People vs. Corporations - The Harlan County War And What America Looks Like Today

When burning, mountain coal looks like a living thing. It breezes, mushrooms, and exhales a harsh chemical smoke as it starts to glow. It expands, expressing little cracks, creating surface area. That's why it gets so much hotter than charcoal, and that's why you can melt metal with mountain coal, but not with BBQ briquettes from the store.

When Joe Scopa came to Harlan County, he was 19. He was hired to work in the Appalachian Minds before arriving in America. That's how desperate mining companies were for skilled labor. Joe’s whole family - his dad, brothers, cousins, and even his grandfather all worked and lived around the Toms Creek Coal Camp because the family knew how to cut stone. Back in Italy, the Scopes were rock masons. Stonecutters would build hotels, motels, and bathhouses all made from native Italian stone. But in America, they were sent into the mines - 500-600 Italian immigrants who slept on warehouse cots or in rows of coal shacks like drones being sent into a black mound to fetch the coal.

Joe came to Harlan County in an age when working for the steel industry was a solid job. He arrived just before the company started buying up their labor towns; before the companies could dictate the price of everything, even the rent - making a living at the mine more expensive than the job itself could earn. In 1919, Joe compared his situation to slavery. He wrote, “This part of the country reminds me where I come from, North Italy. Now that they have all the factories after WWII, all the people move north. They're just like the southern people here. They left the South and went North because the South was just like slavery. That's what's happening in the Appalachian Mountains.”

Ironically, an Italian immigrant who arrived during America's Gilded Age to work in a traditional American job compares the situation to slavery. It's also worth noting that Joe wrote that in 1919 because in less than a decade, the skilled immigrants who arrived to put down roots would get caught up in a deadly labor dispute; a page in American history known as the Harlan County War, or the Bloody Harlan Coal Strike, where America proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if local government was forced to take sides between laborers or the company, they would defend the company with rifles in hand.

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Anthony Bourdain once wrote; one understands and appreciates the American dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. In the 1940s, union membership peaked. Pensions, loyalty programs, and benefits were expected. By the 50s and 60s, the middle class expanded. Between the 1950s and 1970s, wages doubled. Every generation pushed fair compensation up just a little until we finally got the quintessential honest, blue-collar grunt who lands a solid company job, invests in our future, buys a home, and retires on their pension.

But there's a problem with this picture; the era of peak wages didn't evolve out of company loyalty, and Boomers sure as hell didn't trust their employers to have their best interest at heart. Baby Boomers who worked in the 1970s worked a lot of different jobs. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Baby Boomers chased jobs an average of 11 times before they retired. There was no company loyalty at the peak of the middle class. In fact, laborers like Joe, who carved a piece of America out for themselves back in the 20s, suffered for it. It was their children who could expect a factory job and their grandchildren who could expect a livable wage.

What can an immigrant working in today's labor force expect? What happens if we put Joe, the picture of a hardworking immigrant in America, in today's job market? That's what our myths today will cover.

Myth One: Who wants Joe to succeed? Trump's policies have made it hard to enter the country. But what about highly skilled laborers? Could a brain surgeon enter the country or a nurse during a shortage? 

Joe: Todd, did you watch the news last year when the Portland Police defended the dumpster full of meat?

Todd: No…that reminds me though of the tiger cage, where they were going to Walmart to get all the hot dogs to feed the tigers.

Joe: Okay, at least that makes sense because they were feeding tigers. Though one though…please, anyone who's listening, go look it up - it was a wild story. So, last year in East Portland, Fred Meyers frequently threw out their excess food. And they will usually throw it out at a time when it's about to be picked up. They claim that if people go through the dumpster, eat the food, and get sick, they are liable. But it's bullshit. Now, if a dumpster is placed off property, like at the curb, you are allowed to go through it and take things from it. So, if you ever want to go dumpster diving, that's how you can do it legally. Well, the Fred Meyers took offense to the homeless going through their meat dumpster, called the cops, and the cops showed up and like stood at this dumpster and defended it. I shit you not.

Todd: This was probably going on during the riots and stuff too. We have a huge drug and homeless problem. I'm sure they had other things they should probably have been doing, maybe of higher priority.

Joe: The chief of police last year declared that they only had one traffic cop in East Portland doing traffic stops, but they can apparently spare a couple of cops to defend Fred Myers.

