By Samuel Messidor
After 23 months on the picket line, around 1000 striking coal miners are returning to work at the Warrior Met coal mines in Alabama. The United Mine Workers of America proposed to end the strike and asked Warrior Met to take back the workers. Despite the heroic efforts of the workers, they are now being driven back to work having not won any of their demands.
The strike began with the vast majority of Warrior Met coal miners demanding better pay and decent time off after accepting pay cuts of 50% to help the corporation get out of its own bankruptcy and putting up with 12-hour days and 6-day weeks.
The strike was uncommonly long and significant because the miners are workers in the commanding heights of the economy, extracting metallurgical coal for use in steel production. These 1000 workers are among those of our class with their hands on the key levers of society.
The heroic strike effort in which the workers payed in lost wages as well as their own sweat and blood was met with retaliation by the mine operators in the form of scabbing, vehicular assaults against those on the picket line and a smear campaign in the monopoly media. The union reports that no charges were filed against the reactionary strike breakers who used their trucks as weapons against the workers.
Meanwhile, according to miners, 41 Warrior Met workers will not be allowed to return to work under the newly reached deal, effectively blacklisted for vague “wrongdoing” during the strike. Many of these workers are union representatives and have been accused without evidence of trespassing and property destruction.
The working class needs to oppose any attempts at blacklisting workers for strike activity, regardless of acts of alleged property destruction or other activities the company decides are wrongful as an attack on the right to strike for the whole class.
The corporation bribed scabs with salaries upwards of $130,000 to cross the picket lines. The workers these scabs betrayed bragged sarcastically that their strike created the highest paying miners in the country. The police defended the scabs and repressed striking workers for “trespassing” and other petty charges, while the courts banned the workers from exercising their democratic rights to protest after a picket outside a Warrior Met executive’s home.
Union members argue that the union leadership’s response to the company attacks—of moderation, limiting picketing, avoiding confrontation with scabs, and filing police reports—handcuff ed the struggle and reduced the militancy needed to win, for instance compared to the mining site take-overs and blockades set up during the 1989 Pittston strike.
During the 23 months, workers not just picketed but also held solidarity rallies and concerts, raised tens of thousands of dollars of support, organized bus caravans to New York City to protest outside of BlackRock investment firm (a 15% shareholder in Warrior Met) and yet could not break the unified power of the ruling class to achieve their demands.
This is because the battle of these 1000 coal miners and their families was only one front in the wider class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Without the reconstituted Communist Party to unite these dispersed struggles with the struggle for power, these limits will not be overcome.
The bourgeoisie are increasing the rate of exploitation and driving down real wages to claw themselves out of their crisis of profitability caused by overproduction. Ironically, the overproducing of coal in the last few years helped the company maintain profitability throughout the strike.
These sorts of struggles will continue as the crisis deepens, and this organized power of the ruling class needs to be met with the organized power of the working class. This means the class conscious US proletariat reconstituting the worker’s Party, the Communist Party, which alone can direct a central strategy for fighting for our demands and our rights, all the while teaching that the struggle leads inevitably to the seizure of power from the few parasites by the vast majority, the workers.
