Republicans Are Killing Life Saving Mine Regulations

 From The Valley Labor Report:

Start at around 1:07 to hear the report on he miners.

A seperate report from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) included the following comments from Union President Cecil Roberts and some needed context:

“What does this rule do?”, said President Roberts. “It’s not overly complicated. More people will be alive 10 years from now if it wasn’t for what we’ve done fighting for this rule. All we have been fighting for decades now is to try and save people’s lives.”

“Young miners in their 30’s and 40’s are getting lung diseases that are being exacerbated by silica dust. What was thought to be a disease of the past is coming back with a vengeance because miners are cutting more rock than ever before. This is a critical step to keeping miners safe and healthy. Now, our focus shifts to holding mining operators accountable. The UMWA remains steadfast in our efforts to ensure strict adherence to the new legislation within the industry.“This is a critical step to keeping miners safe and healthy, not just day to day, but for their full lifetime. This is a good day for miners. Workers in other industries have long been protected from excessive exposure to silica dust, but miners were not, even though they work in an environment where silica dust is encountered daily. It was a travesty that the government had never taken steps to protect them, but now it finally has,” Roberts said.

MSHA’s final rule will improve the health and safety of U.S. miners significantly. The rule will result in an estimated total of 1,067 lifetime avoided deaths and 3,746 lifetime avoided cases of silica-related illnesses. The rule will take effect for coal mines in April, 2025 and for metal and nonmetal mines in April, 2026, in order to ensure operators have the tools to implement it correctly.

Read the entire article from the union here.

Photo from In These Times

Labor journalist Kim Kelly has a good article in In These Times under today's date under the headline 

"Republicans Just Handed Down a Death Sentence to the Nation's Coal Miners." She says

It’s clear that the Republican committee members are determined to slash and burn away whatever ​“excesses” they can find, and nowhere is that more apparent than in their disgusting betrayal of the coal miners their party loves so dearly to pretend to respect. Section 123 of the bill reads, ​“None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to administer, implement, or enforce the proposed rule entitled ​‘Lowering Miners’ Exposure to Respirable Crystalline Silica and Improving Respiratory Protection,’ published by the Department of Labor in the Federal Register on April 18, 2024.” The language is bloodless, but the intent is utterly vicious: These highly paid, pampered modern aristocrats sat back in their padded chairs and casually handed down a potential death sentence to 44,000 people.

That’s how many coal miners currently work in the U.S. as of June 2024. One in 5 of those miners — those who have spent more than 20 years underground — is suffering from coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, the dreadful degenerative lung disease known more colloquially as black lung. As I reported in my 2023 In These Times investigation, ​“The Young Miners Dying of ​‘An Old Man’s Disease,’ ” the biggest direct cause of that spike in cases is silica dust. Coal miners across Central Appalachia are being overexposed to the toxic substance as they work underground, and it has been wreaking havoc upon their lungs and lives. While Rep. Aderholt has been enjoying his cushy office on Capitol Hill, they’ve been breathing in death.

Please read that article here.

Today In Union History: The Founding Of The United Mine Workers Of America & A Short Labor History Lesson

 

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.

Boys working in Pennsylvania's anthracite mines 

Some of the 500-plus dead in the Monongah mine disaster of 1907

Strikers and their families in Ludlow, Colorado

Miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921

The UMWA reached for an all-encompassing industrial unionism and became the foundation of modern mainstream industrial unionism. The union built strong relations of solidarity between Chicano and Mexican and Mexican American mine workers, Black mine workers, and white mine workers in most of the union's districts, but anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism among mine workers limited the union's anti-racism. Other industrial unions that the UMWA helped birth went further. The UMWA led the fight against black lung disease, but with the recent loss of union density in mining black lung is making a terrible comeback. The union pioneered in institutionalizing healthcare in Appalachia, and in union pension and health and welfare programs nationally, but coal industry economics and some stubborn and corrupt corporations and politicians---and, regrettably, some corrupt union officials and staff---have done much damage to these programs.

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.

Cecil Roberts, President of the UMWA