A little good news...really

 

(This exploited dog has had enough.)

If, like me, you're looking for good news anywhere you can find it, here's a bit: for the first time in many years, union membership grew in 2025. And yes, this happened in spite of the Trump administration's war on federal workers. Numbers were up by almost half a million (463,000 to be exact). The number of workers covered by a union contract grew from around 16 million to 16.5. Much of that gain is in the public sector, but there were gains in the private one as well.

That's still not enough. We desperately need changes in federal labor laws to make organizing easier and make it harder for employers to retaliate. And we need to roll back state anti-labor legislation, restoring prevailing wages for state and local projects, sending "right-to-work-for-less' laws back to their rightful place in hell, and rolling back legislation that defunds public education.  Such policies are deliberately designed to reduce the bargaining power of workers and prevent organizing.

Still, it's a start. In the meantime, audacity and creativity by worker-organizers can prepare the way.

Roll the union!

 The United Autoworkers strike against the Big Three car companies in late 2023 gained national attention and enthusiasm. That might have just been the beginning. 

Following the successful strike, which linked issues related to class and climate, the UAW turned its attention to organizing the unorganized. Those efforts have recently been crowned with success by the overwhelming vote of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  

The vote was 2,628 in favor of joining the union and 985 against, meaning around 73% supported the drive. Earlier efforts to unionize the facility failed in 2014 and 2019. Next month, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama will also vote on joining the union. 

If this trend continues, this win in the traditionally anti-union South could be as historic as last year’s victory—or the epic organizing drives of the 1930s. 

It’s no secret that for decades corporations have been shifting production to southern states, where the power of unions has traditionally been thwarted by so-called “Right to Work” (RTW) legislation. I call it “Right to Work for Less.” 

RTW laws lower labor standards, undermine the democratic process, weaken unions, and allow free riders to benefit from collective bargaining agreements without providing dues to support the process. And unfortunately, these laws have spread beyond their southern origins. 

Many people may not be aware, however, of the vile and explicitly racist origins and motivations of RTW. 

The person who came up with the name and launched the movement to enact it as law was a Texas businessman and politico named Vance Muse, who lived from 1890 to 1950. An unabashed racist and anti-Semite, he bitterly opposed the labor law reforms of the New Deal, which he referred to as “the Jew Deal.” 

At the time, the labor movement was making huge advances and helping to build working-class power. However, it faced serious obstacles in the South, where a racial caste system divided workers and kept wages low for everyone. 

Vance and his allies in the “Christian American Association,” an organization he founded to promote RTW, were opposed to unions not only for their promotion of better wages and conditions but also for their potential threat to the system of racial segregation. But they soon gained powerful supporters beyond the South and began to win major victories. 

According to Dartmouth historian Marc Dixon: “The Christian American Association out of Houston was the first to champion Right-to-Work as a full-blown political slogan in 1941. The organization stood out in a crowded field for its fiery rhetoric against President Roosevelt and especially labor. But Right-to-Work quickly moved from the fringe to the mainstream. After the war, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers championed the laws with great effect. By the early spring of 1947, fourteen states had adopted Right-to-Work, and the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress later that year, solidified the rights of states to pass and enforce these laws.” 

Muse was able to play on racial biases to promote RTW with considerable success — but not a lot of subtlety. Some of his anti-Black and antisemitic remarks are too inflammatory to include here. Suffice it to say that he believed anti-labor laws and repression were necessary to “keep the color line drawn in our social affairs” and “protect the Southern Negro [sic] from communistic propaganda and influences.” 

When union organizers with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) dreamed of launching “Operation Dixie” in the 1940s to organize southern workers and overcome segregation, Muse’s wealthy backers of millionaires, corporations, business associations, and demagogic politicians were able to largely neutralize the effort. 

It won’t be easy, but perhaps this most recent UAW victory will be a major step toward undoing that shameful legacy of racism and greed. 

I don’t know of anyone who spoke the truth about RTW—and the connection between the struggles for racial and economic justice—more clearly than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work’” he said. “It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.” 

King elaborated that RTW’s “purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.” 

Amen to that. 

(This appeared on the AFSC website. The UAW has won another victory since this came out.)

A time for solidarity

 It’s been over five years since the historic teachers strike in West Virginia. To this day, it’s one of my proudest moments as a West Virginian. Teachers, cooks, bus drivers, students and parents like me filled the state House of Delegates and Senate galleries, the upper and lower rotundas and spilled out into the hallways of the state capitol. The frustration, and also the joy of being together in the fight for working people, were palpable.

Of course, union organizing in West Virginia is nearly as old and storied as our mountains, but the 2018 teachers strike was the first time I got to witness its power first-hand.

Today, even though we’re a few states away from the action, the strike of the United Auto Workers in Michigan is pretty darn exciting. Of course, another reason West Virginians can feel close to the UAW strike is that our own Walter Reuther, a native of Wheeling, was the longest-serving president of the UAW. Reuther, having survived two attempted assassinations, served as UAW president until he died in a plane crash in 1970.

During his time as UAW President, Reuther used (with a lot of success) a strategy called “pattern bargaining” against what were “the big three” auto companies – then General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler. Pattern bargaining was essentially a tactic to leverage the competition amongst the big three in order to advance the wages or improve the working conditions of all autoworkers.

Martin Luther King Jr., on the 25th anniversary of the UAW’s founding, wrote in a letter to Reuther, “Through trials, efforts and your unswerving devotion to humanitarian causes, you have made life more meaningful for millions of working people. Through moments of difficulty and strong obstacles, you have stood firm for what you believe, knowing that in the long run ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ As I have heard you say, the true measure of a man is where he stands in moments of challenge and controversy.”

