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.

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!