An Alabama community marked the 20th anniversary Thursday of an underground explosion that killed more than a dozen coal miners in one of the state’s worst mining disasters in generations.
The Alabama Miner’s Memorial Foundation planned a memorial service at a church in Brookwood, where the blast at Jim Walters Resources Mine No. 5 claimed 13 lives on Sept. 23, 2001. A monument to the victims was erected at the church in 2002.
Thomas Wilson, who was a representative with the United Mine Workers Health and Safety board at the time of the explosion, knew all 13 miners who died. He told WIAT-TV that remembrance ceremonies help those still grieving their loss.
“Healing and support for the families for the other miners. I also believe if we don’t remember what’s killed workers, we are bound to repeat,” Wilson said.
The victims were working about 2,000 feet below the surface when a pair of explosions ripped through the mine, located about 40 miles southwest of Birmingham. An investigation showed a battery charger ignited highly flammable gas in the mine, causing the blast.
The anniversary came as more than 1,100 Alabama miners are in their sixth month of a strike against Warrior Met Coal Inc., with headquarters in Brookwood.
BARDSTOWN, Ky. (WDRB) — Nearly 400 workers at Heaven Hill’s Bardstown location plan to strike over contract negotiations.
Since the summer, the union for the workers, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23-D, have been negotiating with Heaven Hill Brands.
Heaven Hill’s Heritage Center
The current five-year contract ends Friday at 11:59 p.m.
The workers argue Heaven Hill Brands is trying to change their shift from traditional Monday through Friday to what’s called a non-traditional option, meaning workers could have to work Saturday and Sunday.
Along with the schedule discrepancy, the union employees say they also want to see competitive wages.
Jerry Newton is a foreman at Heaven Hill and a project chairman for Local 23-D. He says the wages at Heaven Hill are the lowest in the area compared to other distillery companies.
“It’s not all about the money, but it’s about how we are treated,” Newton said.
On Thursday night, the union group of about 420 workers voted to strike since an agreement hasn’t been reached. The union says 96% of the 420 employees voted in favor of the strike.
“During the pandemic and all that, the company has told us, we’ll remember you all during contract time. Well, contract planning is here, Newton said.
“They have showed us no appreciation.”
Heaven Hill’s Heritage Center
Heaven Hill Brands released the following statement to WDRB News:
“Last evening, the membership of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23-D failed to ratify a new five-year contract with Heaven Hill Brands. Since the company was founded, the support of our employees has been a source of pride and we have had productive conversations with the union for several months now regarding components of the contract. We will continue to collaborate with UFCW leadership toward passage of this top-of-class workforce package.”
The employees plan to strike outside Heaven Hill’s Bardstown location until contract negotiations are complete.
RACINE, WV (WOWK) — West Virginia labor leaders reflected on the state’s union history at the annual Labor Day celebration in Boone County.
This picnic celebrates the achievements of labor unions and workers. This year, they also highlighted the Battle of Blair Mountain’s centennial and how it paved the way for workers today.
“When we think West Virginia, people often think of a place that’s behind the times. But the coal miners who marched in 1921 were a generation ahead of their time,” said Chuck Keeney, a college professor and author of the book The Road to Blair Mountain.
United Mine Workers of America and people from all over came to commemorate the Battle of Blair Mountain that took place 100 years ago. Over the weekend, people retraced the historic miners’ march.
“We just had tired legs at the top of the mountain, they were facing death but they knew the cause was worth it,” said David Hadley, a UMWA member from Indiana who participated in the retracing.
Keeney emphasizes that this part of the Mountain State’s history was often overlooked and forgotten. “For a couple of generations, it was deliberately taken out of the textbooks by West Virginia governors and West Virginia politicians that didn’t want coal viewed in an unfavorable light. So it’s great that this history is finally getting its due.”
People like Hadley say its history, like Blair Mountain, is why they continue to fight for better working conditions today. “That led to unionization and that led to the middle class. Today we need to pass legislation in Congress and signed by the President so that we can renew that middle class through the labor unions and that people have their right to democracy through the workplace.”
Some of the legislation people at the picnic were calling on Congress to pass is the Pro Act, a bill to expand various labor protections related to employees’ rights to organize and collectively bargain in the workplace.
