DEMOCRATIC REFORM IN THE MINERS' UNION
Clark, Paul F.
0 n December 22, 1972, Arnold Miller and other members of the Miners For Democracy (MFD) reform slate were sworn in as new officers of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). Exactly ten years...
...When an agreement is reached with the coal operators, the proposed contract starts back through the internal bargaining procedure—first requiring the approval of the Bargaining Council before being sent again to the district conferences for explanation and clarification...
...But let us not glorify it unduly...
...Equal rights for women, especially those now so rapidly swelling the work force, is a goal whose time is long past due...
...The union's constitutional convention was seen as the mechanism that could best serve this function...
...This is no time for retreat from the struggle for human betterment...
...Before I leave you in peace, let me address a canard that has dogged American labor for many years...
...Led by black-lung activist Arnold Miller, the MFD ticket defeated the incumbent Boyle and moved into UMW headquarters in December 1972...
...more books and less arsenals...
...UMW members surrendered a great deal of control over their union by gradually permitting Lewis to centralize power in his office...
...The UMW has a long and rich history dating back to its founding in 1890...
...If we are to preserve a measure of independence from coercion by foreign cartels and offer our youth brighter prospects than employment in the servicing of Atari games or the dispensing of junk food, the broad industrial base of this country must be reconstructed and modernized...
...The new leadership they chose, led by "a young, articulate miner-lawyer dressed in pinstripes, not overalls," captured the imagination of the media, which saw Trumka's image as incongruous with the stereotypical image of the coal miner...
...The only source from which it could have been derived was an item dated 1893, where Gompers declared: What does labor want...
...Now these district elections were conducted under new guidelines designed to insure miners a fair opportunity to elect their leaders...
...more leisure and less greed...
...Can anyone reasonably hold that these advances, these revolutions of our time, have impaired rather than enhanced the capacity of man 144 little or no input from the membership...
...The final step is ratification by all members covered by the agreement...
...In addition to the factionalism that resulted, the UMW experienced a dramatic increase in wildcat or unauthorized strikes during the reform administration's first term...
...Without Jock Yablonski's initial challenge, without the MFD's election victory and, most important, without the democratic mechanisms put in place by the reform administration and the democratic consciousness raised in the process, the 1982 UMW elections would have been business as usual...
...That has become a synonym for our alleged innocence of ideals, if not unbridled avarice, in the accepted wisdom...
...At Yablonski's funeral, the miners who had worked with him formed the Miners For Democracy (MFD) to carry on the struggle he had begun...
...THE UMW IS GOING through a learning process...
...more constant work and less crime...
...As a consequence, the average age of entry into the work force has been delayed significantly and the time of voluntary exit advanced...
...On that, I am willing to stand...
...From an address by Lane Kirkland, AFL-CIO president, at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., October 4, 1982 145 pains that any dramatic change is likely to entail...
...But it did provide UMW members with the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction with the existing leadership...
...The Bargaining Council, which is composed of all district presidents and International Executive Board members, serves to advise the International officers and other members of the negotiating team on bargaining strategy...
...In those same years, the rise of free trade unionism has effected another quiet but profound revolution, one that has enhanced—in ways perhaps unrecognized—the lives of all of you here...
...These facts of life make serious efforts to unseat incumbent officers in major American unions rare events...
...The democratic process that allowed Richard Trumka to challenge and decisively defeat the incumbent UMW President Sam Church did not function without flaw...
...The students of this college may well be part of the first generation in the history of man on earth for whom the necessity of working for somebody else will occupy the lesser part of your total lifespan...
...The new leadership, recognizing that top-down reform was beyond a point inconsistent with the principles of democratic unionism, moved quickly to involve the rank and file in the reshaping of their union...
...The movement was initially led by former Lewis loyalist Jock Yablonski, who challenged Tony Boyle for the UMW presidency in 1969...
...Lewis's achievements, however, were not without cost...
...Under previous administrations, the union leadership had bargained for and signed contracts with A Few Words from Lane Kirkland . . . The list of real national and human problems that were answered only when the federal government got "on our backs" could be extended at tedious length, but let it just be noted that while they profited handsomely from federal action, neither the states nor private industry rose to meet those occasions...
...and guidelines delineating the powers and responsibilities of elected union officials...
...Many of today's miners still talk of growing up in households where pictures of the holy trinity—Jesus, FDR, and John L.—hung over the mantle...
...A university group from the University of Maryland recently completed the task of copying and indexing all of Gompers' recorded papers and words...
...The MFD nominated a slate of candidates to oppose Boyle in a court-ordered election...
...In retrospect, these problems appear to be simply the growing and woman to stand free and independent before the state or any other stronghold of power...
...But Lewis's leadership had ended, and many had come to realize that if the union's bargaining strategies were going to reflect the sentiments of the rank and file, then the rank and file had to be involved in the process...
...The task must call for the cooperation of labor, management, and government in the development and execution of a sound national industrial policy...
...Exactly ten years later, on December 22, 1982, Richard Trumka and his slate of challengers took the same oath of office as elected leaders of the miners' union...
...Even in the relatively few unions that conduct open membership elections for top union offices, challengers very often begin with an insurmountable disadvantage because the incumbent, in many cases, is able to mobilize the organization's resources on behalf of his reelection bid...
...Given the opportunity, the delegates to the 1973 and 1976 conventions made significant changes in union structure and policy, laying the foundation for democratic unionism...
...Twenty-two days later, on December 31, 1969, gunmen entered the Yablonski home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania, and murdered Jock Yablonski, his wife, and their daughter as they lay in their beds...
