Alabama’s Coal Miners Are Striking for Their Lives
Over a thousand miners at Warrior Met Coal have been on strike now
for over two months, and the conflict is only heating up.
ByKim Kelly <https://www.thenation.com/authors/kim-kelly/>Twitter
<https://twitter.com/GrimKim>
The Nation, June 11, 2021
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(Kim Kelly)
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Alabama is a beautiful place filled with contradictions and
complexities, but there are a few things that my time there has taught
me that this state holds sacred. God, football, and barbecue top the
list, of course (Roll Tide!), but for a group of coal miners in
Tuscaloosa County, there’s another hallowed institution perched up on
that pedestal: the union.
While Alabama itself may be a “right to work” state with a blood-red
Republican legislature, its labor bona fides run just as deep, and its
people are no strangers to organizing for the common good. The labor
movement in Alabama is tough, determined and nimble; it has to be, given
what it’s so frequently come up against from anti-worker politicians and
powerful corporations. This past year, a high-profile union drive at an
Amazon warehouse in nearby Bessemer, Ala., captivated the nation—but
really, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, given the area’s grounding
in the civil rights movement and its unionized industrial past. A few
days after the sad results of the Amazon election were announced (and
national attention turned back away from the Deep South), a small
coal-mining community in the rural region between Birmingham and
Tuscaloosa came together to launch one of the largest strike actions in
Alabama’s recent history.
On April 1, 2021, 1,100 miners at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood pulled
off their hard hats, hung up their reflective gear, and walked off the
job. Their union, the United Mine Workers of America, had called a
strike—the first one to hit the state’s coal mining industry in four
decades—and the workers knew what was coming. There’s a deep
generational memory in these mines. While many of this latest crop of
workers hadn’t been around (or even alive) the last time coal miners in
the area went on strike, their fathers, grandfathers, and
great-grandfathers surely were, and passed down that knowledge to their
kin. The union has been a part of life in those mines since1890
<http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/Article/h-2948>, when John L. Conley
founded the UMWA’s District 20 in Alabama, which remains one of the most
racially integrated UMWA chapters in the country, where about 20 percent
of workers are Black. Crossing a picket line is a mortal sin here, an
unthinkable betrayal that is enough to earn a permanent black mark on
one’s reputation and standing in the community.
Striking miners
<https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/3.jpg>
Striking miners.(Kim Kelly)
A hundred and thirty-one years later, the current members of District 20
are out on an unfair labor practices strike against Warrior Met,citing
<https://umwa.org/news-media/press/umwa-issues-strike-notice-at-alabamas-warrior-met-coal/>the
company’s conduct during negotiations, and have been for over two
months. It wasn’t initially expected to last this long. About a week
into the strike, the company and UMWA leadership came to a tentative
agreement, but after it was presented to the membership, they voted
overwhelmingly to reject the offer and stay out on the picket line.
As multiple striking miners told me, the company’s offer didn’t improve
enough on the current contract, which was implemented five years ago
when Warrior Met bought the mines. The previous owners, Jim Walter
Resources, had gone bankrupt, which resulted in mass layoffs; when
Warrior Met bought the company, executives promised to rehire the bulk
of the workforce on the condition that they accepta subpar contract
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzkzKMP7hs8>—and calling it merely
subpar is generous. Pay was slashed by $6 per hour to an average of $22;
workers lost many of their paid holidays, some of their time off, and
their ability to earn overtime pay; and their health insurance costs
went way up while safety standards and working conditions went way down.
A severe policy for absences from work that eliminated any flexibility
whatsoever in case of unexpected sickness or emergencies was also
enacted; as one miner’s wife described it to me, it’s a “four strikes
and you’re out” system, which felt especially onerous considering the
heavy toll that the work takes on the workers’ bodies, and the fact that
the majority of them are parents.
Nonetheless, the miners signed on the dotted line back in2016
<https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/coal/041221-us-met-coal-miner-warrior-strike-continues-as-union-rejects-deal>with
the understanding that, five years later, when the company was on its
feet, they’d be rewarded with a better deal. While Warrior Met’s
finances improved considerably during that span and remain robust even
in spite of the pandemic’s impact, that time is up—and the company has
shown zero interest in holding up its end of the bargain or in
transferring any of that wealth to the workers who created it. On top of
that, with a spate of recent attacks being attributed to company
employees, Warrior Met has also shown that it has no qualms about
playing dirty—even when that places its own workers’ lives at risk.
The Warrior Met picket line is really a grouping of 12 small outposts,
stationed in front of each entrance to the sprawling mines. Many of the
mine entrances are isolated, set down wooded country roads with no
cell-phone service; there are never more than a few people out there,
because the company finagled a court injunction limiting the number of
people allowed on the line at a time. It also called in both state and
local police as well as its own private, armed security to surveil the
pickets and enforce the cap, which began as a paltry six but was bumped
up to 10 following an appeal. Both the company and the union fly drones
overhead to keep an eye on the lines, and police are a constant presence
at the larger entrances.
