The following article by Mark Pattison for the Catholic Labor Network shows how some workers used the traditions they are familiar with in their fight for social justice. Such struggles have so much to say to us: workers have real material needs, they can be creative and united in fights to win justice and equity, God has a preference and a special relationship with the poor and the oppressed, and thisis salvific work that gives us a taste of God's Kingdom.
Thousands of workers at two dozen hotels in the Los Angeles area won contracts by the end of 2023 as UNITE HERE Local 11 has waged a campaign since April to win improved pay and benefits for union members – but thousands more are still waiting for an agreement.
Eréndira Salcedo, a housekeeper at the Hilton Pasadena and a UNITE HERE shop steward, is one of those workers. She’s one of 15,000 hotel workers represented by the local.
“The salary has been a main issue because we are not paid enough to live,” Salcedo, a native of Michoacan state in Mexico, said through an interpreter. “What we’ve also been fighting for is health insurance, a pension fund when we retire, and opportunities for growth.”
To prepare for a strike, UNITE HERE members at the Hilton Pasadena walked out four different times, for shorter durations. They also brought attention to their situation to the larger community by giving a new twist to “las posadas,” a nine-day devotion popular for centuries among Latin Americans that re-enacts Joseph and Mary’s quest to find an inn where the Christ Child could be born.
The hotel workers didn’t need nine evenings to make their point. Instead of selecting houses to play the role of inns, “we made different stations. The Hilton Pasadena was the first place, the Hyatt Place Pasadena and then at City Hall,” Salcedo said. She served as a reader at the Hilton.
“We were working on Colorado Avenue. It’s the main thoroughfare in Pasadena where we were doing the procession,” she added.
“It was an experience like no other. We thought it was relevant. We were looking for peace in our homes, and it was an experience that brought us and our coworkers together.”
Community support is tangible. “People come out, sometimes they bring us water, they bring us burritos. We appreciate people from outside the union who have shown their support,” Salcedo said.
While UNITE HERE urges would-be hotel guests to cancel their reservations if they find that their hotel has been struck – some hotels are using an app to recruit scabs – hotel chains are actually operating fewer of the hotels that bear their name, and make their money licensing their brand name. The Hilton Pasadena, for instance, is operated by a company called Aimbridge Hospitality.
Salcedo believes the workers’ actions will ultimately convince Aimbridge to come to terms. “Yes, of course. Claro que si. I have total faith that they’re getting close,” she said. “I hope this will push the company to finally sign a contract.
Workers at the Hilton Pasadena went on strike for the fifth time on New Year’s Eve, just in time to throw the hotel into chaos on the eve of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day, one of college football’s premier events. Like the previous four walkouts, it’s a short-term strike, but nobody was saying how long they intended to stay out.
“A lot of the guests, once they go back in,” Salcedo said, “have been very supportive. I believe that we’re fighting for our rights, and that we’re entitled to those rights.”
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) was founded in Columbus, Ohio on January 25, 1890. The union was founded by people who came from different coalfields and from different traditions of mine worker unionism. Many attempts had ben made to form local, regional, and national unions of mine workers, and there had been notable successes and failures in organizing the coal miners. The methods of mining coal and the structures of the anthracite and bituminous coal industries were changing as coal was helping to drive the expansion of modern capitalist industry. Competition between mining districts and between the coal operators and changes in the methods of extracting coal tended to drive wages down and makes mining ever more dangerous.
The UMWA sought to achieve industrial stability in coal mining from the union's earliest days. In the best light, this meant restricting competition between the operators and winning legislation that restricted or outlawed child labor, defined what a legal ton of coal was, required safe mining practices and workplace safety, insured mine workers' safety and health, and provided for mine workers after they were too old or infirmed to work. In the early days the union and the coal operators sought to reach agreement on coal prices together and to use their relative power to control coal markets together. But the operators were never good partners to the union, and competition from non-union and low-cost mining districts and industrial monopolization worked against union-operator cooperation. Industrial chaos was always just a half-step away. Under these conditions, then, the union and the operators came to represent different and opposing interests.
