A major confrontation over wages and labor organization entered a decisive phase in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields. The Miners and Laborers’ Amalgamated Association had demanded a 15 percent increase in the wage basis during August. Working jointly with the Knights of Labor, its leaders established September 10 as the deadline for anthracite operators either to grant the increase or enter negotiations. Operators who refused faced a strike. The ultimatum represented one of the most ambitious attempts since the labor upheavals of the 1870s to coordinate workers across Pennsylvania’s separate anthracite districts.
The movement developed from several years of renewed organization following the destruction of earlier miners’ unions. In 1884, miners in the Schuylkill region organized the Miners and Laborers’ Amalgamated Association. Its membership included English, Welsh, German, and other mine workers, while many Irish miners remained associated with the Knights of Labor. Competition between the organizations weakened their bargaining position, but by 1885 they had established a joint committee to coordinate labor demands. Their cooperation demonstrated an attempt to overcome organizational and ethnic divisions that had historically limited collective action in the anthracite fields.
The September 10 strike call produced sharply different results across Pennsylvania’s coal regions. In the Wyoming-Lackawanna field, where the organizations lacked sufficient strength, miners largely ignored the strike call. Conditions differed substantially in the Schuylkill and Lehigh districts. In the Schuylkill region, the Philadelphia and Reading interests, which exercised enormous influence over mining and transportation, entered negotiations shortly before the deadline. The resulting compromise granted an 8 percent wage increase through January 1, 1888, pending developments elsewhere. Most independent Schuylkill operators followed the Reading arrangement, temporarily preventing a general walkout there.
The Lehigh region became the principal center of resistance. Operators there refused the workers’ demand for a 15 percent increase, and approximately 20,000 miners stopped work. The Lehigh strike therefore transformed the September 10 deadline from a negotiating threat into a prolonged industrial struggle. Communities around Hazleton and elsewhere in the Lehigh field became central to the confrontation. The dispute also demonstrated the growing participation of Southern and Eastern European immigrant miners, whose increasing presence was changing the demographic composition of Pennsylvania’s anthracite workforce.
The strike soon became more than a wage dispute. Operators attempted to maintain production, employed replacement workers, and used their economic control over housing and company stores as leverage against strikers. Organized labor and local communities developed relief systems to sustain miners and their families. Merchants in coal towns sometimes extended credit or participated in relief efforts because prolonged mine closures affected the entire commercial economy of communities dependent upon anthracite production. The conflict consequently exposed the close relationship between mine employment, local commerce, housing, transportation, and corporate authority throughout northeastern Pennsylvania.
The temporary Schuylkill settlement eventually collapsed. When the Philadelphia and Reading interests refused to continue the wage arrangement into 1888, Schuylkill miners joined the broader struggle in January. Their entry expanded the confrontation at a moment when Lehigh miners had already endured months without normal wages. The prolonged dispute drew congressional attention, and a federal committee investigated labor conditions in Pennsylvania’s anthracite districts. Testimony revealed the difficult economic and working circumstances surrounding the industry, placing Pennsylvania’s coal conflict within the national debate over industrial labor relations during the Gilded Age.
The miners ultimately failed to secure their original objectives. During February 1888, workers began returning to the mines as the financial strain of the prolonged shutdown intensified. Schuylkill organizations abandoned the strike later that month, and the Lehigh forces formally capitulated on March 4. The defeat severely weakened both the Miners and Laborers’ Amalgamated Association and the Knights of Labor within the anthracite industry. Neither organization regained its former position among Pennsylvania mine workers.
The historical significance of September 10, 1887, therefore extends beyond the immediate wage demand. The deadline marked a major attempt at coordinated labor action across Pennsylvania’s anthracite regions and demonstrated both the potential and limitations of interregional union cooperation. The strike revealed major differences among the Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Wyoming-Lackawanna fields, showed the increasing importance of immigrant workers in organized labor, and exposed the economic power that coal and railroad companies exercised over mining communities. Its defeat closed an important phase of nineteenth-century anthracite unionism, while the unresolved disputes over wages, recognition, corporate power, and working conditions continued into the labor struggles that followed.
References / More Knowledge:
Aurand, Harold W. “The Anthracite Strike of 1887–1888.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 35, no. 2 (April 1968): 169–185. Penn State University Libraries. https://journals.psu.edu/phj/article/download/23295/23064/0
Aurand, Harold W. “Early Mine Workers’ Organizations in the Anthracite Region.” Pennsylvania History 58, no. 4 (October 1991): 298–310. Penn State University Libraries. https://journals.psu.edu/phj/article/download/24915/24684
Aurand, Harold W. From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869–1897. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971. https://temple.manifoldapp.org/read/from-the-molly-maguires-to-the-united-mine-workers-the-social-ecology-of-an-industrial-union-1869-1897/section/3020654d-de3f-4b69-bbab-cdfc7cc37402
Blatz, Perry K. Democratic Miners: Work and Labor Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industry, 1875–1925. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. https://books.google.com/books?id=zIVVzeoUhKMC
Pennsylvania Labor History Society. “A Bibliography of Labor History in Pennsylvania.” https://palaborhistorysociety.org/a-bibliography-of-labor-history-in-pennsylvania/