We are not anti-police on the show, and we are not anti-capitalism, but it seems like we aren't afraid to repeat Harlan County and the Bloody Harlan County battle. The sheriffs and law enforcement sided with the corporation. This meat dumpster, which was on national news, was a small microcosm case of the police taking the corporation's side versus the people.

This episode, the episode about immigrant work ethic, showed up on our pitch doc a couple of times. Why is it so important in today's day and age? Well, we have a great work resignation going on right now. Many people are not allowed to come into this country, who could come here, pay taxes, be great citizens, send their kids to school – but they're kept out. To me, it's concerning that we're not openly recruiting other people to move to this country right now. All the best employees I've ever worked with 100% are immigrants. They work exceptionally hard. They did clean work. They were honest. They showed up.

In our opening narrative, we talked about these people who were all Italian stone masons, and who made beautiful hotels and cut marble. And then they come here, and we make them dig coal. So, like whatever thing you think is unskilled, even if it's like landscaping, try to run one of those riding mowers, levitation motors, or whatever. It doesn't matter what you don't want to do. The thing you don't want to do has levers and buttons that you haven't used before. Do you remember when it used to be real pride and being a hardworking American? That's kind of gone now. People are not proud of that anymore, and certainly, their kids are not proud of their parents for being hard workers; they think their parents are dumb for working too hard. We used to have the Teddy Roosevelt method of hard work makes a man and it's good for the soul. We've gone from Teddy Roosevelt saying the strenuous life is the best to don’t do anything.

I want to point out that intelligent people in America being against immigrant workers has been as old as America, and it is changed over the years. I don’t understand that because those are the people that need them the most. Now, we're going to start really far back. I want to look at immigrant work ethic from the beginning of what an immigrant is. So, in ancient Rome, they had a real issue when Rome started shrinking, and the population started getting taken over by the Gauls, the early French. They were barbarians, and they were buying land and coming in illegally. They weren't technically Roman citizens, and some senators and landowners were like, we're not going to be Romans anymore. So, the idea of being afraid of immigrants changing your national identity has always existed. In 1775, Benjamin Franklin warned everybody against how destructive German immigration would be. Ben wrote quote, “A colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, who will never use our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion.” I'm thinking of people today who have spoken out against immigration that sound just like that. They don't have the same complexion as we do. They're not going to adopt our language. They're not going to adopt our customs. Those are all from Ben Franklin.

Later in 1850, it was the Irish; in the 1880s, it was the Chinese coming over with the railroads. In the 1900s, it was the Italians who we were just talking about. Here's the real history of America in a nutshell; Americans started hurting because the labor market sucked for a little bit. So, the people running the labor markets point the finger at the immigration line. They don't blame the mining companies for raising prices, they point at the five or six hundred Italians who came over from stonecutters to dig coal, and they say, hey, those guys are making it tough on everybody. Not us setting the prices on what everything costs or the company working everything. In history, this is so well known. Like the idea that a company like a mining company will end up controlling the store and the rent under your feet. How was that allowed to happen? The Harlan County Mining incident is basically the thing we all avoid. Octavia Butler's book, The Parable Of The Sower, is an award-winning book because it replicates that in the Modern Age. When people look at what Amazon's doing right now, setting up hubs and Amazon towns, we all look at that and say, not again; we're not doing that again.

Myth Two: We all like to believe we're hard workers. But are we really? Maybe everyone thinks they're hard workers in the same way everyone thinks they're funny.

Joe: I remember a Freakonomics episode recently that was talking about how they're having trouble even getting immigrants to work the farm jobs now. They can't get one person to stick around, even somebody who's working on a Visa. So, before we had the tomato picking machine, we had German and Italian and Polish immigrants. Was there somebody representing these people?

Todd: They did; they have a strong union leader called Tony Boyle. The problem with Tony was he was not for the rights of the workers. He was not for the right of his own Union. He used his power to hold down and line the pockets of the owner of the mines and himself. A man came along named Joseph Yablonski; his nickname was Jock, and he was born in Pittsburgh, PA. 1910. He was a Polish immigrant, he was a second-generation born here, but his dad was a miner, and he was a minor. So, he knew this industry. He was a generational worker. His father died a violent death in a mine. So, Jock's calling was to make mines safer for everybody. He went after Tony every chance he got because he knew how corrupt he was.

