JOHN  SINEY

To America
  With the ensuing Civil War in America came the Union's blockade of all Confederate ports, which severely crippled the South's cotton exports to Great Britain.  The textile center of Manchester was thrown into a major depression, affecting all industry, including the building trades.  Within one year, John Siney was desperately without work.  To make matters worse, his young wife soon fell ill and died.  England no longer looked good.
   In 1863, at the age of thirty-two, John Siney came to the anthracite mining regions of Pennsylvania as yet another immigrant, prepared to accept a new and hard life of laboring down in the mines.  He arrived in St Clair already well-schooled in hard knocks, as a man intimate with personal tragedy and a skilled veteran of labor organization.  He was no greenhorn.

A Brief Overview of John Siney's Contributions
to the American Labor Movement

  Highly valued for his union experience back in England, Siney helped organize the St. Clair-based Workingmans' Benevolent Association and was soon elected its president.   He rapidly went on reshape this mostly fraternal organization into the first effective coal miners' union.  This initial success would lead him onto other, ever-more ambitious undertakings, both labor and politically oriented in nature.   Most of these efforts would ultimately be seen as failures by his contemporaries.   At times, Siney himself became a victim of these same perceptions and was directly reproached or ridiculed. Perhaps the worst of this was experienced in 1875, when under his leadership, a long and bitter coal strike of six month's duration was lost and his union was severely weakened and in many areas, totally destroyed.  Thousands of miners, including many men who were friends or neighbors, turned against their leader to openly curse the name of John Siney.
 
In Retrospect
  With the passing of 120 years since his death, St. Clair's adopted son is now seen, instead, as both a visionary and innovator among America's early labor leaders.  A short list of John Siney's accomplishments include…
- The successful enactment of the first mine safety inspection laws in the United States.
- Negotiation of the first minimum wage agreement for working miners.
- Organization of the first nation-wide miners union (Miners' National Association)
- The first industry-wide collective bargaining (now common with the Auto Workers and other unions.)
- The first written and signatured labor agreement between coal miners and employers.
  Finally, under Siney's leadership, his union's locals organized their own libraries and food cooperatives, this latter done to allow miner families an alternative to prices charged at the company-owned stores.

The Inheritance
  As a labor leader, nearly all of his accomplishments were short-lived and his working years were benchmarked by many bitter failures.  Later on, however, those same rough benchmarks would serve as an invaluable pathway for future leaders of   America's unions, including  the coal miners' own John Mitchell and John L Lewis.  Truly, John Siney's major short-coming was in being ahead of his own time and place in history.
   Of all his struggles, he fought the longest and the hardest of all for the safety of those who earn their living down in the mines.  In 1869, only a few months after Siney's successful legislative fight for state inspections in all of Schuylkill County's coal mines, a major disaster struck in neighboring Luzerne County.   At the Avondale mines near Plymouth, 110 men and boys were lost in one of the worst mine fires in U.S. history.  Recovery teams came upon fathers and sons who had died together, with some found in each other's arms.  Every single man and boy in the mine had died of suffocation.  On September 9, on a dark and satanic-like hillside near the Avondale mine, a pale and solemn John Siney stood before an immense gathering of anthracite miners and the families of the dead.  He spoke in a low voice, telling them in part…

"You can do nothing to win these dead men and boys back to life, but you can help to win fair treatment for the living who risk life and health in their daily toil… "
 
 John Siney died in poverty in 1879 at the age of 48.  He is buried in old St. Mary's Cemetery, close by his adopted town of St. Clair.

John Siney / St. Clair

Samuel Gompers, founding president of the American Federation of Labor, recalls St Clair's John Siney in his 1924 autobiography, "Seventy Years of Life and Labor"…

" My first personal knowledge of the miners dates back somewhere between 1870 and 1875. John Siney was the most important figure in the trade…he was then president of the Anthracite Miners' Union and he had finally built up a national miners' organization…Siney was a sturdy upright character, with extraordinary knowledge of human nature and ability for leadership."

 The eminent journalist and historian, McAlister Coleman, in his book, "Men and Coal", describes the same John Siney thus…

Terence Powderly, leader of the nationwide Knights of Labor, three-time Mayor of Scranton, Pa. and later U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, credited John Siney with stirring in him (at Avondale in 1869) the passion to take on a life of serving others…

"Siney was the first man I ever heard make a speech on the labor question. I was just a boy then, but as I looked at John Siney…and listened…I saw the travail of ages struggling for expression on his stern, pale face. I caught inspiration from his words and realized that there was something more to win…than dollars and cents for oneself."

"Well, we’ve been beaten, beaten all to smash,

and now sir, we begin to feel the lash,

as wielded by a gigantic corporation

which runs the commonwealth and ruins the nation,

Our union lamp, friend John Siney, no longer shineth,

It’s gone up where the gentle woodbine twineth."

Taken from --THE GILMARTIN FAMILY - THREE GENERATIONS IN AMERICA