Three Installments for the Ten Percent

A meeting in Shamokin brought coal company officials and individual operators together over a practical question: how to pay the ten-percent amount due for the period from November to April. The Mount Carmel Item reported on March 23, 1903, that they had met the preceding Saturday evening and agreed to divide it into three installments.

The first installment was scheduled for March 30, with the other two to follow on the next two paydays. The brief said the Union Coal Company was expected to adopt the same plan, which would finish paying the amount before May 1. That company decision was still described as anticipated.

The notice records an agreement and its intended timetable, not a worker's pay envelope or a completed payroll. It nevertheless gives the settlement a local, everyday scale: an amount owed over several months was to be delivered in stages tied to familiar paydays. Whether each company adopted the plan and each payment followed is not established by this report.