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BLAIR, W.Va. — On the shoulder of a lonely stretch of highway miles into the hills, a sign stands in the weeds. “Battle of Blair Mt.,” it says, informing the tumbledown cinder block building across the road that here, 100 years ago, was the largest armed labor uprising in U.S. history.
In late August 1921, thousands of rifle-bearing coal miners marched to this thickly wooded ridge in southern West Virginia, a campaign that was ignited by the daylight assassinations of union sympathizers but had been building for years in the oppressive despair of the coal fields. The miners’ army was met at Blair Mountain by thousands of men who volunteered to fight with the Logan County sheriff, who was in the pay of the coal companies. Over 12 miles and five days, the sheriff’s men fought the miners, strafing the hillsides with machine-gun fire and dropping homemade bombs from planes. There were at least 16 confirmed deaths in the battle, though no one knows exactly how many were killed before the US Army marched in to put a stop to the fighting.
The roadside marker and the spent shell casings found in the hillsides are the only reminders at Blair Mountain that this took place.
The country has begun wrestling in recent years with its buried trauma, memorializing vile and suppressed histories like the Tulsa Race Massacre. The Battle of Blair Mountain, the culmination of a series of violent conflicts known as the Mine Wars, would also seem to be a candidate for such exhumation.
A coal processing site in Logan County, W.Va.Credit…Mike Belleme for The New York Times
The army of miners that came to Blair Mountain was made up of Black and white people, new immigrants and people with deep roots in Appalachia. They did perilous work under conditions close to indentured servitude: They were kept in line by armed guards and paid only in company scrip, with their pay docked for the costs of housing, medical care and the tools they used in the mines. These conditions eventually erupted in the largest insurrection since the Civil War.
But while there are commemorations this weekend in West Virginia, including talks, rallies and re-enactments, a century of silence enforced by power and fear has left the battle nearly forgotten elsewhere.
“It is one of the most amazing confrontations between workers and bosses ever in this country and no one knows about it,” said Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mine Workers of America and a great-nephew of Bill Blizzard, who led the miners’ army in 1921. “It seems to be almost impossible unless there’s a concerted effort for people not to know about it.”
Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America, center, and other U.M.W.A. members, recreating the march to Blair Mountain for the 100th anniversary of the battle, in Marmet, W.Va., on Friday.Credit…Mike Belleme for The New York Times
The Mine Wars era was bloody, with at least 100 deaths in shootouts and violent crackdowns. For most of the 20th century, silence about it served mutual interests. The participants kept quiet out of self-protection and solidarity. Mr. Blizzard was charged with treason and murder, though he was acquitted, and some of the most prominent labor leaders faced permanent ostracism. Frank Keeney, who roused thousands to fight as head of the U.M.W.A. local, spent the latter part of his life as a parking lot attendant.
Mr. Keeney’s great-grandson, Charles B. Keeney, a history professor at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College, had trouble getting his own family to talk about the uprising. Instead, he learned about it from stray remarks at family cookouts and from older strangers, who told him star-struck tales after approaching him when they learned of his family connection.
But it was primarily the coal industry and its supporters in state government, Mr. Keeney and other historians said, who tried to smother any public discussion of the history. State officials demanded that any mention of Blair Mountain be stripped from federal oral histories. A 1931 state law regulated the “study of social problems” and for decades, the Mine Wars were left entirely out of school history textbooks. Today, the battlefield is owned in large part by coal operators, who until recently planned to strip mine Blair Mountain itself.
A postcard of Blair, W.Va.Credit…Collection of Kenneth King, West Virginia Mine Wars MuseumC.F. Keeney and Fred Mooney of the United Mine Workers were charged with treason. As president and secretary-treasurer of the union, they organized the Logan County March of Aug. 24, 1921. The March escalated into the Battle of Blair Mountain.Credit…Everett Collection, via AlamyA still image from a news reel filmed and produced after the battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, showing miners with a machine gun.Credit…Collection of Kenneth King, West Virginia Mine Wars MuseumA crowd gathered to listen to a speaker in Blair, W.Va., in 1921.Credit…Collection of Kenneth King, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum
This was narrowly averted in 2018 after Mr. Keeney and a group called Friends of Blair Mountain succeeded in a nine-year campaign, resisted at virtually every turn, to have the site placed on the National Register of Historic Places. But even that does not prevent logging or natural gas exploration, he said.
