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072307
THE TEN DAY TRAMPS
Courtesy: JIM FOSTER
Published in “Labor History”
"
As historians have paused to
reflect upon almost three centuries of organized Labor, a theme which emerges
ever more frequently is the enigma of the migrant worker. E.P. Thompson,
discussing the rise of the English working class, made special note of the "tramping
artisan," the worker whose restless search for work took him all over,
19th century
It is a sad fact of traditional history that only the literate and the sedentary survive. It is their records, writings, and memorabilia which travel through time to the second and third generation. The mobile, the less literate, and the tramp may have lived a much more exciting life, but all they can leave history is an exciting tale which fades with life and is lost in death. To recapture the life of the ten day tramp has proven a most difficult undertaking indeed. Only the fading memories of a few mining
1
E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class (New York,
1964), 240-242. .
2 E. J. Hobsbawn, "The Tramping Artisan," Economic
History Review. Series 2, 3 (1951), 313.
3 Particularjy Par.t II . "The
Traveling Member and the National
veterans remain to remind us of the days when a teenager
would try to pass himself off as an experienced 21 year old and begin the tramp
that would take him from Arizona to California to Montana. Only a few yellowed
union cards remain to show us, how the embattled Western Federation of Miners
(WFM) hoped to deal with this important segment of western society. Indeed, the
problem of the migrant-miner is one which requires the investigatory
preferences of both the social historian and the labor reporter. Between 1893
and 1920, it was a subject which the WFM addressed at almost every meeting.
What was it like to tramp the West
in the teens? A number of interviews with mining veterans in
“We were young Footloose, and fancy free. We could get work in any camp
and the pay was pretty good. Besides there was always a camp just over the hill
which we had never seen and a boarding house which was rumored to have the
prettiest waitresses in the West. We'd usually work one job for no more than a
month or two, long enough to sample the cooking, wink at the waitresses (the
best ones were at Burke.
That particular miner had
wandered throughout
4
Interview with Arturo Jorquez,
5
Interview with Livrado Jorquez,
When the old miner spoke of
"good pay" he was referring to a miner's scale which was almost
universal in the West between 19 I 0 and 1930 (with the exception of the
inflated war years). Miners who had experience on either the old "dry"
drilling machines the new "wet" machines, or with the hand steel
which a few smaller operations still used into the 1920s (this was particularly
common around Cripple Creek, CO), were assured of at least $3.50 per day for
mining or $3.00 per day for mucking. (6) A few particularly skilled
occupations in bad mines would bring more (the scale at Bingham Canyon, UT
called for as much as $4.50. for blacksmiths and $4.00 for machine-men in wet
shafts) and, as World War I approached, all wages in the West moved upward.(7)
Copper miners, in Arizona made as much as $6.75 during the war years. (8) Such
wages made the miner the prince of the tramps, for those who tramped without
mining or other specialized skills could expect no more than $1.00-$2.00 per
day. The tramping miner could do quite well in the West of nickel beer and
bargain beef. (9)
While tramping may have been an individual adventure and a sociological phenomenon of more than passing interest, it was interesting to organized labor in quite a different way. Every tramp miner was a potential scab. With no loyalty to the local union and no family responsibility, the tramp was unlikely to seek the security of a union hall or the solidarity of collective bargaining. Labor unions had realized this from the beginning and had struggled for years to reconcile their fear of tramps with the
6 Interview with Bill
Waters, Mountain View Nursing Home, Cripple Creek, CO, Aug. 8, 1978. Waters
explained that he was a mucker and that throughout the teens and the twenties
his wage was $3.00-$3.50 per day.
His recollections agreed
with almost all published WFM scale determinations of the early teens. For
instance, Vincent St. John's report of the San Juan (Colorado) scale of 1902
cited miners' pay at $4.00 for machine men and $3.00 for muckers working an
eight hour day (Minutes of the Executive Board of the WFM, June 9, 1902,
Western Federation of Miners Collection, Western History, Collection, Univ. of
Colorado, Boulder; also, Wage Scale of District 6, Western Federation of
Miners, n.d. [1916], Box 155, Folder 4, IUMMSW Collection, University of
British Columbia Library, Vancouver, B.C. [scale = miners $3.50, muckers $3.00, and general labor $3.00]). ,
7
Minutes of regular meeting of Bingham Canyon (UT) Local 67, July 20, 1907,
8
Federal Labor Administrator Award,
9
Interview with Bill Waters, Aug. 8, 1978. Waters had been the milk delivery man
in
certain knowledge that much of the membership tramped. This
paradoxical attitude was best expressed by the Iron Molders' Journal in a
sing1e editorial in its February 1877 issue. Tramps, wrote the editor, were the
"real bane of the working class." In almost the same sentence, he
noted that "spring will start many of our members on the tramp." (10)
What could unions do to stop members from becoming the "bane of the
working class?" Several organizations tried "tramping funds."
