[Meet the women who nourished the longest strike in Alabama’s
history.]
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THERE IS POWER IN A PANTRY  
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Kim Kelly
March 24, 2023
In These Times - Labor
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_ Meet the women who nourished the longest strike in Alabama’s
history. _

Connie Jones, Haeden Wright and Cheri Goodwin in the pantry that kept
the Warrior Met strike going for nearly two years., Kim Kelly

 

If you’re one of the people who’s been following the Warrior Met
Coal strike over the past 23 months, it’s almost certain that
you’ve heard the name Haeden Wright. The 35-year-old mother of two
is a teacher, an activist, an elected official, a coal miner’s
daughter and a boss’s worst nightmare. She’s a vocal presence on
social media, has given countless interviews, and has participated in
panels and other public events in an effort to direct attention to
the strike. 

But the first time I met Wright was before all that. It was April
2021 and we were standing in a forest clearing in Alabama’s
Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park, surrounded by 1,000
striking coal miners and their families. Wright had her four-month-old
baby, Everly, on her hip, and was keeping one eye on her rambunctious
six-year-old, Averi, who was ping-ponging around the field with
a gaggle of other kids. 

Her husband, Braxton, had just gone on strike, walking out of the
mines in Brookwood, Ala. on April 1 when contract negotiations
between the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the coal bosses
broke down. Wright introduced me to her friends, Cheri Goodwin and
Connie Jones, whose husbands were also part of the strike. The three
women had only just begun thinking about ways they could support the
strike; they, like many others, assumed a resolution couldn’t be
that far off. No one knew that coal prices were about to skyrocket,
dampening the intended economic impact of the strike, or that the
conflict would ultimately drag on for nearly two years. At that point,
Wright was just excited to see UMWA president Cecil Roberts speak and
to brainstorm ways she could get involved. She had no idea just how
involved she would become, and how much of the strike’s survival
would come to rest on her shoulders.

When it became apparent that the strike would not be over in a matter
of weeks, Wright, Goodwin and Jones put their heads together and came
up with a plan. The Warrior Met mine is served by four UMWA union
locals (2245, 2368, 2397 and 2427), and at that time, only one of
them, Local 2397, had an auxiliary set up. An auxiliary is a union
affiliate group made up of spouses, family members and union retirees;
auxiliaries traditionally perform various functions, from fundraising
to event planning to strike support. The union’s strike fund was
providing the strikers with health insurance and biweekly strike
checks, but it had already become abundantly clear that the miners’
families, especially those with young children, would need some
extra support. 

The women decided that the best course of action would be to set up
a pantry to provide strikers’ families with groceries and other
essential items. They reached out to that auxiliary’s president,
Evelyn Berryhill, for guidance on how to get things rolling. ​“We
asked some questions, like ​‘What did you do? How do you get
started? How does it work?’” Wright explains. 

“I don't want this to go down in history as us just being housewives
... We've fought hard, and we've organized things.”

“We were just building an airplane while it was flying, and on
fire,” says Wright, who was elected president of the auxiliary for
Locals 2368 and 2245. The women themselves had no prior experience in
community organizing or food banking, so they learned on the job. One
of the union locals offered space in their hall to house the pantry
and serve as the base of auxiliary operations, and in a few weeks,
the auxiliary was holding fundraisers and handing out weekly grocery
bags. The auxiliary also established a bank of hygiene items, baby
products and clothing that would be made available to striking union
members’ families. Additionally, auxiliary members prepared and
served food at rallies, and would continue to do so for every single
strike rally for the next 23 months; they cleaned up afterwards and
took any leftovers to Grace Klein Community
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rescue organization. 

While they may have drawn upon their own experiences with meal
preparation and coupon-cutting to keep the pantry running smoothly,
auxiliary members bristle at the idea that what they were doing was
mere ​“women’s work.” ​“I don’t want this to go down in
history as us just being housewives,” Goodwin tells me.
​“There’s nothing wrong with leading the life of
a homemaker,” she adds, but running the auxiliary took ​“a lot
more than just domestic skills. We’ve fought hard, and we’ve
organized things.” 

Auxiliary members emphasize all the steps that went into keeping the
operation running: planning, organizing, execution, perseverance and
patience — a lot of patience. For instance, they had to
establish an auxiliary bank account, begin the process of registering
as a nonprofit and start holding monthly meetings. ​“Our finance
stuff is pretty easy as far as us managing it, because literally
everything that comes in goes right back out to the people,”
Goodwin, the auxiliary’s chief financial officer, tells me. It was
extremely important for them to be transparent about every dime that
came in, and Goodwin says she has kept every single receipt from every
supply run and grocery order as well as meticulous records on every
donation that’s come in.

And there have been a lot of donations — in the ballpark of
$185,000 over the course of 23 months. ​“The main thing that
really made the pantry work was that … lots of different people who
are involved in unions [supported it],” Goodwin says. While
a number of UMWA locals sent regular collections, many of the
donations came from individuals or small groups, and Goodwin says that
social media support also played a huge role. ​“Seeing somebody
send in $5 from Ohio, or send a message like, ​‘Hey, we’re
cheering you on from England!’ That was a huge part of keeping the
pantry going, because without feeling like we had moral support from
people, it would have been really dark and really heavy times.” 

“People that did not know us, didn’t know our families, cared and
loved us enough to make sure they were provided for,” Wright says.
​“When we lived that, we really started to understand what it
means when someone talks about solidarity, when they talk about mutual
aid and loving each other.”

