they have no regard for their welfare. It is a matter of no great difference to the employer what happens to men of this character.

The CHAIRMAN. How long does it take a man to become an efficient coal miner?

Mr. LEWIS. That. Senator, is

The CHAIRMAN. It is more or less an academic question?

Mr. LEWIS. It is more or less an academic question, Mr. Chairman, for this reason: The man who is raised in the industry becomes a miner par excellence. The man who reaches the age of maturity

before he goes in is not so adaptable and never does become as efficient a miner as the man who has been trained for it systematically. It also depends upon the age of the man, his personal characteristics, etc. But it is not reasonable to suppose that any man can be trained to be an efficient producing miner in any short length of time-six months or a year that is required to break a strike.

May I say right here that our miners in America are the most efficient in the world. The production per man per day in American mines is more than four times greater than that of any civilized country in the world.

Senator COUZENS. To what extent is that due to improved machinery?

Mr. LEWIS. It is due partly to that and also to our engineers and technicians and methods of mining. The production per man per day in the United Kingdom of Great Britain is probably 1,800 pounds or thereabouts, less than a ton. Our own production per man per day is 4.56 tons per day per man.

Senator GOODING. Mr. Lewis, what is the percentage of deaths in the coal mines in this country as compared with England or other countries.

Mr. LEWIS. We kill just about three times as many per million tons of coal.

Senator FESS. How do you account for that? Why should we have more accidents in the mines of this country than they have in England or other countries that are producing coal?

Mr. Lewis. It costs money to save lives in a coal mine.

It costs money to put an adequate quantity of air in the mines to keep out

the

gas in order to prevent an explosive mixture from being formed that will, perhaps, kill 100 men. It costs money to properly timber a mine, to sprinkle a mine, to rock test a mine, to ventilate a mine, to inspect a mine. The fierce competition in the industry acts as a constant pressure upon the operators to save money at the expense of human life.

If he needs a new 26-foot fan to put enough air in that mine to keep the gases out, he can not afford to buy a fan, perhaps, and sell his coal at the price at which he is compelled to sell it. The result is that he does not put in the fan and 150 men die in that mine some day.

The CHAIRMAN. Is there any sort of State or governmental regulation?

Mr. LEWIS. There are mining laws and State enforcing departments in practically all of the producing States; and these State departments find themselves constantly up against the proposition. that the operator says he is not able to spend the money to put in the safety regulations or equipment ordered by the State mining department. It is a constant pressure. We kill more men in American mines because we have more mines that can not afford not to kill them, paradoxical as that may sound. We pay an awful price for the conditions in our industry to-day.

In August, 1925, the Pittsburgh Coal Co., operating in western Pennsylvania, and generally recognized in the financial world as a Mellon company, which also had a contract with the United Mine Workers of America that did not expire until March 31, 1927, posted

notices of wage reductions and abrogated its contract with the union. Due to its large financial resources and political affiliations, this company was able to inagurate a nonunion drive in a big way to deunionize its coal mines. Wholesale employment of coal and iron police, detectives, and deputy sheriffs followed. Former employees were evicted from their homes and a reign of terror and intimidation inaugurated that has excelled for brutality and lawlessness any union-busting endeavor this Nation has witnessed in recent years.. The story of the outrages in western Pennsylvania, perpetrated upon the innocent populace by thugs and gunmen employed by the Pittsburgh Coal Co., will be submitted to this committee in a separate report.

All during this peroid of contract abrogation the United Mine Workers sought to show the utter futility of reduced wages improving the coal trade in any manner whatsoever. As a matter of fact, the wholesale contract repudiation merely operated to increase internal competition and render bituminous coal production more unprofitable in these fields where. the union contracts were scrapped. The union characterized this onslaught against American wages and American living conditions as being an attack upon American prog ress, and in so doing the union has been sustained by all the leading agencies of American economic thought. In the very year 1925, when these wholesale contract abrogations were taking place and the big drive to deunionize the coal mines of these regions inaugurated, the Standard Daily Trade Service, an economic trade forecast publication, which, by no stretch of the imagination, could be termed a spokesman for the United Mine Workers of America or the cause it represents, in surveying the problem of coal, had the following to say relative to wage reductions:

REDUCE WAGES

We are much less impressed by this panacea than are most investors in coal properties.

Assume that union wages throughout the bituminous fields were reduced 25 per cent forthwith. This would merely mean a horizontal and uniform reduction of costs throughout the union fields. From a competitive standpoint, it would leave the status of production precisely where it was before the wage reduction was made. It would redistribute some of the coal business, giving back to the union operators the markets that they have temporarily lost to the nonunion operators.

But a wage cut would not in the slightest affect the overcapacity of the industry as a whole; it would not lessen competition throughout the industry as a whole; it would not in the aggregate increase profits unless prices could be pegged at a level which would not yield to competition.

And even were considerably lower prices for coal to result, they would not appreciably affect the total volume of demand for coal; fuel oil is the only important substitute that alternates with coal on a price basis, and it is estimated that all the industrial plants which change over from fuel oil to coal when coal is cheaper do not make a difference of more than 2 to 5 per cent in the total demand for coal.

Lower union wages would be excellent for operators in the union fields; excellent for consumers of coal; disturbing for the nonunion operators; but probably of negligible effect so far as the industry as a whole is concerned, so far as the total sum of profits and the total volume of demand is concerned.