...From a not-too-distant day of local lynch law and a pattern of racial apartheid every bit as brutal as that of South Africa, we have approached the goal of full and equal rights and opportunities...
...If I have talked a little treason here, excuse me, but it goes with my territory...
...Not all of the membership, or leadership, supported the reform movement, and the new democratic framework, within which the union was governed, provided a forum for dissenters to openly make their case...
...An investigation would later confirm that the gunmen were hired by Tony Boyle...
...While the 143 MFD election was indeed a significant achievement, the task it faced in rebuilding the UMW into a democratic labor organization was an even more formidable challenge...
...It was not until the 1930s, however, that the UMW, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, became a significant force in the labor movement...
...The union's 1982 elections, however, are evidence that substantial progress has been made...
...The absence of these men was indeed an irony, since the election of Richard Trumka as president of the UMW is nothing less than the legacy of the democratic reform movement that swept through the mineworkers' union in the 1970s...
...They ought not to be undone...
...I do not mean to scorn the work ethic or to suggest that it has waned...
...Must active national concern await a string of tragedies...
...Among the measures taken were provisions to place tight control over the International's power to bring a district or local under trusteeship...
...As a friend of mine in the Caribbean trade union movement once put it: "If hard work were really such a great thing, the rich would have kept it all to themselves...
...The process of learning significantly new roles could not be expected to proceed quickly or painlessly...
...Toward this end, the delegate selection process, the convention committee system, and the rules by which the convention was governed were revamped to insure that the convention would truly be a representative forum...
...The MFD ticket was elected on a reform platform that called for the reestablishment of democratic procedures that would return control of the union to the membership and force the leadership to be more responsive...
...Richard Trumka's election challenge, his victory, and the opportunity he will have to head the UMW are the legacy of the reform movement that took control of the union exactly ten years earlier...
...The evolution of trade unionism in my lifetime has brought about the democratization of privilege —that is to say, of education, leisure, travel, good health care and housing, and other advantages for centuries reserved for the few—to an extent previously unknown in history...
...These problems were compounded by the sometimes ineffective response of a still inexperienced leadership...
...Lewis once justified this "imperial bargaining" arrangement by declaring that " . . . I [Lewis] know more about the problems of miners than anyone else...
...We want more schoolhouses and less jails...
...This final step fulfills one of the basic promises of the MFD campaign by insuring that no miner would have to work under a contract he had not voted on...
...The UMW's bargaining procedure remains one of the most democratic in the American labor movement...
...In its early days in office, the reform administration moved to restore the right of UMW members to elect their district officials, a practice that had been largely discontinued when previous administrations placed the districts in trusteeships and appointed their officers...
...The transition to 'democratic unionism was not without problems...
...Largely through trade union collective bargaining and legislative endeavors, working hours have been reduced, paid leisure time gained and expanded, family incomes raised, educational opportunities broadened, and earlier pensions gained...
...The procedure begins with rank-and-file miners electing representatives to a district bargaining conference that meets to transmit the sentiments of the membership to the next step in the procedure, the Bargaining Council...
...The UMW election process was reshaped to provide opportunity for challenges to sitting officers...
...And it is a legacy that will insure that he will have lots of help in guiding the UMW through the difficult times ahead...
...Most unions elect their top leadership at union conventions, thus denying the membership an opportunity to participate directly in choosing International officers...
...The bargaining procedure created by the 1973 UMW convention embodied this thinking...
...The convention mechanism, which had been a largely orchestrated, pro-forma affair under John L. Lewis and Tony Boyle, was badly in need of reform...
...more learning and less vice...
...Although the results of this process have been mixed, the membership itself has made the hard decisions about whether a contract was acceptable or not...
...more justice and less revenge...
...Importantly, these changes were made by UMW members in what one veteran of UMW conventions testified were "the most open and democratic conventions I have ever attended...
...This abuse spawned a movement to return control of the union to the membership...
...Must rotten bridges collapse under loaded school buses before work can begin...
...Supervision of elections by elected union tellers, equal use of the union's official publication by all candidates for International office, a bona fide appeals process, and voting at the mine site, all helped to make subsequent UMW elections legitimate exercises in union democracy...
...I asked them to find that quote and was informed that it did not exist...
...Critics have fixed on these troubles as proof that democracy, as defined by the MFD, could not work in a union context, or that democratic reform had gone too far...
...The American people should be proud, rather than contemptuous, of the role of their government in that achievement...
...It is the legend that our founder, Samuel Gompers, when asked what labor wanted, responded simply: "More...
...They missed the story...
...When Lewis stepped down in 1960, the far less capable men who succeeded him coveted and seized the same unchallenged power...
...Over the years between then and now [from the 1930s till today], democratic government has safely steered this nation through social revolutions that no other nation has managed peacefully or so well...
...That process, in turn, has created new industries, services, markets and opportunities for enterprise...
...Few leaders of the MFD movement were present and there was little talk of democratic reform or of giving the union back to the membership...
...In an election that would later be overturned by the Department of Labor because of massive irregularities committed by the incumbent, Yablonski was declared defeated...
...steps to insure honest elections at all levels of the union...
...These are no mean achievements...
...Urgent new challenges and tasks await the prudent and measured invocation of the federal instrument...
...Unfortunately, this power was used more effectively to enrich the leadership than to improve the lives of coal miners...
...Few people argued the point...
...It is a legacy that Trumka will be continually reminded of as UMW president...
...During the 40 years of John L. Lewis's presidency, the UMW won significant gains for its members and Lewis became a revered figure among American coal miners...
...It has found its way into textbooks, learned papers and baser prose, and may be no stranger here...
...Concerted attention to the decaying infrastructure that supports our economic and community life must be organized and applied...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