Store sign <https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2.jpg>
Support for the strike is high in the community.(Kim Kelly)
It’s a recipe for tension, especially when the scabs and supervisors
pass in and out and the community is small enough for folks to know
exactly who has sold them out by crossing that line. At the end of May,
after leading 300 miners on a march, 11 UMWA leaders were arrested
forblocking the entrance <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs6BmN0mJqM>to
Mine #7 and refusing to leave; they were taken to the Tuscaloosa County
Jail and kept overnight. The company’s silence at the bargaining table
has grown deafening, and those escalating tensions have recently reached
a fever pitch, as the UMWA alleges that company employees have begun
waging blatant acts of violence against the striking miners.
Thanks to the watchful eye of the UMWA’s drone, footage of a brazen
vehicular attack surfaced earlier this week. It wasthe third such attack
<https://umwa.org/news-media/press/company-inspired-violence-on-warrior-met-picket-lines-increasing/>on
the strikers in as many days, and in each instance, UMWA leaders allege
that a truck was driven directly into the picket line. I was able to
review footage of the incidents, which shows exactly that—a black pickup
truck turning off the highway and driving straight for a group of
striking workers; a man is seen connecting with the hood of the truck,
and stumbling backward from the impact. Multiple police reports have
been filed and at least one arrest has been made, but strikers say that
local police have shown little interest in pursuing the perpetrators. In
one case, police are actually looking to arrest one of the/victims/, on
the allegation that they used pepper spray on the driver in
self-defense. Meanwhile, several strikers have been sent to the hospital
with injuries. As UMWA International President Cecil Roberts commented,
“Warrior Met seems to believe that it is all right to strike people with
cars as they engage in legal, protected activity. This is a dangerous
course of action that can swiftly lead to events spiraling out of control.”
Amy Pilkington’s husband, Greg, a six-year veteran of the mines and a
coal miner’s son, is one of the miners who was injured in the attacks.
She says that as a truck barreled through a picket line earlier this
week, the truck hit a heavy burn barrel, throwing it against Greg’s leg.
Doctors say that the impact left him with a torn meniscus. Back in 2016,
he was badly injured in an accident underground, and sued Warrior Met;
his wife was unsure if he had been specifically targeted as a result,
but all the same saw it as part of a dangerous pattern. “They’re all
right now really being targeted,” she explained.
“But I’m not going to give up, because that’s what they want,”
Pilkington relayed from Greg, who was sitting next to her as we spoke on
the phone. “That’s part of their agenda, to scare us off or physically
and mentally make us to where we don’t want to fight anymore. [And] I
grew up in the union. I know my dad and them picketed back in the ’80s,
and it was a whole lot worse than what is going on now. I’m not going
to, but if I was to give up this spot, my dad would probably come back
to haunt me.”
Protest sign <https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/1.jpg>
(Kim Kelly)
The strike continues, even as the miners are now faced with the
additional worry of company violence on top of the day-to-day struggle
of keeping their kids fed and a roof over their heads. Unlike many
unions, the UMWA does have an active strike fund, so members are able to
draw biweekly $650 strike checks as long as they spend 16 hours on the
picket line per week. But those checks only go so far, so the UMWA
Auxiliary, which is run by miners’ spouses, family members, and
retirees, has also organized a formidable strike pantry operation that
takes in donations to provide groceries for over 200 families per week.
It’s truly a community effort, in an area where entire generations of
families are tied to the mines by blood and coal dust.
While the metallurgical coal produced at Warrior Met will continue to be
in high demand in rapidly industrializing nations in Europe and Asia,
the US coal industry as a whole is already in the midst of a sharp
decline. Securing a strong union contract is one way that these workers
can protect their livelihoods, and ensure that they’re not left behind
as the country fitfully transitions to a post-coal future. Coal mining
is inarguably a dirty, deeply environmentally unfriendly job, but for
now, someone’s got to do it, and they deserve to be compensated fairly
for their labors.
It has been a hard slog, and will undoubtedly get even harder, but the
miners are determined to win. The Pilingtons and their brothers and
sisters in UMWA District 20 aren’t backing down, come hell, high water,
or (God forbid) another boss’s F-150. As they’ve made clear, Warrior Met
can’t scare them; they’restickin’ to the union
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1g4ddaXRs0>.
“In this day and time you have to have a union to support you,”
Pilkington, who is herself a member of the Alabama Education
Association, explained. “Companies are so greedy that they’re going to
take care of their selves and they don’t give a flying fart about their
employees, as long as they’re getting their money. That’s all they care
about. And it’s not right to the worker. We deserve just as much as
these people that are sitting in offices.”
Kim Kelly <https://www.thenation.com/authors/kim-kelly/>TWITTER
<https://twitter.com/GrimKim>Kim Kelly is a writer, organizer, and labor
activist based in Philadelphia.
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