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Labor unions facing tough times

6 min read
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The difficulties facing organized labor today are not unlike what unions faced 100 years ago in the early 20th century.

At that time, unions were at a crisis point after spending decades working to organize employees in coal mines and other manufacturing industries in order to improve working conditions and increase bargaining power.

“The union mines almost don’t survive in the 1920s,” said Ken Fones-Wolf, a professor at West Virginia University specializing in modern America and labor.

“After the Labor Relations Act (in 1935) during the New Deal, they go from small percentage of the workforce to prevalent.”

As America exited World War II and accelerated into a manufacturing boom throughout the mid-20th century, organized labor took on a significant presence, Fones-Wolf said, with one out of every three industrial workers carrying a union card. But membership has since “steadily, and then, rapidly” declined, he said.

A century after those initial dark days, organized labor once again finds itself in a similar predicament as union membership in industrial-related jobs plummeted in recent decades.

Evidence of that decline can be seen locally in Greene County, where only one coal mine is operating with union workers after the closure of Emerald Mine near Waynesburg last November. At one time, countless union mining operations dotted the landscape in Western Pennsylvania, but now only Cumberland Mine uses organized labor in Washington and Greene counties.

On the surface, the lack of union coal mines appears to correlate with the overall downturn in the mining industry. But more specifically, the mechanization of work and longwall mining techniques utilized over the past few decades made the operations more efficient with a smaller workforce.

In 1950, there were a total of 470,000 coal mining jobs in the United States, according to research compiled by Rob Dunn, an energy economics professor at Washington & Jefferson College. By 2000, that number plummeted to about 78,000, such a small number the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis stopped tallying coal mining jobs separately and grouped them together with other industries, such as logging. Meanwhile, during that same time, the coal output in the mining industry nearly doubled to 1.1 billion short tons, according to Dunn’s research.

“It’s an incredible decline,” Dunn said of the total union and non-union workforce numbers. “Even with that incredible reduction in employment, they still doubled production. It shows how much more productive they are with capital – machinery or robotics – over those years.”

Those workforce losses go beyond mining and unions. Dunn pointed to employment figures during the same time that show manufacturing jobs are down by about one-third, but overall production is up 8.5 percent.

“Labor is a smaller piece of the puzzle and you could see how that really erodes their bargaining position,” Dunn said. “Labor has declined to some extent, but you see them hold strong in industries where labor is still essential.”

Specifically, jobs that still need workers here and can’t be replaced by machines, such as the service industry, education, health care, transportation, warehousing and public sector positions. Dunn also used the example of pro sports leagues, all of which have strong labor unions, because the talent on the field cannot be replaced.

“It’s all about the players,” he said.

Ed Yankovich, District 2 vice president of United Mine Workers in Uniontown, blamed the erosion of unions on a prevailing “anti-labor” sentiment that demonized them. But he suggested the loss of unions correlated with wage inequity.

“Why is it so difficult to bring up the middle class? People scream we’re losing the middle class,” Yankovich said. “We’re going back to the times of the beginning of the 20th century and the Gilded Age in disparity of income.”

Fones-Wolf said he found parallels between now and 100 years ago.

“You have growing income inequality and lots of powerful businesses that want to get rid of union contracts,” Fones-Wolf said. “Then there’s a workforce that is caught between wanting to have a job and have good wages and working conditions that they negotiate.”

Labor Day began in New York City in the 1880s as a “recruiting device” for unions to improve wages and working conditions, while fighting for benefits such as weekends off, Fones-Wolf said.

“Workers should have some control over their lives.” Fones-Wolf said of the organized labor concept. “Providing a fair day’s work should get a fair day’s wage and good working conditions.”

What started as a way to call attention for the importance of unions morphed into a celebration of the American worker, Fones-Wolf said.

A day to reward people for their hard work isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even if the original meaning changed, Yankovich said.

“It means the same thing it meant to us over 100 years ago,” Yankovich said. “That meaning hasn’t changed. It means it’s a day set forth to honor fruits of labor, to honor the working man what he has meant to the country.”

The original meaning of Labor Day is still felt in Rust Belt cities where blue-collar jobs once were king during manufacturing’s heyday.

That’s illustrated by Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, who is Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate, and current Vice President Joe Biden attending today’s Labor Day Parade in Pittsburgh.

Locally, Richard Trumka, a Nemacolin native who headed the UMW for 13 years, is the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest conglomeration of labor unions in the country.

Yankovich said the UMW diversified itself to reach into sectors outside of coal mining, but that doesn’t mean the union doesn’t still pack a punch.

“I believe in capitalism, but there are checks and balances,” Yankovich said. “We’re essential to people getting their fair shake. We go get our members a piece of the pie.”

Thousands of current and retired UMW miners marched and rallied near Waynesburg in April to raise awareness about protecting their health care and pensions. Union miners from across the country are also heading to Washington, D.C., Thursday to promote the Miners Protection Act, which is the bill to preserve union health and pension funds impacted by the recession and coal company bankruptcies.

The UMW has also successfully renegotiated the union contract for its workers at Cumberland Mine following Alpha’s bankruptcy, which he called “unprecedented” when it came to bankruptcy proceedings. The union is also organizing food drives and other services for unemployed miners displaced from recent mine closings.

Those impacts will be felt for generations of families, he said.

“You want to know what unions do? We don’t give up,” Yankovich said. “The UMW will be here to pick up the pieces. We’re not leaving. We’re not going away.”

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