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**APRIL 20, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

What the Mine Workers Need to Emerge in Sunlight

The United Mine Workers union is no stranger to making history. In the
1930s, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, the union led the
breakaway from the hidebound American Federation of Labor so that it
could support building a more powerful and more populous union movement.
The UMW favored industrial unionism-unions that consisted of all the
workers in a factory, or better yet, an industry-while the AFL favored
unions just of skilled craft workers, so that its forays into factories
consisted of trying to organize, say, just the electricians or just the
carpenters.

The UMW worked differently: When it organized a mine, it organized all
the non-management employees, and as mass-production factories had
become the nation's dominant employers, the UMW thought it was
time-past time, in fact-for labor to organize everyone who worked
there. So at the 1935 AFL convention, Lewis picked a fight and then
one-punch-decked the president of the Carpenters (taking care to pick a
fellow leader who was even bigger than he was), and, having thereby
secured nationwide press coverage, stormed out of the convention to
proclaim that his union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers would fund
the company-wide organizing of America's leading industries-steel
and auto in particular. Hiring hundreds of militant organizers, and
providing the funding for these massive efforts, the new alliance (which
soon took the name of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO
for short) presided over sit-down strikes and kindred actions that
organized General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, U.S. Steel, tire
manufacturers, and electrical equipment manufacturers, creating in the
process the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, and a host of
other unions. In a very real sense, the UMW laid the groundwork for the
broadly shared prosperity of postwar America.

The post-postwar decades, however, have not been kind to the UMW or,
over the past decade in particular, to the use of coal in powering the
nation. An industry that routinely employed more than half a million
workers in the first half of the 20th century now employs just 44,000,
and by no means are all of them union members.

So yesterday, the UMW made another kind of history. It announced

it would support a transition away from fossil fuels so long as the
government guaranteed employment with comparable wages and benefits in
the rising clean-energy industries, investment in carbon sequestration
programs, and support for the mine workers who'll lose their jobs
until they find comparable ones. Acknowledging that "change is coming,
whether we seek it or not," the union made clear that the Biden jobs and
infrastructure proposal should include just such provisions.

Such governmental provision-supporting workers who agree to such
job-threatening change-has ample precedent. As I've written
previously,
when Congress enacted legislation expanding the Redwood National Park in
1977, the act included long-term subsidies for the thousands of loggers
who'd lose their jobs. The bill was authored by Rep. Phil Burton
(D-CA), the pre-eminent labor-left congressman of the 1960s and '70s,
who also authored the bill that required the federal government to pay
for the treatment of mine workers who'd contracted black lung disease.

Donations Are Tax Deductible

Yesterday's announcement from the UMW is both a landmark and a
guidepost in how the nation can move toward a Green New Deal. It sets a
template for the kind of transition the government needs to ensure not
just for mine workers but for the oil refinery workers, the laborers who
install and maintain the pipes through which oil and natural gas flow,
and all the building trades unions whose members work in fossil fuels.

To sweeten the Biden administration's pot, the UMW made its
announcement yesterday alongside West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who
endorsed not only the union's position but also the PRO Act, the
legislation that would enable workers once again to form unions without
the management threats to them that have been common practice since the
1980s. Of course, Manchin would also have to support scrapping the
filibuster if the PRO Act, and most other items on Joe Biden's to-do
list, are to have a chance of passing.

Over the past century, once their industry was unionized, coal miners
have been trapped. If they were UMW members when the industry still
thrived, their jobs paid well and had decent benefits, but despite the
union's best efforts, working in a mine remained an exhausting
endeavor that inherently threatened workers' health and safety. In the
late 1950s, near the end of his tenure as UMW president, John. L. Lewis
was asked how he felt about his members losing jobs to new technology
within the mines. Using the word "millennium" to denote a heavenly
condition, Lewis replied, "It will be a millennium if men do not have to
work underground but can all work in God's sunshine."

Today, that millennium-working not only in sunshine but with it-is a
little bit closer.

______________________________________________________________________

Also today, the Sidney Hillman Foundation (named after the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers leader who co-founded the CIO with Lewis) announced the
winners of its 71st annual prizes for journalism "in service of the
common good." Winning in the category of magazine journalism was the

**Prospect**'s own David Dayen, for "Unsanitized
," his exhaustive and
brilliant daily reports and analyses of the COVID pandemic and the
responses to it. Winning in the opinion journalism category was

**New York Times**columnist and former

**Prospect**writing fellow Jamelle Bouie. Congratulations to them both!

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Letter Carriers' Union and Congressional Democrats Clash Over Louis
DeJoy

House Democrats want the entire Postal Service board fired so their
successors can remove DeJoy. The National Association of Letter Carriers
privately opposed them. BY DAVID DAYEN

Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities

Even in anti-union terrains, the centers have found ways to change
public and corporate policies. BY MATTHEW CUNNINGHAM-COOK

Government's Unused Power to Regulate Nursing Homes

Let's not give more taxpayer money to corrupt nursing home operators
until we replace them with caregivers who place care over profits. BY
ROBERT KUTTNER

First 100: A Crossroads for Biden on Corporate Power

Also, Congress focuses in on the failing arts venue grant program. BY
DAVID DAYEN

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