Click on the headline to link to an American Left History blog entry reviewing the documentary, Harlan County, USA that gives addition information about the strike below.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of
Women and Revolution,Spring 1976, that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of
Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Women Fight for UMWA in Harlan County-Brookside Organized After 13-Month Strike
HARLAN, November 8—After thirteen months on strike the miners of Brookside, Kentucky, scored a victory when Duke Power Company and its subsidiary, East-over Mining Company, agreed to accept the national contract of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) on August 29. A long and tough class battle has been fought to bring the UMWA back to Harlan County, and the job is only begun. One thing everyone involved agrees on, including Norman Yarborough, president of Eastover, is that the women of Brookside were key to the miners' victory.
Union-busting is a tradition in this southeast corner of Kentucky. Harlan County earned the byname it carries to this day-"Bloody Harlan"-in the organizing battles of 1931-32 during which three thousand men were blacklisted in the area. On 5 May 1931 the Battle of Evarts took place in which an undetermined number of men, including three deputies, died. As a result 34 miners were charged with murder, and 100 more were arrested on charges of "criminal syndicalism."
Among the numerous pensioners who reside in Evarts, just a few miles up from Brookside on High¬way 38, and the other mining villages in the hollows along the Cumberland River, many vividly remember these battles and are more than willing to recount the events in dramatic and articulate detail. They remem¬ber well because then, perhaps even more than now, the issue was one of survival.
The headaches of Norman Yarborough and Carl Horn, president of Duke Power Company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, began at the end of June 1973 when miners at Eastover's Brookside and Bailey's Creek mines voted to recognize the UMWA as their bargaining representative by a vote of. 113-55. For three years, since Duke Power had bought the mines, they had involuntarily been represented by the company-created Southern Labor Union (SLU), whose "sweetheart" contract had expired. The entire purpose of this "union" is to prevent unionization of the mines in the area* Workers were fired according to company whim under the SLU contract.
Safety conditions were abominable. In 1971 the Brookside mine had a disabling injury rate three times the national average; in 1972 its rate was twice the national average. Welfare and retirement benefits, as important to the miners and their families as wages, were virtually non-existent.
The Brookside women all tell the same story of doctors, clinics and hospitals rejecting the SLU med¬ical card as a scrap of paper from which they would never collect their fees. On occasion, when the medi¬cal cards were accepted, the women who had used them found themselves pursued by collection agencies.
Even now in Harlan the campaign waged by the com¬panies against the UMWA retains crusade proportions. Every few minutes the local radio station broadcasts spot announcements sponsored by the company front, "KIN, Inc." (Keep Informed Neighbor), denouncing the UMWA as an enemy of working people. In response to KIN, Inc.'s broadcasts and newspaper ads the presi¬dent of the local Boosters Club has offered a $5,000 reward to anyone who can produce three miners on SLU pension. A safe bet.
Duke Power Refuses to Negotiate
In provocative defiance of the workers' vote Duke Power refused to sign the standard national UMWA
contract which has covered UMWA's mines since 1971 when it was negotiated by Tony Boyle. Limited as the benefits provided by this agreement were, it was too much for Duke Power, the largest electric power com¬pany in the Southeast and third largest coal consumer in the country with assets of $2.5 billion and posted 1973 profits of $90 million.
During negotiations the company insisted that any contract it signed had to contain a no-strike provision. Furthermore it demanded deletion of the fundamental contract clause that all mining and coal preparation was to be performed by UMWA miners. Promotion was to be based on "ability" as opposed to seniority and a 50 cents per ton royalty to the-welfare and re¬tirement fund, as opposed to 75 cents^ then provided by UMWA contract, was more than enough for miners, in the company's opinion.
Duke Power refused to budge, and at the end of July the Brookside miners struck. Judge Byrd Hogg of Letcher County, a former coal operator, issued an injunction limiting the number of picketers at any mine entrance to three. Brookside women speak bitterly of the experiences of their husbands on picket duty. Scabs had a heyday crossing the picket line, cursing and spitting on the picketed and waving their paychecks in their faces, finally,.as one woman put it, "After working in that mine for so little, watching some scab come in to take his job when he fought for something better was more than I could take."
