25,460 Feet Before the Work Began | Jewell Ridge, Virginia, 1946

The man trip pulls in, and the men come off it at a run. Tazwell County, Virginia, August of nineteen forty-six.

Russell Lee made the photograph. His caption says the miners rush to check in their safety lamps and identification tags.

They are running because the shift is over. And when a shift began and ended was, that summer, an open question in the law.

One note first. Lee shot in black and white. The color was added by a machine. It is an estimate, not a record.

The original negatives are free to anyone at the National Archives. Every caption quoted in this film is the photographer's own.

Here is the question. A miner reaches the mine. He draws his lamp. He rides underground. He walks to the coal face.

Then he cuts coal. Which of those is work?

A local of the United Mine Workers sued a coal company in southwest Virginia to find out, and the case reached the Supreme Court of the United States.

Jewell Ridge Coal Corporation against Local Number Six Thousand One Hundred Sixty-Seven. Number seven twenty-one. Argued the ninth of March, nineteen forty-five. Decided the seventh of May.

The Court held that time spent traveling underground, between the portal and the working face, belongs in the workweek and must be paid for. And that no custom and no contract could take it away.

To see why that was worth four years of litigation, you have to know how far it is from the portal to the coal.

The opinion sets it out. The men draw their lamps at the lamp house near the main portal. They board the man trips. They are carried down to the underground stations.

A journey varying in distance from four thousand two hundred and fifty feet, to twenty-five thousand four hundred and sixty feet.

Twenty-five thousand four hundred and sixty feet is four and eight-tenths miles. Underground. Before the first swing of the shift.

A man trip is a train of small empty coal cars pulled by an electric motor. Seven or eight men to a car. The cars are a few feet high.

The men must be on constant guard, the Court wrote, for the frequent low ceilings which force them to bend over to avoid striking their heads. And the dangers of falling slate and falling ceilings are ever present.

At the end of the ride they check in at a board, collect their tools and their explosives, and carry them on foot another five hundred to fifteen hundred feet.

Through tunnels, the opinion says, often so low as to force them to crouch over while carrying their burdens.

Keeping constant vigil against live electric wires, falling rocks, and obstacles under foot.

At Jewell Ridge's own mine, about seventy-two men never used the main portal. They went in somewhere else and walked the whole way to their places of work.

The company's answer was that none of this was work. The district court had come close to agreeing. It found the journey definitely not luxurious.

But neither painful nor unduly uncomfortable. Then the Supreme Court quoted what else was in the record. Six men hurt badly enough on the company's man trips to miss a week of work or more. And two deaths.

Thirty miles up the road, in the town of Richlands, there was a building where you could see what the ride cost.

The Clinch Valley Clinic Hospital opened in nineteen thirty-eight. Seventy-five percent of its patients, Lee wrote, are miners and their families.

This is Robert Lee Donley. He worked for the Pocahontas Corporation at the Amonate mine, and the caption says he lost a leg when he was crushed between cars and electric motor, on August the first, nineteen forty-six.

Cars and an electric motor. That is a man trip. Lee found him in a two-bed room about three weeks later.

Paris Duty, Amonate mine. A broken leg in a mine coal car accident. One of the six-bed wards.

Dominice Napoli, Pando Coal Company, Rosan mine. A crushed ankle in a slate fall.

Charlie Williams, Amonate mine. A fractured leg.

This is Doctor Tillou Henderson, dressing a stump. The man is John Beavers, a miner at Amonate. The caption says he had his arm torn off and chest muscles torn out when he was caught in a conveyor belt.

John Looney, Crystal Coal Company, in the Vansant mine. Ruptured, Lee wrote, when he threw rocks across the tracks.

A. J. Buchanan. His caption is nine words long. He worked in the coal mines for over fifty years.

A surgeon setting a pin in a broken hip.

The operating room.

The X-ray room.

The chart desk.

Not everyone here was hurt at the mine. This is the wife and son of Conley Hoanker, who worked at Bishop. The child has tuberculosis of the bone.

Richard Earls visits his wife.

And in the nursery, the next shift.

These undisputed facts, the Court concluded, compel the conclusion that the underground travel involves physical and mental exertion.

A foreman rode every man trip and gave work instructions on the way. A miner who kept breaking the rules of the ride could be laid off or discharged. A man who can be fired during a journey is working during it.

So what did the walk pay for? Lee spent August photographing exactly that, and the answer depends entirely on which company you worked for.

