Workplace of Their Own

At the turn of the twentieth century Colorado's coalfields were the site of the nation's most violent labor conflicts. The remote mountains were home to mining companies that provided workers and their families with supervised housing, education, health care, and stores. Resisting corporate control, workers deployed armed bands against their employers, leading to a pitched battle between the groups for control over the workplace. Efforts to defuse the situation, including strategies that had worked in other industries, all failed. In this book, Maria E. Montoya examines two key figures who practiced rival Progressive reforms for resolving these industrial conflicts. John D. Rockefeller Jr. used paternalism and philanthropy to promote the scientific management of his workers' professional and personal lives. Josephine Roche advocated for worker autonomy, collective bargaining, and government-backed labor protections. Both honed their Progressive ideals in New York City and transported these ideas to manage their businesses in Colorado. Their reform efforts played out and eventually failed against the backdrop of the deadliest mining conflicts of the early twentieth century, the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the 1927 Columbine Massacre. Rockefeller's Industrial Relations Plan did not satisfy his workers and could not prevent strikes. Roche's vision of expert-supervised collective bargaining collapsed under the political and economic pressures brought on by the Depression. Presenting both the capitalists and the men and women who worked and lived in their mining towns, A Workplace of Their Own shows how they grappled with issues around workplace conditions, compensation, benefits, work hours, and corporate decisionmaking-questions that remain as relevant today as they were in the early twentieth century.

María E. Montoya is a Global Network Associate Professor of History at New York University and the former Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU Shanghai. A past President of the Western History Association, she is the author of Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900 and the lead author on the US history textbook, Global Americans: A Social and Global History of the United States.