One day the Brookside women decided to gofrom a demonstration in Harlan to the scene of the action where they could be most effective. From then on they manned picket lines at Brookside. They organized themselves into the Brookside Women's Club to act primarily as a strike support committee. Though such activities by women are not unprecedented, this is probably the first time women have undertaken such initiative in the mining industry.
There is little press coverage of the Brookside strike that fails to mention the Brookside Women's Club. The effectiveness of the efforts of the women on the picket line earned them a well-deserved repu¬tation for courage and militancy. Brookside was shut down by their numbers, "persuasiveness" and untiring perseverence. They threw themselves in front of the cars of the scabs to stop them. They beat them with one-inch tree branches. At least one state trooper numbers among their casualties. The stories of their encounters with scabs, operators and the companies' "law enforcers" and thugs have become part of the folklore of the region.
Norman Yarborough's name has become a dirty word in the Harlan County mining community and be¬yond over the course of 13 long months. Duke Power understandably came to represent more than a giant absentee monopoly-capitalist corporation—an imper¬sonal force somehow coldly and imperiously determin' ing the course and quality of their lives from distant urban offices. The policies of Duke Power and East-over Mining were determined and implemented by human beings whose greed, dishonesty and contempt for working people could be observed firsthand, most directly in the person of Norman Yarborough. One of the women who spent a night in the Harlan jail where "Yardbird" had strikers sent described how she stayed up all night rather than sleep among the cockroaches, which she "hates almost as much as Norman Yarborough."
The Eastover president entered his office each day under heavy guard. To occupy the time on the picket line the women plotted various means of "getting their hands on him to knock some sense into his head." At one point they taunted him to come outside in order to discuss the possibility of their employment at the Brookside mine as soon as the UMWA contract was signed. As Yarborough cautiously peeked around the door of his office, each in turn made her pitch as to her qualifications and abilities—her physical strength, experience and knowledge of machinery and mining methods. Needless to say he was far from enticed by their modest proposal. He was later horrified to dis¬cover that the women "forever milling around and acting crazy put there," were not totally usurious in their ambition: with the end of the strike several fa¬miliar female faces appeared in his office to request employment applications. According to reports, though he appeared relieved to discover their business, a certain exasperation was apparent in his expression.
The Duke Power Company has notoriously discrim¬inatory employment practices, victimizing blacks as well as women, and has lost several law suits in this regard. The coal industry has hired women as under¬ground miners since December 1973, when the first two went to work in Jenkins, Kentucky. Since then sev¬eral dozen have been hired in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio. The reaction to women in the mines, as well as to women on the picket lines has been mixed. The argument that "the mines are too dangerous for wormen" tends to be put forward infrequently and sometimes sheepishly, given the obvious fact that danger doesn't discriminate. More commonly, opposition to women in the mines comes from miners' wives concerned to "prevent hanky panky in the mines."
Increasing integration of women in the industrial work force tends to allay such fears. The real inter¬ests of women and all workers are promoted by such integration. Not only are women thus able to make a better living, but working outside the home in social production increases social and political conscious¬ness. Women have significantly contributed to labor's struggles historically, having been in the forefront of many class battles. The unity of the labor movement and thus its strength is greatly enhanced by breaking down the divisions created by women's forced exclu¬sion from many areas of productive labor. Equal pay for equal work and equal access to training programs and all job categories are a fundamental democratic right of all workers, regardless of sex or race.
Companies Use Terror Tactics
The women involved in the Brookside strike laugh as they recount their experiences, but they also point out that many events they laugh over now were far from funny at the time. The strike was a grueling experience, won at great expense. It was not simply a matter of long and late hours on the picket line, foul weather or the fatigue of the pace of fund raising efforts, but of fending off attacks of the companies which ranged from harassment, arrest and prosecu¬tion to the most brutal terrorization of strikers and their families by hired gun thugs.