In the worst light, local and district unions competed with one another and the union's leadership played union locals and districts against one another. The leadership sometimes sought to partner with certain operators and politicians in ways that were at least unethical and that did not always serve the worker's long-term interests. Corrupt union officials have done much damage to the union's cause and reputation. The union was sometimes fighting for industrial stability on its own. Mine workers often looked first at their mine, then at their company or region, and then, perhaps, at the national picture when it came to union affairs and deciding union policies and voting on union contracts. Changes in mining technology worked against the mine workers maintaining employment and solidarity and keeping control of their work, and resentments have grown from this. The noble attempts by the union to win industry-wide contracts and to create a working pension system and to provide for healthcare have depended on extending union organizing, stable employment, payments made by union-represented coal operators, industrial stability, fair courts, and cooperation and support from state and federal officials. Only at rare moment in our history have most of these factors been in place at the same moment.
It is a miracle and a blessing that the UMWA still exists. The coal operators and their allies have sought to divide the mine workers and have used their economic and political power to isolate the workers and break the union. They have brought extraordinary pressure to bear against the union and have used violence when that suited their needs. They have influenced the public schools and other public institutions in many areas to be "pro-coal," which has come to mean pro-company, and the true history of mine workers' struggles has to be constantly rescued from their hands.
The union remains the only reasonable and available institution to represent mine workers' interests. There are about 67,000 coal mine workers in the United States and Canada, and the UMWA may represent something just over 20 percent of those workers. According to the union's website, the UMWA now represents "coal miners, manufacturing workers, clean coal technicians, health care workers, corrections officers and public employees throughout the United States and Canada." Not too many years ago the union had the slogan that "God, guns and guts built the UMWA" and I believe that that has been true. The UMWA has set a high bar for other unions and has used its power to support other unions. The idea that strikers have to "last one day longer" and our modern concepts of industrial unionism come from the UMWA to a great extent. Today the union depends more on God and guts and its ability to make its case to workers and its power to win good contracts.
We need a new era of union organizing to boost the union's numbers and influence and power so that mine workers do better and so that their communities survive. Good living wages and retirement benefits, guaranteed by a union contract, circulate through mining communities quickly and raise everyone's standards of living. A progressive wage floor, strong health and safety provisions with active enforcement, and protected pension plans in coal mining benefit all workers and our communities no matter what jobs we have or where we live.
The pictures and music below come from a variety of sources and are posted here to show readers something of mine workers and mining communities. I am including some of my own narratives and commentary by others. Not all of the workers and mines here are union-represented. My point is to create a context for understanding where the UMWA comes from and why the union is needed now.
Built in 1921 for the African American community of Tams, West Virginia. The New Salem Baptist Church is one of the last remaining structures in Tams. At one time the church boasted a congregation of around 350, but those numbers have dwindled to about a dozen since the mine closed in 1955. The last residents of the town of Tams vacated in the 1980s and the remaining structures were destroyed or moved. Photograph and text by David Dunlap, courtesy of Broken Doors Photography and Art Collective
A snapshot of War, West Virginia.
Incorporated in 1920, War was previously known as Miner's City. At its height War had almost 4,000 residents, a far cry from the approximately 690 as of the 2020 census. Photo and text by David Dunlap, courtesy of Broken Doors Photography and Art Collective
Blue Diamond Mines--The Johnson Mountain Boys
1973
An anthracite miner and his wife
A coal mining community and family in Utah
Women gathering coal in the Pennsylvania anthracite region.
Photograph by Kristen Kennedy of Virginia Lee Photography. She is one
of my favorite modern photographers and her work has appeared on this blog many times.
The Monongah Mine Disaster of December 6, 1907 took the lives of at least 362 mine
workers, many of them immigrants. It was the worst disaster in coal mining history in
the United States.
"The coal you mine is not Slavic coal. It's not Irish coal. It's not Polish coal. It's not
Italian coal. It's coal."---John Mitchell, President of the UMWA 1898-1908
Around the time that Arnold Miller was becoming nationally known I decided that I would
go to work in the mines as some of my great uncles and others in my extended family had done. I was close to dropping out of school, and working in the mines was all that I could see myself doing. My father, who knew the miner's life, and I had quite an argument about it. The argument ended with me saying arrogantly "I'm going to work in the mines!" and my father saying, "Just stay where you are. I'm going to go find a heavy object and kill you and save the company the trouble." I waited until after my father passed on to get my mining papers.