The tramping fund, as it was most
often found, was merely a local reserve drawn from dues which could be used to
keep tramping brothers out of the labor market but off of the street. Custom
dictated that the traveling brother asks for no more than a few nights food and
lodging before he moved on to a new community; a week's rest would be a
serious breach of manners. However, this did not always work as the unions
hoped. Periods of economic depression, excessive demands upon the fund, or just
a few tramps that refused to live by the rules could bankrupt a tramping fund.
The Cigar Makers' International, which had long experience with tramping funds,
carried this cryptic warning from its
The ultimate fate of the tramping
fund experiment was neatly stated by a
The Western Federation's approach to tramping was both structural and educational. On the structural side, a variety of WFM committees periodically wrestled with plans for a new and improved travel card. (14)
10 Iron
Molders' Journal, Mar. 1877, 238-239.
11 Cigar Makers' Journal, Mar.
1877, 10.
12
13 A review of all the local union
constitutions collected by Vernon Jensen shows
that not a single one made provisions for
a tramping fund although every one had special provisions for transfer of tramp
miners. See for example Tintic District Miners Union Local 151 Constitution and
By-Laws,
As old as the national trade union movement, the traveling card allowed a tramping worker to check out of one local and check into a new local (presumably at the end of his tramp) without the burden of paying costly initiation fees for reinstatement. Lloyd Ulman wrote that other unions had adopted the traveling card as a defense against the membership of defunct locals. (15) Considering the average age of a WFM local (6.33 years), such a practical consideration may have influenced the Federation's architects as well. However, the most cogent rationale for an effective traveling card was expressed by E.G. Locke of Bingham Canyon while debating a proposed five year card at the 1907 WFM Convention. Said Locke: "The great majority of the members of the Western Federation of Miners are itinerant. They are traveling, around from place to place and pay little attention to what kind of card they have. You can make it of gold and I will guarantee that so called tramp miner or ten day miner will not keep it.” (16) Other delegates jumped into the debate with their own stories about ten day tramps, lost traveling cards, and the difficulties of keeping a traveling miner's dues straight. J.T. Lewis of Globe, AZ expressed the frustrations of all when he roundly condemned the "hobo miners" who could lose a dozen cards a year and stick nearest local with the cost of paying for them ($10.00 per hundred from Denver). (17) If nothing else, the debate showed that the traveling card had not proven to be a satisfactory method of controlling tramp miners.
14 This was done in several stages. First, the 1902
(Tenth) Convention of the WFM created a universal WFM membership card which
would be carried with a member in addition to a transfer card. To this card, a
stamp would be :affixed every quarter indicating a payment of dues. Once this
was done, Haywood suggested the abolition of the old transfer card to simplify
the work of local secretaries. The third step was a 1907 Haywood plan for a
five year WFM membership card which would be used both us a transfer and a
regular membership card. None of these plans really seemed to solve the
bureaucratic problems created by tramping. Minutes of the Executive Board of the
WFM, Nov. 26, 1902, WFM Collection.
15 Ulman, 108-112. .
16
The 1907 proposal was' merely Haywood's plan brought before the assembled
delegates at the 1907 convention. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Convention of
the WFM, June 10 to July 3, 1907,
17 Proceedings of the
Fifteenth Convention of the WFM . . . 1907, 828.
How serious -was the tramp miner
problem? Consider for a moment the case of Patrick H. Callahan, a member in
good standing of WFM Local 106 (
The real problem was the local's responsibility to the migrant miner. Every time that Pat Callahan paid the migrant's initiation fee of $1.00 and checked' into a new local he immediately became eligible for a union-paid workman’s compensation program that had brought many men into the WFM. Most
18
Membership card and other documents, Various dates (1909-1921). Patrick Callahan
Collection (P939), Manuscripts Division.
