‘Workers in power would ensure miners jobs, safety’

Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, former coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers union, released the following statement May 11.

Working people today face the smoldering reality of a deepening economic, political and moral crisis of the capitalist for-profit system. No one knows this more than U.S. coal miners. Tens of thousands of coal miners have been thrown out of work. In March 2016 there were 56,700 working miners, one-third the number working in April 1985.

Five major U.S. coal companies and some 50 smaller bosses have declared bankruptcy. They use government bankruptcy courts to tear up United Mine Workers contracts and gut pensions and health care for retired miners. Today the overwhelming majority of working coal miners are in nonunion mines. Deaths, injuries and black lung disease are increasing.

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the remaining bourgeois presidential candidates, say the only way workers get jobs and see their lives improve is when the bosses make big profits. They tell us that’s how it works under capitalism, and that “we” Americans are all in it together, taking on “them” in the rest of the world.

This is a lie aimed at making us subservient to the boss class and their government.

I was part of the first wave of women who obtained jobs in the underground coal mines in the 1970s and ’80s. Together with our union brothers we fought to improve conditions in the mines. In the 1960s and ’70s coal miners carried out a revolution in our union and joined family members and other workers in coal country to wage powerful battles that won black lung benefits, medical clinics and the right to secret ballot votes on union contracts.

We won the right to union-organized safety committees in the mines and to shut down production when we found unsafe conditions. While the coal bosses have fought relentlessly to erode those gains, and over decades our union has gotten weaker, our labor and social battle is an example of what can be accomplished when we rely on our own strength and solidarity.

Over the past year, defending life and limb was central to the overwhelming rejection of the one-man crew by rail workers at Burlington Northern, the strike by oil workers at refineries across the country and the determination of Steelworkers to battle against a lockout by ATI bosses.

In 2003, I was part of a fight to unionize the Co-Op mine near Huntington, Utah. My coworkers there, mostly immigrants from Mexico, were at the forefront of the fight for union representation, safe work conditions and better wages. Working people can’t let the bosses divide us in our fight for dignity and union power. It is our class against the bosses’ class, not “our” country against the workers of the world.

Under the capitalist system that puts profits before human needs, the inherent dangers in mining, the environmental consequences from uncontrolled burning of coal, and the energy needs of millions worldwide will never be solved.

The working class must end forever the rule of the bosses. Taking political power in our own hands, coal miners and other workers can organize to ensure no worker has to die on the job. We can take control of the stewardship of labor and the environment, and organize access to energy and electricity, equalizing workers’ conditions worldwide.

Under capitalism any transition to cleaner energy production means throwing thousands of miners out of work. The working class in power would ensure that every miner is guaranteed a socially useful job and rewarding place in the process of organizing such a transition.

Related articles:
Miners’ anger at capitalist crisis marks W.Va primary

Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home