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united mine workers of america
The Democratic Party Failed Striking Warrior Met Coal Miners in Alabama
Political strategists seem content to cede red states to Republicans, and thereby confirm for the working people living in those states that their belief that Democrats don't really care about them is justified.
Feb 22, 2023
After almost two years on the picket line, the hundreds of United Mine Workers of America members who have been on strike at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama have offered to go back to work. They still do not have the fair contract they have sacrificed so much for. Their negotiations will continue, but they did not win this strike—and that is tragic. The company and its private equity owners bear the most direct responsibility for precipitating this heartless, inhuman struggle. But if you are looking for a meaningful place to focus your rage over the way that this strike has turned out, look directly at the Democratic Party.
Imagine, hypothetically, that we were living in a period of history in which inequality has soared for a half-century, thanks in large part to the decline of unions and working-class bargaining power; in which the American Dream has been hollowed out, and decades of economic gains have flowed almost exclusively to the rich; in which poorly designed free trade policies supported by Democrats have sucked middle America dry of once-abundant blue-collar jobs; in which the obvious failures of neoliberalism to rectify this situation have soured millions of once-reliable blue voters on the Democratic Party, and tempted them into a Republican Party that offers easy scapegoats for systemic problems; in which this toxic lack of opportunity paved the way for a xenophobic, lying narcissist to spend four years in the White House on the strength of racist fables about making America great again. Imagine, further, that after those dark four years, Democrats were back in power; that they had a leader who proclaimed himself the most pro-union president of our lifetimes; and that he led a party that fretted continuously about how to win back working-class voters from the clutches of Trumpism.
This was not just some missed photo-op for Democrats—this was an instance in which Democrats failed to support what should be the core platform of the Democratic Party.
Then imagine that there was a long, grinding strike. By coal miners. In Alabama. Who were fighting against the predations of the sort of ultra-insulated capitalist financiers who are accelerating the inequality crisis. Imagine that walkout became the longest major strike in America, dragging on well past the point when most people would have given up, with the strikers assaulted by oppressive police and court rulings. And yet, for month after month, these workers persevered, held the line, and sacrificed greatly in order to fight for dignity and the fundamental ability for working people to be treated fairly by the faceless forces of capital.
It is obvious to anyone with an ounce of imagination that this scenario represents more than a single, local fight. It contains the potential to be a powerful symbol. Not just a generic "workers fight back" photo-op for politicians, but a very specific inspirational symbol of what the Democratic Party could and should be. What better way to overcome the cynical but effective Republican strategy of declaring itself the party of regular working Americans, than to actually be the party of regular working Americans? What better way to overcome the accusations that Democrats are ivory tower elites than to go all out to support a justified, heroic strike of blue-collar workers in a red state? Why wasn't Joe Biden on the picket line in Brookwood, Alabama? Why wasn't Labor Secretary Marty Walsh at any of the big rallies the UMWA held over the past two years? Why weren't these strikers invited guests at the State of the Union? Why weren't Democratic senators and congresspeople on the ground giving speeches for the strikers, again and again? (Bernie Sanders cannot be expected to singlehandedly drag the entire Democratic Party to the promised land.) Where was everyone? Where were the ads rallying national support that should have blanketed America before the midterm elections? Why did the Democrats let this potent symbol slip through their grasp?
The utter failure to harness the political potential of the Warrior Met strike is not the most important failure here. That would be the failure to support the substance of the strike. Because this was not just some missed photo-op for Democrats—this was an instance in which Democrats failed to support what should be the core platform of the Democratic Party. What are the only institutions that can bring together people of different races and political persuasions in the deep South? Unions. What is the key to rolling back our inequality crisis? Unions. How do you start to change the electorate in deep red states and open their eyes to worker power? Unions. What do unions need to advertise themselves to people unfamiliar with their power? Successful strikes. Besides workers, who have the decline of unions in middle America hurt the most? Democrats.
So, does anyone know where the Democratic Party might find a major strike of blue-collar workers in a red state, that it could energetically support to prove to everyone that it is not a party of remote coastal elites, but rather that its commitment to regular workers is real, that it is ready to repair the damage done by neoliberalism? If anyone sees a strike like that, please let the Democrats know. It's not an opportunity they would ever want to miss.
The infinite admiration that we owe to those UMWA members who walked the line at Warrior Met for all these months should be matched by our infinite disgust at their lack of national political support. The Democrats blew this. The whole thing gives me the same feeling I had in 2021, watching the Democratic Party similarly fail to rally behind workers at a West Virginia pharmaceutical plant that was being callously shut down and offshored during the depths of the Covid crisis. That, like the Warrior Met strike, offered a chance for Democrats to stand up for unions, against heartless financiers, and in support of blue-collar, red state workers. But nobody cared. That opportunity floated away in the wind, along with the jobs that the union was trying to save.
For all the billions of dollars spent on lobbying and gauzy political advertisements, there seems to be no one in Washington, D.C. capable of conceptualizing a way to take advantage of the rare chance to combine substance and symbolism in a pro-worker Democratic Party. Political strategists seem content to cede red states to Republicans, and thereby confirm for the working people living in those states that their belief that Democrats don't really care about them is justified.
The Warrior Met strikers made labor history in Alabama. They may still make some material gains as their negotiations continue. But the lack of political vision by the Democratic Party establishment means that a priceless chance to shake off the boring, Fox News-style polarization of our politics has slipped away. Do better next time, you oblivious cowards.Keep ReadingShow Less
Mother Jones Is Still Calling Out Deadbeat Coal Barons (on Coal Miner's Day)
Oct 13, 2013
I hear Mother Jones calling. The deadbeat coal barons still need to be called out.
