Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight against Big Coal

4. Strained Solidarities

4. Strained Solidarities Over its lifetime, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) has moved through three distinct eras that I label confrontational organizing , labor brokerage, and crisis management. John L. Lewis’s legacy as iconic union president transformed the union from a fractured organizing body to a streamlined labor broker, negotiating contracts and winning the best possible wages and benefits—one that brokered the best deals possible with industry. However, the wildcat tradition of the 1970s directly confronted union leadership in its labor-broker role. In Coal River, I argue, the community and environmental activism of the late 1990s emerged as a challenge, only somewhat veiled, to the leadership of the UMWA, this time demanding a strong stance against mountaintop removal. To frame this argument, I set a 1977 strike in two important historical contexts—the UMWA as an institution , and the history of the relationship between union leadership and the rank-and-file miners and coalfield citizens who made up the union. * * * It was an unwritten rule, but one everybody understood: you don’t cross picket lines in West Virginia. The United Mine Workers’ District 17 is one of the most storied divisions of one of the most storied unions in American labor history. Miners from District 17 marched across southern West Virginia in 1921 to organize mines in Logan County when they met a militia backed by U.S. troops atop Blair Mountain. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first instance of the U.S. military attacking its own citizens. In the 1970s, District 17 comprised the heart of the West Virginia coalfields in Kanawha, Boone, Raleigh, Logan, and Mingo counties. Roving pickets and 72 CHAPTER 4 daily wildcat strikes earned District 17 a reputation for miners being fierce and brash in confrontations with coal operators. At that time, my grandfather was a coal miner in McDowell County, West Virginia, part of District 29. A group of striking District 17 workers he met while deer hunting stopped speaking to him when they heard District 29 was working. A new generation of miners entered the mines in the 1970s. Virtually all of them had grown up with the union. Many of the young faces in District 17 became union leaders, including current UMWA international president, Cecil E. Roberts. While they participated in, and in some cases led, the pickets , many miners of this generation now say they took the union for granted. As the contentious 1970s gave way to the depressed 1980s, no one can identify one single factor that caused the wildcat strikes to end. According to some, President Ronald Reagan’s message to labor was loud and clear when he fired striking air traffic controllers—the old rules no longer applied. Others say that the brash young miners of the 1970s grew up into more reserved family men in the 1980s. Some point to the booming coal market of the 1970s that collapsed into depression in the early 1980s. Whatever the reasons, the labor climate changed in West Virginia. A History of Gains What I call the confrontational organizing period of the United Mine Workers encompasses the period prior to the Wagner Act that established the right to organize labor unions in 1935. The so-called mine wars, the tent colonies, and the infamous Baldwin-Felts mine thugs that characterized what Mary Harris “Mother” Jones called “medieval West Virginia,” all fall into this period. The idea of organizing the coalfields was a radical concept. The politics and geography of southern West Virginia made it particularly hard to organize. The railroad was the only way into and out of many company towns. Often union organizers were met at the depot by armed guards who forbade them to get off the train. In his biography of Mother Jones, Elliott J. Gorn suggests that in the first decade of the twentieth century the miners themselves were often not eager to organize. In many places, he argues, coal was plentiful and the structure of the company towns allowed miners and their families to carve out a decent living. Changesintheindustryandworkforce,notablyaninfluxofAfricanAmericans from the South and a wave of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, eventually forged a class consciousness across racial and ethnic boundaries that aided the union. Coal production in West Virginia soared through the century’s first two decades. As operators demanded more of their workers in Strained Solidarities 73 the way of ten- and twelve...