Union Busting Coal Bosses, Sellout Labor Tops

Harlan County Miners: Pay Them Now!

“No Pay, We Stay!” echoes across Harlan County, Kentucky, Appalachian coal country where heroes and martyrs of labor battles past lie buried. Since July 29, laid-off miners have occupied railroad tracks to stop coal from being sold off by non-union Blackjewel, the bankrupt mining company that axed 1,800 jobs without notice in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Court documents show that management knew there was no money in its accounts when it cut paychecks on June 28.

Now the determined former mine workers, who have no union to defend them, are being jacked around by the bosses’ bankruptcy courts and the bloodsucking banks, which heaped financial penalties on the miners when their checks bounced, forcing them to scramble to pay bills. Even unemployment claims have been held up because Blackjewel issued no pink slips. The company also failed to make proper reports to Social Security and payments to the health savings plan for its workforce. In Kentucky alone, miners are owed at least $2.5 million. Kopper Glo Mining has since bought the Harlan mines, offering a pittance of $450,000 to the miners and a paper promise to rehire some of them. Pay the miners now!

While the new bosses seek to tamp down the anger of the miners by offering them a few crumbs, finance capitalists feast on the main course as Blackjewel assets are liquidated. Riverstone Holdings stands first in line, having declared itself “super-priority senior secured debtor-in-possession” when loaning the mining outfit $32 million beginning two years ago. The very purpose of bankruptcy law and the courts that enforce it is to protect the interests of capital.

Bankruptcy proceedings have been used by the bosses in industry after industry to slash labor costs and gut unions, and coal mining is a prime example. In the 1970s, the coal barons hatched a plan to move production from the heavily unionized, labor-intensive coal fields of Appalachia and the Midwest to more efficient, high-profit strip mining in the West, far from the historic base of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Today, Wyoming is home to some 40 percent of U.S. coal production.

As the mine owners packed up and went west, bankruptcies became their favored weapon for busting the UMWA. Operations were reorganized under Chapter 11 to close union mines piecemeal and reopen them without union labor. This wave of bankruptcies, particularly over the past decade, goes some way toward explaining why the Blackjewel mines were non-union, including in Harlan County. “Bloody Harlan” was the site in the 1930s and again in the ’70s of pitched battles between miners fighting for union organization and the bosses’ armed attack dogs, both in and out of uniform. Immortalized in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., the 1974 Brookside strike was won when the UMWA ranks engaged in a nationwide week-long memorial strike in response to the murder of a union supporter by one of the Duke Power Company’s gun thugs.

In the course of the 1930s, the UMWA became the largest and arguably most powerful union in the U.S., with 800,000 members. Today, it is a shadow of its former self, representing 20,000 active miners, less than half of the roughly 50,000 remaining. As the coal bosses shuttered mines and slashed jobs over the years, the UMWA bureaucracy facilitated the decline in union power, preaching reliance on the bosses’ political representatives, especially the Democrats but also Republicans.

In a sign of the times, there is not a single working UMWA member in all of Kentucky. The state’s last union mine, the Highland Mine, belonged to Patriot Coal. That company, spun off by Peabody Energy in 2007, had been “set up to fail” in a bid by the mine owners to purge their books of UMWA pension and health care liabilities. After Patriot declared bankruptcy in 2013, the UMWA tops pinned the union’s fortunes on its status as a creditor, as well as on the good graces of Democrat Jay Rockefeller, then U.S. Senator from West Virginia and great-grandson of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. The Highland Mine closed two years later.

The plight of the Blackjewel miners is emblematic of the plight of coal miners throughout Appalachia and beyond. The industry has for years experienced job contraction, a trend fueled by capitalist market forces and technological development, including greater resort to strip mining. With the boom in hydraulic fracking, natural gas is now abundant and cheaper. Last year, the electricity-generating capacity of natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. surpassed that of coal-fired plants for the first time. The accompanying devastation of laid-off mine workers and their communities is a testament to the irrational destructiveness of capitalist production for private profit. Miners who for decades put their lives and lungs at risk to perform backbreaking labor deep underground are now deemed expendable by the capitalists.

There is a burning need for a class-struggle fight to organize the unorganized, in the coal industry and throughout the entire energy sector, in order to bolster the fighting capacity of the workers against the bosses. Unions are vital to enforce safety standards on the job and to wrest real gains from the employers, like the cradle-to-grave health care miners once had. At the same time, though, trade-union struggle alone cannot stop the capitalist rulers from looting the wealth of society and discarding their wage slaves when operations are no longer profitable.

