The UMWA was attempting to retain pay raises gained in the contracts it had negotiated in 1922 and 1924, while management, stating that it was under economic pressure from competition with the West Virginia coal mines, was seeking wage reductions.
[6] Northern coal mining operators, looking to reduce costs, blamed their weakened competitive position on the high and inflexible wage rates negotiated by the union.
[1] When the northern operators continued to lose market share to their southern counterparts, they asked the union for a renegotiation of the Jacksonville scale.
In August, 1925, the Pittsburgh Coal Company, largest in the district, closed down, rejected the Jacksonville agreement, and reopened on a nonunion basis.
The operators requested a reduction of the Jacksonville scale as well as union acceptance of the principle that wages should be tied to the changing price of coal.
The American Federation of Labor, responding to a plea from John L. Lewis (the head of the UMWA), passed a resolution which called on its affiliated international unions to help the coal miners.
When the Coolidge administration refused to intervene in the dispute, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis could not get the major coal operators to agree to go back to the negotiating table with the UMWA.
[5] In a major setback for the union, the company brought in strikebreakers and reopened the Rossiter mine in September,[3] on a non-union basis with most of its employees recruited from outside the district and paid on the lower 1917 scale.
[5] A further, and much greater setback for the unions occurred in November, when Judge Jonathan Langham, serving on the Court of Common Pleas of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, published several sweeping injunctions against the protesters, putting a halt to their collective activities.
[5] But it was his final injunction which brought national attention to the conflict in Pennsylvania: He issued a prohibition against singing hymns and holding church services on the last two pieces of property in Rossiter not owned by the mining operators: lots owned by the Magyar Presbyterian Church situated directly opposite the mouth of the mine.
[5][3][10] The publicity spawned by Langham's injunction attracted out-of-state journalists, and a United States Senate investigating committee that came to Rossiter in February 1928.
The company continued to import strikebreakers and rely on Coal and Iron Police, and by the end of August virtually every Rossiter-area mine operated on a non-union basis.
It also stipulated uniform scales of wages and hours and created a national commission which would fix prices and regulate production.