From Blair Mountain to Mount Hood

It’s August.

A group including military veterans, immigrants, socialists, self-described anarchists and people of every political stripe have gathered and are ready to march. The vets help everyone organize into proper ranks as they stand together against the many injustices they’ve faced individually and within their communities. They’ve been divided on racial and ethnic lines in the past (and maybe they will be again in the future), but today they march and sing and stand as one.

This is what we’ve seen here in Portland and across the country since George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, but what I’m describing here happened in West Virginia in 1921, as 10,000 miners and their families marched on Blair Mountain to face off against the mine operators who ran their company towns and hired the “detectives” who murdered them whenever they dared to push back.

If it weren’t for my grandfather being a West Virginia coal miner who was born in 1917, I might never have learned anything about the largest armed uprising in America since the Civil War. Labor history tends to be buried, but — just like on Blair Mountain — if you dig even a little you start finding the bullet casings strewn everywhere.

The mine operators of Appalachia 100 years ago may have been more brazen and short-sighted than the ones that the United Mine Workers of America have been striking against since April, but not by much. Just today, the National Labor Relations Board threw out a case alleging that management at Warrior Met Coal has been attacking strikers and their families with their vehicles, despite ample evidence that this has happened multiple times.

These Alabama coal miners say they’re fighting for working Americans everywhere, just like their forebears who took up arms against Baldwin-Felts and Pinkerton detectives at the beginning of the last century. And as we see a string of high-profile strikes at places like Frito-Lay and Nabisco, it’s clear that workers across the country are realizing their power and demanding basic decency from those who would exploit them.

We’re not coal miners here in AFSCME Local 328. We don’t crawl on our hands and knees under the earth, inhaling dust that will stick in our lungs and kill us before our time. We don’t work in a factory with burning hot ovens that bake us as we stand on the line. But to say that we are not the same as those workers sells short what we do as we toil to keep OHSU running during the deadliest period in living history. We have workers doing everything from keeping the surfaces in the hospital clean as the emergency department overflows to intubating those who would otherwise drown in their beds from this deadly virus to supporting the education of the next generation of health-care workers (who we need on the frontlines as soon as they’re ready) to everything in between.

Many of our people are tired and worn thin, but they keep going because they know how important the work they do is to their communities. But all humans, no matter their compassion or determination, have limits. It has never been clearer how important every employee represented by Local 328 is to the mission of OHSU.

As our union prepares to elect our next executive board and bargaining team, we must take a moment to remember the fights of our union family all across the world, both today and in the past. We’ll enter our 2022 contract negotiations knowing our vital role in keeping people in the entire Pacific Northwest healthy. Knowing that this work can’t be done without us. Knowing that — despite dire projections — OHSU still made a profit in the face of an ongoing pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

My grandfather refused to work for a non-union mine. He saw every sacrifice he made for UMWA and his fellow workers as a payment towards future workers and their prosperity. As his lungs slowly failed him from the black lung that ultimately took his life, he wanted to be sure his children and grandchildren never saw the bottom of a mine. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t want us to continue the fight for our fellow workers.

Many seek to divide us, and always for the same reason: to keep the few who cling to their authority from having to give up even the smallest amount of power to those of us who keep everything running. We are all workers, and when we stand together, we win.