Wright estimates that it took about $8,000 per month to keep the
pantry running, a task that required a lot of ingenuity on the
auxiliary’s part. ​“When we didn’t know any better, we were
actually going to about eight different grocery stores every single
week and clearing out shelves of items,” Wright recalls. ​“It
would literally take about 16 hours a week to go and get everything
from Tuscaloosa, from Hoover, to bring it back, to unload it, organize
it, to check out individually one item at a time.” But they soon
realized there might be a better way — approaching local
grocery stores to ask about ordering in bulk. ​“And they let us
start doing that about four months into the strike,” Wright says.
​“They wrap it up in pallets for us and then it takes five or six
trucks to carry those pallets.”

Cracking the bulk ordering code was a godsend, but the auxiliary
members still had to be creative — and thrifty — about how
they actually stocked the pantry. Since they didn’t have access to
a refrigerator or freezer for most of the strike, the shelves were
always full of canned goods, shelf-stable items and meal mixes;
pallets of flour, ramen noodles and pudding packs sit alongside cans
of Manwich and instant ranch flavoring. When musician and activist Tom
Morello came down to the pantry for a visit, I vividly remember how
seriously he took his assignment — he was on Jell-O duty and
made sure each bag had its allotted ration of gelatin. 

“We knew that we couldn’t afford to buy meat for everyone, so we
thought if we can give you the things to make the meal except for
that, that still would be a help to families,” Wright explains.
​“And things like peanut butter and jelly that everybody eats.
Taco kits were really popular.” Wright says stocking the pantry also
required keeping an eye on sales: ​“When muffins are on sale for
89 cents apiece, you go ahead and you buy 200 packs of muffins, or
when mac & cheese was down to 99 cents a box, you go ahead and buy
more of that.”

It’s now been nearly two years since the strike pantry was
established, and when I chatted with Wright and Goodwin last week,
they were preparing for their last couple of grocery pickups after the
company accepted the union’s return-to-work offer on February 17.
With Warrior Met contesting the reinstatement of 41 strikers,
auxiliary members have decided they won’t be shutting the project
down because there will still be families needing help, but the effort
will probably start looking a little different than it has. Going
forward, one of their group’s big dreams is to put together
a mobile strike pantry — one that travels to picket lines and
uses their accrued knowledge to aid workers across the country. 

The women now dream of putting together a mobile strike pantry—one
that can bring their knowledge to picket lines across the country.

The women involved have new dreams, too. Though she’s worked as
a high school English and theater teacher for the past 11 years,
Wright has been job-hunting since before the strike ended — she
wants to take a greater role in the labor movement. She is also
getting involved in local Alabama politics. Part of Wright’s drive
to be a force for change comes from politicians’
reaction — or rather, the lack thereof — to the strike.
She describes a feeling of ​“being so isolated — feeling
that we’re in Alabama, we’re in the Deep South, no one cares about
us.” Both Republicans and Democrats largely ignored the strike:
there were no picket line visits, no high-profile shout-outs and no
acknowledgement given to their struggle (though Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) invited Braxton to
Washington, D.C. to testify in a hearing about private equity’s
impact on the strike
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“One group sees us as coal miners and one group sees us as union
radicals — where do we fit? We fit because we’re workers, we
fit because we’re people,” she says. She particularly points to
the deafening silence from Alabama’s Republican politicians, from
local officials up to and including Gov. Kay Ivey, who ignored
a demonstration that UMWA miners held in front of the state capitol
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and continued allowing state troopers to escort scabs through their
picket line. 

Wright says the only way things will change is if people like her
start participating. ​“It’s really easy for us to get in this
bubble of ​‘this is bad, this is bad, I wish this would
change,’” she explains, ​“but sometimes we have to take
a leap of faith and say, nothing’s going to change if all of us
just talk about it.” In 2022 she was elected to the State Democratic
Executive Committee (SDEC), to which she was recruited by State Rep.
Chris England, a former chair of the SDEC and one of the only Alabama
politicians who showed up to support the strike. 

For now, though, she’s happy to give advice to other workers who may
be facing down a long strike of their own; just don’t expect her to
sugarcoat it. She tells me not everyone in the community was up to the
challenge. Because most of the people running the auxiliary had
full-time jobs as well as children, they ​“had people scab or
people decide it’s too hard to keep helping,” Wright says.
​“So then you have to be willing to take up more of a load.”
Goodwin adds,”you have to get a core group of people that are
committed — people that, no matter what differences of opinions
there are, have the same goal of providing for the people that you
want to provide for.” 

The women of the UMWA auxiliary in Brookwood, Ala., never lost sight
of their goal, and as a result, hundreds of union families were able
to make it through the longest strike in Alabama’s history. It was
a Herculean effort for them to have undertaken. ​“Growth and
beautiful things don’t come from things that are easy, those things
are cultivated,” Wright says. ​“Throughout this, a lot of us
have experienced that growth within ourselves. Before [the strike], we
might have whispered, but now we have accepted that it’s okay to
speak out against things that we think aren’t right.” 

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Kim Kelly [[link removed]] is a freelance
journalist based in Philadelphia. Her work on labor, culture and
politics can be found in _Esquire_, _Teen Vogue_, _The Baffler_ and
the _Washington Post_.

* Warrior Met Coal Strike; Local Mineworkers' Auxiliary; UMWA Strike
Pantry;
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