This webinar was organized by the ReImagine Appalachia campaign and featured Phil Smith, Director of Government Affairs, United Mine Workers of America, Myya Helm, Research Associate at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, and Stephen Herzenberg, Keystone Research Center economist and Co-Director of the ReImagine Appalachia campaign, and Hannah Halbert, Executive Director of Policy Matters Ohio.
As part of the Centennial commemoration of the Battle of Blair Mountain, this session reflected on the lessons for today from the worker organizing across racial lines in West Virginia that helped sparked the U.S. industrial unionism and the New Deal in the 1930s. That organizing fixed the unprecedented inequality in the United States in the 1920s, ushering in four decades of shared prosperity as wages improved in connection with higher rates of unionization. In recent years, big corporations have aggressively beaten back worker efforts to form unions and the results are clear. Six of ten of the most common occupations earn so little a family of three still qualifies for food assistance. In reaction, U.S. workers and unions have once again been organizing across racial lines to transform poverty wages into family-supporting jobs by joining together in solidarity to increase power and bargain their wages collectively.
To repeat the success of the New Deal, union organizing needs to scale, and U.S. labor law needs to level the playing field so that workers have a real right to form unions again. Enacting the Richard L. Trumka Protect the Right (PRO) Organize Act can help spark the upsurge in organizing we need. Ensuring federal climate infrastructure dollars come with community and labor standards, including an agreement from employers receiving federal assistance not to fight workers if they choose to form a union.
GA resurgence of unionism also addresses climate change: growing good union jobs in the services and in the clean economy show that we CAN have sustainability and a strong middle class. It’s not one or the other.