United Mine Workers Of America Research Articles

Wildcat strikes, the Industrial Workers of the World, and dual unionism: labor insurgencies in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, 1900–1939

ABSTRACT The anthracite mineworkers of Northeastern Pennsylvania fomented a series of insurgencies during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This study focuses on their activism in the northern-most of three ‘hard coal’ fields, located around the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Following several failed unionization attempts between 1848 and 1895, the United Mine Workers of America (UMAW) entered anthracite in the mid-1890s, organized the workforce, and called a successful strike in 1902. However, the discontent continued prompting the Industrial Workers of the World to enter the field in 1907. Drawing mainly on immigrant support, especially from the Italians, the ‘Wobblies’ suffered defeat in the Strikes of 1916 and left the area. The grassroots rebellions nevertheless persisted undere the Cmmunist-inspired National Miners Union between 1928 and 1931, the United Anthracite Miners of Pennsylvania between 1933 and 1934, and the Progressive Miners Association in 1939. The rear-guard actions ended during the post-World War II years and the decline of the industry. Through it all, the workers, who were originally British and German but by 1900 mainly Eastern and Southern Europeans, were motivated by grievances agaisnt the coal companies and the UMWA, and sustained by a deep well of family, community, and religous solidarity.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry

The Herrin Massacre of 1922: Blood and Coal in the Heart of America

The Herrin Massacre of 1922: Blood and Coal in the Heart of America

Whither the Working-Class Journalist over Thirty?

Whither the Working-Class Journalist over Thirty?

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Richard L. Trumka: A Labor Leader in Troubled Times

Carbon County, USA: Miners for Democracy in Utah and the West

In Carbon County, USA, the historian Christian Wright examines the history of labor organization in eastern Utah's coal mining industry between the 1930s and 1980s. Split into three parts, the book first documents the period from the 1930s to the early postwar years, including the problems emerging in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Part 2 chronicles the coal industry's revival during the nationally and internationally tumultuous 1960s and when the UMWA encountered the rise of a competing union in 1970: Miners for Democracy. In the book's final section, Wright dedicated one chapter each to race, gender, and generation, emphasizing the 1970s to 1980s period, which was also the decline of industry and organization. In the epilogue, Wright connects the preceding chapters to pending questions about the roles of coal and labor organization in the United States during the twenty-first century.Wright's argument is at least twofold. One argument is that labor history is still relevant and valuable. But Wright also argues that looking beyond the labor–management and union–antiunion dichotomies to the nuances of labor organization demonstrates that union power's decline in Utah's coal industry resulted from fracturing union leadership and changing understandings of identity among rank-and-file workers. Integral to Wright's study of identity are race, gender, and generation. While the first argument—the relevance and value of labor history—will speak mainly to an academic audience, the second will likely appeal to anyone interested in the histories of coal mining, Utah, labor organization, and identity studies.In exploring the depths of labor organization in Utah, Wright's book adds to several bodies of literature. For one, it is the most comprehensive examination of coal mining labor organization in Utah. It adds to a 2006 edited volume on Utah mining by examining eastern Utah over a fifty year period in particular. Additionally, Wright's arguments about labor organization extend the chronology of most mining labor histories, which often analyze the pre-1930s period. In doing so, Wright's work fills a gap but also demonstrates the value of learning from the decline of the movement, not just its heyday. Finally, labor history had its own heyday and has seen some decline, but Wright's analysis reveals how labor history might add to ongoing political conversations.Overall, this volume contains excellent prose, impressive research, and useful graphics, ranging from graphs and tables to historical images. The introductions to chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 are particularly noteworthy for their prose. Wright's spread of records from the United Mine Workers of America and Miners for Democracy archives to local repositories, including museums and records in Carbon and Emery counties, expresses a deep engagement with the national and regional stories. Readers will surely appreciate the images contained throughout the text as well, including the maps at the front, the appendices (e.g., a timeline of regional and national events), and tables throughout that illustrate Wright's extensive and impressive use of demographic data.Wright's inclusion of race and gender in particular are a welcome addition to the literature on mining history, especially in Utah, though the analysis and framing might have benefitted from stronger situating in gender and identity studies. Commendably, he consulted numerous sources regarding women's history and several histories that speak to Mexican American and Mexican workers. That said, the concept of “intersectionality” might have offered Wright a way to investigate race and gender more consistently throughout the narrative. Cordoning off race and gender in their own chapters, rather than integrating them more prominently into earlier chapters, comes with costs and benefits. Treating them separately highlights them in a way that integrating them would not. On the other hand, it suggests that the two are mainly characteristics of later labor organization. The introductions of the race and gender chapters provide only brief information about those themes in earlier chronological periods. To be fair, perhaps Wright did not include women earlier because they were not miners—state law did not allow women to mine until 1973 (227). Even so, were women part of the strikes or other labor events, perhaps similar to the involvement of auto workers’ wives at the 1937 Flint General Motors strike? If not, how did notions about masculinity affect pre-1970s unionizing? Even without answers to these questions, these chapters are still much-needed additions to the extant literature on mining and labor history in Utah and the West.In the end, Wright's thought-provoking, nuanced work is a useful base for further explorations and a smart addition to the current literature on mining labor organization efforts.

