PLP has long been active supporting and participating in miners’ struggles, both in the U.S. and abroad.
‘Communism Comes To The
Mountains!’
One of our first actions — six months after having launched the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM) — was to support a 1963 strike of 500 wildcatting rank-and-file miners in Hazard, Kentucky. The armed miners went from mine to mine, routing scabs and dynamiting scab mines. PLM members organized a Trade Union Solidarity Committee and shipped truck- and trailer-loads of food and clothing to the militant miners while collecting money from workers outside factory gates in NYC, Buffalo and San Francisco. Our effort transformed the strike into a national issue.
We brought the miners’ leader, Berman Gibson, to NYC to address 800 workers and students at the Community Church in zero degree weather. When we shipped hundreds of PL Magazines to the miners, the local Hazard rag ran an 8-column headline across its front page charging, “Communism Comes to the Mountains!” The miners scoffed at their attempted red-baiting and warmly received us as brother and sister workers.
Support West Virginia Strikers
In 1987, PLP was very active in the Pittston coal strike when several thousand miners struck against the coal bosses’ attempt to force major concessions. The coal bosses were killing miners the “slow” way, ignoring safety rules and falsifying air samples. Hundreds of miners died lingering deaths from black lung disease, denied benefits because the air in the mines was supposedly “clean.” CHALLENGE was distributed to many miners as well as a newsletter sent to hundreds of strikers, pointing out the need to destroy capitalism and build communism.
A group of PL’ers came from Detroit to the Logan, West Virginia union hall with a trunk full of food purchased with money collected from auto and hospital workers and in front of supermarkets. An angry flood of miners were streaming into the hall, having just walked out on their union leaders who were trying to sell them out — including UMW President Richard Trumka (now AFL-CIO President). One miner told us, “You go back to Detroit and tell everyone that Richard Trumka is trying to destroy this union!” We couldn’t have asked for a warmer welcome.
PLP organized strike support in many cities and sent groups of workers and youth to deliver food and spend time with the strikers, some living with the miners and participating in strike activity while distributing CHALLENGE and discussing world politics. Ties were built with some amazing people that lasted well after the strike ended.
One day a very militant, angry group of strikers’ wives had had their anti-communism stirred up. One was ready to defend the PLP when another said, “You’re a communist and you didn’t tell us! We can’t have communists down here.”
One PL’er replied that our “communism is a world without bosses, money or profits, where workers get what they need just because they need it, not because they can afford it.”
One woman declared, ”Hell! I’d be a lot better off than I am now,” and we all laughed. “And all of you that feed the strikers, you’re the most communist group down here! You collect and prepare the food collectively, and then you join the picket lines and feed the strikers. You don’t ask them who they voted for in the last election or how much money they have. You feed them because we’re in a war and they need to be fed.!”
Now the women were much friendlier except the one right-winger who originally got them stirred up. She said, “Maybe so. But I STILL ain’t no damn communist!” Everybody roared with laughter.
Back Striking British Miners
In 1984-85, when British coal miners struck for 15 months to save their jobs, PLP actively collected money, Christmas gifts for the miners’ children and letters of support from our own unions. Miners and their spouses came to the U.S. and marched with us on May Day, helped organize California farmworkers and spoke to large and small groups in the U.S. about their struggle against capital.
The strike, over the closing of the coal mines destroying 40,000 jobs, almost toppled the Thatcher government. There were pitched battles between the miners and the police. Mining communities throughout Britain pooled their food and opened communal kitchens for miners and their families.
In the late 1980s, when many U.S. coal mines were being closed or turned into open-pit strip mines (requiring less labor and destroying the land), PLP won British miners to send letters of support to striking U.S. miners in Southern West Virginia.