[Yesterday] was Coal Miner's Day -- or used to be: October 12th marks the day a small band of striking coal miners in southern Illinois called out Chicago coal barons and stood their ground at Virden in 1898. By the end of the day, seven miners lay dead, but the the strike-breaking barons had been stopped. For most historians, the defiance of union coal miners at the Virden Massacre marked the turning point in the labor movement, impacting the lives of untold thousands of laborers over the next century.
A century later, the coal barons are up to their same games -- billionaire coal baron Chris Cline, in fact, named his 164-foot yacht, Mine Games.
Mother Jones, the miner's angel, may be gone, but Mother Jones magazine just called out International Coal Group -- who gave us the Sago, WV tragedy -- for 20,000 clean water violations.
And Illinois is now dealing with the billionaire coal king Cline, who recently praised Massey Energy's Don Blankenship for his "moral" convictions in one of the bloodiest years of coal mining, and on the 10th anniversary of the Martin County coal sludge disaster; in Ohio, Murray Energy's coal slurry leaks continue to wipe out aquatic life.
After removing thousands of indigenous people on Black Mesa, Arizona and around the nation, Peabody Energy has now set its sights on plundering Mongolia.
Amid mind-boggling strip-mining destruction in Wise County, Virginia, Dominion Resources is building a new coal-fired plant as a monument to yesterday. Check out this trailer from the forthcoming film documentary, The Electricity Fairy:
Electricity Fairy Trailer.movTrailer for The Electricity Fairy, a 2010 Appalshop documentary that examines America's national addiction to fossil fuels through ...
"WHEN MINING BEGAN,"noted a U.S. Coal Commission report in the 1920s, examining the conditions before the union movement in 1897, "it was upon a ruinously competitive basis. Profit was the sole object; the life and health of employees was of no moment. Men worked in water half-way up to their knees, in gas-filled rooms, in unventilated mines where the air was so foul that no man could work long without seriously impairing his health. There was no workmen's compensation law, accidents were frequent. . . The average daily wage of the miner was from $1.25 to $2.00."
Francis Peabody, the namesake of the world's largest coal company today, called it "survival of the fittest."
Miners not only lived and worked in deplorable conditions. They were subjected to the whims of the market, often out of work for the long summer months and forced to migrate for poorly paid day labor. Displaced and unorganized, the miners faced a situation of extreme vulnerability. They often lived in company-owned houses, held in debt, compelled to patronize company-owned shops, and were paid in a company script only valid at company businesses.
To address this miserable situation, the United Mine Workers of America called for a general strike across the nation in 1897. Founded in Columbus, Ohio, in 1890, they counted less than four hundred members in Illinois. Little did the district leaders know that a flamboyant thirty-one-year-old miner in southern Illinois, a veteran of hunger marches on the nation's Capitol in Washington, DC, in 1894, would don a silk top hat, a Prince Albert topcoat, and an umbrella and declare himself "General" Alexander Bradley.
Bradley led marches from mine to mine in southern Illinois, in a crusade to unionize the workers. Thousands of miners swept across the coalfields, attentive to Bradley's spellbinding speeches and flashy attire, assisting in setting up a union vote. He forbade any violence. And the mines unionized. By the end of 1897, the union ranks grew from 400 to over 30,000. With the backing of the militant southern Illinois contingent, the United Mine Workers ironed out a deal with coal operators for an eight-hour day, a six-day week, and major concessions for better working conditions. And a 30 percent increase in wages.
Bradley's rank and file, though, and the United Mine Workers nationwide, were tested later that year. While the "General" and the UMWA had successfully bridged ethnic differences among various European and non-English-speaking miners, the Chicago-based company for a mine in Virden, Illinois, looked south of the Mason-Dixon Line for an old tactic of division. Recognizing that black laborers had been used in the mines in Alabama and Tennessee -- many in a decades-long scandal of convict labor, or rather, laborers who had been framed for minor offenses and sent to the coal prison labor camps -- the Chicago company sent a recruiter to Birmingham, Alabama, to hire non-union black coal miners and break
Bradley's strike.
The black coal miners were mistakenly told that the regular miners had left their jobs to serve in the Spanish-American War. They boarded the trains. So did their armed escorts, Thiel Detective Service agents out of St. Louis.
The coal barons' intentions were clear; they planned to test the mettle of the striking union, and the resolve of the governor. In the coal company's mind, the lives of the strikebreakers were as expendable as the miners.
When the escorted strikebreakers arrived at an armed stockade set up near the train station in Virden around midday on October 12, 1898, a shootout erupted. It lasted ten minutes. The company gunmen overpowered the strikers with their modern Winchester rifles; the striking miners returned fire with shotguns and hunting rifles. Twelve men were killed; seven were miners, five were armed guards. Forty strikers were wounded. None of the black strike-breakers were wounded. The National Guard arrived several hours later. The governor's inaction was ultimately denounced across the country.
At her request, the nation's coal miners buried Mother Jones at Mount Olive in the south-central Illinois coalfields -- the burning ground of unionism -- at the only Union Miners' Cemetery in the nation. It had been established after the Virden battle, when a Mount Olive church refused to inter the bodies of the seven strikers. A local coal miner raised the money to buy the plots, which soon spread across the fields; an arching gate declared it the terrain of union miners.
"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest," Mother Jones had written, "will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden, Illinois. . . They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America. I hope it will be my consolation when I pass away to feel I sleep under the clay with those brave boys."
Alexander Bradley died in 1918 from black lung disease, having returned to the mines as a front loader. His role in building the United Mine Workers disappeared from most history texts. But the militant southern Illinois mine workers had become the most powerful vanguard in the union movement and churned out new generations of leaders.
And coal mining communities in southern Illinois today, under a new onslaught of coal barons like Cline, remember his legacy.
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