When I was visiting a salt mine in Poland, we were told that the miners got to take a handfull of salt with them at the end of the day. Salt, being so valiuable, gave the miners the means to live a wealthy life.
At the same time, when we talk about traditional curing of fish in my home country of Norway, salt is used by the kilos when making the brine.
Norway was by no means a rich country, so how come our poor fishers could use salt by the kilos, while salt miners in Poland became rich just by getting a handfull each day?
This is a difficult question because you may be talking about two economic practices that happened at different times. Maybe if you gave the time period the Polish miners were getting rich?
I know in Norway that salt was indeed scarce during the Viking Age and Medieval period which is why stockfish(tørrfisk) that has been dried in the cool-air and lutefisk which is treated in lye made from birch ash are food items in Norway. Norway for a long time was THE source to get stockfish because the conditions for curing it are perfect in more Northern Norway. The stockfish trade was lucrative for the Hansa in Bergen trading it all over Europe.
My focus in Norwegian history is mainly Viking Age so I can't tell you about when salt was more accessible to Norwegians to use in treating fish but using salt to treat fish has not always been the case in Norway and I am thinking that if these mines were operated during the medieval period that Norwegian fisherman and fishmongers didn't have the access to salt thus the huge trade in stockfish.
I think you may have misunderstood the explanation of salt mining in Early Modern Poland. Working in a salt mine has always been dangerous and unpleasant work, but the King of Poland held the rights to the salt mines as a royal monopoply. The workers were usually free peasants, not serfs, so they were paid what was considered at the time as a fair prevailing wage of around 3 grozy as day (about 4-5 grams of silver equivalent, i guess?). The miners were also allowed to take home a certain amount of salt each day as part of their compensation -- they didn't have to buy in on the open market like everyone else.
Most of the rock salt mines in Poland are in the southern part of the country, today near metro Krakow, and supplied markets across Central and Eastern Europe as far away as what is today Hungary and Romania.
I suspect, based on my knowledge of Early Modern "patterns of trade" that fishermen in Norway likely got their salt from Portugal or somewhere else on the Atlantic coast, as much or more than places in Poland and Germany. In the late medival and ealry modern eras (1300s-1700s?) coastal and inland areas tended to have somewhat segregated commercial networks, becuase of the economics of transportation in that era (overland transport of bulk goods was VERY expensive compared to transport via oceans or even rivers).
It was my understanding after visiting the same mine that they were paid handsomely as well as getting a handful of salt a day. So I took away from it that salt mining was a wealthy industry, not that salt was extremely expensive. Can anyone confirm?
Does anyone know how wealthy the peasants could actually get in mining salt in Poland? I think that would go some way to roughly comparing the value of local salt to that imported from Norway.
Terms like 'wealthy' can be somewhat subjective. Could they save up at a bank and use it to buy an estate replete with servants and settle in leisure? Also like the other guy said, what time period was this?