The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1933-09-02
CODE To OPEN
NEW ERA FOR
UNION MINERS
Peace Treaty to Be Handed
President on His Return
Next Week.
BY FRED III. KURY
Times Special Writer

WASHINGTON, Sept. "A peace
treaty for capital and labor in the
coal industry, with many new per-
sonal privileges for miners, will be
ready for President Roosevelt when
he steps ashore from the yacht
NourmahaI here Monday night or
Tuesday morning. These liberties,
which meant a mans job prior to
NRA, come after hard-fought battles
of their leaders, led by John Lewis,
president of the United Mine Work
ers: Phillip Murray, international
vice-president; and Pat Pagan,
president of district No. 8.
To gain them, the union men
have given up one of their weapons,
the checkoff system of collecting
union dues from the employers.
Details of their victories were re-
vealed today. Although the code
IAN not be quoted until it is ap-
proved by the President, it has been
leaned from indisputable author
ity that it will contain provisions to
eliminate the coal and iron police,
whose operations are bloody chap
tiers in the history of coal.
Company House Evil Ended
Also out will go the operator
hired deputy sheriffs.
The code as now written also pro-
vides that miners need no longer
live in company houses to work in
the coal fields. Deduction Of rent
from the pay envelopes that some
times contained no money at all,
and many times showed the worker
owed the operator a deficit at the
end of a two-week period also will
disappear.
In the future a miner can live
where he chooses. No longer Will
his bed and board be the choice
weapons of the operators, for the
New Deal provides that he can not
be required to buy in company
stores, where the prices for the
meager fare of "sowbelly and
hominy" kept the average miner in
virtual peOnage.
Child labor must disappear en-
tirely from the coal fields.
The miner of the future will not
be in a position to boast that he
went into. the pits at the age of II
or IA to labor in the s%puttering
glare of a carbide lamp under con-
ditionS that made him an old man
before he was IS.
Age Limit Is IS
Under the code no one will be
able to work below the surface be-
fore he is ID. The "trapper boy" the
stable boy, and the child loader
or miner will have disappeared as
soon as the coal code becomes efec-
tive.
Another feature is that the miner
must be paid in coin of the realm
not scrip, which formed a great
total of the currency put into the
pay envelopes of miners, particularly
in the western Pennsylvania fields.
If he did earn a surplus W his
"store bill" and rent charges, the
miner of the past was kept in bond
age by scrip acceptable only at COM
pany stores, where charges often
were 80 to so per cent higher than
the prevailing cash prices on the
most necessary commodities.
AS the pick, shovel, black pow
der, carbide, and other necessities
of the trade are furnished by the
miners in some instances, they also
were sold at exorbitant prices by
company stores.
This also is eliminated in the new
code.
CheckOff Is Eliminated
Universal recognition of the check
Weighman, the man who weighs
each miners output at the pit
mouth, now becomes a fact. Under
the code. the check weighman no
longer will be a company man."
but elected by the miners them
selves, and paid by the company,
to assure full credit for product of
their laborS.
officials of the miners union, on
the other hand, have sacrificed their
claims to the famous "checkof"
system. That was the plan where
the miners dollar a month dues to
the United Mine Workers was de-
Quoted from the envelopes and paid
in bulk to the local labor organ
ization leaders.
In the future, the support of the
miners union will be left solely in
the hands of those who voluntarily
pay at the end of each month.
All these new privileges will come
to the miners c~oincidental with the
celebration of Labor day.