"The Names of Kings": Bringing Workers into the Workplace

The Archaeology of the Colorado Coalfield War Project

Department of Anthropology
University of Denver
Denver, CO 80208-2406

Abstract
Industrial archaeologists and "social" (for want of a better word) archaeologists do not communicate much.
I argue that that this separation is not due so much to differences in outlook , but rather to commonalities—a
set of common assumptions anout class ad labor. On one hand, workers, if they are visible at all are treated
as adjuncts to the technology. On the other, workers are treated simply as consumers. In either case, labor
struggle and class relations are invisible. However some archaeologists have begun to look at he industrial
workplace as the site of class struggle, integrating social ad industrial archaeology and providing new
perspectives on both. Using coal mining in Southern Colorado as a case study, I argue for a class-based
understanding of the workplace. By looking at industrial innovations as sites of struggle for control over
the labor process, we move beyond narratives of entrepreneurs and technological efficiency, and bring the
workers back into the workplace.

Paper presented in the session "Theory and Future Directions for Industrial Archaeology"
at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference, Mobile, Alabama.
 First off, I think there is no denying that there is a divide between Industrial
Archaeology and “Social” Archaeology. In this paper, I simply use “Social” to refer to
those archaeologists who work on residential sites. “Residential” or “Domestic”
Archaeologists just sounded too strange. And I am not saying that Industrial Archaeology
has nothing to do with human society. In fact I am saying quite the reverse. But the
divisions between the two kinds of archaeology are quite real. The basic research
orientations are very different and just don‘t mesh even though they probably should--
disconnected appendices in each other’s reports. The functioning of a piece of
machinery in a workplace is of little interest to a Social Archaeologist studying consumer
choice among the people who actually worked that piece of machinery. Just as Social
Archaeologists’ on-going amazement that workers drank tea is of little interest to
Industrial Archaeologists.
I am not an Industrial Archaeologist. But I don‘t know why I am not. I consider
myself a labor archaeologist, using archaeology to study the lives and struggles of
working people. It is as an archaeologist interested in labor history and issues of class
that I approach this session. Right now I am part of a project in Southern Colorado
investigating sites associated with a famous labor struggle; the 1913-1914 Colorado
Coalfield War. The signal event of this strike was the Ludlow Massacre, where the
Colorado National Guard and coal company mine guards attacked a tent colony of
strikers, killing over 20 people and burning the colony to the ground.
Labor archaeology is a topic that operates at the fringes of this Industrial/Social
divide, but does not by any means straddle it. If I send a submitted paper on this topic to
the annual SHA conference, I can be pretty sure it will be placed in an Industrial
Archaeology session. Cynically I might say it is because I often have the word "coal" in
my abstracts, but it may have more to do with the topic. I don’t discuss technology or
industrial artifacts, but I do discuss workers in an industrial setting. Looking at the
working class as workers is certainly appropriate for an Industrial Archaeology session
and I know from experience that Industrial Archaeologists are more likely to have heard
of Ludlow and similar such events than Social Archaeologists, simply because of their
greater awareness of industrial history. But the study of strikes and labor struggle does lie
outside the interests of most Industrial Archaeology, just as it exists outside the interests
of most Social Archaeology.
It is bridging this divide that concerns me. This divide has a lot of causes and is
an interesting problem in itself--different disciplinary histories, different datasets,
academic divisions of labor, and the demands of CRM recording, which is where most of
the work in both fields takes place. But I think the divide has a social or even cultural
component. A possible “bridge” over the divide, between the technology of the
workplace and the working class residences, is the workers themselves, peoples
enmeshed in sets of social relations that structured their lives at work and at home—
relations of production. Like the UK and the US, two countries divided by a common
language, Industrial and Social Archaeology are two disciplines divided by a common
assumption—the absence of class as a social relation. This assumption is embedded in
our culture. The title of my paper, for example, comes from a poem by Bertolt Brecht
published in 1935 that begins
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?
 In the books you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?
Like every discipline Industrial Archaeologists have a certain database and
definite ways of interpreting that data that stem from a definite set of theoretical
orientations. These theoretical orientations structure and limit what can and can't be said
about the database. The same goes for Social Archaeology. Bridging the divide means
different theoretical orientations on both sides. One way of bridging this divide is a
relational, rather than categorical, view of class. In such a view classes are not simply
boxes we put people in, but are composed of relations and antagonisms between groups
of people. In a marxist view the central such antagonism is exploitation--the
appropriation of workers' labor power by capitalists, or, more conventionally, the drive on
the part of business owners towards productivity and efficiency, which translates to lower
labor costs per unit. Business owners, driven by competition, seek to extract as much as
possible from their labor forces. Workers, driven by survival, resist this. The artifacts we
find, both Industrial and Social, participate in this relation.
Social Archaeology focuses largely on people as consumers, to the extent that
class membership seems to be actually caused by what you buy. People become not
workers but shoppers. Industrial Archaeology focuses on the relationship between people
and nature. In many programmatic statements Industrial Archaeology confines itself to
technical and engineering processes, thus (theoretically) avoiding the theoretical sturm
und drang of Social Archaeology. But this involves theoretical commitments itself.
Technology becomes simply a tool for the appropriation or conversion of nature. People
exist only insofar as they assist in this appropriation. Different classes exist certainly, but
only insofar as they serve different functions within the enterprise. They are not in
conflict but all directed to the same goals, the goals being those of the business owners,
the kings who did not haul the lumps of rock.
We need to consider to what extent technological innovation was a result not just
of human-nature relations but also relations between people. Efficiency and economic
rationality are not unproblematic concepts. One doesn't need to be a postmodernist to ask
"Efficient or rational for whom?" For us productivity and standardization are self-
evidently beneficial. But productivity means producing more with fewer workers and
standardization means stripping workers of their craft skills. When we ask these
questions we realize that there is nothing efficient about being replaced by a machine.
What rational worker would want their skills to become irrelevant? Rationality and
efficiency ensure that conflict is inevitable.
Technology participates in and is a key weapon in the shopfloor struggle between
workers and managers. Bridging the gap between Social and Industrial Archaeologies
entails considering technology as more than just a part of human relations with nature, but
also human relations with eachother--not just the industrial process but also the labor
process (Braverman 1974).
The labor process is not a seamless flowchart of inputs and outputs. Control over
the labor process is a central site of labor struggle as workers seek to maintain their
independence and their control over their labor, and managers seek to assert their
ownership of this same labor. Whole fields of study have grown up attempting to resolve
this conflict; industrial psychology, industrial relations, human resources management,
not to mention time-motion and efficiency studies.