plans guaranteed members between $7.00 and $10.00 per week
for any work missed due to mine-related injury. (19) Because state-financed compensation
laws did not appear on the scene until much later this WFM benefit was a very
attractive incentive to union membership. However, there was a catch. Locals
had to pay all benefits out of their own funds. Help from
Haywood understood the financial
facts which made the migrant a risky proposition for locals in the WFM. After
all, he had been secretary of
-----
19 The various compensation plans were written into
local constitutions,' a few examples were:
I)
Grass Valley (CA) Miners Union Local 90, compensation for injury shall be
“$7.00 for the first week and $1.00 per day thereafter for the next 15 weeks,”
p. 15. Constitution and By-Laws, Grass Valley Miners Union No. 90,
2)
Pony Miners and Millmen’s Union (
20 In his very first meeting as local secretary (Nov.
9, 1896), Haywood was immediately faced with the problems of transfers and
benefits. A certain "Wm. Mitchell," wrote Haywood, was accorded
"2 weeks sick benefits $20.00." His second meeting brought him the
more complicated' problem of determining sick benefits for a tramping brother
who had moved to
See
Minutes of meeting of Silver City Miners Union Local 66. Nov. 9. 1896 and Nov.
30, 1896, Silver City Minute book (P-H 105), Bancroft Library Unv. Of
system of membership stamps, supposedly a system which would
make the local secretary's job easier when dealing with the Pat Callahan’s of
the WFM. (22) It was also Haywood who single-handedly designed and implemented
one of the WFM's most interesting tramp experiments, the
During a long Executive Board
meeting on November 26, 1902, Haywood interrupted a dull series of
deliberations about local union organizing; rights by asking the Board to
consider creating a whole new structure for certain kinds of organizational
problems. This new structural entity, which he dubbed the Union-at-Large,
would be an organization tied directly to
The success of the
21 Minutes of the
Executive Board of he WFM, Dec. 9, 1905 and June 15, 1906 WFM Collection.
22/bid. Also, Proceedings of the Eleventh Convention of the
WFM, May 26 to June 10. 1903,
23 Minutes of the Executive
Board of the WFM, Nov. 26, 1902 and Dec. 3, 1902, WFM Collection.
24
Proceedings. . . 1903, 38. .
25 Proceedings of the
Twelfth Convention ,of the WFM, May 23 to June ,8f 1904,
The following year was no better as Haywood
reported that the
in 1906. A tramp himself, Paretto seemed to have an uncanny
knack for winning
The income of the
Large
had managed to bring in only $273.95 in initiation fees and transfers in the
entire year. This would amount to no more than 135 new members and perhaps as
few as 50 members if the higher $5.00 initiation fee were charged. See
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Convention of the WFM. May 22 to June 6, 1905,
26 Report of James Parello to the Fifteenth Convention
of the WFM. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Convention of the WFM … 1907, 253-255.
Also. Minutes of the Executive
Board of the WFM, Dec. 12, 1905, May 22, 1906, and June 14, 1906. WFM
CoIlection.
27 Report of the Acting Secretary-Treasurer to the
Fifteenth Convention of the WFM in Proceedings... 1907. 135. Also see Appendix
A.
28 As Appendix A .shows. the cost of hiring organizers
and paying compensation benefits (the U-A-L paid $10 per week for sickness
until 1907 when the rate was reduced to $5 per week) almost always surpassed
the amount of dues monies and initiation fees taken in by the organization.
Minutes of the Executive Board of the WFM, Dec. 10, 1906, WFM CoIlectlon.
.
was hard to assess. As Paretto explained at both a private
session with the WFM Executive Board and at the 1907 Convention, the U-A-L was
most successful in bringing Italian and Serbian miners to believe that
unionism was a necessity in the Rocky Mountain West. His report noted that even
those miners who returned to the coal fields of the United Mine Workers took
with them the seed of WFM ideology and thought. (29) The Union-at-Large was
the virus with which the WFM hoped to infect the mining community of
While Paretto's work was limited to
the
Oberto went right to work at Rossland and quickly discovered that English organizers had made only the most rudimentary efforts to incorporate Italian miners' into the fabric of local union life. Nobody had bothered to explain to the recent immigrants that union members had to pay dues once a
29 Report of E.M. White on
30 A. Shilland to Executive Board, District 6, WFM,
Feb. 23, 1911.
month. No one had, felt it necessary to tell the recruits
that failure to pay such dues would cast them into the netherworld of scabs and
other union enemies. Thus, when the newly-organized fell into arrears, they
were shocked and humiliated to discover that their union brothers treated them
as scabs. Once this occurred, the dues-paying friends of the victims retaliated
against the shabby treatment accorded Italian miners by dropping out of the
local as well. All in all, the Rossland local had been split down the middle by
an English organizer who brought a few Italian tramps into the fold without
informing them of their new obligations, and informing them in Italian. Oberto
remedied the situation in a few days of diplomatic negotiations, negotiations
carried on in the miners’ native tongue. (31) It was this kind of attention to
detail which made the
While the U-A-L was
.
