Development of The Union
The UMW was founded in Columbus, Ohio, on January 22, 1890, by the merger of two earlier groups, the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 135 and the National Progressive Miners Union. It was modeled after the American Federation of Labor (AFL).The Union's emergence in the 1890s was the culmination of decades of effort to organize mine workers and people in adjacent occupations into a single, effective negotiating unit. At the time coal was one of the most in-demand natural resources, used to heat homes and to power machines in industries. The coal mines were a competitive and dangerous place to work. And with decreasing amounts of pay occurring on a regular basis, miners sought a group to stand up for their rights.
Read more about this topic: United Mine Workers
Famous quotes containing the words development of, development and/or union:
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)
“America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)