Such struggles must be linked to a fight to expropriate the mines, gas and oil wells and other means of production through socialist revolution, which would lay the basis for a rational planned economy. Crucial to this perspective is the forging of a multiracial workers party, the necessary instrument to bring the working class to power. When those who labor rule, production will serve human need, and only then will everyone be provided for, with new technology serving to better the lives of all, rather than to pauperize whole swaths of the population.

For a Class-Struggle Union Leadership!

Earlier this year, the UMWA tops held a “30th Anniversary Pittston Strike Celebration.” Far from a “victory for the labor movement,” as was claimed there, the eleven-month strike was betrayed by the bureaucrats, especially then UMWA head and current AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka and his lieutenant, Cecil Roberts, who is today the union president. With miners industrywide champing at the bit to fight the coal bosses and their government, UMWA leaders instead threw everything into a toothless “corporate campaign” that appealed to the supposed good conscience of the ruthless capitalist class. Among other things, union members were sent to beg the big banks not to lend money to the Pittston Coal Company. After wildcat strikes broke out in ten states and a coal-processing plant was occupied, Trumka & Co. herded the ranks back to work, bowing before court injunctions and bending over backward to appease the “friend of labor” Democrats they supported.

Over the decades, the combativity of the miners often ran up against the UMWA bureaucracy’s allegiance to the capitalist order. For example, a series of hard-fought strikes in the 1970s saw miners revolt against every wing of their union officialdom, from the despotic Tony Boyle to the treacherous Arnold Miller, notorious for asking the Labor Department to intervene against his opponent in a union election. In fact, the Great Coal Strike of 1978 was waged in defiance of both Miller and a Taft-Hartley back-to-work order issued by Democrat Jimmy Carter. (For more, see WV pamphlet “The Great Coal Strike of 1978.”)

Pittston proved a turning point for the union, as Trumka was able to hogtie the historically militant UMWA membership by playing by the bosses’ rules. His successor, Roberts, has followed suit. In recent months, the UMWA president invited the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls to coal country to drum up support for candidates of that party of the class enemy, while also praising the Trump administration for its efforts boosting the coal companies. Truth is, as the Blackjewel bankruptcy attests, Trump’s claim to have “saved coal” is a cruel hoax. But so is the “just transition” offered the miners by Democratic Party politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders under the “Green New Deal.” The transition in question is the pie-in-the-sky promise of job retraining for workers in the fossil fuel industries that these Dems want to wipe out in the name of combating climate change.

The Democratic Socialists of America and other “progressive” Democrats advocate this scam, which is little more than a ploy to garner votes, especially from student youth, liberal environmentalists and select union bureaucrats, by putting a “worker friendly” spin on anti-carbon bourgeois energy policy. The reformists of Socialist Alternative peddle the same rubbish, calling their version of how best to power the capitalist economy a “Green New Deal for working people.” The proposition that the capitalist rulers will provide miners with decent jobs outside the mining industry is ludicrous. Under successive Democratic and Republican administrations, coal communities have been totally impoverished.

The anarchic and crisis-ridden capitalist system not only devastates the working masses but also is the main obstacle to addressing human-induced global warming on the necessary global scale. Only in the context of a world socialist economy that relegates poverty to the past can a rational plan be hammered out to modulate climate change and minimize its human toll. At the end of the day, those touting a “Green New Deal” are using the issue of global warming to advance an anti-worker agenda.

Its backers place themselves in the tradition of liberal hero Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal legislation was designed to restore capitalist profits and contain working-class struggles within bounds acceptable to the ruling class. The 1935 Wagner Act, which is hailed by labor officialdom to this day, set up a mechanism to put union organizing under the thumb of the capitalist state. In so doing, FDR was intent on keeping the new wave of unionization from falling under the sway of avowed Marxists. The year prior, three victorious citywide strikes led by communists and socialists—in Minneapolis, San Francisco and Toledo—had opened the door to the organization of the CIO industrial unions.

The UMWA and other unions need a leadership that won’t crawl on its knees for any capitalist politician but will fight on the picket lines. A leadership proceeding from the standpoint of class against class would break all union ties to the Democrats and launch important struggles, not least a concerted campaign from Wyoming to West Virginia to bring workers in the strip mines, the vast fracking fields and everywhere else into the unions. In the face of the catastrophe of joblessness, workers armed with a class-struggle program would fight for a sliding scale of hours to divide up the available work at no loss in pay, among other transitional demands aimed at uniting the proletariat and the unemployed in struggle to sweep away the capitalist exploiters. The Spartacist League/U.S., uniquely on the American left, has as its perspective the building of a revolutionary workers party to make a new society possible.