Technology as social
Technology, the resource base of industrial archaeology, is a crucial part of the
struggle. Mechanization and standardization of industries were often explicitly used to
break workers' power, with the intention (whether realized or not) of turning skilled
craftsmen in to low-paid and easily replaced assembly workers, and unionized workers
into unemployed workers. Ideally anyway.
Probably the clearest expression of this ideal is in the program of Frederick W.
Taylor (Taylor 1911; Braverman 1974; Brody 1990), an engineer who sought to apply
engineering solutions to the problems of labor management. For Taylor, the presence of
skilled workers who passed on a traditional fund of practical knowledge from one to
another, who performed their tasks unsupervised, and who set their own pace of work that
conformed to a group-approved norm was an absolute offense. It meant, in his words,
that "The shop was run by the workmen and not by the bosses".
Taylor's solution to this problem had three main principles. In his own words:
1) "The managers assume…the burden of gathering together all of the traditional
knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying,
tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae..". That is to say the
work skills are removed from the worker.
2) "All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the
planning or laying-out department…". Thus conception is separated from execution.
3) "The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day
in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions describing
in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the
work…not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed
for doing it." So the monopoly over knowledge acquired through Steps 1 and 2 is then
used to control the labor process and the workers.
The exact impact of Taylorism is open to debate. Certainly no company ever
implemented Taylor's scheme entirely. Those that tried to found it ruinous. Worker
resistance as well as the impossibility of reducing workers' skill to "rules, laws, and
formulae" guaranteed this. Much to his surprise Taylor also faced considerable resistance
from capitalists themselves, in part because many were reluctant to turn the
administration of their enterprises over to middle-class professionals. Also Taylor did not
really invent "Taylorism". Much of what he advocated, standardization and deskilling,
were already underway the end of the century, as Paul Shackel, for example, discusses for
Harper's Ferry (Shackel 1996). But it is probably the clearest and most thorough
statement on deskilling workers to be found.
We must remember that the struggle over the labor process is a struggle, not an
inevitable evolution from proud and independent craft-workers to drone-like bolt-
tighteners. As many industries have found to their cost, most work cannot be stripped
entirely of skill. Workers also resist the deskilling and dehumanization of their jobs. In
an example I am sure we are all familiar with, "Luddite" has entered our language as an
anti-technology hooligan, but these were weavers who destroyed the looms of specifically
those mill-owners who used the looms to undermine their craft (Thompson 1963).
 Although I think nobody seriously believes that replacing workers with
technology entails simply a more highly skilled or more educated workforce than the
previous one, there is something of a leveling effect--fewer unskilled and skilled
positions, and more semi-skilled (CITE), but almost always a smaller workforce overall.

