es corporate capital appropriated the rich mines of the American West and proletarianized independent miners, workers resisted by forging a genuine, indigenous, and radical working-class culture based on reciprocity and solidarity, and rooted in earlier gold and silver rushes, in the perils of the mining experience, and in a producers" discourse of a moral economy. Despite systematic coercion, miners, and their families established powerful industrial unions and tight-knit working-class communities.
As early as the Civil War period, industrial unionists on the Comstock opened membership to all underground workers regardless of skill or wage levels--a radical departure from the conservative craft-based unions evolving elsewhere. In addition to the central struggle for hegemony between labor and capital, miners contested among themselves over the extension of dignity and material well-being to all workers. In the process, union miners and mining communities came to understand, sometimes painfully, the importance of recruiting and welcoming previously excluded groups. In time, vigorous networks of support and resistance evolved, giving miners, families, and communities a significant measure of control over their lives. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Go Ye and Study the Beehive : The Making of a Western Working Class (Garland Studies in the History of American Labor) (Jeanette Rodda)