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The miners work eleven hours on an average, and average two tons per day, at 60 cents per ton. They are not allowed to work more than six months in the year on an average. This makes an income of 60 cents per day the year round, or not quite $200 for a year's work, upon which they must live and support a family. These miners tell me that when they dig two tons of coal, one ton is counted as worthless by the company, and they pay them nothing for it. The nut, pea, and slack coal averages one-half the out-put; the miner receives .60 cents for the "lump coal." This lump coal brings $3 per ton at wholesale in the market, for the mining of which the miner receives 60 cents, but the nut, pea, and slack, for which the miner receives nothing, is also sold by the company to the working class of our cities, who y this nut coal by the scuttle at 10 cents a scuttle, paying $12 a ton for it, as the writer knows from personal experience last winter. In fat, the so-called unmarketable coal, for the digging of which the minors are not paid a cent, is sold by the company at a sum which pays the miners' wages, Governments taxes, insurance, freight, etc., leaving the "lump" or marketable coal a clear wholesale steal in the hands of the labor exploiters! And yet the Pinkerton thugs, the militia, and armed murderers are employed by these labor robbers on any pretext to prevent the miners from obtaining a 10 or 15 per cent. increase on the ton. One corporation, the Salineville Coal Company, owes its miners two months' wages for work done over a year ago, the company pleaded poverty, and agreed to pay it as soon as they made any profit, upon which assurance the men returned to work and have been working ever since. The company still owes the two months' wages, and from all indications will owe it forever. The generosity of the coal cormorants is shown in the fact that the heads of families can have free what coal they can use, but if the sons, even though they are grown up men, work in the mine and the father does not, why, the family is compelled to buy its coal.
The life of these miners is beset on every hand with danger. Three persons on the average are murdered each year in the mines, and many are crippled for life, and still more contract painful rheu-
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