Josephine Aspinwall Roche

By 1927 she had become a leading progressive liberal and labor advocate in Colorado. When her father, who was president of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company (RMF), died, she inherited his minority stock and found herself ready and willing to apply her progressive ideas close to home. In March 1928, when Roche had purchased enough shares to control RMF, she invited the United Mine Workers to unionize her mines. RMF was the first western coal company to sign a union contract and pay its miners an unheard of $7 a day. After Roche’s unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Colorado, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.

For years, disagreements between laborers and corporations were still common, and some turned bloody. In April of 1914, The National Guard shot miners, their wives and children after being called in to control a volatile situation at a mining camp which was owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Ludlow, located between Walsenburg and Trinidad, Colorado. Josephine helped attend to the grieving families and helped them testify. After years of fighting for rights, as some battles were lost and won, the eight-hour work day became standard practice in 1940 for all laborers in the private sector after a long, drawn out battles over the years between workers and government officials.