“In an ideal world, it should be a state park,” said Mr. Keeney. Instead, he climbs through metal gates blocking the roads into the mountain to see what industrial activities may be going on outside of public view.
In recent decades, the Mine Wars have steadily drawn more attention, with a critically acclaimed movie; serious history books; an exhibit in the state museum; and explicit allusions to it during the 2018 state teachers’ strike.
Earlier this year, a great-grandson of one of the coal company detectives even showed up in the little town of Matewan, once a citadel of union resistance, and began offering tours.
“There are two sides to every story,” said James Baldwin, who sits on a bench in front of the Mexican restaurant, waiting to tell tourists of the “brave” detectives who were killed in a shootout after they evicted the families of striking miners from company-owned houses.
“In an ideal world, it should be a state park,” said Charles B. Keeney, in reference to Blair Mountain and the site of the battle.Credit…Mike Belleme for The New York TimesJames Baldwin, whose great-grandfather was part of the Baldwin Detective Agency that participated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, has become a local tour guide in Matewan.Credit…Mike Belleme for The New York Times
The history is being talked about more, but still only in “bits and pieces,” said Stan Bumgardner, the editor of Goldenseal, the state history magazine. “It’s missing in the public sphere.” The events of the Mine Wars are noted far less vigorously than those of the tourist-pleasing Hatfield-McCoy feud, broadcast on signs all over southern West Virginia.
The chief mission of remembering Mine Wars history on the ground has remained with Mr. Keeney and his small cadre of activists, residents and retired union miners. In 2015, they opened the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, privately funded and located in a union-owned building in Matewan. They have also organized the main events for the centennial of the Battle of Blair Mountain, including a re-enactment of the march this weekend. None of these are state-sponsored, although to the surprise of the organizers, the West Virginia governor, Jim Justice, a billionaire owner of coal companies, issued a proclamation in recent days in which he recognized the “significance” of the battle as a “fight for fair treatment of working peoples.”
Mr. Keeney said powerful interests were not the only opposition to his cause. Past re-enactments of the march have been met with hostility and even assault by people along the route, many of them coal families, who were angered by the involvement of environmentalists.
An exhibition on the battle of Blair Mountain at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, W.Va.Credit…Mike Belleme for The New York Times
Mr. Roberts, who has spent much of this summer rallying hundreds of union coal miners on strike in Alabama, sees this as a natural consequence of hard times. Decades of automation and changes in the energy market have dried up the coal jobs in West Virginia, and years of anti-union campaigns have frayed old loyalties. People desperate for work tend to view any critic of the coal industry, including those championing oppressed miners of 100 years ago, as a threat to their livelihoods.
Mr. Roberts cited a quote from Jay Gould, the Gilded Age railroad baron: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Not long ago, a local historian found a document in the attic of the Logan County courthouse, listing hundreds of miners who were charged for taking part in the Battle of Blair Mountain. It may be the only list of its kind, said Mr. Keeney, who plans to dig into it after the centennial has passed. And it may offer surprises for people throughout the coal fields and scattered around the country who had never learned that their great-grandfathers had gone to war in West Virginia a hundred years ago.
Fed up with the deadly work and poor wages and living conditions, thousands of coal miners marched to unionize in West Virginia a century ago, resulting in a deadly clash and the largest U.S. armed uprising since the Civil War.
On Friday, some of their descendants joined others in retracing the steps that led to the 12-day Battle of Blair Mountain. Multiple events are planned looking back at the fight, highlighted by the 45-mile (72-kilometer) march over three days.
“Every step you take, you just think about what kind of courage that took,” said United Mine Workers international President Cecil Roberts, whose great-uncle, Bill Blizzard, was a leader of the 1921 march as a union subdistrict state organizer.
The miners — whites, Blacks, and European immigrants — banded together, bent on doing something about their treatment by coal operators. They became known as the “Red Neck Army” for the distinctive bandanas around their necks.
MARMET, WV (WOWK) – This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, which took place in West Virginia. It was the largest labor uprising in US history.
The Battle of Blair Mountain occurred in Logan County, West Virginia as part of the Coal Wars – a series of early 20th-century labor disputes in Appalachia. Today, the United Mine Workers of America retraced the miners’ march to that historic battle.