Case Study: Coal Mining

In this light I consider coal mining technology, not from an engineering
standpoint, but from the effects it had on the workers in those mines. My discussion
focuses on the Southern Colorado coalfields. By the time of the 1913 Strike the
workforce here was largely immigrants from southern Europe. Union organizers counted
24 different languages in the camps. Their suspicion was that the operators were
importing so many ethnic groups in order to make organizing them more difficult.
The largest operator in this field was Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) which was
owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. These mines were a very small part of his holdings,
even the ones in Colorado, but were nonetheless crucial. They were "captive" mines,
serving to supply fuel for the CF&I steel mills in Pueblo, which supplied rails for the
railways.
Late 19th and early 20th century miners worked as independent teams. The mines
were laid out in a "room and pillar system" in which teams worked in narrow parallel
"rooms" cut into the seam at right angles to a main corridor. As coal was removed from
the face, the rooms lengthened. To remove the coal, the miners undercut the seam with
picks, and a specialized shot-firer would then set a charge to blast the coal from the face.
Assuming all went well with the blasting, the team would then load the coal in carts, put
their tags on the carts, and the carts were pulled out of the mine by mules. The carts were
weighed and the weights recorded against the miners names. The coal was then tipped
out, sorted and screened, (with the amount of slate also being noted against the miners'
names), and dumped into waiting trains.
This is all pretty straightforward. We can say some interesting things about how
the location and the irregularity and thinness of the Southern coalfield seams, as well as
the explosiveness of the mines, affected the techniques used. But there is more involved
than simply an engineering relationship between people and nature. There is the
relationship between people, the labor process.
In southern Colorado, as well as in most US coal mines, the miners were not paid
by the hour. They were legally independent contractors paid by the ton of coal. They
were not paid for laying track so the coal could be removed, nor were they paid for
timbering and shoring their rooms. The temptation to take your chances with safety in
order to make a living is obvious and is reflected in coal-mine fatality statistics. Most
miners did not die in the dramatic explosions, but in ones and twos in room collapses.
Invariably the coroners in this area ruled that it was the miner's fault. After all they were
independent contractors.
The assignment of rooms was subject to arbitrary abuse by the supervisors. A bad
room could mean working in knee-deep water or having a pencil thin seam that made it
impossible to break even. In the Colorado camps, a common complaint was that the
supervisors traded rooms for services from the miners' wives and daughters. Generally
this was free housecleaning, although the second fatality of the strike was a supervisor
who had been raping the women of the camps and doing so with impunity. The arbitrary
exercise of power by supervisors was generally a major factor in strikes.
Weighing the coal was, as you can imagine, another area with enormous potential
for abuse. One of the seven demands of the strikers in 1913 was that they be allowed to
appoint their own "check weigh man" to ensure that the scales were accurate. Their
suspicions were not unjustified. One mine inspector in Colorado, on checking a mine's
scales, found that he weighed only 50 pounds.
A central issue during this period was the status of miners as independent
contractors. It was a status most preferred. Many of the pay demands in early strikes were
not that the miners become company men on a wage, but that they be paid "run-of-the-
mine" where all miners in a mine would share equally in the output. There was certainly
a craft pride, and the right to work independently and set one's own pace of work was
greatly valued (Brody 1993:4). Late in his life, John Brophy, a well-known CIO
organizer, recalled his father in Western Pennsylvania,
It was a great satisfaction to me that my father was a skilled clean workman with
everything kept in shape. The skill with which you undercut the vein, the judgment in
drilling the coal after it had been undercut and placing the exact amount of explosive
so that it would do an effective job of breaking the coal from the solid …indicated the
quality of his work. (Brody 1993:3)
This craft pride and the independence of coal miners certainly played an important
role in their militancy. Coal-mining was harder to deskill than other industries, but it did
happen. Undercutting machines, which eliminated pick-work, were introduced in the
1880s. The introduction of these machines eliminated the skilled part of coal-mining and
reduced miners to loaders. As one Kentucky miner noted, "Anyone with a weak head and
a strong back can load machine coal, but a man has to think and study every day like you
was studying a book if he is going to get the best of the coal when he uses only a pick".
By 1913 about half the US bituminous coal came from mines with undercutting
machines.
Generally workers will resist mechanization, and coal-miners certainly did. But
the boom and bust nature of coal-mining, in 1925 led John L. Lewis, the president of the
UMWA, to encourage mechanization and reductions in mine workforces; "Too many
miners and too much coal". With this program he sought to reduce the number of mines
and control coal output. Fewer miners would be left, but those that survived would have
uniformly high wages. To this end Lewis relentlessly centralized the control of the
UMWA and ended up cooperating closely with the larger coal operators (Dubofsky and
Tine 1986).
In the 1930s coal-loading machines were introduced. The individual independent
mining teams were replaced with teams of specialists, and tonnage rates with wage labor.
Then in the 1950s the separate undercutting and loading machines were replaced with a
single unit, the continuous miner. At each step miners lost more autonomy. Their skills
were mechanized, the pace of work became set by machinery, and they became subject to
constant supervision as they were no longer in separate rooms. Even by the 1930s coal
mining had become, according to one miner, "nothing but a goddam factory".
Conclusions
In this paper I have taken a class-based approach to technology. This is only one
particular approach, one that emphasizes the role of material culture in relations of
exploitation. It is not a new perspective, and has been an important theme in much labor
history and industrial anthropology for decades. But it is not a perspective that is used
much in archaeology, although there are some examples. Two notable ones are the work
of Paul Shackel and his team at Harper’s Ferry, interpreting the assemblages from
domestic sites in the light of the changing labor processes in the armory (Shackel 1994a,
1994b, 1996), and Michael Nassaney and Marjorie Abel’s study of cutlery manufacture
in the Connecticut River Valley (Nassaney and Abel 1993).
The engineering focus of Industrial Archaeology is important and yields valuable
information. However this approach cannot avoid theoretical commitments. In fact it
entails commitments that are extensive and robust. Theoretical diversity may result in a
lack of disciplinary coherence, but considering technology as socially active is, as these
studies show, an approach with considerable potential for integrating the databases of
industrial and social archaeology…and the lives of the people who dropped that trash and
worked those machines.
References Cited

