by Cecilia Woloch
from LABOR: The Testimony of Ted Gall
I. MINING (1918 – 1920s)
You had to load 20 ton out of there.
That was for your shift.
Then you had at least 5 ton of stuff
that you threw away
that was no good
and maybe about 10 ton that you got paid for
if you were lucky.
Then your 30 cents a ton made you $3.80 per day
and then you had to pay for rent on your lamp
and buy your powder.
Of course, you had a lot of work that was called dead-work
that you gave to them—
putting up support poles, dynamiting, etc. . . .
That was for free. You only got paid
for the tonnage that crossed the scales.
Then you usually had guys down there
that would cheat on the scales.
You were lucky if you ended up with a dollar a day.
*
After they had the machine coal taken out
then they had the pick men who would follow them
where it was too dangerous any more
to go back in with the machine.
Then the pick men would go in there and hit the face.
If you just hit the face with your pick
the coal would just fly out because of the squeeze on it.
Then you worked like mad.
When you’re doing the pick work
you can hear that limestone cracking up there above you.
Boundaries were set by the engineers.
Lots of times mistakes were made.
For instance, a mine was worked out.
It would gradually fill with water.
Sometimes the weight of the water
would just push that coal right out of there.
Then you were in trouble.
Most falls happen just (snap) like that.
The company, even if they knew they had a bad roof,
wouldn’t do anything about it
until they had a fall.
Then they only took care of the effects.
Prevention, that was something else again.
That they didn’t do
because that took money.
Now, in Rural Ridge, the town next to Russellton,
going down toward the river by the turnpike,
they had a fall. A man was caught under it
and they had mules in the mine
to move the cars around
and a mule was caught in the fall, too.
There was a lot of screaming and commotion
and the men working in the other room heard it
and came over to where the fall was.
The boss, he was sitting on the mule’s head
to try to keep it from thrashing around.
Now the first man that got over there,
the boss told him to sit on the mule’s head
and to hold that mule’s head down.
This old Polish man said, “Shit on you,
that man over there is under stuff.”
The Polish man was fired
because he wanted to help the man under the fall
instead of sitting on the mule’s head.
A mule cost money
and they could always hire another man.
II. UNIONS (1920s – 1930s)
We had to strike for better conditions.
We had to strike every step of the way.
John L. Lewis and those guys got big names
but any progress that was made
was made over them and in spite of them.
They were getting good wages.
They were getting good salaries
from the dues that were paid by the miners.
They didn’t want that disrupted.
They had a working agreement with the coal companies
and everything went along real fine for them.
If you wanted any progress at all
it was only through wildcat strikes.
*
During the ’27 strike
when people were being evicted out of their houses
my brother Ervin was building barracks
for the evicted people to live in.
The company didn’t like this.
The company owned the houses
so they could evict people if they didn’t work.
They wanted workers to have no place to go.
They wanted them to have nothing
so they would just acquiesce.
Because of the strike, I got away from the mines
and it wasn’t until November 1928 that I went back.
I guess I was desperate. You just couldn’t get a job.
I had been really sick with the flu in February ‘28
when we were all really sick with it
and Ervin died from it.
*
And then Roosevelt came in
and then you were allowed to organize for unions again.
But the company had people
who would tell the bosses what was going on.
They maneuvered a fellow to work with me.
He was telling the company everywhere I went
and almost my thoughts.
The Coal and Iron Police,
they controlled all the roads around the coal camps.
I went into Butler County to organize there.
I didn’t even have one contact to talk to.
I would go and wait alongside the road
when the people came out from work.
I would walk alongside them and talk to them
as they were walking home.
They were frightened. They were afraid to talk to anyone
for fear that someone would report them to the company.
At Russellton, after we had reorganized there
and had a semblance of a union,
we had no way of collecting dues
and had no contract with the company.
Everything was more or less freewill.
Good fellows, strong fellows—
mentally, morally, every way strong fellows
but they were frightened.
We had to collect dues out on the road,
on the public road.
They would drop their dues money on the ground
and then walk across the road to the other side
so that they wouldn’t even be seen talking to us.
But we succeeded, we succeeded.
IV. NEW YORK DAYS (1930s - 1940s)
In my life I’ve always wondered why.
Why was I exposed to this or that or the other experience?
Why, just when I seemed to have it made
in a particular area,
would that door close and a new one open
in an entirely different field?
Why did I find myself involved in something
that was not of my own making
but seemingly had no beginning
and seemingly will have no end?
*
Would it interest you to know
that Langston Hughes once instructed a class
in a labor school of which I was a member?
If you know Langston Hughes
you have my permission to check with him
as to whether this story is so.
I would ask about it low-key
because he may not want it generally to be known
that he once instructed a class
that was under Communist jurisdiction.
But then again he might not mind at all.
The intent of his poems was to make people aware
that the world is not free.
Even though on the surface the slaves have been freed,
underneath the struggle goes on
of one class attempting to dominate the other
by subterfuge, by terror, or by open brutal force of arms.
All this to keep the working class, the producers,
the ants of the human world in their place.
How beautifully he brings this out in his poem about Spain during the revolution.
In 1937, there were many volunteers
who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
who came from the ranks of labor in the Pittsburgh district.
Six from the Russellton-Curtisville Valley.
Two of them returned, but four of them died.
I was the district secretary of the International Workers Order.
As the district secretary, I was instrumental in raising the money
to purchase three ambulances for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
and enough money to furnish the ambulances
with surgical instruments and supplies.
The International Workers Order was the insurance wing
of the militant labor movement.
In 1938 the IWO ran a school for district class members
to learn about mortality tables and other actuarial tables.
The school was held in New York City in the old Broadway Hotel.
One of our instructors was the author of a book,
“Investing in Disaster.”
The disaster part entered in
when the insurance companies devised a scheme
to combine insurance with savings,
in which, actually, a person became his own insurer.
But the worst part was that the insurance companies
became bankers.
The insurance companies had millions of dollars
of other people’s money to invest.
The insurance companies’ money was invested
in the companies that were the most brutal
in their suppression of labor
and legal and illegal interference
in any attempt of labor to organize.
I was not convinced that the insurance companies
were a boon to policyholders
or to the general public
because they invested in industry.
That was why the IWO was organized,
to give the poor good insurance
at a rate they could afford,
where they were given an opportunity
to express their frustration.
The class was instructed to give an analytical report.
I made the report.
I’m not sure now if Mr. Hughes was then in the audience.
I’m assuming that he was, because the next day,
a Black man sat with me for a while,
gave me a package and left.
In the package was Langston Hughes’ book of poems.
*
That has now been 42 years ago.
At graduation, six places were named.
I didn’t get any of them, but I did get a mention.
It was: “Mr. Gall is the one most likely to succeed.”
Of course, it’s still not too late for that.
I see that the roughest days of my life
and of all those now living are just ahead.
Cecilia Woloch is the descendent of labor activists who lived and worked in the Pennsylvania coalfields. She was born in Pittsburgh and grew up there and in rural Kentucky. LABOR: The Testimony of Ted Gall, due for release from Accents Publishing in November 2024, will be her seventh collection of poetry. She’s been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize and other honors. She’s traveled the world extensively as a teacher and writer. Her book Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem has had multilingual, multimedia performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens, and elsewhere. ceciliawoloch.squarespace.com.