by Lucille Beals

Created on: September 14, 2008

John L. Lewis, that bushy-browed labor organizer of the coal mines, described the mine owners of his day with this wonderful word: pusillanimous.

The first time I read it, I didn't know what it meant, but it sounded pretty bad. I looked it up. It was probably one of the longest words I'd ever encountered - it was bound to be a terrible thing. Raised on Gunga Din and Beau Geste, I thought, safe in my library chair, that to be cowardly was deeply shameful. And it was; mine owners were cowardly, or pusillanimous, because they refused to address the inhumane treatment that was routinely exhibited towards their workers.

In those days (John L. Lewis' days), a miner was paid 50 cents a day and had to cut his own timber to shore up the mine where he worked. I suppose he had to haul it there himself, too. There must have been a lot of trees close by the mine portal then. The miner also lived in a company house, and bought groceries - mostly salt pork and corn meal, what else? - at outlandish prices. Safety concerns? There weren't any, until John L. brought the mine owners to their knees through a series of strikes and perhaps some mayhem.

In these days of outsourcing, you may wonder how the labor movement got started. Think about the why, the causes and effects, and give a tip of the hat to those who did something about the problem. Coal at that time couldn't have cost more than one or two dollars a ton, but conditions prevailed that made absentee landlords wealthy.

Now, a job as a miner pays pretty well. Miners are trained before they are hired, and mines are inspected on a regular basis for safety violations. It is almost difficult to believe that egregious safety violations once occurred on a regular basis, or that workers were virtually enslaved by mine owners.

Remember that song: "Another day older and deeper in debt / St. Peter don' you call me, 'cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store..." It no longer applies. Too bad it wasn't written 70 years earlier. Maybe John L. wouldn't have had to use words like "pusillanimous" to get the attention he deserved had our culture been given a kick in the pants at that time because of a folk song.

As the pendulum swings, perhaps abuses by the labor unions in general have contributed to the outflow of jobs to foreign countries. What we need now is someone with a rich vocabulary and a lot of courage to describe the problem as it is today and return the working person to jobs in this country.

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