Vol. 79/No. 31      September 7, 2015

The Black Lung Association, which rank-and-file miners formed in January 1969 to sponsor and push for the West Virginia law, soon became an advocate for the interests of working and retired miners within a union whose leaders had sold out to the companies.

The strike also inspired Joseph “Jock” Yablonski to challenge Tony Boyle for the union’s presidency. Running on the slogan “Boyle’s in bed with the coal operators,” Yablonski ran a strong campaign and vowed to continue the fight beyond the December elections. He was assassinated by Boyle-hired gunmen on the last of the year, but at his funeral, Miners for Democracy was formed.

In June 1970, a third rank-and-file organization was born out of another strike in southern West Virginia, the Disabled Miners and Widows of Southern West Virginia.

These three groups united to back the Miners for Democracy slate at a West Virginia convention in May 1972. In December UMW members elected nine rank-and-file miners [from the MFD slate] to the international office for the first time in the union’s history. …

Boyle was ousted by MFD candidate Arnold Miller, a victim of black lung and a former miner, an electrician with twenty-four years on the job. A new regime set in.

In 1974, miners voted to ratify their contract for the first time in the union’s eighty-four-year history. A small group of handpicked negotiators could no longer sell out the interests of thousands of miners in smoke-filled rooms, hundreds of miles from the coalfields.

Coal miners continued to demonstrate their militancy during the summers of 1975, ’76, and ’77. Local disputes which began in southern West Virginia in 1975 and 1976 flared up into coalfield-wide strikes both years, because miners were so dissatisfied with the way the operators were refusing to deal with grievances at the mines. Instead of discussing disputes, the companies tried to force miners back to work with federal injunctions, fines, arrests, and threatened firings.

In 1975, 80,000 miners struck. In 1976, 120,000 did — nearly every union miner east of the Mississippi. The 1976 strike was so effective that federal judges in Charleston withdrew their fines and injunctions, an event almost unique in modern labor history.

Then in 1977, miners struck again in protest over cutbacks in their medical benefits, so important in a dangerous industry centered in southern Appalachia, where hospitals refuse to admit patients without cash on the spot to pay for emergency care.

Then in 1978, the UMW strike emerged as the central class question in the United States. The coal miners were fighting for the very existence of their union and every other union in the nation.
 
 
Related articles:
Steelworkers fight bosses’ demands for concessions
Solidarity actions set when contracts expire Sept. 1
Mineworkers protest Patriot’s attack on union
Nonunion construction deaths on rise in New York
On the Picket Line
Don Rasmussen: Stalwart of miners’ fight for safety
 
 
 
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