Joe: Have you ever been present when a company or group of labor switches to a Union?

Todd: Yeah, and it was ugly.

Joe: In my past security company, we had a Tony. We were all trying to unionize because our medical wasn't being covered and we had a supervisor who was "one of us," but we found out he had his medical covered, and we didn't. So, I'm guessing Tony Boyle was not suffering like these exploding miners.

Todd: He wasn't. Now, he saw Joseph as a threat and threatened him multiple times, but it didn't work. Joseph was not going to stand down. He cared too much about his. So, what Tony did was he sent a hit squad and had him killed. They went to this guy's house and killed him, his wife, and his 25-year-old daughter. This tells you how serious this is, not just in the mines but the politics behind it as well.

The thing about immigration is that different people come to work together. That is fascinating to me. There's a documentary called 'The Men Who Built America', and it goes deep into immigration, shows how this country was formed, and why parts of our country are into the things they are: it's because of immigrants. It's because of all the stuff they brought over. And in these mines, it wasn't uncommon to have hundreds of Polacks and hundreds of Italians. And so, as you walk through these camps, it's like you're in Italy - the language, the food, the smells and then you're in Poland right across the street. I just thought that was cool. Since we're on the subject without taking political sides, let’s talk about the current foreign immigration policy that is in place.

Without saying a side is right or wrong, we just want to look at immigration standards: What laws are in place and how they work. So, this is from Forbes reviewing Trump’s immigration policy. They report that most highly-skilled form born are blocked or denied at higher rates. Now, high skilled foreign Nationals, like people with unique or exceptional skills, went from being blocked 6% of the time back in 2015 to now 30%. To be considered a high skilled foreign National, it's my understanding that you have to have a credited certificate degree or something like that.

When Trump went on national news and said that we want educated, skilled people here, you know, people of exceptional abilities, we may have wanted them in a motion, but that's not what our current policy shows; it shows we will block a third of people who come with good degrees. So, these aren't Arts Majors that are showing up at our borders. These are people who were nurses and doctors getting told to shove off. And were suspended for Nationals for their H-1B and L1. Highly skilled individuals in the world cannot enter America under the Trump administration's immigration policy; reports from attorneys and statements from the state department confirm the US Consular Office in Europe is denying 01 visas for individuals with “extraordinary” abilities based on a health pretext. So again, if you're a nurse or a neurosurgeon, or you have a legit degree in something, we still have a one-in-three chance of just straight up saying no.

When we talk about hard workers in the US, I want to do a celebrity death match for the hard workers of America today. This sounds very stupid, but I went looking for does a Goldman Sachs worker today stack up mining workers? And how would they compare to like a burger-flipping teenager from today? I’d like to think the miner would physically cream everybody. But if we were just talking about a stone cutter mason who's used to the long days, would they be able to do a 16-hour shift at Goldman Sachs? Who really wins? What about a teenager who is forced to study to get into Duke University? Are they really getting less sleep than a minor or a Goldman Sachs employee?

So, we in America like to believe that the older Americans tell younger Millennials that we aren’t hard workers, yet younger Millennials tell everybody else we're working harder than anybody; we are just in debt. And then older ones say nobody in America today is a hard worker because you haven't seen what a mine looks like. And then tell us we're all weak and soft because of it. First off, I want to tease this and say we have the numbers. We know how hardworking Americans are, and we have a statistic for that. Now, the housing market is high, and I remember people saying if people wanted a livable wage to get an adult job.

Well, that's the thing is, I don't want my teenager working that burger flipping job. Due to the current prices of things, parents want their kids to excel past that and go to college/study instead for something more. They think that if I have my kid is flipping burgers at any point past 14, then I have seriously messed up as a parent. So, without teenagers doing those smaller jobs, if we all have them studying as we should, then we don't have those laborers unless we're willing to pay adult wages for a burger. We haven't gotten to Harlan County boiling over point quite yet with Wendy's. And with the current American unions being formed for Amazon, it might be getting close. Like, how hot does it have to get in an Amazon warehouse before they start pulling guns on each other?

