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| United Mine Workers of America | |
| Founded | January 22, 1890 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States, Canada |
| Affiliation | AFL-CIO, CLC |
| Key people | Cecil Roberts, president |
| Office location | Washington, D.C., United States |
| Website | www.umwa.org |
The United Mine Workers of America (UMW or UMWA) is a North American labor union that represents workers in mining. One of the groups in the forefront of the fight for collective bargaining in the early 20th century, the UMW was founded in Columbus, Ohio, on January 22, 1890, by the merger of two earlier groups, the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 135 and the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers. It was modeled after the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
After passage of the National Recovery Act in 1933, organizers spread out throughout the United States to organize all coal miners.
During the 1930s the UMWA was often thought by many men in the field as being too involved in "Washington Politics" spawning such alternative unions such as the Progressive Mine Workers.
Famous UMWA leaders include John Mitchell, co-founder Phil Penna and John L. Lewis.
Contents |
Achievements
- An eight-hour work day in 1898.
- Collective bargaining rights in 1933.citation needed
- In 1969, the UMWA convinced the United States Congress to enact the landmark Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act which provided compensation for miners suffering from Black Lung Disease.
Violent clashes
The union's history is filled with examples of members and their supporters violently clashing with company-hired strikebreakers and government forces:
- Lattimer Massacre - September 10, 1897. 19 miners were killed by police in Lattimer, Pennsylvania, during a march in support of unions.
- Battle of Virden - October 1898. Part of the larger mine wars that established Illinois as the leading union state in the country, and the reason that Mother Jones is buried at Mt. Olive, Illinois
- Ludlow Massacre - April 20, 1914. 20 people, including women and children, killed when armed police, hired guns, and Colorado National Guardsmen broke up a tent colony formed by families of miners who had been evicted from company-owned housing.
- Matewan, West Virginia - May 19, 1920. 12 men were killed in a gunfight between town residents and the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, hired by mine owners. This is depicted in the John Sayles film Matewan.
- The 'Redneck War' - 1920-21. Generally viewed as beginning with the Matewan Massacre, this conflict involved the struggle to unionize the southwestern area of West Virginia. It led to the march of 10,000 armed miners on the county seat at Logan, ending in the Battle of Blair Mountain in which the miners fought state militia, local police, and mine guards. These events are depicted in the 1987 novel Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina and the 2005 novel Blair Mountain by Jonathan Lynn.
- The Herrin massacre occurred in June 1922 in Herrin, Illinois. 19 strikebreakers and 2 union miners were killed in mob action between June 21-22, 1922.
Organized politics
The United Mine Workers ran candidate Frank Henry Sherman under their union banner in the 1905 Alberta general election. Sherman's candidacy was driven to appeal to the significant population of miners working in the camps of southern Alberta.1 He finished second in the Pincher Creek electoral district.
BESCO Strike, Nova Scotia
District 26 of the UMWA in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada struck in early March 1925 against the British Empire Steel Corporation (BESCO). On June 4, the union pulled its men from a company power plant in New Waterford. More than fifty company police, many on horseback, occupied the plant on the morning of June 11. An estimated 700 - 3,000 miners and supporters gathered in New Waterford and marched to the power plant that morning. The company police opened fire when the crowd arrived and then charged the crowd on horseback, swinging nightclubs and firing revolvers. Miners fought back with stones and pulled police off horses. William Davis, a miner, was shot dead and several others were wounded by gunfire or trampled by horses. After the riot ended, the miners sabotaged and disabled the power plant for the duration of the strike. Police and company officials that didn't escape the battle were locked up in the town jail. In the following nights, company stores were raided and burned, including the colliery building. The Canadian Army deployed thousands of soldiers to the area in the second largest deployment in history for civil unrest within Canada. The union later suspended the 100 percent strike, allowing maintenance workers to return.
The 1925 strike lasted through the summer and contributed to the bankruptcy and breakup of the BESCO conglomerate several years later. The strike against BESCO by UMWA 26 in the Sydney Coal Field was unprecedented for the violence and militancy exhibited by the company toward the striking miners and changed the labour dynamics in Industrial Cape Breton.
Harlan County War
In the summer of 1973, workers at the Duke Power-owned Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky voted to join the union. Eastover management refused to sign the contract and the union went on strike. Duke Power brought in replacement non-union workers, who were attacked. Hogg, the local judge was a coal operator himself and consistently ruled for Eastover. He was accused of being paid off by the company.citation needed During much of the strike the mine workers' wives and children joined the picket lines. Many were arrested, some hit by baseball bats, shot at, and struck by cars. One striking miner, Lawrence Jones, was shot and killed by a replacement worker, Bill Bruner. Bruner served no time for the murder.citation needed
Three months after returning to work, the national UMWA contract expired. On November 12, 1974, 120,000 miners nationwide walked off the job. The nationwide strike was bloodless and a tentative contract was achieved three weeks later. This opened the mines and reactivated the railroad haulers in time for Christmas. These events are depicted in the documentary film Harlan County, USA.
Other strikes
On October 21, 1902, the five-month Coal Strike of 1902, led by the United Mine Workers, ended.
Internal conflict
The union's more recent history has sometimes been marked by internal strife and corruption, including the 1969 murder of Joseph Yablonski, a reform candidate who lost a race for union president against incumbent W. A. Boyle. Boyle was later convicted of ordering the murder.
The killing of Yablonski resulted in the birth of a pro-democracy movement called the "Miners for Democracy" (MFD) which swept the Boyle regime out of office and replaced it with a group of leaders who had been most recently rank and file miners. Led by new president Arnold Miller, the new leadership enacted a series of reforms which gave UMWA members the right to elect their leaders at all levels of the union and to ratify the contracts under which they worked.
2008 Election
After tapes surfaced directly quoting President candidate Barack Obama as saying "So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”, United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement:
“Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have once again demonstrated that they are willing to say anything and do anything to win this election. Their latest twisting of the truth is about coal and some comments Sen. Obama made last January about the future use of coal in America.
“Here is what the McCain campaign left out of Sen. Obama’s actual words: ‘But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it.’
“Sen. Obama has been consistent with that message not just in the coalfields, but everywhere else he goes as well. Despite what the McCain campaign and some far right-wing blogs would have Americans believe, Sen. Obama has been and remains a tremendous supporter of coal and the future of coal.
“I noted that Sen. McCain even went so far yesterday as to say he has always been a supporter of coal. I wonder, then, how he can justify his statement at a Senate hearing in 2000 that, ‘In a perfect world we would like to transition away from coal entirely,’ and his leading role in sponsoring legislation in 2003 that would have wiped out 78 percent of all coal production in America?
“Fortunately, UMWA members, their families and their friends and neighbors in the coalfields know all too well what is going on here. They’re not going to fall for it, and we urge others throughout America who care about coal to review what the candidates’ records on coal actually are. We are confident that once they do, and once they see the many other benefits to working families of voting for Sen. Obama, they will make the right choice for themselves and their families."
Decline of labor unionism in mining
Automation and a general decline in American unions cut heavily into the UMW's membership after World War II. In 1998 the UMW had about 240,000 members, half the number it had in 1946. In the early 2000s, the union represented about 42 percent of all employed miners. The UMW is most powerful in West Virginia, as well as in Montana and other western states.
References
- ^ Brown, George; David M. Hayne, Francess G. Halpenny, Ramsay Cook (1966). Dictionary of Canadian Biography, University of Toronto Press. pp. 950. ISBN 0802039987.
External links
- Justice at Peabody current campaign website
- Remember Virden: documentary on the mine wars in Illinois
- West Virginia's Mine Wars
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 28 November 2008, at 20:38.
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