At Jewell Ridge itself, the company had built well. Surfaced streets. Painted houses under the trees.

An office, a store and a recreation hall in one building.

Bowling alleys inside it.

A gymnasium, where the miners' children wrestled.

Horseshoes in the yard.

A church. The building was donated by the company, and Lee adds that the minister's salary is supplemented by the company if necessary.

A dispensary.

Children against a wall, waiting to be vaccinated for smallpox.

Doctor Tiernan, the company doctor, doing the vaccinating.

And then the rents, which Lee wrote onto nearly every frame. Mrs. Paul May and her son, going in their own front door. Four rooms. Twelve dollars a month.

Her kitchen. She has no running water in the house.

Mrs. Oswald Baldwin, ironing on her porch. Four rooms, eighteen dollars, and a shower bath on the back porch.

Eleven miles away at Bishop, the Pocahontas Corporation housed its men like this.

The home of Robert Roop, miner.

His bedroom.

A back porch at Bishop. A mop, a broom, boots under the bench, and the vegetables strung up on hooks to dry.

And the privy that went with it.

A dispensary at the mine office.

Mabel Stanley, in the boarding house, making up the miners' lunches.

A community building with a pool table.

A church, where Lee notes that the fine cabinet work was done by the miners themselves.

They built the inside of it after their shifts.

And then there is Raven.

Raven Red Ash Coal Company, Number Two Mine. Lee worked there on a rainy morning, and the pictures never quite dry out.

Two-family houses near the tipple.

Houses on the hill in the rain.

The railroad runs through the middle of the camp.

He photographed two small children sitting in the ballast. The tracks, his caption says, run a few yards from their front door.

These houses stand along a stream. The stream, the caption says, is used for disposal of trash and garbage.

He photographed it again from the far bank.

House and privies.

Typical privy.

Of one row he wrote that the only access to these houses is up this stream bed, and up the railroad track. Furniture and coal, he says, are sledded in up the stream bed.

Sledded in. In nineteen forty-six.

A miner's wife at a flowing well. She must cross the stream and carry the water about a quarter of a mile to her home.

Archie Isreal's daughter, on the same errand.

Two adults and five children lived in her family's three rooms. The rent was five dollars and twenty-five cents a month.

Mrs. Tudor Circo, on the back porch of a two-room house. Three dollars and fifty cents a month. Her husband built the lean-to himself.

Her kitchen.

Tudor Circo at home.

The two of them on the front porch, in front of the vines.

Mrs. John Price and three children. Four rooms, seven dollars fifty.

Her children played under the house.

The Wheeler family on their steps.

Lee photographed James Wheeler's back porch and wrote one clause that carries the whole arrangement. He screened it at no expense to the company.

The company store.

The meat and vegetable department.

And the houses going away up the hollow along the stream.

This is what the ride and the walk were being argued over. Not a principle. Rent.

Justice Murphy ended the opinion with a line you would not expect in a case about hours. Thus shall each of petitioner's miners receive his own reward according to his own labor. Affirmed.

It was five to four. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by the Chief Justice, Justice Roberts and Justice Frankfurter.

The Court's decision, Jackson wrote, either invalidates or ignores the explicit terms of collectively bargained agreements between these parties, based on a half century of custom in the industry.

Two mines, he noted. About five hundred men each.

That dissent became the argument. Two years and one week after the decision, Congress answered it.

The fourteenth of May, nineteen forty-seven. Public Law forty-nine. The Portal-to-Portal Act.

An act to relieve employers from certain liabilities and punishments under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Congress found the Act had been interpreted judicially in disregard of long-established customs, practices, and contracts.

Jackson's phrase, almost word for word, now in the statute book. And in the list of harms Congress was heading off, item four. That employees would receive windfall payments.

A windfall is money you did not earn. The Supreme Court had just finished holding, on the record of these two mines, that they had earned it.

Her name was Irene Shelton. Her husband was killed in a mine accident in July of nineteen forty-six, a few weeks before Lee came through. She had six rooms and a bath, for twenty dollars a month.

Lee photographed her on the front porch, and wrote down the last thing anyone wrote about her. She believes the company will ask her to move soon. The house came with the job, and the job was gone.

If your people worked the Pocahontas seam — Jewell Ridge, Bishop, Raven, Amonate — tell me what they told you about the ride in. That record mostly is not written down.