So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979

So Much to Be Angry About: Appalachian Movement Press and Radical DIY Publishing, 1969–1979

Labor Unions and Democracy: A Long View

This essay historicizes some of Stephen Ashby's findings, and elaborates on a thesis that union democracy is weak in the United States because capitalist opposition was so strong in a formative stage of union development. It introduces a brief survey of the first major U.S. industrial union, the United Mine Workers of America, to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. It introduces a brief survey of the first major industrial union, the United Mine Workers to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. Union leadership responded to that challenge with highly centralized control that blocked more democratic and struggle-based unionism. This had long term consequences through the next insurgency the Congress of Industrial Organizations. These historic influences are operative in the present, when workers seek power to build a counter to the growing inequality of wealth.

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

Precarious Politics: Friends of Coal, the UMWA, and the Affective Terrain of Energy Identification

Precarious Politics:Friends of Coal, the UMWA, and the Affective Terrain of Energy Identification Sylvia Ryerson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rocky Adkins, then Democratic House majority leader for the Kentucky House of Representatives, speaking at a pro-coal rally in 2012 (Tom Hansell, "The Narrative of Renewal: 'If We Can't Mine Coal, What Are We Going To Do?'"https://dailyyonder.com/the-narrative-of-renewal-if-we-cantmine-coal-what-are-we-going-to-do/2018/10/10/), Adkins is now senior adviser to the governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear. Photograph by Tom Hansell / After Coal, 2012. In the iconic scene of Harlan County USA, Barbara Kopple's 1976 Academy Award–winning documentary film, shots are fired in the dark at striking miners and their wives, and Kopple's camera is knocked to the ground. The moment captures the violent escalation of the Brookside Strike of 1973–74, organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) against Duke Power, the owner of the Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. In the early morning darkness, the battle lines are clear. The predominantly white UMWA miners and their wives on the picket line confront the company-hired [End Page 719] "gun thugs" working to bring in scabs and break up the strike. With an active membership of 213,113 and 1,329 local chapters nationwide, in 1973 the UMWA remained one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in the country, and the Appalachian coalfields had long played a central role in the union's history.1 The Brookside Strike gained symbolic significance and moral authority by contextualizing itself as a clear continuation of the Harlan County mine wars of the 1930s known as "Bloody Harlan," the nearly-decade-long battle that first established the UMWA in Eastern Kentucky. Kopple films a local UMWA rally during the Brookside Strike, where the songwriter Florence Reece comes to the podium. Her husband, Sam Reece, was a Harlan County miner and union organizer in the 1930s, and the retaliation they faced inspired Florence to pen the now-famous social justice anthem "Which Side Are You On?" As she sings her renowned verses to the 1970s crowd, Come all you poor workersGood news to you I'll tellHow the good ol' unionHas come in here to dwell Which side are you on?Which side are you on? If you go to Harlan CountyThere is no neutral thereYou'll either be a union manOr a thug for J. H. Blair Which side are you on?Which side are you on?2 Released some forty years later, the 2015 documentary film Overburden follows the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR) in the Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia, and across the Central Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The drama climaxes at a 2009 anti-MTR rally held outside a Massey Energy–owned coal processing plant near Coal River Mountain, the site of an impending MTR job. The "anti-MTR" activists are met by dozens of "pro-coal" miners and supporters, in an emotional confrontation. As the anti-MTR activists demand that the state intervene to halt the blasting, pro-coal supporters shout back angrily "go home tree huggers!" and wave Massey Energy flags. Thirty-one arrests are made, as the anti-MTR protestors attempt to block the road to the plant.3 Again, the [End Page 720] battle lines are clear—but the political allegiances have completely changed. While the picketers of the Brookside Strike held signs reading "Duke Power Wants Rate Increases for Customers, Poverty for Coal Miners" and "Duke Power Co. Owns the Brookside Mine, But They Don't Own Us," the miners at the 2009 protests held signs reading "EPA = Equal Poverty for All" and "If You're Against Coal Then Turn Off Your Lights."4 In a stunning reconfiguration of roles, this scene played out over and over again in protests and rallies across the coalfields beginning in the early 2000s. The question "Which side are you on?" remained ever present in the coalfields, but the sides were redrawn: one was...

