From Richard Mellor in California
In Harlan County, Kentucky, miners that have been blocking railroad tracks for three weeks now in protest over a failure to pay their wages when a mining company abruptly shut down. The now redundant miners have raised a banner saying, “No Pay, We Stay” and are defying efforts to move them on.
The protest that began with only a few of the laid-off miners who took the initiative to blockade a coal-train but the protest has now grown into a 24-hour operation, with a ‘tent city’ alongside the railroad tracks and immediately beside a local highway. It has been visited with offers of support from many trade union and labour activists and the local community has supported the miners. As the New York Times put it, “it is the first organized miners’ protest that anyone can remember for decades in Harlan County… a place once virtually synonymous with bloody labor wars”.
The blockade has been going since July, after the mine-owners, a company called Blackjewel, suddenly announced they were bankrupt. Blackjewel own mines in four states, and employed over a thousand miners in central Appalachia. It was during the afternoon shift that the miners heard that Blackjewel was immediately closing the mine and laying off all the workers. The company failed to file the mandatory 60-day advance notice and failed to post a bond to cover the payroll, as is required by state law. When it comes to the interests of business, workers’ legal ‘protections’ mean little.
So for their final week, the workers received no pay. To add insult to injury, they then discovered that their previous two weeks pay cheques had bounced.
Harlan County has a long an proud tradition of workers’ struggle
What is important about this is not just that it is in Harlan County, a historic place when it comes to union battles and working class history, but it is Kentucky where union teachers and their allies have fought major battles over public education and teachers working conditions.
The miners, from what I can gather are trying to avoid partisan politics, but that doesn’t mean we avoid working class politics, the politics that affects all workers.
I read in the article that the Kentucky Governor, Matt Bevin, the multi-millionaire manufacturer and investment banker who manages money for rich people, has visited the blockade. Bevin is the same individual who has savaged working people’s living standards as well as teachers’ wages and working conditions. He has publicly attacked teacher and other unionists in the state.
This is an opportunity for the unions that were involved in the teachers’ and parents’ battles in education earlier this year that shut down the schools for a week, to make attempts to link with these miners. Many workers are supporting the miners (see photograph above, from New York Times, of truckers with the miners).
The trade union hierarchy should be organizing this and building links between the eastern part of Kentucky and the west, including Louisville. Both the urban west and the rural east is suffering from the assault on working class people that is taking place throughout the country and under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The trade union leadership cannot be relied upon to initiate such actions and if they won’t the many activists in Louisville in the west can take that lead, if they haven’t done so already. Harlan County has a tremendous history and this great history can be reborn. The miners blocking those tracks would surely welcome support in any form from western Kentucky and the teachers who have waged a huge struggle on behalf of workers in that state. At the very least, tenuous links can be built by sending messages of support from the teachers unions. Louisville Labor Council has 50,000 workers affiliated to it. This is a huge potential source of power and must be used, we all have the same needs and desires.
Aug. 22, 2019
For a detailed report on the miners’ action, read the article in the New York Times here.
