The increasing interest in, and membership in, labor unions that began in the mid-19th century was by no means limited to the Lake Superior copper region. Nor was this growing trend restricted to metal mining. The topic was already being studied in the eastern coal mining regions in 1872. The Tuesday, November 5, 1872 edition of the Engineering and Mining Journal looked at unions and strikes from the perspective of the employees.

“If we tell men on a strike that they are foolish and unreasonable,” the author wrote, “that their interests are really identical with ours; that we love them, and they ought to love us, etc., etc., they judge our words in the light of our lives, and they can see through our game to put down their wages as plainly as we ourselves.”

The topic again appeared in the E&MJ’s Jan. 14, 1888 edition, in an article titled: Some Aspects of the Labor Question, written by R.W. Raymond, a director of an anthrocite mining company in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Raymond provided an in-depth analysis of earnings of contract workers and “company men” of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, commonly called the Lehigh Company. The payroll analysis covered the dates from Jan. 1, 1886 to June 30, 1887.

Lehigh contract miners, Raymond reported, averaged $2.72 per day, at least $55 per month, or $660 per year. At the same time, however, non-contract wages were not as generous. Miners averaged $1.93 per day; miners’ assistants averaged $1.66; mule drivers (boys 15-16 years of age), 90 cents per day for single mules and $1.52 for mule teams of 5 or 6 mules.

“Picking,” sorting slate out of the coal on the surface, was performed by boys of 12 years of age and upward, and by old men incapable of heavier work. Wages for picking ranged from 26 cents per day for boys and 73 cents for old men. Work days for all workers averaged 10 hours. Raymond justified those wages this way:

“Concerning these coal pickers, it must be admitted that their work is dusty, and they are a grimy-looking lot. But the labor is not hard; it is performed in a sitting position, in buildings warmed by stoves or steam pipes; and the boys themselves, as they come racing and tumbling … shouting out when work is over, are not conscious of hardship in their lot.”

When a strike was called in the fall of 1887, Raymond placed no blame whatsoever on the companies, but rather on the miners whom, he said, were getting the highest wages.

“It was part of a deliberate plan to conquer once and for all the anthracite business,” Raymond declared, “and this was part of a wider and wilder plan, to rule the country, in spite of law and justice, by a comparatively small minority of laborers, arrogating to themselves the title of representing ‘labor.'”

The strike was led by the Knights of Labor. To assist in ending the strike, union members were fired and scabs were brought in.

While industry officials verbally belittled the KOL, the rhetoric was based largely on fear of the labor organization.

The KOL was founded in 1869, in Philadelphia, as a secret organization of tailors. It quickly broadened its base, dropped its secrecy and became one of the most significant early labor organizations in the United States. It was the first labor organization to become a national organization and the first to break the racist and gender barriers by welcoming skilled and unskilled labor members, non-whites and women. The KOL established union locals throughout the Lake Superior mining region.

Raymond, like other industrial managers, made the argument that it was a minority group’s goal to conquer the anthracite business, a similar argument from any sector confronted by organized labor. In the case of the KOL, however, their goals, according to the University of Houston’s Digital History, were not to conquer any industrial sector, but to improve living and working conditions across the country.

The organization campaigned for an eight-hour workday, the abolition of child labor, improved safety in factories, equal pay for men and women, and compensation for on-the-job injury. As an alternative to wage labor, the Knights favored cooperatively ran workshops and cooperative stores. By the late 1880s, several KOL locals or assemblies, had been organized in the U.S.

The University of Washington’s Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium states that in the mid to late 1880s, assemblies were organized throughout the Lake Superior mining region.

Jonathan Garlock, author of Knights of Labor History and Geography 1869-1899, for the university’s History Department’s Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium classified locals or assemblies as mixed, mixed/trade, or trade. Assemblies at Osceola, Lake Linden and Hancock were categorized as mixed membership. However, the Hancock assembly No. 6569 was classified as “mixed and trade,” focusing on the cigar and tobacco trade.

Assemblies at Bessemer, Ironwood, Iron River, Stambaugh and Fon Du Lac, Minnesota, were classified as mixed and trade, representing metal mine workers. An assembly at Champion represented iron mine workers.

Regarded as a progressive platform, the goals of the KOL were later compared to Marxism. As Garlock stated in his article: The Knights operated as both a trade union federation and a political movement. Like other labor organizations of its time, KOL’s was a vision of a “Cooperative Commonwealth” in which producer cooperatives and nationalized railroads would replace monopolistic capitalism, the Knights launched dozens of local and state labor parties and hundreds of worker-owned cooperatives.