Negotiating and Upholding the Law of the UMWoA
This contract was negotiated by District 14 of the UMWA to protect their members' rights in the minefields. This document outlines the obligations of an employer to their employees, the payment of employees (times and adherence to minimums), working hours, rightful causes for termination of employment, and procedures for suspension of mining among other activities. The Hearl Maxwell collection contains other documents that tracked what the minimum wage was for the miners while keeping track of the changes in these wages and spreading the word thereof to employers as it changed. This contract was negotiated and enforced by the UMWA, and the Hearl Maxwell collection also contains multiple documents that contain details of "cases" that they "tried" as judge and jury, an example of which is presented below.
In this case, the member of the UMWA was laid off, and the organization was asked to examine his claim that their choice to lay him off went against his employment contract. They utilized the agreements between the union and the employers (not the exact contract above, but this case would be operating under would be operating under an incredibly similar one) to make a judgement on his claim, ultimately deciding that the employer was in the right. This displays an interesting conundrum for the union; they have an obligation to try their hardest to protect their member's job and rights, but they also need to maintain a relationship with the employers. Utilizing unfair interpretations of the contract or putting up too much fight even if the ultimate outcome is a loss would alienate employers and possibly lower the union's ability to work on behalf of their members in the future. They fought to give their members the best contracts possible, but in the end they had to uphold those contracts in an objective manner to protect their ability to continue bargaining for better working conditions in the contracts.
Unsurprisingly, the discussion of contracts in the corpus as a whole primarily revolves around violations. The image below shows the words most closely related to the word contract in the entire body of the Hearl Maxwell collection. This image shows that the most common word used alongside contract is violation. The organization's primary duty with contracts is more upholding them than negotiating them. Violations were mentioned twice as often as negotiations, suggesting that the organization spends a great deal more of its time and resources protecting its members when contracts are breached than actually creating the contracts. Additionally, operators (mine owners) are mentioned often enough to make this list of the most highly related articles, but no word for the union's members is. This suggests that although the union would protect mine owners side of the contract too, they also would not actively seek prosecution against their own members for contract violations --that is assuming, of course, that the reason far fewer laborer-side contract breaches are mentioned is not only because fewer happen but actually due to the union's objectives and the ways it communicates about these issues.
