Without this altered focus of union policy, it is doubtful that there would be any coal industry left today, or any jobs for coal miners. He put all the energy, ingenuity, and even ruthlessness he had formerly applied to conducting epic strikes for higher wages and more generous welfare benefits into the perfection of new instruments for speeding the mechanization of the mines, assuring continuity of supply for the electric utilities and other big burners of coal, and expanding markets for coal in its war of survival against the competitive onsurge of oil and natural gas.
The Lewis approach was precisely the reverse of this foot-dragging technique. This was not the depressingly familiar story of a union fighting a rear-guard action against progress by insisting on the retention of men long after all need for their services had evaporated, or by otherwise frustrating employer efforts to achieve increased productivity. Lewis did all the things most of us applaud as enlightened, forward-looking, statesmanlike, socially minded - pick your own adjective to connote union cooperativeness in fostering industrial efficiency and cutting costs to the consumer. The miners under the leadership of John L. The despair that marches across the gray, gutted Kentucky hills, leaving its footprints in blood, economic privation, and the threat of civil war, is an extreme expression of the troubles that afflict the UMWA troubles that raise ominous questions for other basic labor organizations and for society in a period when technological innovation is smashing established industrial patterns with such speed that Secretary of Labor Wirtz suggests history ought to be arrested for reckless driving. Today, in valleys rendered even more somber by the decline of the coal industry, many of these same miners have taken up guns and dynamite again, but this time it is to fight off the union they once fought to build.
Thirty years ago this defiant war cry rang through the sere valleys of eastern Kentucky as coal diggers and their wives and children used guns, clubs, stones, and dynamite to defend the United Mine Workers of America against the coal operators and their allies, the company-owned upholders of the law. My daddy was a miner And I’m a miner’s son, And I’ll stick with the union Till ev’ry battle’s won.
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