31 Steve Oberto to A.
Shilland, May 2, 1911, Box 156, Folder 2, IUMMSW Collection.
32 Interview with Bill Waters, Cripple Creek, CO, Aug.
8, 1918. he interesting thing about the
if the miner wished to purchase a "family ticket,"
an additional dol1ar a month would cover all dependents medical expenses. (33)
Mining has never been a healthy occupation, so bargain coverage of this sort
convinced Bill. Waters and many other miners to end their tramp where medical
benefits were good.
On the tramp, in the local, or
pursued by the
How successful was the WFM in
bringing tramps into the fold? A review of the statistical evidence in Appendix
B shows that the tramp was always part of the WFM. Even when membership
remained almost static, about a third of card-carrying WFM members could be
classified as tramps and such a figure did not take the
33 Doctors Agreement Between Rossland Miners Union No.
38. and the Doctors of Rossland. June 18, 1916.
34 WFM Data Bank. This was the mean figure for all WFM
unions for which membership data was available between 1893-1920. Some large
and settled unions had a much smaller annual turnover figure. For instance, the
records of the Rossland (BC) Miners Union showed an average annual turnover
figure of about 10-12% in transfers, initiation of transferees, and new
memberships. See Quarter Report Rossland Miners Union No. 38, Sept. 30, 1912
and Dec. 31, 1912, Box 154, Folder - Dues and Receipts, IUMMSW Collection,
locals and, compares each to the other and to the WFM mean
in terms of strike success, incidents of violence, political preferences, and a
variety of other variables. While features of both are similar, there were
substantial differences in terms of industrial relations performance.
Tramp locals existed for a shorter period on the average, were involved in more strikes, and were less likely to win those strikes than the more stable WFM locals. The likelihood of violence during a strike was also increased when tramp locals took the field. Indeed, tramp locals were more than twice as violence prone as the non-tramps. Yet, the violence may have been useful for tramp locals did win more non-strike disputes than their counterparts and did so in a shorter period of time (shorter local life span). Perhaps the most interesting statistic is item l0 in Appendix C. In reply to WFM inquiries about local dissolution, most tramp locals noted "lack of interest" all other federations were more likely to cite "mines closed."
Was the WFM concern about tramps a valid one? On the one hand, the WFM never succeeded in bringing all the miners of the West into the union fold and many of those outsiders must have been tramps. Never could the WFM compare its success to that of its eastern counterpart the UMW. On the other hand, regression equations comparing success to tramp status and other variables show that tramp membership seemed to have little effect on a union's performance. The greatest impact that the dummy variable "Tramp/Stable" had on a regression equation occurred in the third example where it was added first. In none of the other equations did the dummy exceed a beta weight of .146 (not a major contributing factor). The size of a local's membership was apparently much more critical in predicting a local's success add life span.
In the long run, the obsession of Moyer arid Haywood with tramp miners may have distracted them from more important work. The crusade to win the tramps may have been just another false lead which the WFM followed in its futile search for success. Even with the tramps, the WFM failed.
On a personal level, tramping was quite another matter. Seventy-six year old Erresto Romero leaned back in his chair as my three hour interview with him drew to a close. His eyes seemed to cloud for a moment as he returned to his teens. "It was a good life," he concluded.
APPENDIX A
The
|
|
|
|
Estimated Membership |
|
Year |
U-A-L Income |
U-A-L Expenses |
(initiations- membership) |
|
1904 |
$
273.95 |
$ 38.35 |
43 – 59 |
|
1905 |
$
4,055.50 |
$
1,851.20 |
1235 – 635 |
|
1906 |
$ 5,146.00 |
$
6,252.00 |
954 – 1189 |
|
1907 |
$
3,190.50 |
$
4,248.15 |
380 – 682 |
|
1908 |
$
363.94 |
$
62.50 |
16 – 85 |
|
1909 |
$
4,882.31 |
$
4,610.24 |
622 – 763 |
|
1910-1915 |
No Report |
|
|
|
1916 |
$
25.50 |
$
45.50 |
- 826* |
|
1917 |
$
21.00 |
|
- 826* |
|
|
|
* actual membership (only
recorded years) |
|
APPENDIX B
WFM Tramps and Members **
..