Braverman, Harry
1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. Monthly
Review Press, New York, NY.

Brody, David
1990 Labour Relations in American Coal Mining: An Industrial Perspective. In Workers, Owners, and
Politics in Coal Mining: An International Comparison of Industrial Relations, Gerald D. Feldman,
and Klaus Tenfelde, editors, pp. 74-117. Berg, New York.

---
1993 Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle. Oxford University
Press, New York.

Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Warren Van Tine

1986 John L. Lewis: A Biography. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.

Nassaney, Michael S., and Marjorie R. Abel

1993 The Political and Social Contexts of Cutlery Production in the Connecticut Valley. Dialectical
Anthropology 18:247-28xx.

Shackel, Paul (editor)

1994a Domestic Responses to Nineteenth-Century Industrialization: An Archaeology of Park Building
48, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park
Service, National Capital Region, Regional Archaeology Program, Washington, D.C.

---
1994b A Material Culture of Armory Workers. In Domestic Responses to Nineteenth-Century
Industrialization: An Archaeology of Park Building 48, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park.,
Paul Shackel, editor, pp. 10.1-10.7. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,
National Capital Region, Regional Archaeology Program, Washington, D.C.

---
1996 Culture Change and the New Technology: An Archaeology of the Early American Industrial Era.
Plenum Press, New York.

Taylor, Frederick W.
1911 The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper and Brothers, New York.

Thompson, E.P.
1963 The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, New York.