This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
In 1920, Mingo County miners struck. Armed Baldwin-Felts agents evicted them from company houses. Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield backed the strikers. He led a squad of armed miners to face the union-busters at the town's railway platform. The shootout killed seven guards and four townspeople, including the town mayor. Hatfield soon married the mayor's widow.
Near-warfare ensued in Mingo. In 1921, a three-day gunbattle raged, killing perhaps twenty. President Warren Harding declared martial law in West Virginia. Gov. Ephriam Morgan proclaimed that the region was in "a state of war, insurrection and riot." West Virginia's State Police force was created chiefly to curb coalfield violence.
Police Chief Hatfield, ruled innocent in the "Matewan Massacre," was charged with a different shooting at a coal camp in adjoining McDowell County, along with a companion. As the two walked up the steps of the McDowell courthouse at Welch for a hearing, Baldwin-Felts men in the crowd stepped out and shot them both to death.
The Hatfield murder inflamed union miners. They rallied at the Capitol in Charleston and vowed to march southward like an army. UMW leaders roused workers to arm themselves. About 5,000 bandanna-wearing "rednecks" gathered and headed south on Aug. 24, 1921. More joined them along the way, swelling the throng to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000. As the first groups approached Blair Mountain, some strikers hijacked a train and backed it fifteen miles to transport fighters.
Full-scale warfare between defenders atop Blair and strikers below ensued for several days.
After the Battle of Blair Mountain, grand juries returned 1,217 indictments, including 325 for murder and twenty-four for treason. But the charges mostly evaporated. The only treason conviction was against a Walter Allen, who skipped bail and vanished, never to be found.
----
Around America, various other violent conflicts and massacres accompanied the growth of labor unions. The right of workers to seek better conditions slowly won the eight-hour workday, the five-day workweek, a minimum wage, abolition of child labor and many other benefits. Support of unions became a bedrock principle of liberal politics.
"What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails, more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice, more leisure and less greed, more justice and less revenge," said American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers (1850-1924).
President Jimmy Carter said: "Every advance in this half-century -- Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another -- came with the support and leadership of American labor."
Abolitionist Wendell Phillips (1811-1884) said: "The labor movement means just this: It is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth."
In a 1961 essay titled If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) wrote: "Our needs are identical to labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures". That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a two-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."
---
But trends of economics and technology slowly undercut the union movement. As jobs grew more specialized and individualized -- and machines took over many tasks -- the need for blue-collar armies shrank. Unions were squeezed to the sidelines.
In the 1950s, when American manufacturing boomed, about one-third of all workers carried union cards. But steady erosion occurred. Today, only 6.7 percent of private-sector workers are union members. However, white-collar government jobs remain one-third unionized.
Republican legislators work incessantly to destroy unions. Right-to-work laws -- designed to break unions by letting some employees refuse to join locals and also refuse to contribute payments for collective bargaining -- have been passed in half of American states.
The retreat of unions is among a few sectors in which conservatives have scored greater success than progressives.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