“It’s all part of a larger historical struggle for unionization rights in the United States,” said Ericka Wills, a professor at the University of Colorado in Denver. Wills traveled from Colorado to participate in the march, and to embed herself in the lessons she teaches as a professor.
In the long-term, the battle was the start of labor laws, showed a need for unionization in West Virginia, and raised awareness about the dangerous conditions coal miners faced.
Organizers and participants say the battle is not over for fair labor laws in this country. “We’re fighting every day now because of the shift away from coal and we’re saying to Congress and we have been saying to Congress for some time, you can’t just do away without good-paying union jobs without someplace for people to go,” said Cecil Roberts, the UMWA President.
Fighting for the protection their ancestors also fought for 100 years ago. “I’m walking in the footsteps of my grandfather Roberts, my Grandfather Harlow, and my great Uncle Blizzard who led this March so to me it’s a personal thing too,” added Roberts.
The United Mine Workers of America started in Marmet Friday morning and traveled 15 miles on foot to Racine, and they will travel 15 miles Saturday and Sunday as well, ending the march in Sharples, West Virginia.
The United Mine Workers of America is hailing a decision by the National Labor Relations Board against Warrior Met Coal.
The NLRB notified Warrior Met on Aug. 13 that it is prepared to issue a complaint if the company does not enter into a settlement and provide the union with information in ongoing contract negotiations.
The UMWA has filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against the company since a strike began April 1. The NLRB’s action dealt with what the union called bad faith bargaining, with the union saying Warrior Met did not provide information it was obligated to disclose.
The decision is the latest action in an ongoing strike that began back on April 1 when about 1,100 miners walked off the job over a new contract.
“This is welcome news, but is no great surprise,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said in a statement. “We have seen this company act in ways contrary to American labor law from the outset of this strike.”
Warrior Met Coal emerged from the bankruptcy proceedings of the former Walter Energy, which declared bankruptcy in 2016. Union members say they made numerous concessions in pay, benefits, holidays, overtime and in other areas at that time to keep the company going and get it out of bankruptcy – concessions they say total more than $1.1 billion.
The union overwhelmingly rejected a proposed contract back in April, saying it did nothing to restore the lost pay and benefits. Since then, the union has staged large scale demonstrations in Tuscaloosa County and sent members to demonstrations in Manhattan to call attention to the strike. Earlier this month, Warrior Met announced that the ongoing strike cost the company $7 million in the second quarter of the year.
Warrior Met produces coal used in steel production in Asia, Europe and South America. Requests for comment from Warrior Met were not immediately returned.
“We will see where we go from here,” Roberts said. “We continue to call on the company to get serious about reaching an agreement that is fair and reasonable for both sides. As we wait, we continue our unfair labor practice strike.”
History repeated itself as hundreds of miners spilled out of buses in June and July to leaflet the Manhattan offices of asset manager BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining company Warrior Met Coal.
Some had traveled from the pine woods of Brookwood, Alabama, where 1,100 coal miners have been on strike against Warrior Met since April 1. Others came in solidarity from the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania and the hollows of West Virginia and Ohio.
Among them was 90-year-old retired Ohio miner Jay Kolenc, in a wheelchair at the picket line — retracing his own steps from five decades ago. It was 1974 when Kentucky miners and their supporters came to fight Wall Street in the strike behind the film Harlan County USA.
“Coal miners have always had to fight for everything they’ve ever had,” Kolenc said. “Since 1890, when we first started, nobody’s ever handed us anything. So we’re not about to lay our tools down now.”
The longest that miners ever went on strike was for 10 months in 1989 against the Pittston Coal Company in West Virginia, defending hard-won health care benefits and pension rights. Some 3,000 miners got arrested in that strike. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who passed away on August 5, was president of the Mine Workers (UMWA) at the time.
In Manhattan, mixed in the sea of camouflage T-shirts outside BlackRock was a smattering of red and blue shirts — retail, grocery, stage, and telecom workers. The miners and supporters circled the inner perimeter of four police barricades, chanting “Warrior Met Coal ain’t got no soul!” and whooping it up.
Postal and sanitation trucks honked in solidarity. “You’re in New York City,” Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts told the crowd. “When somebody comes by driving a trash truck, they’re in a union. Chances are, somebody comes along with a broom in their hand, they’re in a union.”
“Where’s Our Money?”
