Response to Harlan County USA (1976)

¶ … labor market in Harlan County, Texas, was monopolistic in the sense that Duke Power had a significant amount of wage-setting power at the time that Harlan County, USA was filmed. The company and its subsidiary, the Eastover Mining Company, were one of the largest employers within the county. Moreover, the sort of people that the company hired did not have a lot of other career prospects. Most of them were relatively uneducated by contemporary standards and had high school diplomas or did not finish high schools. As such, the work afforded by this company was fairly important to their livelihoods, which is why the laborers were willing to endure a strike for as long as they did.

Since Duke Power was one of the larger employers within Harlan County, they were able to set wages in the region. A testament to this particular fact is the scab replacements that the company got to replace its regular workers during the strike. The scabs did not make as much money as the regular employees did, and did not even have the paltry health benefits that the striking workers did. Due to the fact that Duke Power could hire these laborers for less than their regular ones, it is fair to say that it had a degree of wage-setting power in this part of the country.

Women had a predominant role in this movie and in the strike that the documentary depicted. Their input was invaluable, and all the more remarkable for the fact that at the time, there were no female miners employed by Eastover Mining Company, whereas today they compromise approximately half of the company's workers at the Brookside mine (Schneider, 2010). Therefore, it was a little surprising to see them take the forefront in the initiative to strike, and to continue the strike, and to defend themselves against the dangers that accompanied such a choice.

In retrospect, however, the involvement of the many wives of the workers actually is not that startling. The adage goes that men make the money and that women spend it so, in that respect, the participation of these women was merely part of the husbandry that many women naturally exhibit in marriage. However, the lengths that the women depicted in the movie went to keep the strike going were certainly encouraging. The most prominent one, Lois Scott, showed the type of tenacity that ultimately saw the strike through to its completion, as her pistol-pulling episodes unequivocally revealed. Even the presence of the documentarian, Barbara Kopple, had a prominent role in this particular strike as it has been posited that the mere presence of a camera helped to reduce -- not eliminate -- the threat of violence (Long, 2006). The beating that she received was endemic of the role of women in this strike, which was actually at the forefront and more dogged than the involvement of the workers, their husbands.

If one considers the henchmen hired by Duke Power company's Eastover Mining Company to help scabs cross the picket lines and work as part of the scabs themselves, then it is fairly obvious that they played a major part of the antagonism that the striking workers faced. Those who actually labored in place of the strikers (the true scabs) were depicted in somewhat of a sympathetic light for the simple fact that they were willing to endure the hazardous and arduous nature of coal mining work at even lower wages -- with no benefits -- than the strikers did.

Yet the presence of the henchmen was incorrigible, as they showed no compassion in their blatant attempts to break up the strike. The worst one of these, Basil Collins, a gun wielding thug (Krundt, 2011) was emblematic of the sort of ruffian tactics that were used against the strikers. An economist, however, would more than likely favor scabs simply due to the monetary advantages of using them. As previously denoted, scab workers are paid less for performing the same jobs as regular employees. Additionally, cost is reduced when one uses scab workers for the simple fact that they are not entitled to benefits. Finally, scabs are relatively easy to recruit, particularly if one or a group of them does not work out.

There are several factors that one has to consider when deciding if the workers at actually were successful in negotiating a settlement. The settlement they received, of course, took approximately a year's worth of time of striking -- in which workers did not receive wages -- and resulted in the death of one of the laborers. From that perspective, the settlement that they negotiated must have been a welcome respite to a year's worth of no monetary compensation. On the other hand, the settlement should have been worth the price of the life of the dead worker and the time and energy that all of the strikers put into this issue for the past year.