Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America
Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America

Author: Mark A. Bradley

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0393652548

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A vivid account of “one of the most shocking episodes in organized labor’s blood-soaked history” (Steve Halvonik, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). In the early hours of New Year’s Eve 1969, in the small soft coal mining borough of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, longtime trade union insider Joseph “Jock” Yablonski and his wife and daughter were brutally murdered in their old stone farmhouse. Behind the assassination was the corrupt president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), Tony Boyle, who had long embezzled UMWA funds, silenced intra-union dissent, and served the interests of Big Coal companies—and would do anything to maintain power. The most infamous crimes in the history of American labor unions, the Yablonski murders catalyzed the first successful rank-and-file takeover of a major labor union in modern US history. Blood Runs Coal is an extraordinary portrait of one of the nation’s major unions on the brink of historical change.

The Challenge of Interracial Unionism
The Challenge of Interracial Unionism

Author: Daniel Letwin

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780807846780

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This study explores a tradition of interracial unionism that persisted in the coal fields of Alabama from the dawn of the New South through the turbulent era of World War I. Daniel Letwin focuses on the forces that prompted black and white miners to colla

Digging Our Own Graves
Digging Our Own Graves

Author: Barbara Ellen Smith

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1642593931

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Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be near-eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and the collective power of rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. This destruction of militancy and working class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of a health crisis that is still barely acknowledged by the state and coal industry. Barbara Ellen Smith’s essential study, now with an updated introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the Black Lung Movement in 1968 to the present-day importance of demands for environmental justice through proposals like the Green New Deal. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.

Union Renegades
Union Renegades

Author: Dana M. Caldemeyer

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2021-01-11

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0252052382

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In the late nineteenth century, Midwestern miners often had to decide if joining a union was in their interest. Arguing that these workers were neither pro-union nor anti-union, Dana M. Caldemeyer shows that they acted according to what they believed would benefit them and their families. As corporations moved to control coal markets and unions sought to centralize their organizations to check corporate control, workers were often caught between these institutions and sided with whichever one offered the best advantage in the moment. Workers chased profits while paying union dues, rejected national unions while forming local orders, and broke strikes while claiming to be union members. This pragmatic form of unionism differed from what union leaders expected of rank-and-file members, but for many workers the choice to follow or reject union orders was a path to better pay, stability, and independence in an otherwise unstable age. Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.

From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers
From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers

Author: Harold W. Aurand

Publisher:

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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USA. Historical account of coal mining and trade unionization attempts among coal miners in pennsylvania from 1869 to 1897 - covers labour relations conflicts, wages, working conditions, political aspects, etc. Bibliography pp. 193 to 214 and statistical tables.

"Everybody was Black Down There"

Author: Robert H. Woodrum

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780820328799

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In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.

The Court-Martial of Mother Jones
The Court-Martial of Mother Jones

Author: Edward M. Steel

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0813147883

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In March 1913, labor agitator Mary Harris "Mother" Jones and forty-seven other civilians were tried by a military court on charges of murder and conspiracy to murder—charges stemming from violence that erupted during the long coal miners' strike in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas of Kanawha County, West Virginia. Immediately after the trial, some of the convicted defendants received conditional pardons, but Mother Jones and eleven others remained in custody until early May. This arrest and conviction came in the latter years of Mother Jones's long career as a labor agitator. Eighty-one and feisty as ever, she was able to focus national attention on the miners' cause and on the governor's tactics for handling the dispute. Over the course of seven months, more than two hundred civilians were tried by courts-martial. Only during the Civil War and Reconstruction had the courts been used so extensively against private citizens, and the trial raised a number of civil rights issues. The national outcry over Mother Jones's imprisonment led the United States Senate to appoint a subcommittee to examine mining conditions in West Virginia—the first Senate subcommittee ever appointed to investigate a labor controversy. Public sentiment eventually forced a release of the prisoners and brought about a settlement of the strike. In the face of this overwhelmingly adverse publicity, the governor suppressed publication of the trial transcript, and it was long thought to have been destroyed. Edward M. Steel Jr., an authority on Mother Jones, uncovered the trial proceedings while searching for Jones's manuscripts amid private papers at the West Virginia and Regional Collection. This volume makes available for the first time the transcript of this landmark case in labor and legal history, including an introduction that provides background on the issues involved.