Myth Three: We've entered the era of the Great Resignation. We're all being denied raises, asked to work from home without benefits, and treated like ungrateful children tugging on the skirts of Amazon and Walmart. Maybe we deserve our shabby treatment. Maybe America's people aren't as hardworking as we thought.

I'm a millennial who's paid rent, and when rent exceeds 40% of your income and the rest is medical? Imagine coming to this country with nothing without any benefits at all. You speak a different language, you’re tired, and let's not forget the most important thing and I don't just mean the husbands in the mines. I mean, the whole family. This thing in Harlan, it boiled over based on them wanting to unionize. Half of the place wanted to unionize, and the other half didn't and then it just became a war and when I say War, people were going to work in the dark of the morning and were worried about getting shot by the strikers.

Now when I first watched the Harlan County documentary, I watched it with the mind of this was America versus a corporation. I did not look at this from the right light. I did not think of this as this was a bunch of immigrants and Americans who ended up coming to this spot and accidentally ended up in the fight. I saw it as this American icon. Now, we're looking at it and it's like all these immigrants that got blown up and fought for America even though they just wanted to get paid. They just wanted a little bit of money after the day. They would have been happy with just a little bit more. We're talking about the Irish immigrants walking off the job and the Polish there. It's like, how did that not show up in the documentary? All we heard about were these Appalachian Southerners with the songs and the accents. This is not just an American issue but non-Americans coming together to work and seeing this as a uniquely American issue.

This documentary is going to pull at your heart. You're going to see the people who are the Esther's who wanted to earn a living wage and make a better life for their families. They weren't asking for much. They were at churches. They were rallying. They were sticking together and none of the other side. These people who talk like them look like them from the scene, grew up with him, worked with him for years, went to school with them, hating them, thinking of them as being Socialist Communists and trying to not just ruin Harlan County, but ruined America.

These people are walking out of mine every day with a deficit; their debt is growing every day. They walk out of the mine because they are living in the mining town and people who speak the same language and have the same accent or calling them socialists and telling them I hope you die. Like, literally telling them I hope rocks crush you. I'm fired up, but I want to get to our final science point. Basically, are we actually weaker? Have we all become lazy workers compared to our mining forefathers - our celebrity deathmatch of hard worker? Who wins? I think we're better thinkers now with computers and everything, but we're not as physical.

So, if we're just talking, grip strength, over the last couple of generations, it has gone down. Grip strength is what scientists used to just gauge overall physical strength. So yeah, we have gotten physically weaker. However, if you gauge our productivity as a country, our productivity has gone up; we have gone up over the past 10, 20, and 30 years. I'm going to share with you first the equation and then what the graph says. Now, this is, this is famously called The Productivity Graph or the productivity formula. We're going to go for an article from Harvard Business Review because there are people online who argue over how you should measure productivity. Productivity basically shows the overall capabilities of a country. How good is your company at taking raw materials and turning them into a good or a service? That's really all we were measuring in productivity.

According to the Harvard Business Review, most America and their companies use is productivity equals units of output over units of input. That is the simplest way to put it. They have other measures, and I will recognize the people who would argue with us that there are other measures. But this is generally accepted as the gold standard for measuring productivity.

I encourage anyone listening to go look up the productivity formula and the productivity graph of America. It is gone up like a hockey stick like America. If you look back on the 1970s, there is a graph here from the EPI. There is a gap between productivity and typical workers' compensation companies. We're getting smarter as Americans year by year, so why should we have to work physically harder? Why do we have to physically pick up a pickaxe? If the technology is advancing and there are more robots, it seems like a work smarter, not harder situation.

Most jobs aren't that physically demanding. However, you're working 12 to 16 hours a day. It may not be that tough, but it is certainly still demanding. I'm way smarter than my grandpa. Like my IQ is higher. I've studied more. I have more degrees than he had. Why should I accept that I have to work as hard as he did physically, or my alternative is apparently to work 16 hours a day? And you can see a big spike here from 1980 to 2020. And this is what's happened: cell phones, cars, phones, texting and emails have made it, so you don't ever clock out of work.