The UAW is in a great moment of challenge because up until now, the union has never carried out a simultaneous work stoppage at “the big three” auto companies – now General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

As with any historic moment, there is always important context. During the great recession around 2007 through 2009, the auto industry got a bailout of billions of dollars from the federal government, and at the same time autoworkers took massive cuts to their wages and benefits. Pensions all but disappeared. The companies introduced “tiers” which basically meant worse pay for the same work.

Since then, the labor of the autoworkers has generated $250,000,000,000 – yes that many zeroes — a quarter of a trillion dollars for the shareholders of the three companies. CEO pay is up 40% while autoworker wages went up 6%. Try to square that 6% with inflation having gone up 18%.

Now with major federal investments in a shift toward electric vehicles, the companies are forming “joint venture” battery plants, while closing profitable ones in Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. All of these maneuvers are “profit above all” attempts to pay lower wages and weaken worker safety standards at battery plants.

So, there’s a lot on the line, and what happens in Michigan will set the stage for whether electric vehicle manufacturing will be gateway to the middle class for hundreds of thousands of families, or deepen the already gaping chasm between the CEO class and the working class of this country.

The striking autoworkers are asking for fair pay, equal pay for equal work, and ensuring that EV jobs pay a good wage and are safe for workers. What’s not to like about that?

In the same letter King wrote to Reuther, he said something that hits home today. It’s a sentiment I hope we can echo to both the teachers and school employees who went on strike in 2018, and to the autoworkers in Michigan who are on strike today: “One day all of America will be proud of your achievements, and will record your work as one of the glowing epics of our heritage.”

The legacy of the UMWA

 In happier times, my home state of West Virginia was known as a union stronghold. This tradition of labor action and struggle goes back to at least 1877, when railroad workers in Martinsburg set off something close to a nationwide general strike. 

It continued as coal miners faced company and government repression, including brutal private mine guards, military intervention, airstrikes, legal injunctions, arrests, and imprisonments.  

On my watch with AFSC, I’ve tried to support the struggles of unions on picket lines and at the policy level, ranging from metal workers to building trades to retail workers to teachers and school service workers. Sometimes things got a little wild.  

I’ve made it an informal but unbreakable rule that whenever a good labor dustup happens within my range to drop everything and show up. I’m probably at least as loyal to unions as to the church I belong to … but if I had to choose between them, all bets are off. 

For people unfamiliar with the labor movement, there are three main kinds of unions: craft unions representing primarily skilled trades; industrial unions representing workers at all skill levels in a sector; and public employee unions such as those representing education workers or government employees. The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. federation of unions, comprises around 60 unions of different types and industries. 

Where I come from, you’ll hear people talk about this or that union, but when they say the union, there’s one they have in mind: the United Mine Workers of America. Coincidentally or not, AFSC has a long history of supporting this union and the workers and communities it represents. Over a century ago, AFSC began providing food assistance and supporting economic alternatives for unemployed miners and their families. More recently, it has supported UMWA members in strikes, legislative struggles, mine safety, and corporate bankruptcies that threaten retirees and surviving family members. 

People outside Appalachia may think of the UMWA, if at all, as a relic of an earlier age and a dying and dirty industry. In fact, even though its membership has dramatically declined over the last decades, it has arguably had the greatest impact on economic justice of any single organization. To the extent there’s still a middle class in this country, much of that is due to its direct and indirect influence.  

The UMWA was founded in 1890 by the merger of the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 135 and the National Progressive Miners Union. At a time when most unions represented skilled craft workers—mostly white, U.S. born, and male—the new union’s first goal was “to unite in one organization, regardless of creed, color or nationality, all workmen eligible for membership, employed in and around coal mines, coal washers, and coke ovens on the American Continent.” It was thus an early example of an industrial union, one that tried to represent all workers in a sector. 

The union’s progress in West Virginia was slow and sometimes bloody. It was long known that the state was rich in coal and other minerals, but it required the coming of the railroads to make large-scale extraction economically feasible. Outside investors began gobbling up land and mineral rights and displacing mountain families, generally with the support of state politicians.  

Let’s just say the good guys lost that one.  

After wiping out most of the state’s old-growth forests, corporations began building coal camps in isolated mountain communities and instituting a system of total control, including company towns, company stores, company doctors, armed company mine “guards” to enforce obedience up to and including the use of violence, and company-controlled schools and churches. In many cases, workers were paid with company scrip or currency. Those with the temerity to organize or strike faced eviction from company housing, at the very least. 

Companies actively recruited African Americans from the deep South, mostly white locals, and recent European immigrants to the camps. They hoped a “judicious mix” of different ethnicities would prevent union organization. 

They were wrong. 

From Colorado to West Virginia miners struggled, sometimes physically, for the right to organize, with something like guerilla warfare breaking out in my state during the Paint and Cabin Creek areas in 1912-1913. The struggle inspired writer Ralph Chaplin to pen the song “Solidarity Forever,” an international anthem of the working class. More militant struggles followed, including the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest workers’ uprising in American history. So far. 

It wasn’t until the New Deal era that the right of miners to organize was firmly established. For a generation or two… 

And in the 1930s, the UMWA, under the leadership of the theatrical and sometimes confrontational John L. Lewis, launched the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which initiated vast organizing drives in steel, auto, rubber, and other industries. Unafraid to confront the highest levels of authority, he once said “you can’t mine coal with bayonets.” 

