Talk:Calumet and Hecla Mining Company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mining, a WikiProject which aims to improve all articles related to Mining. |
|
| ??? | This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale. [FAQ] | |
| ??? | This article has not yet received an importance rating within Mining articles. | |
|
This article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article. |
||
[edit] Union representation
I am deleting the following sentence:
- "It is important to note that the Western Federation of Miners did not represent the miners of the Michigan Copper Country; they had not yet have official support of the miners."
Legal union representation elections did not come into being until many years later, so at the time there was no way possible for the WFM to have the "official support of the miners." At any rate, divisions among the miners are noted in the following sentence:
- "... the workers were said to be sharply divided on the strike question."
Plazak (talk) 23:32, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
- I think that there is a kernel of truth in that sentence. Most Copper Country miners were not even members of the WFM when the strike was called -- many joined during the strike instead. It may be worthwhile to mention that, even though formal representation was decades in the future. -- dcclark (talk) 03:48, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
- According to contemporary accounts, workers were highly divided on the strike, which should be (and is) noted in the article. My point was that it is meaningless to say that WFM lacked the "official support of the miners" when there was no such legal mechanism at the time. If there are any reliable numbers on union membership during the strike, that should certainly have a place in the article.Plazak (talk) 13:41, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
- To elaborate on my previous comments, these days it is easy to determine the level of worker support of unions: there is a federally supervised representation election, and so many percent support the union, and so many do not. Back then, however, nothing was so straightforward. Union membership is one gauge, but many may have not joined the union for fear of being blacklisted. If there are any reliable estimates of union membership at the time of the strike, it would certainly be worth mentioning in the article, but I suspect that the WFM kept membership lists secret for fear of blacklisting, and of course both sides would have incentives for skewing the numbers one way or another. Perhaps a more accurate gauge of union support would be the numbers that stayed out after the National Guard moved in to prevent violence against those reporting to work - this would be another valuable addition to the article. But even this is a not perfect measure of union support, as some union supporters may have gone back to work because they saw it as a lost cause once the Guard moved in. To sum up, there are a lot of useful facts that could be added to the article on this topic, but a flat statement that the union lacked "official support of the miners" is misleading, and imprecise to the point of being meaningless.Plazak 15:55, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
