COAL: Profiteering?

The actual cost of producing anthracite coal does not warrant the excessively high prices which the public are paying, according to a report made by a committee representing the United Mine Workers of America, and brought to the attention of the United States Coal Commission.

In the report the miners make the following main contentions:

1) The earnings of miners average from $1,142 to $1,496, annually, which is below the level of minimum subsistence.

2) Some companies make many of their own supplies or are intimately connected with supply companies. This enables them to charge three or four times the actual cost of supplies in their accounting.

3) Companies claim the amount necessary for miners' insurance is 10 cents a ton, while in 1921 only 4 cents a ton was paid out to the miners, thus reducing the coal companies' cost figures by $4,200,000 annually.

4) Electrification of the mines has resulted in economies which have not been shown in the claimed costs.

5) Many collieries have doubled their managerial force without achieving a corresponding increase in production.

"The cost of anthracite coal can never be figured in dollars and cents alone," concludes the report, "there must be added to the labor cost an annual toll of over 500 lives, of over 20,000 workers who suffer accidents, of men and boys who do work as dirty and dangerous as soldiers in war, that coal may be produced to warm the homes of our people."