Alabama miners strike holds strong

ALABAMA and NEW YORK— As the miners fight on into month seven, support for the striking Alabama miners continues to gain momentum, despite the U.S. bosses’ media blackout. As CUNY students, staff and faculty have gone back to classes, communists in the Progressive Labor Party, friends and antiracists are finding initial successes in building solidarity campaigns at CUNY campuses across the city. As winter approaches, the growing support is coming at a crucial time for the strike.

For the miners striking against Warrior Met Coal Company, the struggle is sharpening. Even though the number of scabs working in the mines has increased to 100, the 1,000 remaining miners have closed ranks, are holding fast, and are fighting back. PLP once again salutes and supports the miners’ fightback! With more miners receiving and distributing CHALLENGE with each issue, our plans for continuing our Solidarity Campaign and building for a Winter Project are taking shape.

We invite all striking miners to join PLP and help lead a communist revolution to smash the racist, sexist capitalist system that created Warrior Met and all the capitalists like them, once and for all!

“Nothing to feel defeated about”

Every miner that crosses the picket line is a personal blow for the Warrior Met miners— “a brother lost” and “a nightmare situation,” as a miner recently explained to us, during a recent update on the struggle from one of the Party’s new friends in Alabama.

As the strike reaches seven months, and without help coming from politicians from either the Democrat or Republican Parties at the state or national level, some of the politically inexperienced miners have been seduced into crossing the picket lines and scabbing. Miners remaining on the picket lines are forced to take other jobs to defray mounting bills, while there is a growing sense among some miners that the UMWA is keeping them in the dark about ongoing negotiations.

For most miners, however, the struggle is stiffening resolve. As one Black miner recently put it, “a strike is a battle. It’s a war. That’s a challenging situation for some people. You have to make a decision about what you’re willing to sacrifice. For me, everything, but that took experience. You have to go through fire to remove impurities. This is how we go through hardship. For someone who’s never experienced hardship, it’s hard.

Black workers, especially miners in Alabama, know plenty about hardship through fierce racism—and fierce fightback. From the mass movements defending the Scottsboro Boys to the sharecroppers’, steel and miners’ unions, Black workers’ resistance has long been the key to uniting and igniting the entire working class in rebellion. This history continues being written today, and this group of Black and white miners and new CHALLENGE readers are teaching us that the course of struggle is long, and setbacks are “nothing to feel defeated about.”

“But we’re still fighting and good is coming from this. We’re making new friends, and relationships are getting stronger. The battle goes on. Some of us have been fighting for equality all our lives, and we can dig it.”

What we do counts

PL’ers and friends are organizing our base to rise to this challenge. Solidarity committees and support for the miners are being organized, with wide nets being cast across CUNY campuses and in the CUNY faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress.

The first demonstration currently in the works is for BlackRock, the $14 trillion-rich Wall Street asset management company and Warrior Met’s largest single shareholder. The second is at CSX, to help meet more rail workers and organize pressure against CSX to stop transporting scab coal. We are also planning activities and fundraiser for the miners, and a virtual international miners’ conference, where the miners will present on the strike.

Donations to UMWA District 20 continue to come in electronically and by mail, as the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) launches its Christmas Toy Drive for the children of the miners this holiday season. Currently, the miners receive only a biweekly $700 through the UMWA strike fund, which one miner with small children told us, “doesn’t pay sh*t.”

Solidarity forever

In the meantime, our new friends in Alabama are discussing and coordinating with us for a PLP Winter Project in Alabama. With more details coming in upcoming issues of CHALLENGE, we are preparing the project to bring relief and support the picket line duty during the colder months of the holiday season.

Our immediate task is to expand this campaign beyond CUNY and into the high schools, the MTA, and to cities across the U.S. and internationally (see box). Everything we do counts. Already, contact has been made with miners in two other countries. We continue to fight and make the miners’ strike a “school for communism,” and have already been humbled by the lessons. What we can learn about the persistence in struggle, confidence in the working class, and practice organizing in this strike will forge a mass PLP that will smash this entire capitalist system, from New York City to Beijing. JOIN US!

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We call on all workers, and youth, especially college and high school students, faculty, and staff supporters of the strike to help the relief effort! Every student group, union chapter, and mass organization can organize a local solidarity committee, spread the word, distribute CHALLENGE, and get people involved. Despite the complex attitudes about the UMWA’s role in the strike, donating to the strike fund and to District 20 is the surest way to send support.

For electronic donations to the UMWA Strike Aid Fund:

https://umwa.org/umwa2021strikefund

Checks can be sent to: 

UMWA 2021 Strike Aid Fund

PO Box 513

Dumfries, VA 22026

To send toys directly to District 20 for the Christmas Toy Drive, and urgently needed supplies such as diapers, sanitary napkins, formula, toothpaste, paper towels, soap, shampoo, and deodorant:

UMWA Auxiliary 2245/ 2368

21922 AL—216, McCalla, AL 35111