On April 20, 1914 Colorado National Guard troops opened fire on the Ludlow tent colony in Ludlow, Colorado. Striking mine workers and their families were living in the tent colony during one of the most dramatic and heart-wrenching strikes in U.S. history. At least 19 people, including 12 children and 2 women who were associated with the strikers and the union, died that day at Ludlow. This is a photograph of the Ludlow Massacre memorial.
Nimrod Workman - Forty-Two Years (1976)
Afterword
The "Blue Diamond Mines" song may seem like an odd choice to open this post with, but I believe that it captures a feeling of a place and time and allows me to say something about mine workers' cultures. There are plenty of complaints made by mine workers about the union, but in my experience these are complaints about policies or personalities more than anything else, and they're often made from a place of love and hope. Dissent was baked into the union when it was founded in 1890.
I believe that I owe the UMWA for almost everything that I have today, and I feel good about paying my associate dues every year. How and why I'm paying associate dues instead of retired dues is a long story, but life has its twists and turns. I feel especially good when I can support the Black Lung Movement. I'm thankful every day that I have known so many mine workers, had them as friends and family, joined those picket lines, shared time and food and memories with them and their families. They blessed me with their wisdom and humor, blessings that I have not deserved. Regardless of what you think about coal and energy sources and climate change, I'm sure that you believe that mine workers should receive decent pay and benefits and have secure healthcare and retirement systems. I'm sure that you believe in workplace safety and health. I'm certain that you believe that coal communities and former coal communities should not be abandoned and left to fend for themselves.
Please support those Warrior Met strikers. Please support the miner's rights to a fair standard of working and living, to dignity in retirement and to healthcare. Please support the coal mining and former coal mining communities.
I previously posted on what happened to Damar Hamlin and how his injuries and his determination to fully recover have brought forward some positive thinking and actions by people who may not have previously thought that the had much in common with one another. The two different items below are very much in the spirit of my previous post. I don't believe that we have the time or the luxury to put off praying for Mr. Hamlin or working for justice for all workers. The United Steelworkers union would likely not have been able to win the contract that they did with the United States Football League (see below) if there was not a strong spirit stirring among working people and in the labor movement at this point.
USW: Players Ratify First Contract with USFL--January 9, 2023
Contact: Tony Montana – (412) 562-2592 or tmontana@usw.org
PITTSBURGH — The United Steelworkers (USW) today said that union-represented players have voted overwhelmingly to ratify a new agreement with the United States Football League (USFL) covering roughly 350 professional athletes.
USW International President Thomas M. Conway said that football players, like all workers, deserve fair treatment on the job and that the new agreement empowers individuals to speak up.
“Our union is committed to working with players to improve conditions and ensure that they are treated with dignity and respect by the league,” Conway said. “The contract provides a much-needed voice for players, whose jobs and earnings also will be more secure under the ratified agreement.”
USW International Secretary Treasurer John Shinn, who represents the union on the AFL-CIO Sports Council, said the new contract provides important improvements for players from last season.
“Through standing together in unity, players successfully bargained for enhanced economic and medical provisions, including a newly negotiated five-week injured reserve,” Shinn said. “Throughout the league, from training camp and through the season, players will receive better pay and have more security.”
Ryan Cave, an executive with the United Football Players Association, said that collectively bargaining for better treatment and working conditions is an important step toward raising standards of living in the future.
“From experience, we know that working together is the key to getting results,” Cave said. “Players throughout the USFL stood together, and we achieved a strong first contract as a direct result from that solidarity.”
The USW and the USFL announced tentative agreement on a first contract for players on December 15, 2022, about five months after their representation election in June, which was overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
The USW represents 850,000 workers employed in manufacturing, metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply and the energy-producing industries, along with a growing number in tech, public sector and service occupations.