During the CIO organizing drive, he proclaimed with characteristic flourish, “Let the workers organize. Let the toilers assemble. Let their crystallized voice proclaim their injustices and demand their privileges. Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.” 

These organizing drives eventually won union recognition along with higher wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions for millions of American men and women. These new industrial unions, such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), would become strong financial and political supporters of the Civil Rights Movement. 

This was not lost on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an ardent supporter of the labor movement. In his words, “During the ’30s, wages were a secondary issue; to have a job at all was the difference between the agony of starvation and a flicker of life. The nation, now so vigorous, reeled and tottered almost to total collapse. The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.  

“Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival, but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the ’30s the wave of union organization crested over our nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.” 

The wave that Dr. King spoke of has unfortunately receded over the last 40 years, with devastating consequences. But it remains an example of what can be done when working people act in solidarity. 

So year-round, but especially on May Day and Labor Day, I celebrate the victories and mourn the defeats of the world’s diverse labor unions. However, one union has pride of place. In more ways than one, it lit the way in many dark places. 

(I wrote this piece for Labor Day on AFSC's website.)

My last word (for a while) on a fallen friend and comrade

 Elaine Purkey, 1949-2020. Vintage early 90s, wearing a tee-shirt expressing solidarity for union Steelworkers locked out of Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation from 1990-1992. Story below.

The labor movement and the people of West Virginia lost a powerful voice (literally) last week with the death of Elaine Purkey from COVID-19. Among many other things, she was a singer/songwriter whose music has reached many around the United States and beyond. And she was my friend.

We met during the UMWA-Pittston coal strike of 1989-90, my first big fight after joining the American Friends Service Committee. The strike wasn’t about wages; it was about protecting health care and benefits for retirees, miners with disabilities and their families.

It was a wild and uncut struggle that rumbled throughout the coalfields beyond the Pittston mines. Two union miners were shot, one fatally. I remember burning buildings, vehicles smashed by nonunion coal trucks, evictions from land company property, private “goon guards,” State Police and federal marshals, arrests — but also music, laughter, humor, mischief and love.

(I’m not necessarily proud of this, but some of us were having the time of our lives.)

Elaine’s husband, Bethel, still among us, was a grassroots union leader. Elaine was just finding her voice writing labor songs. At first, I thought Bethel was running the show, at least as far as Logan County was concerned. He was a natural leader who radiated charisma, looked out for everybody and got things done. I’m not even sure he had an official position at the time. A big man with red hair and a red beard, he struck me as your basic Viking, although to my knowledge he never raided an Irish monastery.

I had my first major conversation with Elaine at the Hardee’s in Chapmanville, where she was working at the time. Strike support from the union helped, but it didn’t make up the difference from working miner’s wages.

I was just learning to play guitar, so wanted to talk music as well as strike. I asked an incredibly stupid question in retrospect: Did she flat pick or finger pick? As if a self-respecting mountain singer would arpeggiate on nylon strings. The immediate result was an impromptu concert in the parking lot. It never took a whole lot of effort to get Elaine to perform.

Nothing was ever the same afterward. We did a lot together over the years, not just labor related, but also things like fighting racially motivated police violence and even doing mountain stories and songs with kids.

Elaine grew up in a large musical family near Harts Creek, in Lincoln County. Her father, Winford Moore, was a railroad worker and musical prodigy who could play any instrument he picked up and never bothered with sheet music. Most of the rest of the family was musical, as well. I still remember a magical summer day long ago that I was absorbed in the embrace of several generations of the family.

When Elaine was a child, Winford would pick her up and put her on a rock so that she could sing to whoever was there. While you could never forget that she was a powerful woman, I always also saw in her the little girl singing on a rock for her daddy.

She was very intuitive, like someone who could solve complex math problems without showing her work. Sometimes I’d pitch her a bare song idea, which she’d weave into gold in short order. I think her best is “One Day More,” which was written in 1992, when 1,700 steelworkers were locked out of their jobs at Ravenswood Aluminum Corp. for nearly two years.

Their average age was over 50 and most had worked at the plant for more than 20 years, yet the company declared them permanently replaced, despite the union’s willingness to continue working under their old contract.

Some things are addictive, and a justified fight is one of the best addictions, as such things go.

A lot of people thought the fight in Ravenswood was hopeless. I asked Elaine to write something to boost morale, suggesting a theme like lasting one day longer than the company, something Bethel always said in the earlier fight, and recommending a minor key. Always a lover of snarky banter, Elaine shot back, “Do you want to tell me the words and melody while you’re at it?”

We met in Logan the next morning and I gave her some info on the situation there. At about 11 p.m., I got the call and heard her sing it for the first time. Even then, I felt sure people would be singing it long after we were gone.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed the first performance at the USWA Local 5668 union hall while doing a documentary for PBS on the lockout (I think you can see the neck of my old 12 string on it, too). I knew music was powerful in the struggle, but never saw anything like that, with people crying, clapping and singing along the first time they heard it. The song became their anthem.

And the good guys actually wound up winning.

That song had legs, even showing up in a songbook of the 2011 Wisconsin protests against union busting. I just heard that a co-worker of mine learned it at a rally for hotel and restaurant workers in California in the 1990s. It was included in the Smithsonian’s collection of labor songs. Who knows where it’s been or where it will show up next?

Over the years, we’d sometimes go a good while without seeing or talking with each other, but the connection was always like a live electrical wire. As the ancient Chinese classic the Tao Te Ching says, “That which is firmly established cannot be uprooted.”

I can’t imagine a world without her in it, one way or another.

Along with her family, she took her religion very seriously and was a devoted member of the Church of Christ. If anybody was ever right with Jesus, I’m sure Elaine would make the team, assuming the latter had a sense of humor and a tolerance for banter.

