Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930
by Price V. Fishback. It is a pitty that most studies on labor in the coal industry do focus on the struggle to organize unions. This work is however different and offers a more diverse and quantitative examination of the coal mining labor market. It regards the social and economic lives of the bituminous coal miners in the early twentieth century. Here Fishback's analytic methodology encompasses competition among employers for labor, the legal environment, institutional development in response to transactions costs as well as the impact of labor unions on the coal industry. Utilizing economic theories and proper statistics, Fishback reveals the theory hidden in the descriptions of events, and then tests their internal consistency as well as the hypotheses they generate. The book is designed for the social scientist, but also management practicioners in the coal industry can gain from this some insights that help them to understand the other stakeholders in the coal mining industry.