Strike supporters were repeatedly and arbitrarily arrested during the course of the strike. In October 1973 sixteen picketers were arrested following an incident on the picket line on charges of violating the court order limiting the number of picketers. In a stu¬pid attempt at intimidation seven women were arbi¬trarily held for two days in the filthy vermin- and roach-infested Harlan jail. Several had to bring their children with them for lack of child care.
At one point the women were informed that pro¬ceedings were being initiated to put their children in¬to foster homes on the grounds that they were unfit mothers. They replied that "Bloody Harlan" would be an understatement if this threat were executed. Rather than intimidating the miners, this crass maneuver further solidarized them and won them greater sympathy, even among the petty-bourgeois professionals of Har¬lan proper, many of whom have a contemptuous atti¬tude toward the miners.
The other event that most effectively exposed the cynical duplicity of the company and revealed the char¬acter of the SLU was their attempt to bribe two MWA strikers to lead a back-to-work movement. The strik¬ers reported the offer to UMWA officials and played along with the SLU officials in order to entrap them and definitively document the dirty deal. On two occasions Carl Noe and Ron Curtis received partial pay¬ment from SLU officials near the Harlan airport. They •were wired to record the transaction, and a photo¬graphic record was shot by a hidden photographer, proving beyond any reasonable doubt company/SLU collusion. To the dismay of many strikers, the provisions of the settlement negotiated by the UMWA na¬tional leadership to end the strike included the con¬cession that the charges before the NLRB against Duke Power and the SLU would be dropped in return for company amnesty for fired strikers.
The Brookside mine stayed closed for eleven months. Last July the center of activity moved to Duke Power's nearby Highsplint mine. Given the unreliable sympathies of some local police, state troopers were sent in by Governor Wendell Ford to herd scabs through the picket lines. Though the supply of coal to Duke Power was not cut off, the normal three shifts per day were reduced to one. A machine gun was sta¬tioned in the company office, and on at least one occa¬sion the picketers were forced to dive for cover as machine gun .fire flew over their heads for fifteen minutes.
The strategic situation at Highsplint made the mass picketing tactic difficult, and few of the women who had closed down Brookside participated. Between the gun thugs and state troopers, who escorted the scabs into the mine with drawn* guns, strikers picketed under constant extreme physical danger. Several picketers were shot, beaten and arrested. One of them, 66-year-old Minard Turner, returned to the picket line after two days, despite the bullet still lodged in his chest.
The, strikers were enraged over Governor Ford's use of state troopers. Arnold Miller, who doles out support from the union's political action fund (COMPAC) to Democratic ^friends of labor, "suggested that Ford, who ran this fall for U.S. Senator against Marlowe Cook, was behaving in an "unfriendly" manner by strikebreaking. Miller met with Ford and, lo and- behold, the strikebreaking turned put to be all a "misstake"—the result of a "misunderstanding"—and the state troopers were for the moment called off.
But Wendell Ford had, not had a change of heart; the "mistake" was merely that the timing was momen¬tarily inopportune for such blatant strikebreaking. As a capitalist politician he is by definition a strikebreak¬er. Arnold Miller's support to Democratic "friends of labor" puts him in a political alliance with these strikebreakers and their capitalist bosses who control both the Democratic and Republican parties, lock, stock and barrel. Workers need their own political party. The UMWA, like other unions, needs leaders that will fight for the political independence of the working class and build a labor party based on the trade unions to fight for a workers government.
Finally, Highsplint foreman Billy Carroll Bruner shot and killed 23-year-old Lawrence Jones. Even as he lay dying in the hospital four days after he was shot, the strike settlement was being drawn up in spe¬cial negotiating sessions. A combination of factors had made any other course but surrender suicidal for Duke Power. Not least among these was the fact that a number of strikers had taken all the abuse they were going to take. It was to grim and angry miners, prepared to defend their numbers with any force necessary —to answer kind with kind—that the settlement an¬nouncement arrived in the pre-dawn hours.
