Labor Market in Harlan County, Texas, Was Research Paper

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labor market in Harlan County, Texas, was monopolistic in the sense that Duke Power had a significant amount of wage-setting power at the time that Harlan County, USA was filmed. The company and its subsidiary, the Eastover Mining Company, were one of the largest employers within the county. Moreover, the sort of people that the company hired did not have a lot of other career prospects. Most of them were relatively uneducated by contemporary standards and had high school diplomas or did not finish high schools. As such, the work afforded by this company was fairly important to their livelihoods, which is why the laborers were willing to endure a strike for as long as they did.

Since Duke Power was one of the larger employers within Harlan County, they were able to set wages in the region. A testament to this particular fact is the scab replacements that the company got to replace its regular workers during the strike. The scabs did not make as much money as the regular employees did, and did not even have the paltry health benefits that the striking workers did. Due to the fact that Duke Power could hire these laborers for less than their regular ones, it is fair to say that it had a degree of wage-setting power in this part of the country.

Women had a predominant role in this movie and in the strike that the documentary depicted. Their input was invaluable, and all the more remarkable for the fact that at the time, there were no female miners employed by Eastover Mining Company, whereas today they compromise approximately half of the company's workers at the Brookside mine (Schneider, 2010).

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Therefore, it was a little surprising to see them take the forefront in the initiative to strike, and to continue the strike, and to defend themselves against the dangers that accompanied such a choice.

In retrospect, however, the involvement of the many wives of the workers actually is not that startling. The adage goes that men make the money and that women spend it so, in that respect, the participation of these women was merely part of the husbandry that many women naturally exhibit in marriage. However, the lengths that the women depicted in the movie went to keep the strike going were certainly encouraging. The most prominent one, Lois Scott, showed the type of tenacity that ultimately saw the strike through to its completion, as her pistol-pulling episodes unequivocally revealed. Even the presence of the documentarian, Barbara Kopple, had a prominent role in this particular strike as it has been posited that the mere presence of a camera helped to reduce -- not eliminate -- the threat of violence (Long, 2006). The beating that she received was endemic of the role of women in this strike, which was actually at the forefront and more dogged than the involvement of the workers, their husbands.

If one considers the henchmen hired by Duke Power company's Eastover Mining Company….....

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