I think her message to us in these dark days would come straight from that song: Hold out, one day more.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail)

Losing a voice

 

The labor movement and the people of West Virginia lost a powerful voice (literally) yesterday with the death of Elaine Purkey from COVID. Among other things, she was a singer/songwriter whose music has reached many around the US and beyond. And she was my dear friend. 

We met during the Pittston coal strike of 1989-90, my first big fight after joining AFSC. Her husband Bethel was a grassroots union leader and Elaine was just finding her voice writing labor songs. It was wild and uncut class struggle: there were shootings, at least one fatal, burning buildings, vehicles smashed by nonunion coal trucks, evictions from company property, private gun thugs, state police and federal marshals, arrests, and a bit of the wooden shoe and black cat. Also music, laughter, humor, mischief and love. 

(I’m not necessarily proud of this, but some of us were having the time of our lives.)

We did a lot together over the years, not just labor stuff, but also things like fighting racist police brutality and even doing mountain stories and songs with kids. It never took much to get her to whip out her guitar. She was very intuitive, like someone who could solve complex math problems without showing her work. 

Sometimes I’d pitch her a bare song idea, which she’d weave into gold in short order. Her best song is One Day More (here’s the Smithsonian version), which was written in 1992 when 1,700 Steelworkers were locked out of the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation for nearly two years. 

A lot of people thought the fight was hopeless. I asked her to write something to boost morale and she came up with one for the ages in less than 24 hours. The first time I heard it, I knew people would be singing it after we were gone.

The Oscar winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed the first performance at the union hall while doing a documentary for PBS on the lockout (I think you can see the neck of my 12 string on it too). I knew music was powerful in the struggle but never saw anything like that, with people crying, clapping, and singing along the first time they heard it. The song became their anthem and the good guys actually wound up winning. 

The idea behind the song was just to hang on one day longer than the company. It had legs, even showing up in a songbook of the 2011 Wisconsin protests against union busting. If you decide to listen but aren’t used to Appalachian twang, you may want to stand back and play it low. 

I think her message to us in these evil days would come straight from the song: hold out one day more.

Don West: a legend remembered

I think of Don West (1906-1992) as a Primal Ancestor of Appalachian hellraisers. I feel very fortunate to have had the chance to get to know him and to have received his “blessing” during his last days.

I first became aware of West when I haunted a used bookstore in Huntington’s approximation of Skid Row, now long demolished. It was one of those magical places where something unexpected could be found on any visit.

On one trip, I came across a shelf of softbound books and pamphlets by an outfit called Appalachian Movement Press. Some had titles like “Paint Creek Miner” or “Songs of Freedom” and told stories of the mine wars, while others might document absentee corporate ownership.

Also to be found there were works of mountain poetry and essays by West. It didn’t take much browsing to realize this was not John Boy Walton stuff.

West’s poetry was a bit like Langston Hughes, whose writings helped nudge me in my life’s direction. Like the great African American poet with whom he had some politics in common, West wrote for and about people who don’t ordinarily read poetry. He was unashamedly partisan, declaring that “Poetry and other creative efforts should be levers, weapons to be used in the people’s struggle for understanding, human rights, and decency.”

A native of north Georgia, West told the neglected story of the mountaineers’ long tradition of struggle. He had no use for the “Gone With the Wind” school of southern history. Instead, he wrote of long-forgotten anti-slavery Appalachians who took up the fight while William Lloyd Garrison was still a child, of poor whites helping runaway slaves along the underground railroad, of courageous southern Unionists who fought the Civil War in their own backyards.

Long before it became fashionable, West fought the passive hillbilly stereotype by pointing to mountain labor’s traditions of struggle and solidarity. I think he—along with people like filmmaker John Sayles (“Matewan”) and author Denise Giardina (“Storming Heaven’)—helped the region recover from the historical amnesia that censored the history of the mine wars and other labor struggles for generations of West Virginians.

But West was more like a literary character than a man of letters. When it came to his adventures, it was hard to say where to draw the line between biography and mythology.  Like a left-wing Jay Gatsby, he seemed to have continually and consciously created his own legend. And he did it well.

It went something like this: in high school, he got in trouble for protesting the racist film “Birth of a Nation.” In college, expelled and reinstated for leading a student strike. Agitating for a union in “Bloody Harlan” County, Kentucky. Organizing workers in publics works projects in the New Deal era. Fighting for civil rights since the 1920s. Recruiting volunteers to fight fascism in Spain.

He had known kangaroo courts and jail cells; beatings by company thugs; Ku Klux Klan terrorism; and government inquisitions. But it never seemed to occur to him to give up the battle.

West was a co-founder with Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School in 1932, now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a huge role in the history of the civil rights and southern labor movement.

He soon parted company with Horton but went on to found the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem in the 1960s. (My kids in the mid-1990s used to refer to it as “the Dorklife Center.”) It never rivaled the Highlander, but it did influence a number of Appalachian young people in southern West Virginia. West helped bring some of the political culture of an earlier era to those who were otherwise influenced by that of the 1960s, which in my book wasn’t a bad thing.

I have come to believe that people like Horton and West helped create an Appalachian “lineage” of social action.

I finally got to meet him in 1988, thanks in part to my friend Yvonne Farley, who had a longtime connection with West.  I had gone to a festival there and was interviewing him for the state magazine Goldenseal.  When we were alone, we had a short Zen-like dialogue which was to have a great deal of influence on my later work.

I asked, not too originally, “What is to be done?”