Burning Bridges: Senator Rush Dew Holt and the Guffey Coal Acts of 1935 and 1937

Burning Bridges: Senator Rush Dew Holt and the Guffey Coal Acts of 1935 and 1937 C. Lloyd Tomlinson The legislative session was drawing to a close on the evening of June 20, 1936, the day after Rush Dew Holt’s thirty-first birthday. The United States Senate was ready to vote on a replacement bill for the Guffey-Snyder Act, a law intended to stabilize the bituminous coal industry. The Supreme Court overturned the 1935 law barely a month before with its decision in Carter v. Carter Coal Company. The court ruled that local wages and hours did not fall within the federal government’s powers to regulate interstate commerce, thereby rendering the law null and void. The Senate worked hastily to churn out a replacement and essentially stripped the labor protections from the new bill. The amended legislation had the support of the majority of the Senate as well as the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), John L. Lewis. The new bill was almost guaranteed to pass.1 Holt, the “Boy Senator” from West Virginia, had other plans. The junior senator took the floor and declared that he would spend his unlimited time reading from Aesop’s Fables. In addition to reading Aesop, Holt attacked Lewis for siding with the coal companies over the miners, lambasted West Virginia’s senior senator Matthew Neely for ignoring the miners in their state, and ripped into the Works Progress Administration for acting as a tool of political patronage. By the time he concluded his filibuster and the Senate adjourned, it was 11:55 p.m., and the bill was dead.2 The filibuster left an undeniable impact on Holt’s image and political career. Rush Holt Jr., in the inaugural lecture named for his father, notes that the senator “became a man without a party” that some viewed as “fearlessly honest, while others perceived him as quixotic, unreliable, and ungrateful to those who had supported him.”3 Through the remainder of his term, Holt grew increasingly isolated. The results of the 1940 primary election ensured that Holt would not return to the Senate for the next term.4 While the filibuster remains an excellent piece of political theater, as well as the defining moment of Holt’s Senate career, it merely scratches the surface of his fight against legislation that he believed did not help working [End Page 29] West Virginians. The 1936 filibuster began Holt’s shift toward becoming more critical of the New Deal. It also created a deep personal and political rivalry with Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, who cosponsored the legislation, as well as Senator Matthew Neely of West Virginia. After the filibuster, their feud played out in the public sphere: political rallies, the press, and the airwaves all served as battlegrounds. Holt also managed to make enemies of John L. Lewis and UMW District 17 president Van W. Bittner. Though Holt found himself a pariah by the end of the decade, he nevertheless remained convinced that he was fighting for the best interests of coal miners throughout West Virginia. Rush Holt has been covered by a handful of historians to date. Jerry Bruce Thomas takes a sharply critical view of Holt, pointing out his attempts to use New Deal programs as a form of political patronage to get a job for his brother, Matthew, and his persona as a reckless maverick who “took any sort of disagreement on issues as a personal attack and tended to respond in kind.”5 A doctoral dissertation by William Coffey remains the most thorough study of Holt’s life and career to date. It functions as a fairly evenhanded biographical treatment, though it does not examine his career past 1942.6 In 2011, Rush Holt Jr. delivered the inaugural Rush D. Holt lecture, which focused on the filibuster and its immediate consequences.7 The filibuster figures prominently in each of these works, revealing its importance in West Virginia and American politics, as well as its impact on the bituminous coal industry. Bituminous coal mining had been a “sick industry” for decades before the passage of the Guffey Act. It was an industry bloated by excessive competition...

