We agree with Salazar. The fight of the Co-Op miners is an example for miners and working people across the West. That’s why we urge every class conscious worker west of the Mississippi to use the remaining days to build the March 12 solidarity rally with the Co-Op miners in Price, Utah.

The capitalist family that owns the mine—the Kingstons—has used every tool at its disposal to resist the Co-Op miners’ just struggle for a union, and for safety, dignity, and a decent livelihood. Intimidating lawsuits, arbitrary firings, legal challenges to every labor board ruling, and efforts to buy off individual miners—all of these actions are the stock-in-trade of the bosses’ anti-union efforts everywhere.

The miners have answered these tricks by sticking together, refusing to be cowed, and seeking solidarity. They have reached out broadly in the labor movement in the West and beyond and they have received a warm response from fighting workers in every place the news of their battle has reached.

This has had an impact. As Salazar points out, when workers in the largely nonunion mines across the West see that the Co-Op miners can win, they’ll say, “we can too.” The same life-and-death questions facing workers at the Co-Op mine face underground miners everywhere. Where the union is weak or nonexistent, so too are safety protections on the job. Where miners have built a strong union, they are better able to defend life and limb and resist the bosses’ drive to speed up production and drive down wages and working conditions.

This is why the federal labor board and its lackeys can’t be relied upon to give the miners a fair shake. The NLRB has sat on the ballots from the union representation election for three months, hoping the fight would dissipate and the example it provides to workers more broadly would be forgotten.

This is a crucial moment for this struggle. Solidarity is needed to counter the pressure on the miners and their supporters to just wait and see if a positive development will come from the slow-turning wheels of “justice” of the labor boards and the courts.

The March 12 rally is the miners’ clear answer to those who hope their struggle will simply fade away quietly. It is their answer to the intimidation campaign of the bosses, who, when they couldn’t force the workers to back down, tried to muscle them by slapping a lawsuit on them. And finally, a week before the union election, the bosses fired about 30 miners, most of them UMWA supporters, supposedly because they lacked sufficient proof of their “eligibility” to work in the United States.

Fighting workers should join the miners at the UMWA hall in Price, Utah, at noon on March 12—or send donations and solidarity messages if they can’t be present physically—to send a clear signal both to the mine bosses and the government, and to fellow workers everywhere, that the miners will not be intimidated or isolated. Their cause is the cause of all labor.
 
 
Related articles:
Utah miners reach out to build March 12 union rally  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home