West answered, “Education.”

I said, “Okay.”

I have come to believe that people like Horton and West helped create an Appalachian “lineage” of social action which is based primarily on popular education, understood as dialogue, relationship building and problem posing, that is a bit different from the more issue-based community organizing model of Saul Alinsky.

A similar approach evolved simultaneously in Latin America and elsewhere based on the work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. That shouldn’t be surprising, since many people have compared our region to the so-called Third World. Freire said that “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

I stayed in touch with West and was able to spend more time with him when, in his last act of political theater, he decided to move back to Cabin Creek to end his days. It was the site of a bitter episode of the West Virginia mine wars in the early 20th century that inspired the writing of “Solidarity Forever,” the international anthem of the labor movement.

West wrote about it at the end of what I think was his best poem:

There was a yesterday of hurt and hope
and solidarity
when a virgin Union’s inspiration
stirred mountain men and women
to heroic feats.
Born on Cabin Creek,
“Solidarity Forever”
went on to stir lowly hearts in all parts of the land.
And there may be a tomorrow
On Cabin Creek
a clean tomorrow,
child of hope and hurt and solidarity.
May it be so.

(Note: I wrote this piece, adapted from a memoir in progress, for Doug Imbrogno's newish online multimedia "magazine" WestVirginiaVille. It's worth checking out. The occasion was the airing on WV Public Broadcasting of a new documentary on West titled "What Will You Do for Your Hills? The Legacy of Don West,” which unfortunately I couldn't watch because we don't get public TV on the farm for some reason.)

Let's not "gig" working families

There are lots of ways working people can be deprived of their rights on the job. They can be discriminated against on the basis of race, nationality, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc.

They can be denied pay for overtime, a practice known as wage theft. They can be cheated out of break- and mealtimes. They can be deprived of their rights to associate and organize.

They can be compelled to work under unsafe conditions. They can have promised benefits, such as pensions, taken away.

But maybe the worst way to abuse working people is to deny that they are workers at all.

Unfortunately, that’s just what Senate Bill 528, now making its way through the West Virginia Legislature, does. Titled the “Creating Uniform Worker Classification Act,” the bill comes straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded group that cranks out model state legislation that benefits big donors.

SB 528 allows businesses to reclassify workers as “independent contractors.” And that makes all the difference.

While U.S. and West Virginia labor laws are pretty weak compared to other economically advanced nations, state and federal laws do provide some protection for employees, sometimes including legal remedies.

By allowing companies to classify workers as independent contractors, this bill would take those protections away.

For example, an employee injured on the job is generally eligible for workers’ compensation. Independent contractors are not.

When employees lose jobs through no fault of their own, they’re entitled to unemployment insurance. Independent contractors are not.

Employees are protected to a degree by anti-discrimination laws (although West Virginia has yet to enact state anti-discrimination legislation based on sexual orientation). Independent contractors are not.

It’s tough to do these days, but employees have the legal right to organize unions and bargain collectively. Contractors don’t.

In the case of programs like Social Security and Medicare, costs for retirement and post-retirement health care are jointly paid for by the employer and the employee. Independent contractors are totally on their own.

Supporters of such legislation claim this will help facilitate the so-called “gig economy,” (a term that makes me think, perhaps appropriately, of the practice of stabbing or “gigging” frogs with barbed, pitchfork-like spears to harvest their legs for food).

The non-frog version refers to those parts of a workforce based on temporary and often short-term engagements. While there are people, generally those with specialized skills in high demand, who fit this profile, being reclassified as an independent contractor is a losing proposition for most working people.

According to the National Employment Law Center, SB 528, if enacted, would “allow employers in any industry to easily convert virtually any worker into an independent business, simply by presenting the worker with a take-it-or-leave-it contract that may not reflect the actual relationship between the parties.” Examples might include people working in home health care, construction, transportation, retail, etc.

The measure doesn’t just undermine workers’ rights and labor standards. The law center also cites research showing this kind of reclassification actually would result in lost revenue while also putting responsible employers at a disadvantage.

So is it possible to legitimately distinguish between an employee and a real independent contractor? In a word, yes.

Fortunately, there’s such a thing as an “ABC test,” according to which people may be fairly classified as independent contractors if they are outside the control of the hiring entity, the work they perform is outside the hiring entity’s usual business and the contractors are customarily engaged in this kind of work. That’s a sensible approach and one that should be allowed to stand.

West Virginia’s working families are having a hard enough time getting by these days. They certainly don’t need to be “gigged” by this kind of trick.

It’s bad enough when it happens to frogs.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

West Virginia's construction workers deserve better

In 2016, the West Virginia Legislature repealed the state’s prevailing wage law, which set pay standards for workers on public construction projects.

The intent of prevailing wage laws was to prevent these projects from turning into a race to the bottom, with out-of-state contractors profiting at the public expense by underbidding local businesses and importing low wage, low skill workers laboring under unsafe conditions.

The idea for that kind of legislation didn’t come from a bunch of labor radicals. Rather it was the brainchild of two Republican U.S. senators, James J. Davis of Pennsylvania and Robert L. Bacon of Long Island, New York.

In 1927, Bacon was angered to learn that an Alabama contractor won a bid to build a veteran’s hospital in his district, bringing in poorly treated workers to do the job. In his words, they were “herded onto this job, they were housed in shacks, they were paid a very low wage, and ... it seems to me that the federal government should not engage in construction work in any state and undermine the labor conditions and the labor wages paid in that state.”

In his view, setting locally based wage standards for public projects would ensure fairness and allow local and distant contractors to compete for bids on an equal basis.

