The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was founded in Columbus, Ohio on January 25, 1890. Two days after the union was founded the union's convention voted to create what I believe was the first union strike defense fund paid for by assessing union members' wages in the United States. The founding of the UMWA and the creation of that fund marked a turning point in labor and industrial relations in the United States.
Mine workers had tried many different kinds of labor and union organizations by 1890. There had been sick and death benefit funds and lodges, unions restricted to skilled miners, ethically-based organizations, and local organizations that had been secretive and that sometimes engaged in violence. All of these had failed, most often because employers had the upper hand and could divide the workers and use repressive and violent strategies. There were also the problems of local and regional unions calling strikes prematurely or on their own, an absence of unity and an absence of a shared sense of obligation among mine workers, and the introduction of new ways of getting out coal and getting it to markets that challenged the forms of workers' control in and around the mines that mine workers refused to concede on. Coal markets were changing, mining technology was changing, methods of work were changing, mining was becoming more hazardous, and new immigrants who did not speak English as their first language and who had traditions of their own were entering the mines. In almost every coalfield in the United States what happened in the mines was joined to what happened in the communities aboveground, giving a unique shape to mine worker consciousness and mine union organizing.
The parents of the UMWA---the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers and the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 135---had been able to rely on autonomous and secretive local organizations. Early union-employer bargaining in the key Ohio-Illinois-Pennsylvania-Indiana mining districts was carried on with union delegates and coal operators assembling and setting wages and working conditions with what their markets could bear first and foremost in their minds. Miners struck, or refrained from working, in order to create scarcities of coal and increases in coal tonnage market prices and returned to work when prices rose. This helped the operators and the industry, such as they were. But by 1890 this was becoming, or had become, ineffectual. The important anthracite coal industry in northeastern Pennsylvania operated under different conditions, and the push by coal operators into Appalachia and the south and the rise of coal mining in the lower Midwestern and western states threatened stability where the union had its base. The operators who had previously cooperated with the labor organizations were no longer willing or able to do so. Local autonomous organizations could not meet these changing times. The old ideas of uplifting union miners on the basis of their skills, high wages and the contributions they made to their communities as citizens were necessarily giving way to forming a union that included all mine workers, regardless of citizenship or skill levels or racial or ethnic considerations, centralizing union bargaining power and strike coordination, maintaining national strike and defense funds, and forcing the coal industry to regulate itself.
Since the UMWA's founding the union has struggled with an industry that resists both voluntary and imposed regulation, even when that resistance costs lives, resources, money, and long-term industrial survival. The 19th century mine worker traditions of local union autonomy and action, even when these sometimes undermine regional or national solidarity, have never completely disappeared, either. Behind these mine worker traditions stand other traditions, also still somewhat in place, of worker control in the mines and community involvement in mine worker unionism. The UMWA has had to operate within these divergent and conflicting traditions. Employer and state violence and repression followed the union's early and most determined efforts to win justice in the coalfields, and union members and their supporters have responded as well with dramatic and defensive actions that often aroused the conscience of people of good will and eventually won progress. The Ludlow Massacre, the Lattimer Massacre, and the West Virginia Mine Wars were perhaps the most dramatic events that forced the union to toughen up and to often take a hard line in organizing, but these events came with the times in which they occurred. Dramatic struggles resurfaced in the coalfields in the 1960s and 1970s, in the mid- and late-1980s, the early 1990s, and most recently in 2021-2023 with the Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama. The Warrior Met Coal strike was Alabama's longest strike.
A legacy of fighting back exists in the UMWA, and a shared and certain knowledge of the human costs of working non-union holds on as well. The union's presence in the coalfields has made the difference between life and death in the mines.
Has the UMWA failed? No, not at all. That a small group of miners coalesced behind a shared and optimistic vision of effective industrial unionism in 1890 and built a union that has lasted 134 years is in itself a tremendous victory. The UMWA has withstood repression and violence brought against it by hostile employers and anti-union politicians. The union went through a particularly tough period following the First World War, a period that saw the UMWA nearly dissolved as internal factionalism and widespread unemployment in the coalfields and anti-union court rulings and legislation took a hard toll, but rebounded to lead the labor upsurge of the 1930s. It was at that point of crisis after the First World War that John L. Lewis took control of the UMWA, and his presence and leadership defined much of the labor movement into the late 1950s. To this day there are mine workers and others in coalfield communities who hold his memory dear.
Internal corruption wounded the union in the late 1940s and 1950s, but the mine workers and their allies who fought for mine safety, black lung prevention and benefits, pension rights and union democracy supported the Miners for Democracy campaign and a widespread strike movement that brought Arnold Miller to the presidency of the UMWA. Miller's election and the movement around him represented a great advance for labor. The election of Rich Trumka to the presidency of the UMWA in 1982 (and later to leadership in the AFL-CIO), the A.T. Massey strike (1984-1985), and the Pittston coal strike (April 5, 1989 to February 20, 1990) also opened new possibilities for labor in the United States. Women miners and mineworkers fought their way into the industry, found a home in the UMWA, and as union members opened the doors for other working women. Their work is still being celebrated. Improvements in mine safety are due almost entirely to the UMWA's work.
The UMWA has been built from the mine workers and the foundations of the union are in the coalfields, but the union represents many occupations that are unrelated to mining. If you are not a union member, and if you and your coworkers want a union, consider the UMWA. There is also an Associate Member program for friends of the UMWA that builds solidarity and provides some great benefits.
The UMWA has not failed. The best is yet to come.
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