[whswhs]

I'm going to suggest that Hilaire Belloc's discussion of "distributism" in The Servile State may be relevant to what you're looking at (and it seems to have been at least a small influence on Tolkien and Lewis). The idea of distributism is that you have a deliberate policy of enabling as many people as possible to be small property holders. Dwarves seem to be an intensely propertarian race, so this could fit them.

I'm thinking that mines might work somewhat along the lines of the old putting out system. You don't actually have "workers"; you have a mine developer who plans the operations, and you have dwarvish households that contract to work in a given min according to specifications. How much a household makes depends on its productivity.

But I suspect that at least the mining dwarves are likely to have something like the Freemasons—a mutual aid setup that insures against death, disability, and injury. Mining is a dangerous trade, after all.

Bill Stoddard