mine workers

By Li Mei Brusey, Tim Lang, Grant Howard, Matthew Jeffrey, Maddy Yerbury, and Zane Alcorn - Green Left, November 24, 2023

By Kalina Arabadjieva, et. al. - European Trade Union Institute, October 30, 2023

By Svjetlana Nedimović - Berliner Gazette, October 16, 2023

Svjetlana Nedimović · Resisting Green Capital from Berliner Gazette on Vimeo.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 19, 2023

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, September 5, 2023

By Kim Kelly, Union Jake and Adam Keller - The Valley Labor Report, August 16, 2023

Kim Kelly, labor journalist, author of "Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor," and friend-of-the-show, joins us to talk about another disease epidemic that no one's talking about that is hurting some of the country's hardest workers.

Read Kim Kelly's full report on how Silica is destroying the lives of coal miners and their families: here.

By Heidi Binko - Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, August 3, 2023

By staff - Appalachian Voices, August 3, 2023

By press associates - People's World, August 2, 2023

A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge has strongly blasted the Warrior Met coal company in its long-running dispute over a new contract with the United Mine Workers—a dispute which led bosses to lock out the firm’s 1,100 miners for more than a year and a half. The judge formally ruled the firm’s unfair labor practices provoked the conflict.

In an 88-page ruling, ALJ Melissa Olivero came down particularly hard on company officials for claiming they couldn’t afford the union’s demands for raises in each year of a new contract, and the union’s tries at reclaiming the givebacks the workers had to yield to keep the firm going when it was the old, and bankrupt, Jim Walter mine.

Even as the firm gave out big bonuses to its corporate honchos, in a poor area of rural Alabama, and shoveled out millions of dollars in stock options and dividends to its Wall Street investors, it was claiming poverty and saying paying the miners would force it to close, Olivero said. It denied making the closure threat, but Olivero found its denials were not credible.

Such claims, Olivero noted, entitled the Mine Workers (UMWA) to review the mine’s books, but the mine bosses refused to turn them over, and that broke labor law, too, Olivero said. That led UMWA to declare the strike was about Warrior Met labor law-breaking, formally called unfair labor practices.

That made the strike, and Warrior Met’s lockout of the workers, an unfair labor practices strike, Olivero ruled. Warrior Met appealed her decision to the full board, which has called for briefs from both sides by late August.

Warrior Met also was hiring subcontractors to work alongside the miners, Olivero noted—another bone of contention in the bargaining between the two sides.

By Claire Kovach, Stephen Herzenberg, Amanda Woodrum, and Ted Boettner - ReImagine Institute, Keystone Research Center, Ohio River Valley Institute, July 25, 2023

The Appalachian region has long suffered from not having enough good paying jobs. Even when the unemployment rate is low, too many Appalachians are disconnected from the workforce entirely due to a myriad of factors. The result has been a long-term structural unemployment problem that has persisted for decades, with too many Appalachian adults out of the workforce entirely and unable to secure a decent paying job where they live.

A federal job subsidy program that is targeted at breaking down barriers to employment – such as improving the skills and experience of potential workers to meet current employer demands in their local labor market – and connecting them with a job could not only boost incomes and improve the livelihood of thousands of Appalachians but also give people self-esteem, a source of identity, and feel more connected to their community.

This report examines the economic conditions of Appalachia with a particular focus on the Appalachian counties of four states—Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—that comprise the footprint of ReImagine Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley Institute. This includes describing how Appalachia has been a “region apart” from the rest of America, including its history of resource extraction and exploitation, the collapse of the steel industry, and now coal, that has led to large employment losses in the area, and how the region’s uneven development has led to chronically low rates of employment, disenfranchisement from the labor market and even loss of hope underpinning the opioid epidemic from which the Appalachian region was particularly hard hit.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).