Word: coaling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Long an outspoken opponent of the nonunion policy of the Colorado coal field, she got ready to fight it. Within a few months she bought the interest of Denver Capitalist Horace Bennett and gained control of $10,000,000 R. M. F. Then to Josephine Roche's office was summoned Rocky Mountain Fuel's general counsel, the late progressive U. S. Senator Edward Prentiss Costigan. To Senator Costigan went leaders of Colorado's struggling mine unions. Late in the summer of 1928 they signed a famed document: the first mine union contract in Colorado's history...
...worked. Colorado union men bought R. M. F. coal, as a contribution to the high wages and good working conditions that Josephine Roche's workers enjoyed. R. M. F. diggers were R. M. F. salesmen, and once, when the company was threatened by a price war by nonunion mines, went without pay for 2½ months to lend $80,000 to the management...
...while R. M. F. did better than others because of its union policy, the whole Colorado coal industry grew sick. The year that Miss Roche took over, a pipeline which had snaked its way from the natural gas fields of the Texas Panhandle went into operation. Owned jointly by Standard Oil of New Jersey, Sinclair Oil and Colorado Public Service Co., it knocked the spots off the coal business. In 1929, 9,934,000 tons of coal were mined in Colorado. By last year production had fallen...
Meanwhile, under the pressure of the New Deal and public opinion, the entire Colorado coal field had been unionized. Paradoxically, it hurt Rocky Mountain Fuel. Union men who once had demanded R. M. F. coal, were now willing to buy from any union mine. R. M. F. sales leveled off, ran a deficit year after year...
...Chief issue in the big April-May coal strike...