This photograph was taken in 1979, and I believe that it appeared in the Mountain Life & Work magazine. That was a progressive or radical magazine at the time that did much to help build peoples' power and workers' power in Appalachia. Linda King had worked in a garment factory in Virginia for a time but then became a roof bolter's helper or a roof bolter at the Bullitt Mine in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.
Treff Watts tells this story on the Appalachian Americans Facebook page:
An old man was on a corner selling his eggs when a woman stopped and asked how much he was charging.
The old man replied, '$0.25 an egg, Madam.' She said to him, 'I will take 6 eggs for $1.25, or I will leave.' The old man replied, 'Come take them at the price you want. This may be a good beginning because I have not been able to sell even a single egg today’. She took the eggs and walked away feeling she had won.
She got into her fancy car and went to a posh restaurant with her friend. There, she and her friend ordered whatever they liked. They ate a little and left a lot of what they ordered. Then she went to pay the bill. The bill cost her $45.00; she gave $50.00 and asked the restaurant owner to keep the change. This incident might have seemed normal to the owner but very painful to the poor egg seller.
The point is, why do we always show we have power when we buy from needy ones? And why are we generous to those who do not even need our generosity? My father used to buy simple goods from poor people at high prices, even though he did not need them. Sometimes he even used to pay extra for them. I got concerned by this act and asked him why he did so? My father replied, ‘It is a charity wrapped with dignity, my child.’
In my world what happened to Damar Hamlin and the role of the players and the NFL Players Association in taking righteous on-the-spot action to end the game on January 2 has loomed extra-large. There have been many strong commentaries on what happened, and Damar Hamlin's gradual recovery is rightfully being cheered on. One of the better commentaries has come from Garrett Bush, who does the Ultimate Cleveland Sports Show. Mr. Bush speaks with prophetic energy.
It is hard for me to tell what Mr. Bush thinks of the Players Association from these clips. I support the Association and all unions, and I hope that we all have the bandwidth to understand that the players and their union took direct action and closed down the game on January 2 and that that took courage on their part. It also sets a great example for all workers and for all unions. I don't hear fans faulting the platers, so it's a safe gamble that what did has mass support.
I think that Mr. Bush makes a strong point in his interview with Robin Young when he talks about coal miners, football players, and Black Lung (see here and here). We all have this tendency to think of sports figures as living and working in another universe, apart from the rest of the working-class. Mr. Bush goes in another direction and shows how the players need to understand the experiences of blue-collar workers, and especially coal miners, and how the work done by the players increasingly feels like blue-collar work to them. This opens a box full of possibilities. Shared experiences create shared interests and shared interests can create powerful movements for social change.
What Mr. Bush does not say---and he may not be aware of this---is that the numbers of people suffering with Black Lung are increasing and the average age for a mine worker with Black Lung is dropping. Why is this so? The nature of coal mining work and the methods used in mining are changing somewhat. The coal mining industry is doing relatively well, but workers are still near the end of the line when it comes to benefitting from this. The most important factor in this in my mind is the loss of union representation in many mining districts. And that loss of union representation in mining should concern everyone.
Mr. Bush makes strong points about the precedents set by miners getting Black Lung benefits and better safety conditions in the mines over time but his data is a little old and the benefits and safety conditions must improve. But both the NFL Players and coal miners have taken strong actions to protest their working conditions. Work safety conditions and coverage for injured nd disabled workers must improve so all workers---all of us---can do better. He still has a strong argument, and he's going in the right direction, but we all need to lend a hand and build solidarity.
Thomas Bell's novel "Out of This Furnace" (1941) tells the story of several generations
of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania. It is not the common and idealized story of immigrants,
but the flesh-and-blood story of people who worked on the railroads and in the steel mills. A
reader can cry and laugh through the book and share the hopes of the steel workers and their
families in the closing chapters. My family were not Slovak immigrants, and they did not work
in the steel mills, but there is so much there from my grandparents' and parents' generations that
I could easily locate something of my family's story there. The book can be raw in sections, but
it is always honest. I reread passages from the book at certain times of the year every year as an act
of memory and of thanking and honoring those who have passed on. The book is one of the most popular published by University of Pittsburgh Press and is used in some college classes. Attempts