Davis believed that the government had a responsibility to “comply with the local standards of wages and labor prevailing in the locality where the building construction is to take place.”

Their legislation, known as the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed in congress in 1931 and became the model for state prevailing wage laws, including the one that used to protect West Virginia’s workers and contractors.

Opponents of the legislation, who, as far as I can tell, are also opponents of working people generally, argued that repealing the legislation would save taxpayers money.

For example, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, argued at the time that “without prevailing wage, you could build five schools for the price of three.” He also claimed that the repeal would save the state $200-300 million annually.

If that really happened, the state would have a huge budget surplus. Instead, the governor has ordered $100 million in cuts due to a budget shortfall.

And the School Building Authority reported in 2017 that, while workers’ wages had gone down on school projects since repealing prevailing wage, “the overall cost of school construction does not reflect a reduction of overall construction costs on SBA projects at this time. At this time the SBA is not realizing an overall savings that would allow for the construction of ‘five new schools for the price of three,’ as some have previously claimed.”

What did go down were the inflation-adjusted wages of carpenters, electricians and operating engineers.

I find it particularly disturbing that repealing prevailing wage seems to have reduced the number of younger workers in apprenticeship programs. In 2016, there were over 5,400 active apprentices. By 2018, that number dropped to 4,400.

That’s 1,000 fewer people likely to earn a living wage with the kinds of benefits it takes to raise a family with a degree of economic stability — a real loss to many struggling communities.

Worse still is the decline in worker safety. On-the-job construction injuries increased by 26 percent since repeal, according to a study from Michael Kelsay, economics professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Frank Manzo, of the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. The study was commissioned by the Affiliated Construction Trades and the West Virginia State Building Trades Council.

According to the report, “Costs associated with worksite injuries and an overall decrease in worker productivity have offset any savings from lower labor costs, resulting in public school construction costs that are not statistically different since prevailing wage was repealed, even after adjusting for inflation.”

Then there’s the hit to local businesses. The shift from union to non-union contractors winning construction bids opens the door for a larger share of out-of-state firms “performing work on taxpayer-funded school projects, and taking their earnings back with them to their home states upon project completion.”

Any way you look at it, repealing our prevailing wage law was a bad deal for West Virginians. It’s time for the Legislature to undo the damage.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Punishing success and the politics of revenge

If you want to know what revenge looks like, you don’t have to look much further than the latest version of the “ominous omnibus” education bill passed by the West Virginia Senate. It seems to me that they want to make an example of what can happen to working people when they dare to fight back — especially if they dare to win.

After all, the 2018 strike by teachers and service workers set off a wave of action by school workers across the country and beyond. Crushing the movement here would send another powerful message.

And maybe some people want to make sure kids in West Virginia grow up without ever seeing people stand together to effect positive change.

Along with some harmless provisions, like a raise for teachers and a boost for mental health, the Senate bill includes measures almost universally unpopular among (non-astroturf) West Virginia stakeholders — like charter schools, which are often run as private schools paid for with public money.

A separate bill rolls in the Trojan horse of education savings accounts, another push towards privatization. Both of those were opposed by 88 percent of people at numerous forums around the state.

On top of that, the bill explicitly states that public employees don’t have the right to strike, that striking could be grounds for termination, that days missed due to strikes will not be compensated and that county superintendents will not be allowed to close schools.

This is the third wave in series of attacks on workers and the organizations that represent them, each targeting a different group.

In the first wave, skilled workers in the building trades took a hit when the state’s prevailing wage law was repealed. The repeal promised taxpayer savings that, according to some reports, never materialized, while depressing wages, increasing injuries and reducing the number of people in apprenticeship programs.

In the second wave, other private-sector workers covered by collective bargaining agreements took their hit with the passage of the misnamed “right to work” law, which is more accurately “right to work for less.” This was challenged in court and is likely to go before the West Virginia Supreme Court soon.

That law undermines industrial democracy by requiring unions to represent all workers, including those who receive the benefits of union membership — typically better wages, benefits and working conditions— without paying dues.

Previously, union membership was determined by democratic elections: if most eligible workers voted in favor of union representation, all were covered. Likewise, if a majority wanted to decertify the union, they could vote on that as well. That’s the way elections work. If “right to work for less” is upheld in court, you can expect to see living standards for working families, union and non-union, decline even more.

Now public employees, particularly teachers and school support workers, are the target. They don’t have collective bargaining rights in West Virginia. If they did, they would have other means for resolving disputes beside work stoppages.

Teachers and support workers in West Virginia have only engaged in work stoppages as a last resort. It’s a rare measure, happening only three times in 156 years, and then only when they feel like they’ve been pushed to the wall. And it’s a sure thing that if they didn’t strike during the last two years, they would have been totally ignored.

As for the legal status of such work stoppages, there’s a saying that there are no illegal strikes, only unsuccessful ones. Since laws are generally made by those with wealth and power, actions that challenge their power are often illegal. Until they’re not. The case of Rosa Parks comes to mind, but examples could be multiplied. It’s always been that way.

My favorite response to the proposed legislation came from Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers union, an organization that from bitter experience knows a thing or two about union busting and how to fight it. His statement said in part, “Teachers and school support personnel already do not have the right to strike in West Virginia, but they ignored that and demonstrated the power of solidarity in each of the last two years. Their fight for better education for our kids remains an inspiration to education professionals across the nation, and the UMWA was proud to stand with them.

“Let me make this very clear: If our state’s education workers believe they need to take to the streets once again, we will be there with them. And if someone comes to arrest them, they will have to go through us first.”

