The hitch is that the 110 scabs working at the struck mine are eligible to vote, but only sixty of the 122 strikers still on the picket line are on the list of voters.

“And there’s going to be a bunch of those sixty challenged,” strike leader Darrel Vanover told the Militant in a telephone interview. Vanover himself cannot vote. “All they told us is that they ‘replaced’ us,” he says.

The Stearns miners, of course, already voted back in 1976—126 to 57—to be represented by the UMWA. That was three weeks after another nonunion Blue Diamond mine in Scotia, Kentucky, exploded twice, killing twenty-six men.

The Stearns miners didn’t want another Scotia. Their battle for the past three years has been first and foremost a fight for safe working conditions.

Blue Diamond’s violent resistance has centered around one issue: the UMWA contract provision giving union-elected safety committees the right to shut down unsafe mines.

The union and industry alike have tied the future of UMWA organizing to the fate of the Stearns strike.

“We didn’t bring this on ourselves,” Vanover says of the bitter three-year fight. “Blue Diamond Coal Company brought all this on. They’re the ones who refused to sign the contract here. Instead they choose to shoot at us and put us in jail, fight us through the courts, fight us every way they can.”  
 
May 10, 1954
MILWAUKEE, April 26—A five mile motorcade of CIO and non-CIO union militants in 1,250 placarded cars yesterday jammed Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, and surrounded the struck Kohler works where a strike of the one-year old CIO United Auto Workers Local 833 entered its 21st day. Three hundred war-veteran pickets stood in the drenching rain at the Plant’s main gate to cheer the statewide labor demonstration against Wisconsin’s worst industrial tyranny.

Three thousand workers of the City of Kohler, supported by the whole populace of Sheboygan County, are once again at war with the labor-hating Kohler family which has been riding high since the 1934 strike defeat. Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Kohler supported McCarthy in 1952.

After 20 years of company unionism that enforced unbelievable pre-industrial union conditions, Kohler employees are striking today for the minimum rights and human conditions of work won by organized labor long ago—for seniority, bargaining rights, grievance procedures, employment security, protection on the job, end of the speed-up and a wage raise of 20 cents over the pre-World War II hourly rates.

In 1934 the bitter historic AFL strike at Kohler ended in complete annihilation for the union, the killing of two strikers, and mass evictions from Kohler-owned Kohler. Herbert Kohler, relative of the Governor, would like to do it over again. But, in the words of Robert Burkart, International UAW representative, “after 20 years of company unionism Kohler workers have more spirit than most organized workers I have seen around here.”  
 
 
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