The women, too, had had enough. Many families had been forced to sleep on the floor for some time in order to avoid bullets fired into their homes by cruising night riders; the home of UMWA local president Mickey Messer was riddled with more than 100 rounds of am¬munition on August 8. Norman Yarborough had framed up picketers in court; the miners' children had been harassed by anti-union elements, and their teachers had ripped UMWA buttons off students wearing them and had penalized them grade-wise.
Several families living in company housing had fought off eviction attempts by Eastover by mobilizing supporters to carry their belongings back in as the company carried them out. Most of the families,forced to live in company housing by a serious housing short¬age in the area, as well as by their financial circum¬stances, lack indoor plumbing, and the water which they fetch from outdoors is infected with fecal bacteria six times the "safe" level. The water tastes bad and makes their children sick.
UMWA Shuts Down the Mines
The decisive step that finally brought the company to terms after 13 months was the national UMWA lead¬ership's mobilization of the entire 120,000 members of the union to shut down its approximately 1200 mines nationally in a five-day "memorial period" beginning August 18. UMWA mines produce about 70 percent of the nation's total.
After a great deal of expense and adverse publicity, including that resulting from the UMWA's participation in campaigns to defeat Duke Power's requested rate increases in North and South Carolina and to under¬mine its capital availability among stockholders, Duke Power settled for terms offered it 13 months before. The UMWA leadership could have won the strike in short order and organized all non-union mines in the process by immediately mobilizing the union's ranks to shut down the entire coal industry in a national strike.
Miller and other national officers made several trips to Harlan during the course of the strike. Hear¬ings were held in March by a panel of "investigators" headed by Willard Wirtz to weigh the relative merits of the two sides in the controversy. Trips to Washing¬ton were organized whereby supporters of the miners could implore their Congressmen to do something about the situation. Not surprisingly, as one enlight¬ened participant put it, "they ran out the back door as we walked in the front."
Much of the UMWA national leadership's rhetoric was devoted to its determination to organize the un¬organized—specifically .to bring the UMWA back to eastern Kentucky. Harlan County was to be the first step in this process. This impressed the miners of Harlan County, as well as did the strike benefits pro¬vided, which seemed fantastic by comparison with UMWA standards under the Boyle regime. The new "democratic," "militant" UMWA leadership has,how¬ever, demonstrated that, though (so far) less venal and perhaps less inclined to resolve internal power strug¬gles by murdering its opposition, its policies will not ultimately protect the miners' interests any better than its predecessors' did.
The reason is simple. The needs of miners, notably safety and job security, can be secured only through class struggle not limited to the confines of capitalism and capitalist "law and order." Just as the CIO's "il¬legal" organizing battles during the 1930's involved immense social struggles, so will organizing the un¬organized today. It cannot be done piecemeal, isolated area by isolated area, but only by united action of the entire labor movement. The fact that even in the wake of the Brookside victory the company/SLU was recent¬ly able to win the Highsplint election illustrates the point. Not only do many miners report that the company/SLU paid for its votes, but management voted in the election. Regardless of whether and when a new election is held, such tactics of the bosses can under¬mine and, and if allowed to continue, defeat an organizing drive.
Arnold Miller Contains the Struggle
Despite his democratic "innovations" like local election of officers as opposed to their appointment by the national office; contract ratification by the mem¬bership; and an end to voting rights for pensioners, Arnold Miller's program is not one of class struggle, but of maintaining capitalism. He was not ushered in¬to power in the UMWA by Nixon's Labor Department in 1972 in order to fight the bosses and capitalism, but to keep the lid on struggle. Though he claims to favor the right to strike over safety and local grievances he has campaigned against the numerous wildcats that have taken place in the last couple of years (more than in any other industry) insisting that Boyle's rotten contract, which authorized the continued endangerment at miners, was more sacrosanct than workers' lives.