If it does come to that, I’d like to think they’d have to go through some of the rest of us, as well.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston WV Gazette-Mail.)

Thoughts on strikes

This could be a tweet. In fact it is, but I think it's worth thinking about these days, especially in West Virginia:

Apropos of nothing, I recently heard someone say "there's no such thing as an illegal strike, just an unsuccessful one." Same goes with other "illegal"events...like the American Revolution #55strong #55United #RedForEd

Born in the USA

Around the world but not here so much (yet), May 1 is celebrated as International Workers' Day. Ironically the roots of this observance began right here in the USA. A major struggle in much of the 19th and 20th century has been to reduce the hours of the working day, which could run as long as 14 hours or more in the early days of the industrial revolution.

A slogan of the movement was "eight hours for work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for what we will."

Trade unionists in Chicago declared a strike for the eight hour day on May 1, 1886. One May 4, as police attempted to disperse a protesting crowd of workers at Haymarket Square, an unknown person threw a bomb which killed several police officers. The remaining police in turn fired at the crowd, killing four.

The bomber was never brought to justice. The only thing most historians agree on is that the eight people arrested and sentenced for the bombing weren't the guilty parties, several of whom weren't even there at the time. Of these, four were eventually executed. They are known as the "Haymarket martyrs."

The struggle to limit the working day didn't end there and was eventually won for many US workers by trade union organization and by the political reforms in the New Deal era and beyond, although some laws exempted protections for some of the most exploited workers, such as farm and domestic laborers.

Like everything else in the history of the struggle of working people for basic human justice, the fight goes on. In fact, as new forms of automation enter the traditional workplace, it may take new forms, such as limiting reducing working hours in order to share the available work.

The fight has always been about more than wages, hours and working conditions, as important as these are. It's also been about the need for culture, rest, leisure, education and dignity.

Lately, this hasn't been going so well, as you may have noticed. But it's not over yet.

(This is a from an earlier May Day post here a couple years ago.)

The Ominous Omnibus

Christmas tree” is a slang term for a piece of legislation that tries to do too much, as in you hang all kinds of things on it. A perfect example of this is the West Virginia Senate’s mammoth omnibus education bill.

Some people I know have already taken to calling it the “ominous bill,” which may be a better fit.

I wish I thought of that.

The proposed legislation could and should be broken up into any number of separate bills, each to be debated on its merits, which in some cases are nonexistent.

To be fair, some provisions are good, such as raising pay for teachers and school support workers and allowing retirees to convert unused sick days into PEIA coverage.

Other provisions, however, would clearly damage public education and move the state further down the road to privatization. These include charter schools, education savings accounts and other means for draining resources from public schools.

Incredibly, the bill actually raises the student/teacher ratio for elementary classes.

Still other provisions seem designed to punish teachers and school workers for their historic victory through a strike last year which improved conditions for thousands of West Virginia families, inspired similar successful efforts in other states and revitalized the movement of working people. These include provisions that make it more difficult for workers to pay dues to the organizations that represent their interests and punish work stoppages even if superintendents cancel schools.

This is what revenge looks like. It’s also a not-too-subtle warning to the peasants on the dangers of revolt.

West Virginia’s children and families deserve better. All of them.

For starters, we need adequate funding for education that includes infrastructure, personnel, equipment, textbooks and materials, including pay raises for teachers and support workers and sustainable funding for PEIA. We don’t need another round of corporate tax cuts that would make it harder for state and local governments to support schools.

When it comes to school reform, we need to say yes to innovation but no to privatization. Obviously, we need new and better ways to deal with trauma, promote STEM learning and encourage entrepreneurship. However, these steps can be taken through existing mechanisms such as community schools and innovation zones.

Gov. Jim Justice hit the nail on the head when he said, “I just believe that today as we strive to provide a better education for everyone, we don’t really need to cherry pick the privileged until we get our public education system in a really good way.”

We need to lower student/teacher ratios, not increase them."

We need a major effort to address mental health issues for students. These are tough times to come of age in West Virginia. We need mandated ratios of mental health professionals and nurses in schools. We also need a statewide task force to identify needs, gaps, best practices and come up with a plan to address the needs. This isn’t a luxury; it’s a matter of basic safety.

Another positive step would be to strengthen Local School Involvement Councils (LSICs), including the creation of a statewide LSIC advisory committee and the representation of students, mental health professionals and disadvantaged parents on local LSICs. We also need a virtual schools advisory council consisting of teachers, facilitators, administrators, parents and students to promote best practices in online education.

To really seal the deal for a better future, we should support an expansion of after school programs, including a transportation component; enhanced early childhood and in-home family education; and expanding debt-free post-secondary education.

Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

The real “school choice” facing West Virginia is one between progress and promise or privatization and punishment.

As the old Appalachian mining song goes, “Which side are you on?”

The best gift of 2018

As 2018 winds to a close, I'm thankful for a lesson it taught me: that unexpected good fortune can come when things seem pretty dark. I'm thinking particularly of the great and victorious WV 2018 Teachers' Strike (technically the teachers' and school support workers' work stoppage, but let's not be  picky).

That historic struggle inspired other successful strikes in several states and gave hope to those who believe in the labor movement and public education. And it just resulted in another victory of sorts, a year of coverage under the Public Employees Insurance Agency without benefit cuts or premium increases. This wasn't a perfect or even a long term solution but it was a clear win.

Charleston Gazette-Mail statehouse reporter Phil Kabler, who has been doing his kind of work for about as long as I've been doing mine, summed it up beautifully:

...What was most remarkable was that this was a grassroots effort. It wasn’t, as critics unsuccessfully tried to portray it, as labor bosses directing their minions. It was teachers fed up with low pay and benefits and a general sense of being unappreciated banding together to let leaders in Charleston know they weren’t going to take it anymore.