|
|
|
Estimated Number |
Tramp |
|
Year |
WFM Membership |
of Tramps |
Percentage |
|
|
|
|
|
|
1903 |
27,154 |
8,250 |
29.5% |
|
1905 |
26,132 |
8,950 |
34.4% |
|
1907 |
40,010 |
15,125 |
34.2% |
|
1909 |
37,980 |
8,025 |
21.1% |
|
1910 |
38,247 |
13,975 |
36.6% |
|
1911 |
31,318 |
10,025 |
31.9% |
|
1912 |
51,300 |
12,000 |
23.4% |
|
|
** initiation figures
available for these years only |
||
A Note on Methodology
Estimation of the number of
tramps was done on a local by local basis using raw "transfer"
figures when available, but more often using the raw "initiation” and
"membership" statistics. Initiations = tramps + new members. whereas
Membership = reinstatements + old members. The trick was to separate new
members from transfers (tramps) in the initiation figures. The method used was
as follows:
n Where:
T = :z: e (M + I - Mp) T
= estimated number of tramps in local
n M = membership of local in a given
year
n = 4 I = initiations in that local in that year
(4 year
observation) Mp = local membership the previous year
And (M
+ I - Mp) = the initiated and members who disappeared from local between previous
year and current year (tramps who left)
T = a four year average of the number of tramps who left local weighed toward the current year.
(All
New locals were excluded as the "initiates" were unlikely to
be tramps)
T
|
|
|
|
|
''''\ |
|
APPENDIX C |
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tramp and Stable Locals |
|
|
||
|
A Comparison
of WFM Local Unions |
|
Tramp |
Stable WFM Average |
|
|
1. Membership (lifetime mean) |
. |
137.19 |
239.27 |
154.60 |
|
2. Existence (Local's life span) |
|
7.56 |
10.64 |
6.33 |
|
3. Strikes (in local's life span) |
|
1.31 |
0.60 |
0.92 |
|
4. Strikes Won (in local life pan) |
0.40 |
0.41 |
0.51 |
|
|
5. Strike Success Ratio |
|
.305 |
.683 |
.554 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6. Length of Strikes (average in days) |
201.36 |
252.75 |
208.14 |
|
|
7. Industrial Relations Violence |
|
|
|
|
|
(incidents) |
|
0.89 |
0.45 |
0.61 |
|
8. Industrial Relations Victories |
|
|
|
|
|
(strikes + others) |
|
1.00 |
0.67 |
0.82 |
|
9. Membership Turnover per Year |
|
|
|
|
|
(percentage) |
|
88.62% |
17.39% |
48.49% |
|
10. Reason for Local Dissolution |
|
|
|
|
|
(most common) |
|
3.00 |
1.00 |
1.00 |
Code: 1 =Mines Closed, 2=Other Federation, 3=Lack of Interest, 4=Charter
Revoked, 5=Strike,
6=Consolidated or Reorganized
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tramp Locals and Industrial Relations Success
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Industrial Relations Successes Regressed with
|
|
Multiple R |
R2 |
R |
Beta Weight |
|
a – Membership |
0.5906 |
0.348 |
0.591 |
0.2907 |
|
b - Number of Strikes |
0.7667 |
0.588 |
0.627 |
0.5664 |
|
c - Tramp/Stable |
0.7668 |
0.558 |
0.177 |
0.0433 |
|
d – Existence |
0.791 |
0.626 |
0.561 |
0.308 |
|
e - Amount of Violence |
0.8096 |
0.655 |
0.247 |
-0.21 |
F = 12.556 with 5/33 DF significant at .0001)
2. Existence of Local Regressed with
|
|
Multiple R |
R2 |
R |
Beta Weight |
|
a – Membership |
0.6066 |
0.368 |
0.607 |
0.56457 |
|
b - Number of Strikes |
0.6168 |
0.38 |
0.267 |
0.0429 |
|
c - Tramp Stable |
0.6373 |
0.406 |
-0.83 |
-0.14668 |
|
d - Amount of Violence |
0.6641 |
0.441 |
0.339 |
0.22044 |
|
(F = 6.704 with 4/34 DF significant at .001) |
||||
3. Stepwise Regression of Success with
|
|
Multiple R |
R2 |
R |
Beta Weight |
|
a - Tramp/Stable |
0.1771 |
0.031 |
0.177 |
0.65096 |
|
b - Membership Turnover |
0.2577 |
0.066 |
0.112 |
-0.54561 |
|
c – Membership |
0.6259 |
0.392 |
0.591 |
0.54561 |
|
d - Amount of Violence |
0.642 |
0.412 |
0.246 |
0.14554 |
|
(F = 5.959 with 4/34 DF significant at .01) |
||||
Jim Foster is
Associate Professor of Labor Relations and Co-ordinator of the Labor Studies
Program as the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. His publications include the
Union Politic (1975) and Labor in the Southwest (1982).
APCRP Internet Presentation
All Rights Reserved
WebMaster: Neal Du Shane
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