The all-day program included speakers and workshops on the rights of immigrant workers. State caucuses also convened to plan future activities.

UMWA Region 4 director Bob Butero, who spoke on one of the panels, described the 18-month-long struggle by miners at the Co-Op mine in Utah to win representation by the UMWA. Three Co-Op miners also attended the conference and set up an information table about their struggle to appeal for solidarity. These miners said a recent news release by a Missouri-based energy distributor shows that the company that owns the Co-Op mine, C.W. Mining, is unable to produce enough coal to meet its contract obligations since it fired most of the UMWA backers at the mine last December, a week before a union representation election.

During a presentation titled “The ABC’s of Immigrant Workers’ Rights,” Tyler Moran from the National Immigration Law Center described how government agencies and federal laws are used to attack the rights of immigrant workers. She said the “Internet and databases is a new frontier. One example is how the Social Security Number Verification System (SSNVS) allows employers to electronically verify the Social Security numbers of their employees.” Moran added that this “is a pilot program with approximately 80 employers participating, but the Social Security administration plans to expand it nationwide in 2005.”

Butero spoke on the panel “Key Issues for Immigrant Workers and Labor Unions in the Region.” He said that the fights of immigrant workers are part of the early history of the UMWA. He invited everyone to attend the June 5 Ludlow monument services to be held in Ludlow, Colorado. Striking miners had set up a tent colony in Ludlow, near Trinidad in southeastern Colorado, he said. On April 20, 1914, Colorado militiamen, coal company guards, and thugs attacked the colony. Eighteen men, women, and children were killed—many of them Mexican, Greek, and Italian immigrants.

A monument to the Ludlow strike depicting a miner, a woman, and a child was vandalized two years ago. The vandals decapitated the statues. At the ceremony this year the monument will be restored to its original state. Donations came in from around the world to help pay for the $80,000 restoration.

Butero then described the Co-Op miners’ union-organizing battle. He said the miners were working in an underground coal mine near Huntington, Utah, were paid $5 to $7 an hour, and had no decent benefits or basic rights. Wages for underground coal miners in the United States average at least $17 an hour.

The miners contacted the UMWA for help and the company began suspending and harassing the miners, Butero said. “After one miner was fired, the miners stood up and said we are not working until you put him back to work,” he said. On Sept. 23, 2003, some 75 miners, mostly immigrants from Mexico, were fired by C.W. Mining for backing this fired worker.

The miners turned the lockout into a strike, setting up picket lines near the Co-Op mine’s entrance. Following a 10-month strike, during which they won widespread support from the labor movement in the West and beyond, the miners won their jobs back. “A week before Thanksgiving the National Labor Relations Board issued a back-pay order and said that no family member of the company could vote in the union election,” Butero said. On December 9, the company fired most the workers again, claiming they did not have proper work documents. The miners have repeatedly told the press they had worked for years with the same documentation, which the bosses claimed had become an issue on the eve of the union certification vote.

“The exploitation of immigrants is an ongoing problem,” Butero said. “This is not an immigration issue, it is an employment issue. And if you don’t help all workers, you help no workers.”

Three Co-Op miners—Bill Estrada, Humberto Miranda, and Alyson Kennedy—set up a large display of photographs of their struggle at the conference. These miners said they were able to talk to many of the participants about their fight and how this struggle has led to a discussion among miners in Utah about the need to organize other mines throughout the western coalfields.

The Co-Op miners said their determination to press for winning reinstatement and UMWA representation has had an impact on C.W. Mining’s ability to produce coal. They pointed to a recent press release issued by Aquila Inc., a distributor of electricity and natural gas based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The press release, dated May 4, says Aquila was notified by C.W. Mining in April that a contract to provide 25 percent of the coal supply to two of Aquila’s power plants in Sibley and Lake Road, Missouri, was canceled. “C.W. Mining has terminated the underlying contract due to workforce issues at its coal mine,” the news release states. “Aquila has notified the supplier that it does not believe the termination was valid, and the company expects to pursue its rights and remedies under the contract.”

The miners also said they continue to receive messages of solidarity. The first week of May, a retired miner from Confluence, Pennsylvania, sent a $100 check along with this message: “UMWA members—Stick together. Old saying ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’ I know what it’s like. I’m 91 and I went through these fights back in the early 30’s. Good luck.”

Messages of support and contributions can be sent to the Co-Op Miners Fund c/o UMWA District 22, 525 E. 100 S., Price, UT 84501. For more information call UMWA District 22 at (435) 637-2037.
 
 
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