http://themilitant.com/2016/8020/802002.html
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Vol. 80/No. 20 May 23, 2016
(front page, Socialist Workers Party campaign statement)
‘Workers in power would ensure miners jobs, safety’
Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president,
former coal miner and member of the United Mine Workers union, released
the following statement May 11.
Working people today face the smoldering reality of a deepening
economic, political and moral crisis of the capitalist for-profit
system. No one knows this more than U.S. coal miners. Tens of thousands
of coal miners have been thrown out of work. In March 2016 there were
56,700 working miners, one-third the number working in April 1985.
Five major U.S. coal companies and some 50 smaller bosses have declared
bankruptcy. They use government bankruptcy courts to tear up United Mine
Workers contracts and gut pensions and health care for retired miners.
Today the overwhelming majority of working coal miners are in nonunion
mines. Deaths, injuries and black lung disease are increasing.
Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the remaining
bourgeois presidential candidates, say the only way workers get jobs and
see their lives improve is when the bosses make big profits. They tell
us that’s how it works under capitalism, and that “we” Americans are all
in it together, taking on “them” in the rest of the world.
This is a lie aimed at making us subservient to the boss class and their
government.
I was part of the first wave of women who obtained jobs in the
underground coal mines in the 1970s and ’80s. Together with our union
brothers we fought to improve conditions in the mines. In the 1960s and
’70s coal miners carried out a revolution in our union and joined family
members and other workers in coal country to wage powerful battles that
won black lung benefits, medical clinics and the right to secret ballot
votes on union contracts.
We won the right to union-organized safety committees in the mines and
to shut down production when we found unsafe conditions. While the coal
bosses have fought relentlessly to erode those gains, and over decades
our union has gotten weaker, our labor and social battle is an example
of what can be accomplished when we rely on our own strength and
solidarity.
Over the past year, defending life and limb was central to the
overwhelming rejection of the one-man crew by rail workers at Burlington
Northern, the strike by oil workers at refineries across the country and
the determination of Steelworkers to battle against a lockout by ATI
bosses.
In 2003, I was part of a fight to unionize the Co-Op mine near
Huntington, Utah. My coworkers there, mostly immigrants from Mexico,
were at the forefront of the fight for union representation, safe work
conditions and better wages. Working people can’t let the bosses divide
us in our fight for dignity and union power. It is our class against the
bosses’ class, not “our” country against the workers of the world.
Under the capitalist system that puts profits before human needs, the
inherent dangers in mining, the environmental consequences from
uncontrolled burning of coal, and the energy needs of millions worldwide
will never be solved.
The working class must end forever the rule of the bosses. Taking
political power in our own hands, coal miners and other workers can
organize to ensure no worker has to die on the job. We can take control
of the stewardship of labor and the environment, and organize access to
energy and electricity, equalizing workers’ conditions worldwide.
Under capitalism any transition to cleaner energy production means
throwing thousands of miners out of work. The working class in power
would ensure that every miner is guaranteed a socially useful job and
rewarding place in the process of organizing such a transition.
Related articles:
Miners’ anger at capitalist crisis marks W.Va primary
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