Every formula we talked about, we peaked in pay in 1979. That's when we hit 100% non-supervisory compensation. It has gone down a little after that, which is weird. Productivity went up from 1980. It was 100%. That's when pay and productivity were at the same rate. Pay has remained the same. So, I'm going to say that again. We were at our most productive as we were at our highest paid in 1980. Just with inflation calculated in and our productivity keeps going up like a mountain on this graph, pay levels off and stays the same. So, let's sum up here: America is the hardest working people that have existed if you calculate how much time we spend working, how much we answer emails, and how much we produce. If you just take that into a calculation, we are the hardest working we have ever been, and we are compensated like we're living in the 80s. If we're talking IQ, that's called the Flynn Effect. We are the smartest we've ever been; we are as creative as we have ever been but not getting paid for it properly. So, what are the chances an immigrant comes to America and ends up in one of those high brackets? And there's an industry conspiracy to keep you happy and keep your content what you're making but give you more responsibilities at work, aka a responsibility raise.

So, we're going to Pew research. In 2018, fewer than a third of foreign-born workers were employed in an occupation where social skills are the most important, like registered nurses, social services, and managers. And that's compared to about 45% of US-born workers. So, if you are US-born, you have a 50/50 chance of being in a happiness index, paid skilled, skilled worker position. If you are foreign-born, it goes to 1 and a 1 in third. Immigrants were more likely than US-born workers to be employed in low-skilled jobs. I mean, that's the corollary that obviously makes sense. Do you remember in our episode about Elon Musk and college degrees - that they really just give you soft skills? Well, those aren't what we consider skilled anymore. The more important jobs, the ones that pay more, aren't the necessary ones like machinists and electricians. We're willing to pay an electrician a nearly livable wage; What we actually pay highly for is soft skills. We want you to manage a team that's managing our robots and algorithms. So, we are weirdly prioritizing social jobs way higher than we are paying vocational jobs.

We eventually are going to have an episode about how many jobs are unnecessary. I read an article saying that 20% of all jobs just exist because we need to make roles for people with college degrees and social things. So, we're kind of a nation that glorifies low working jobs, these soft jobs, and we push off the hardworking jobs where you build America; We push that off onto other vocational people and immigrant people. As we said before, we don't want our teenagers working as burger flippers, and we don't want them when they grow up to work where they are breaking their back working at Jiffy Lube. We don't want them doing unnecessary things. We ironically want them to do unnecessary things that are soft, and they'll still have a spine and knees by the time they hit 35. Weirdly, we all want our children to become the Michael Scott character from The Office, who is a goofy middle manager, and we all recognize he is way overpaid for doing almost nothing. That's now a prestigious job. We all want our children doing that instead of repairing cars that we all desperately need.

Final Thoughts

Joe: For anyone who hasn't seen it, there is part in the Harlan County documentary where the sheriff joins the line against the strikers. They threaten the strikers and bring in bullies, effectively thugs, to threaten the strikers. The strikers go to the city, and in the documentary, there are these moments where people are standing on the street corners in the big city looking out of place. And a cop goes up to one of them and asks them questions such as what are you doing here? Why are you on this corner? What are you protesting? It reminds me of protests in Portland. I'll see a protest where somebody holds a sign up for like free Tibet, and I'm like, I don't know anything about Tibetan Chinese politics. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what the War is about.

Todd: But this New York cop really empathizes with the people. It seems like a very American thing to do, right?

Joe: If we can end on a positive note, that's it. It's the local law around Harlan County wanting to kill those strikers because they had been politicized. They've been told these people, these miners, were unamerican. Because of that, these miners go to New York to protest while seeking legal help. They're not panhandling, they're trying to rally support when they go to court, which is what they do, and the local cop there is like, oh, you poor bastards. So, it's not about us versus the law. This New York cop is like, we have unions, so he understood. That is basically where this comes to an end. If you want to know how this shakes out, the courts found in favor of the miners. It's such a great part of the movie because you've got these women from the mines, these wives of dead miners singing songs about Harlan County while this court battle is going on. Obviously not in court, and eventually, the court rules they're allowed to unionize. They are allowed to seek representation, and the corporations had to either pay a competitive wage or let these miners go. They weren't allowed to stop them from unionizing, stop them from having representation, and not paying them and keep them there. All of that together, that's called serfdom. You can't do that to a human.

Todd: It just came to me, the reason why we didn't see any immigrants in this movie that we watched - this real-life documentary. Do you want to know why?

Joe: Why’s that?

Todd: Because they were the mines working this whole time.