Does Getting Health Insurance Affect Women’s Fertility? Evidence from the United Mine Workers’ Health Insurance

Does health insurance affect fertility decisions? Fertility may increase if insurance lowers the costs of having a child. Fertility may decrease if children are more likely to survive into adulthood (quality-quantity tradeoff). We study a largely permanent United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) insurance program. A large group of women of childbearing age gained pregnancy coverage for the first time. The insurance also covered children. We use a trend break specification with county-level variation in insurance. We find new evidence of the quality-quantity tradeoff. Fertility rates declined by about one percent per year in counties with average levels of insurance.

Denouncing the Hooded Order: Radicalism, Identity, and Dissent in the UMWA

My work examines how the radical immigrant miners of Franklin County, Illinois preserved radical sentiment in southern Illinois during the mid 1920s, despite the decline of both the coal industry in the region and radicalism within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In particular, this paper focuses on the grassroots activism and interethnic solidarity displayed by union miners from southern Illinois at the 42nd annual convention of the Illinois Federation of Labor in 1924. A number of mining representatives disrupted the proceedings and demanded that the conference openly denounce the Ku Klux Klan and their use of terrorism within mining communities. Despite the prevalence of Klan attacks on union members, the miners met heavy opposition from the UMWA hierarchy present at the convention. This was due to not only the political influence held by the KKK in the area, but also the southern Illinois organizers’ affiliation with the Communist party. The dispute at this convention spoke to the presence of a divided working class in southern Illinois that often erupted in violent conflicts based on ethnic identity, national origin, and radical affiliation. I contend that the events at this convention informed the next decade of labor disputes in the coalfields of Franklin County, in which the UMWA consistently neglected the needs of their immigrant members and left them exposed to repression at the hands of the coal operators, the KKK, and the courts.

Health Insurance, Hospitals, or Both? Evidence from the United Mine Workers' Health Care Programs in Appalachia

Should the government subsidize health insurance, health care facilities, or both? The United States has subsidized both for many decades, targeting under-served populations and geographic areas. We study these questions in the first rigorous quantitative analysis of two major natural experiments in Appalachian coal country. In the early 1950s, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) coal mining union began to provide free health insurance to coal miners and their families. A few years later, the UWMA opened ten new state-of-the-art hospitals in Appalachia. These interventions give us the unique opportunity to separately identify (i) the effect of health insurance from (ii) the combined effect of the insurance plus new hospitals for the same place, time, and population. To do so, we use difference-in-differences at the county-year level. We find that the health insurance had large effects on pregnant women and infants. A woman’s probability of delivering her baby in a hospital increased from 60 percent to over 90 percent. The probability of her infant dying before the age of one decreased from 36 to 9 per 1,000. For the new hospitals, crowd-out was low. Adding UMWA hospitals increased hospital beds by more than 50 percent. Health care workers more than doubled.

Collection Profile: Catholic University's Gilded Age and Progressive Era Labor Collections

ABSTRACT Now available online in digital format are the papers of John Mitchell, Terence V. Powderly, and John W. Hayes, three Gilded Age and Progressive Era labor leaders of significant national importance with strong ties to Pennsylvania. Powderly was active in union work, eventually rising to national leadership; in addition, he served as mayor of Scranton, practiced law, and became a Republican Party operative before working for the federal government. He was also a world traveler, talented photographer, and author. John William Hayes also became active with unions and was an ally of Powderly until 1893 when Hayes joined with the socialists and populist agrarians in order to oust Powderly from his leadership role in the Knights of Labor. John Mitchell began working as a farm laborer as a child, then became a coal miner. He was first a member of the Knights of Labor and then, successively, legislative agent, organizer, vice president, and president of the fledgling United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

