Month: March 2018

Company Towns Are Still with Us

On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. Meeting them at the station were the local police chief—a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud—and several out-of-work miners with guns. The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders. The street erupted in gunfire. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead—including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns. The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that […]

The West Virginia Teachers’ Strike Has Activists Asking: Should We Revive the Wildcat?

The stunning success of the recent statewide West Virginia teachers’ strike makes it one of the most inspiring worker protests of the Trump era. The walkout over rising health insurance costs and stagnant pay began on Feb. 22 and appeared to be settled by Feb. 27 with promises from Gov. Jim Justice of a 5 percent pay raise for teachers. Union leaders initially accepted that deal in good faith, along with vague assurances that the state would work with them on a solution to escalating out-of-pocket costs for workers’ healthcare. Dramatically, rank-and-file teachers refused to end the walkout. Every public school in the state remained closed for nine days due to the strike, until the West Virginia legislature voted to approve a 5 percent pay increase for all state workers as well as a formal labor-management committee to deal with the healthcare problem. The entire experience leaves many labor activists […]

Trump is all bluster on trade, but Democrats haven’t shown voters they can do better

[This article was co-written by Erik Loomis.] Our commander in chief, noted admirer of military parades, might finally have his war: a trade war. Victims will include cheap domestic beer and foreign trade in motorcycles, blue jeans and bourbon. Whether Trump is destroying American manufacturing to “save” it remains to be seen. Before proclaiming new tariffs on steel and aluminum last week (which he formally imposed on Thursday), Trump loudly initiated a process to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. These stunts highlight a continuing weakness of Democrats hoping for a blue wave in the midterm elections and beyond. Trump’s posturing on blue-collar jobs is a strong contrast to the Democratic Party’s seeming indifference to the working lives of industrial communities. Trump is known to brag about job creation and take credit for the economic growth generated in the Obama administration, but his big talk is mostly empty. Despite […]

If the Supreme Court rules against unions, conservatives won’t like what happens next

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the case Janus vs. AFSCME, with the fate of the labor movement seemingly in the balance. At stake are agency fees — public sector unions can collect fees for service from employees who don’t join the union that represents them, which the plaintiff argues is an unconstitutional act of compelled speech. The deep-pocketed backers of Janus aim to bankrupt unions and strip them of whatever power they still have, but if the court rules that an interaction a union has with the government is political speech, they might not be so happy with the results. Many have noted that such an overreaching and inconsistent decision could have unintended consequences by granting a heretofore denied constitutional right to collective bargaining and transforming thousands of workplace disputes into constitutional controversies. What the Janus backers (and most commentators) miss is that agency fees are not just compensation […]