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# {2-662.} Miners and Factory Workers

Old and new factors gave rise to socioeconomic tensions in the long-established mining towns and other mining communities. The salt-cutters were paid very low wages (at Désakna, a daily five kreuzers in 1788), but they enjoyed certain exemptions and complemented their income with farming. They were generally quiescent, except when the stability of their life was threatened. One of the causes of the strike at Kolozs in 1804 was a plan to move the miners to a new site at Marosújvár. However, this and other strikes of the period (notably at Vizakna in fall 1804, and in March and December 1807) were also motivated by dissatisfaction with wages that had been eroded by wartime inflation. Occasionally, salt-cutters would also strike in protest at some unwelcome action on the part of the mine's manager.

The tensions between the Érc Mountain's villein-miners and the Treasury were of a different nature. The grievances voiced by workers on the Zalatna domain both before and after the Horea rising were not specific to miners: they involved the problems of villeins in general, such as increases in socage obligations, the prohibition against land-clearing and the seizure of cleared land, and the scale of levies, taxes, and communal work. Different problems arose on the more modern mining sites. In April 1804, fifty-one miners (Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, and Slavs alike) at Boica mounted a week-long strike — a precursor of modern industrial action — in protest against a new wage system based on the precious metal content of the extracted ore (Haltakkordarbeit).

There was less labour unrest in the manufacturing sector. If factory workers were not mentioned in the context of urban society, that is because most manufacturing plants were not located in towns. These workers generally enjoyed better working conditions than the guild craftsmen's journeymen: they earned higher wages, could often supplement their income by farming, and, in some {2-663.} branches, notably the potash industry, had greater freedom to organize their work.