The miners at Co-Op have stood up to firings, a harassment lawsuit, and other attempts by the bosses to intimidate them, but have refused to give up their fight. The two-year anniversary celebration is testimony to their staying power in standing up to the coal bosses and reaching out and winning solidarity for their struggle.

“These miners aren’t joining the labor movement. They are leading it.” That remark, by a Seattle un-ionist who last year helped host a speaking tour in that area by two Co-Op miners, captures eloquently the impact the miners’ example has had on other working peo-ple and why they have been able to win solidar-ity throughout the labor movement in the West and beyond. And they continue to reach out and gain support: among fellow coal miners, members of both the UMWA and the Op-erating Engineers, as well as among other work-ers, from West Coast longshoremen to Laborers in New York, from New Zealand to the United Kingdom.

In recent weeks the big-business press has spilled a lot of ink on whether the withdrawal of several major unions from the AFL-CIO will weaken workers’ ability to organize and fight. Their focus, however, is on the top union officialdom and the factional infighting among its rival wings. Both the officials of the AFL-CIO and of the unions in the so-called Change to Win Coalition continue their decades-long course of tying the future of labor to the profits and prerogatives of the em-ployers and to the bosses’ parties, mostly the Democrats. This course has weakened the unions in face of the stiffening employer of-fensive backed by the government from Washing-ton on down.

A lot of the press coverage has focused on one side or the other talking about the press-ing need for labor to win to its ranks the tens of millions of workers who are not organized into unions today. But the heart of the battle be-tween the two factions is over the allocation of workers’ dues money and, to that end, over how many unions to merge and how fast.

The eyes of militant workers should be on the ranks of the working class, not the union tops. The resistance by workers that has begun in recent years represents the seeds of a strength-ened labor movement and points the road toward its transformation. Out of such struggles it will also become clearer to workers that they need to organize independently of the bosses in the politi-cal arena—to build a labor party based on the unions that fights in the interests of all working people.

What generates this resistance by workers is the relentless drive by the employers today to push down wages, inten-sify speedup at the ex-pense of safety, extend work hours, and cut pen-sions and medical bene-fits. The bosses have no other way to reverse the decades-long decline in their profit rates, as their system enters the opening stages of a worldwide depression and offers working people a future of turmoil, eco-nomic devastation, and imperialist wars.

In face of these in-creasingly brutal condi-tions, the struggles of working people will not be advanced by hollow talk of “unity” at the top. What counts is the actions of workers themselves in organizing to resist the bosses’ assaults and seek solidarity from other working people, both at home and interna-tionally. This resistance is seen today in the bat-tles for a union among Midwest meat packers, the strike by copper workers in Arizona and Texas, and ongoing unionization fights by laundry workers and others.

The efforts of work-ers such as the Co-Op miners to reach out for solidarity from other workers, regardless of what union they belong to, and to offer solidar-ity themselves, can and will continue. This course of effectively mo-bilizing union power is attractive and a powerful example to others who em-bark on the road to fight for decent wages, safer working conditions, and dignity on the job, in-cluding workers who are not yet members of un-ions.

To the ranks of la-bor, these struggles show that solidarity is in our hands.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home