The result of the nonunion program of the big companies which abrogated their union agreements has been to dislocate the normal relationship of the bituminous coal industry within the affected coal fields and as between coal fields comprising the States of Pennsyl

vania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Primarily, the evil of overdevelopment operates to promote disastrous internal competition, but the mere psychological effect of the big companies abrogating their contracts, and in the end completely deunionizing the immediate coal fields in which they operate, has been that of undermining confidence and thereby extending the normal internal competition to the external competitive relationship, which, through fear, if not fact, has depressed coal prices to a level that the price obtained for coal no longer represents a return for the coal produced. In fact, coal-sale realizations at the present time do not even represent the capital assets and labor outlay costs of production. The bituminous-coal industry to-day is in the worst demoralized state that it has ever known, notwithstanding it is admitted that for the past 75 years, excepting the war period, the industry has been a chronic sufferer from its own sins of overcapitalization, overdevelopment, and the naturally resulting excess of man

power.

In certain sections of West Virginia and Kentucky the work day has been lengthened from 8 hours to 10 hours; wages have been reduced to $2, $3, and $4 a day; mines in these sections are only operating two or three days a week; in fact, it is admitted by many operators that the earnings of the men employed in the mines of these coal fields are so meager that they will not enable them to meet their company-store bills, covering only the barest necessary articles to sunstain life.

In Pennsylvania and Ohio, where wages have been reduced from 30 to 60 per cent, coal is being mined and marketed without profit to the operators, while the mining communities are being steadily ground down to pauperized levels.

A larger portion of the coal companies are in bankruptcy to-day than at any other time in American history. Financial reports reveal that among the coal companies making public their financial statements, the operators in the nonunion coal fiends, operating with inefficient labor and paying un-American wages, are in a worse financial plight than is the case of the operators in the union coal fields who still maintain the union rates of pay.

In 1927 the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, at the behest of the Ohio operators, indulged in a mock investigation of the Ohio coal industry, directed by one Samuel S. Wyer, a consulting engineer. Fulfilling the purpose of his employment, Mr. Wyer offered only one solution, which was that of a pauperized wage scale. Mr. Wyer represents the type of man whom the coal operators of the nonunion coal fields frequently use to mold public opinion in support of their incompetence. Mr. Wyer will be remembered by members of the United States Senate as the American engineer who faked a report condemning Canadian water-power development and then used without authority the frank of the Smithsonian Institute to give his report official color, and was, on May 18, 1925, publicly denounced in the United States Senate by Senator Norris and others as a fakir, which was followed by a proper apology to the Canadian Government. Sometimes our economic judgment is sustained by strange sources, and immediately following the Wyer report on the Ohio coal industry the Daily West Virginian, published at Fairmont, W. Va., in the heart of the coal region where wages had been de

pressed below the nominal requirements for workers existence, editorially rebuked the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for its furtherance of a wage-reduction program. This journal had witnessed the business depressions that followed in the wake of wage reductions and possessed first-hand information of the misery and suffering that such uneconomic operations fastened upon innocent people. The editorial follows:

[From the West Virginian, Fairmont, W. Va., December 6, 1926]

MINE WAGES AND BUSINESS

That Ohio Chamber of Commerce review of the coal situation which concludes that the unreasonably high labor rates in the Ohio mines are responsible for an unnecessary burden on the public, it may be all right for the purpose for which it was intended, but it will not increase the reputation of the members of the committee that signed it either for familiarity with the coal industry or with a knowledge of modern business.

There is another way of looking at this mine-wage situation which ought to get more attention than it does. When the mine wage gets too low business over a large section of the country suffers acutely. One would think that bankers, business men, and chamber of commerce officers would consider that. but the Ohio report is renewed evidence that they do not.

Coal is mined on a commercial scale in 26 States. Over large sections of five or six States it is the most important industry. A vast commercial fabric has been built up in the process of making it possible for the miners to follow the coal. There are wholesale and retail stores, banks, churches, newspapers. doctors, lawyers, and other professional people, city and other local government, and all that goes into modern civilization. And it all has to suffer periodically because there is a defeatist state of mind in the coal industry and the kind of thinking that goes into that Ohio report characterizes most of the so-called business investigations made in this country. Which is to say, no thinking at all.

It is time some one began to give a little consideration to the welfare of the coal country. It surely is entitled to equal solicitude with a coal-buying public which is so chuckleheaded that it never gets anxious to buy coal until there is a runaway market.

Business prosperity in the coal country depends upon mine wages. The miner is not a thing apart, as this Ohio committee seems to think, but an important part of the community and what he makes determines in a large measure how the community shall live. They are beginning to understand that up in industrial New England, even if they do not understand it in Ohio, and the Wall Street Journal in a recent issue quotes a member of the Massachusetts Legislature as saying that the new understanding of the economic importance of the spending power of the worker probably will lead to a new taxing policy in that State.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Lewis, you discuss what you conceive to be the remedy for this situation, do you, before you conclude?

Mr. LEWIS. Yes, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well.

Mr. LEWIS. The overdeveloped condition of the bituminous-coal industry has made it an easy prey for the railroads, public utilities. and other large consumers of coal. Prior to the signing of the Jacksonville wage agreement, negotiated for the purpose of stabilizing the coal industry, the railroads, public utilities, and large commercial users contracted for their coal supplies on a yearly basis. In 1925 internal competition within fields, due to the continuity of operations and a 100 per cent railroad-car supply, became so intense that the railroads, public utilities, and big consumers began to place their coal purchases on a spot market, or month-to-month basis. Seizing the demoralized state of coal as an opportunity to further nonunion