Talking Trash

Talking Trash Steven Stoll (bio) Nancy Isenberg. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016. xvi + 480 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $28.00. J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. 264 pp. $27.99. One could say of the United States in the twenty-first century that there has never been a society so divided by class yet in such denial about it. The word class is rarely uttered either by journalists or politicians. Though it merely describes people of the same income and social status, class cannot be separated from the history of capitalism and its creation of owners and laborers. Americans once acknowledged the fact. During the labor movement that extended from the end of the Civil War to the 1970s, workers referred to themselves as workers or employees, not as the associates or partners of their wage-suppressing bosses. They defined themselves in opposition to capitalists, a term reserved for those who invest in the means of production and hire labor. Unions like the United Mine Workers of America and the Industrial Workers of the World engaged in defensive class warfare, enduring unprecedented violence and legal repression through the First World War. The language of class began to fade after the Second World War. Leaders in politics and business put forth the notion that all Americans are capitalists with an equal stake (if not an equal share) in the social system. They confuted consumption with freedom and set this conception of the United States against the austerity of the Soviet Union. Conservative economists like Milton Friedman and James McGill Buchanan asserted that when owners and investors pursued their interests they served the common good. Daniel J. Boorstin published The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), in which he excised class conflict from the nation's past. Since that time and the decline in unionization that followed, the differential in income and wealth between those at the top and bottom has diverged to the point that even conventional economists say it risks financial collapse. Two recent books reintroduce class into the discussion of American history and our present crisis. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in [End Page 345] America, Nancy Isenberg speaks to Boorstin's milquetoast complacency and to all previous historians who sought to diminish or ignore the deep inequalities between whites throughout the history of the United States, in colonial ventures, the Civil War, and in reality TV. J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis is equally compelling but in a different sense. It's an up-from-poverty tale that occludes the history, perpetuation, and destructiveness of class conflict. White Trash is a pageant of the dispossession and hatred that poor whites have endured since the founding of Jamestown. They have been known as waste people, crackers, hillbillies, and mudsills (a word for the loadbearing columns or posts sunk into the muck at the bottom of a structure). Isenberg has a great eye for stories that illustrate moments in the development of the idea she follows—that poor whites built the British colonies and the United States but endured constant revulsion at their imposed condition, whether we observe them closing ranks around Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 or Jimmy Carter in 1976. The book's central point is not surprising, but its vibrant writing and nimble analysis perform a much-needed service by wrapping in a single package the pieces of a scattered story. The book's power lies in its overall effect, the consistent historical presence of a people always visible but misunderstood. They served as soldiers enlisted from the distant provinces to fight the territorial wars of the United States, as well as the nation's forgotten farmers and miners. They were the beneficiaries of the New Deal and Great Society and later opponents of those very policies. They showed violent hostility to African-Americans and Native Americans, yet were themselves abused and maligned. The final chapters are the strongest, where we learn about the origins of the trailer park, how...

Just Transitions for the Miners: Labor Environmentalism in the Ruhr and Appalachian Coalfields

As environmental legislation threatens energy-related jobs, unions may seek to assure just transitions for their workers. Just transitions are programs to guarantee decent, well-paying new jobs or early retirement for workers displaced by environmental regulations. Militant unions with a tradition of neo-corporatism will be best positioned to demand just transitions for their members. This article provides two comparative case studies of coal miners’ unions in areas where environmental reform threatens coal workers’ livelihoods. Workers in Germany’s IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie/Industrial Guild Mining, Chemical, Energy (IG BCE) have applied sustained militancy to force the German government and employers to accept increasingly comprehensive and democratic worker input into the energy sector’s policy-making. Possessing a good deal of control over their industry, IG BCE was prepared to demand a just transition for their miners by the time the German government began phasing out underground mining. The UMWA (United Mine Workers of America) miners have a long tradition of militancy and have, at various junctures in their history, forced their employers and union bureaucrats to accept some degree of industrial democracy. However, the UMWA’s corporatism was a limited corporatism that was never as democratic as German neo-corporatism. The UMWA’s commitment to environmentalism increased as they won an expanded level of input into the coal industry’s decision-making. Nevertheless, since the late 1970s the UMWA’s militancy has waned and they have come to reject just transitions and other environmentalist policies.