The strikers are fighting to reverse concessions that were foisted on them in 2016 when newly formed Warrior Met Coal bought two mines and one preparation plant from Jim Walter Resources during bankruptcy proceedings. BlackRock became one of the three majority shareholders in the new company.
Since then, the union calculates that workers have forked over $1.1 billion in pay, overtime, vacation, safety, health care, and other benefits to help the company regain solvency. Today 26 hedge funds have investments in Warrior Met stock, signaling their confidence in its profitability.
“We want everything back. And then some. That’s the message we’re trying to send to BlackRock,” said Michael Wright, a miner for 16 years.
Warrior Met produces coal used in steel production in Asia, Europe, and South America. In response to the strike it has scaled back production, left one mine idle, and stopped stock buybacks, Bloomberg reported. The strike has cost the company $17.9 million, according to its second-quarter earnings report.
Shortly after the miners walked out, management returned to the table with an offer that would have recouped just $1.50 of the $6 cut in wages from the 2016 contract and left intact punitive disciplinary policies and benefits concessions. The miners voted it down, 1,006 to 45.
“We come back to the table and they’re offering less what we were making originally,” said Brian Seabolt, another 16-year coal miner.
“We go underground to sacrifice our lives for our families,” said Wright. “They’re making billions of dollars. Where’s our money?”
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has burnished his public image as a benevolent capitalist concerned about climate change and social justice. The strikers hope to gain leverage by tarnishing that image.
BlackRock has a shield that makes that harder: two-thirds of its investments are in index funds, passively managed portfolios that bundle together investments regardless of social impact.
But it’s even harder to hit it hard enough in the pocketbook to have an impact: Warrior Met makes up just a tiny fraction of BlackRock’s portfolio. The asset manager had a record $9.5 trillion in assets under management at the end of June.
Nonetheless, to hurt profits, strikers were blocking scabs from entering the mines — until the company obtained an injunction to stop them. Despite that, the mines produced only 1.2 million tons of coal during the second quarter — a million less than the same period last year.
A Grueling Job
Another striker on the Manhattan picket line was Tammy Owens, a former steelworker. She switched to mining because it had better pay and benefits, though the job was grueling. “And then a few years later, I ended up with worse benefits than what I had at the steel plant,” she said.
Since the strike, she has picked up a side job to provide for her family. The union has also distributed $4.3 million to miners to cover health care.
Besides pay and benefits, the 2016 concessions included a punitive attendance policy that one miner’s wife described to journalist Kim Kelly as “four strikes and you’re out.”
“If I had a heart attack, they can give me a strike,” Owens said. “They don’t accept a doctor’s excuse. Even if I have something contagious that I can give to other people — pneumonia, the flu, strep throat, you name it — you have to come to work.”
Excessive overtime is another flashpoint (shades of Frito-Lay and Amazon). Miners have been forced into 12-hour shifts stretching into weekends — without the double pay on Saturday and triple pay on Sunday that they used to get.
And health care looms large. Costs shot up; the company now covers only 80 percent of the premium. “We need 100 percent,” said miner Dedrick Gardner. “Considering the work conditions in a coal mine, health care is vital. You’re dealing with silicosis, black lung, diesel, smoke.”
Black lung is caused by breathing in coal dust. The dust silts up the lungs, scarring and destroying them.
“Health insurance went from $12 for seeing any doctor in the world to $1,500 family deductible and co-pays up to $250,” said Local 2245 President Brian Michael Kelly.
Toxic and Dangerous
Safety is a perennial concern. “I work 2,200 feet underground in one of the most gaseous mines in the world,” Owens said. “If something goes wrong, it could blow the top off the ground.”
In 2001, 13 workers died at one of the mines now owned by Warrior Met after a slab of rock fell and set off a methane gas explosion, burning and pounding miners to death with chunks of rock.
Despite that tragedy, the 2016 contract eroded safety standards. And the situation is presumably even worse for the scabs inside now.
“Nonunion mines are continuously known for cutting corners and creating unsafe working environments in order to increase production,” said union spokesperson Erin E. Bates via email. “Warrior Met Coal is currently mining and processing coal with unskilled workers. We are concerned it is only a matter of time until someone gets seriously hurt.”
Without the union watchdog, apparently the company’s environmental practices slipped too. Shortly after the strike began, wastewater from one of the mines suddenly turned local creeks black with pollution.
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