By Gordon Simmons
Beginning in the late 1800's, local political elites, in combination with financial speculators, effected the wholesale acquisition of mineral rights throughout the Appalachian region. The resulting coal industry was characterized by absentee ownership, as well as a cyclical demand that persists to this day.
Early coal production was labor-intensive, and exhausted the available labor market of the local population that was pressed into wage labor, many for the first time. African American migrants from the agrarian South and European immigrants were brought in to supply the growing need for workers.
From its inception, the United Mine Workers union rejected the racial and nativist approaches that had been commonplace in the craft oriented AFL. And, given the economic, political, and social domination that coal companies exercised in the Appalachian region, the UMW became the principal vehicle by which that domination was challenged. The struggle for unionization in West Virginia was bitter, protracted, and violent, and culminated in the defeat of organized workers at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.
When the UMW did return in force to the southern coalfields, it was in the wake of the New Deal, and the union was no longer the expression of workers' autonomy it had once been. Now the union was an organization firmly under the autocratic regime of John L. Lewis. Lewis set about to broker the terms and conditions for the mechanization of coal production. At his death, control of the union was passed to Tony Boyle, who became ever more flagrant in corruption and sweetheart deals.
In the 1970's, rank and file insurgency, fueled by outrage over the murder of activists, safety issues, and Black Lung, and coalescing around Miners for Democracy, overthrew the Boyle regime. The coal industry responded by renewing its efforts against the UMW. Today, nearly 90% of domestic coal production is nonunion.
Events and conditions leading up to and following Sago prove that things have remained the same in some important respects. The only interest of the coal industry is in maintaining control over production and the resultant profits. The state and federal governments remain political vehicles of coal interests. The only reliable source for coal miners' health and safety are the workers themselves, and their interests can only be realized by their seizure of control of the productive process. And they remain powerless to wrest that control from the owners with anything short of their collective self-organization.