A loyal Democrat who has run or office in his home state of West Virginia, Arnold Miller became the can¬didate of the "Miners for Democracy" (MFD) for UMWA president after Jock Yablonski, a former Boyle lieu¬tenant, was murdered on orders from Tony Boyle. He was elected in a Labor Department-administered elec¬tion re-run in 1972. (See "Labor Department Wins Mine Workers' Election," Workers Vanguard No. 17, March 1973.)
The issues which led to the MFD opposition and the events by which Boyle brought about his own downfall were health and safety, the goal of the miners being mine safety legislation and compensation for the chron¬ic occupational disease of miners which claims the lives of 3,000-4,000 per year-black lung disease.
Though many miners have not forgotten the lessons of past experiences with the federal government, its courts and its troops, and therefore know that all are tools of the companies, Arnold Miller—instead of at¬tempting to reform the union from within, to oust the corrupt Boyle machine by mobilizing the rank and file to take the union into their own hands in order to fight for their interests against the companies—sued the union and brought the government into its internal af¬fairs. The UMWA was put into virtual receivership by the Labor Department during its "investigation."
The government's real concern is not to "cleanup" the unions, but to wreck them in order that the capi¬talists it serves are freed to increase their exploita¬tion of the workers. The notion that Nixon or Ford is concerned about democracy and corruption is ludi¬crous. Miners organized to do so are perfectly cap¬able of getting rid of rotten union bureaucrats without any help from the bosses' government, as the history of the UMWA demonstrates. The question is whether their lot will be any better if they do. If one labor faker simply replaces another not much has changed.
Though when compared to Tony Boyle, Miller may look like the epitome of reform, and regardless of personal character or intent, the disservice he has done the trade-union movement in opening wider the door to government intervention in the unions is enormous. The principle of the independence of the trade unions from the state is fundamental, and every attempt to undermine it and establish a precedent to the contrary is a dangerous betrayal.
As we goes to press Miller is in the process of negotiating a new national UMWA contract, the first since he has been in office. The old contract expires November 12 and the miners' "no-contract-no-work" tradition makes at least a short token strike inevitable. The provisions of the settlement of the Brookside strike against Duke Power included the exemption of Brookside from participation in a national miners' strike with expiration of the contract. Though weary from their thirteen months' battle, the mining popula¬tion around Brookside appears disinclined to continue producing coal while fellow workers are on strike. Miller may well find his "compromise" with Duke Power meaningless if even one miner from anywhere decides to picket at Brookside. Crossing picket lines is correctly considered scabbing there.
Decline of the Brookside Women's Club
The Brookside Women's Club, though formally res¬urrected under "new leadership," in fact ceased to ex¬ist as originally constituted some time after Brookside was closed down. The original core of Brookside wom¬en walked out, with the Maoist October League (OL) asserting in the Call that a split had developed between those who felt that the club should concern itself only with Brookside and those who sought to broaden its sphere of political struggle. The facts remain in dis¬pute. When Brookside representatives did seek to in¬volve themselves in the larger labor movement, how¬ever, by addressing the first national conference of the Coalition of 'Labor Union Women (CLUW), they were denied entry on the grounds that they were not union members! And the opportunist OL, which could not risk alienating the labor bureaucrats who comprise the the source of the dignity and respect to which "those who make society's wheels turn" are entitled.
But despite its members' dedication to trade union¬ism and their personal heroism, an organization like the Brookside Women's Club is necessarily limited from the outset. While it was able to organize short-term strike support, without a revolutionary program and the political leadership of a Leninist party it could go no further toward the achievement of the broader social goals necessary for lasting victory.
Such a victory for the miners of "Bloody Harlan" will require a struggle which will begin with the for¬mation of .opposition caucuses in the UMWA to oust the traitorous bureaucrats who control the union and replace them with a class-struggle leadership dedi¬cated to fight for a workers government; it will cul¬minate in the uprising of all sectors of the working class solidly united under the revolutionary leader¬ship of a disciplined vanguard party to smash the rule of capital and begin the construction of a socialist society. Such a struggle cannot succeed without the active intervention of masses of working women and the wives of working men. We have every confidence that this fighting proletariat will include within its ranks women who are veterans of the Harlan County battles.
