Silliman was addressing a November 22 meeting at the town hall here, organized by the Co-Op miners to thank UMWA members at Deer Creek, a half-hour from Huntington, and oil workers from Salt Lake City, Utah, for their solidarity. The oil workers had braved a blizzard on their way here that day, as they crossed Soldiers’ Summit, the mountaintop near Huntington.

“The safety you work in is appalling,” Silliman said. “That is one thing the union means for us. We make the safety very good in our mine. It will be an exciting day and I look forward to be able to welcome you as brothers when you become UMWA. That is enough reason to support your fight. If you stay together and stay strong, we will be with you all the way. I look forward to the day you will be able to stand alongside us as members of the UMWA.”

The 74 miners at Co-Op, most of whom are from Mexico, are fighting for decent wages, benefits, job safety, and dignity. Most earned only $5.25 to $7 an hour and had no health insurance or retirement benefits. They were forced to work under unsafe working conditions in violation of federal mine regulations. The conditions imposed by the Co-Op bosses were responsible for three deaths on the job in the last half of the 1990s—half of the total coal mine deaths in the state.

“I was able to attend the meeting of the Deer Creek miners,” Arturo Rodríguez, a 14-year veteran miner at CW Mining Co., also known as Co-Op, told the meeting. “I was very glad I was able to go because I see now more than ever why we need to do this. More of us should go to one of these meetings especially for some of us who may be getting weak knees. You see the support we are getting and become more convinced of what we are doing.”

CW Mining fired the miners en masse September 22 after they protested the arbitrary suspension of a co-worker, with intention to discharge. According to a UMWA press release, three-quarters of the company’s 83 hourly employees have signed a representation petition with the union. With the UMWA’s help, the miners have since turned the lockout into an unfair labor practice strike and have been picketing the Co-Op mine.

The mine owners, the Kingstons, are a capitalist family notorious in the region for their brutality against workers they employ in their $150 million business empire that stretches across six western states. They are also widely despised by working people for their abuse of women. One of the directors of the Co-Op mine, John Kingston, was convicted for savagely beating his daughter who had fled a forced polygamous marriage to her uncle, David Kingston, who spent four years in jail for sexual abuse of the 16-year-old.

“I’m proud to be here today,” Buddy Beck told the gathering. “This kind of solidarity and movement is good for everybody. We are doing this not for you, but for us.” Beck, vice president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (PACE) Local 8-0931, helped organize the trip to Huntington.

“My grandfather was a coal miner in Pennsylvania where he helped organize the union among Polish, Greek, German, Italian, and English-speaking miners,” Beck continued. “The union published a bulletin in those five languages. It was because the UMWA forged unity among all those workers that it became one of the strongest unions in the country. Your fight is one of the most important struggles taking place in this country. If you keep that unity and stay strong, we promise you we will be right here with you.”

The oil workers had been organizing to collect donations of food and money for a couple of weeks.

PACE members who came to Huntington said they had to counter arguments by some of their fellow unionists about why it is important to back the overwhelmingly immigrant coal miners here. “There has been some confusion among PACE members as to why this campaign is taking place,” said a flyer PACE locals posted at various workplaces in Salt Lake City. “Today, this strike in Huntington, Utah, is the most important strike in the United States! We cannot let these strikers be broken. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers formed the industrial unions. They built those unions by overcoming language barriers and racial prejudice. These immigrant workers are fighting the same battle our ancestors fought. Defending these workers and helping them fight goes to the heart of the labor movement. Race baiting and immigrant bashing is the bosses’ game—not ours.”

The PACE delegation brought two tons of food for the Co-Op miners.

The embattled coal miners had addressed three meetings of PACE union locals in the first half of November. “PACE workers have donated some $3,000 so far,” said Ana María Sánchez, from the Co-Op miners leadership committee. “Forty-five workers from the Chevron refinery also donated $25 Smith Food coupons each, totaling over $1,200 that our food committee can use to buy whatever is needed. The oil workers also brought cash donations, including some $50 dollars from the staff of a radio station that has been helping. They also brought three pick-up trucks loaded with food that had been collected at KRCL 90.9 FM radio, thanks to the efforts of the Co-Op Miners Solidarity Committee in Salt Lake together with Gena Edvalson, the public affairs director.”

The November 22 event included a report from Co-Op miners who had just returned from a trip to the Navajo Nation. The UMWA locals there hosted a visit by the Huntington miners.

“The trip we made this week to visit our Navajo brothers was worth it. I never imagined the kind of welcome we received,” said Ricardo Chávez. “I was very impressed with what I saw—the Navajo miners have a lot of respect for each other. I admire what I saw and came back more convinced that we need to be organized. It is a necessity for us to organize ourselves even better. We invited the Navajos to visit us. They explained they have been wanting to come, but they have been forced to work a lot of hours and as soon as they get a break for the holidays they are planning to be up here.”

A number of Co-Op miners said they gained a better appreciation of the kind of struggles the Navajos have waged to build and defend the union. “When we went to visit the Navajo miners,” said Jesús Galavis, another Co-Op miner, “they gave us a very beautiful sticker with their union local number on it. I am saving this sticker for the day that we win this fight. I can’t wait to put it on my hard hat and go into to the mine and see the boss’s faces when they see this sticker on my hat.”

“We spoke at two union meetings of UMWA Local 1332,” said Alyson Kennedy, a member of the Co-Op miners outreach committee, referring to one of the locals on the Navajo Nation that Co-Op miners visited. “The local voted to give us $500. They also took up a collection at the meetings that netted another $136, in addition to paying the expenses for our trip. Two women from the women’s auxiliary were at the meetings. The women told us they are planning to organize a raffle to raise money for us. The auxiliary was formed during their last strike and is still active. Sandy Jesús, the president of the local, and Bob Brown, the vice president, took us to visit the Navajo Nation’s government office. Near this office is ground considered sacred by the Navajo.”

The Navajo miners described four strikes they have been through, she stated. Their last walkout was in 2000 and lasted 87 days. “They advised us many times to stick this out,” Kennedy said. “They explained to us that the company out there, P&M, said all of the same things Co-Op is telling us—they would close the mine, they would never give us what we were demanding—but they stuck it out and they won. They pointed out that they made gains in all of their strikes. Bob Brown showed us a beautiful scrapbook of all these struggles.”

A number of the miners said financial support is needed to help sustain them in their struggle. Those wishing to help can make out checks or money orders to the Co-Op Miners Relief Fund and send them to 525 So. 1st St., Price, UT 84501.  
 
 
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