Without a union, a workplace can be a dictatorship.īut what if your boss is also your landlord, your grocer, your bank, and your local police? That kind of 24/7 employer domination used to be a common practice before the labor movement and the New Deal order brought it to an end. When they joined a United Mine Workers organizing drive and struck for better pay, they were fired and blacklisted. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that could only be spent at that company store. The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead-including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns. The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders.
Meeting them at the station were the local police chief-a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud-and several out-of-work miners with guns. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border.
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