Also remarkable was the spirit. Despite the seriousness of the issues at hand, the rallies at the Capitol were joyous affairs, with singing, chanting, dancing, and featuring colorful (and clever) signs. This was a celebration....

Wearing red, teachers in 2018 paid homage to the state’s proud labor heritage, and when the governor and legislative leadership tried to use the strategy of divide and conquer, trying to pit school boards against teachers, then parents against teachers, and then state employees against teachers, the teachers stood united.

Early on, when leadership contended that students would suffer, particularly those needy students who depend on school lunches, teachers and others did the noble thing, rising before dawn each day to pack lunches for their students before heading to Charleston, not only putting their students first, but assuming the moral high ground in the fight.

Most importantly, West Virginia teachers started a movement that spread, so far, to Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, showing that while organized labor may be a shadow of its former self, the ability of working people to fight for their rights may not be lost.

I can still see plenty of hard fights on the horizon in the coming year--including further assaults on public education in the legislature--but these will take place on a completely different landscape.

So thanks, teachers and school workers, for many things, including reminding me that we live in an open universe in which all kinds of wild and unexpected things can occur, some of which may be better than anyone could have expected.

The good guys won one

If you're hungry for some good news, working people got some this week when Missouri voters overwhelmingly defeated so called right to work (really right to work for less) legislation. They didn't just beat it by a few percentage points: they crushed it by a two to one margin. This is the first time the union-busting measure was defeated by a referendum.

Here's wishing that West Virginia will remove this blot of shame from the state code before too long.

From the Goat Rope archives, here are a couple of posts on just how evil "right to work" legislation is and the slimy history of its racist origins.

From the WV teachers' strike to the wave of unrest it helped spark to this victory, it's clear that organized workers are a force to be reckoned with--if and when they choose to be.

Credit where it's due

It's nice to see West Virginia getting some love in the national media for its historic and victorious teachers' strike.

Here's just a sampling of coverage of the spreading ripples of the WV victory:

NY Times: "Thousands of teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky walked off the job Monday morning, shutting down school districts as they protested cuts in pay, benefits and school funding in a movement that has spread rapidly since igniting in West Virginia this year."

Washington Post: "The demonstrations were inspired by West Virginia, where teachers walked out for nine days earlier this year and won a 5 percent increase in pay. Teachers in Arizona are now considering a strike over their demands for a 20 percent salary increase."

LA Times: "The fire started in West Virginia..."

NPR: "This wave of teacher-led actions around the country was kicked off when teachers in West Virginia emerged victorious from a nearly two-week strike earlier this month."

I really hope our state started a fire that ignites labor militant labor action all over the country.

It's way past time.

Worth 2,000 words

Oklahoma

Kentucky

Born in the USA

Around the world but not here so much (yet), May 1 is celebrated as International Workers' Day. Ironically the roots of this observance began right here in the USA. A major struggle in much of the 19th and 20th century has been to reduce the hours of the working day, which could run as long as 14 hours or more in the early days of the industrial revolution.

A slogan of the movement was "eight hours for work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for what we will."

Trade unionists in Chicago declared a strike for the eight hour day on May 1, 1886. One May 4, as police attempted to disperse a protesting crowd of workers at Haymarket Square, an unknown person threw a bomb which killed several police officers. The remaining police in turn fired at the crowd, killing four.

The bomber was never brought to justice. The only thing most historians agree on is that the eight people arrested and sentenced for the bombing weren't the guilty parties, several of whom weren't even there at the time. Of these, four were eventually executed. They are known as the "Haymarket martyrs."

The struggle to limit the working day didn't end there and was eventually won for many US workers by trade union organization and by the political reforms in the New Deal era and beyond, although some laws exempted protections for some of the most exploited workers, such as farm and domestic laborers.

Like everything else in the history of the struggle of working people for basic human justice, the fight goes on. In fact, as new forms of automation enter the traditional workplace, it may take new forms, such as limiting reducing working hours in order to share the available work.

The fight has always been about more than wages, hours and working conditions, as important as these are. It's also been about the need for culture, rest, leisure, education and dignity.

Lately, this hasn't been going so well, as you may have noticed. But it's not over yet.

The winter of my discontent

OK, this winter has already been on my nerves for a good while, what with power outages, burst pipes and all that. But now it's personal. Thanks to a couple of winter storm systems, I missed the two biggest WV labor rallies in years, both targeting the rightward drift of the WV legislature. The first was last month. The latest was yesterday, when I was waiting out a power outage and plumbing woes. I guess I can take consolation in the fact that the fight isn't over yet.

Water and workers

El Cabrero got snowed in today, but a lot has been going on at the capitol. Early this morning, citizens urged the Republican legislature to keep water protections.

Meanwhile, West Virginia got another reminder about what can happen to our water. This afternoon, a train carrying crude oil derailed in rural Kanawha County. According to the Gazette, at least 14 tanks are on fire and some have exploded. There is now burning oil on the Kanawha River.

Water intakes for the communities of Montgomery and Cedar Grove were turned off because of the accident, according to a release from the state Department of Health and Human Resources. While the intakes are off, customers are asked to conserve water, according to the release.

ANOTHER IT'S NOT ALL BAD REMINDER. Despite the snowstorm, a huge crowd of workers and citizens showed up today to protest attacks by the Republican legislature on the rights of working people. One Facebook  friend of mine called it "a sea of Carhardt..."