“A Woman's Place Is in the UMWA”: Women Miners and the Struggle For

“A Woman’s Place Is in the UMWA”: Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union in Western Pennsylvania, 1973–1979

Trish Kahle

When women reentered the American coal mines in 1973 as underground workers, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) had only recently elected the rank-and-file Miners for Democracy (MFD) reform slate, led by Arnold Miller, a disabled miner.1 Support for the previous union leadership, with Tony Boyle at the helm, eroded rapidly after 1968, when a slew of deadly mine disasters exposed Boyle’s col- laboration with the coal industry. Further exposing the depths of his administration’s corruption, Boyle then ordered the murder of opposition candidate Jock Yablonski following the 1969 UMWA presidential election—an act which ultimately was the

I would like to thank James Sparrow, Amy Dru Stanley, Destiney Linker, Marcia Walker, the 2014 Midwest Labor History Colloquium, and the anonymous reviewers at Labor for their helpful commentary on this article. 1. Women had worked underground in small numbers before 1973, but in marginalized and unpro- tected capacities and without the benefit of Title VII, which opened up employment in heavy industry to women and dismantled a legal regime based on protection for employed women rather than equality. Ronald L. Lewis, in Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, documented that enslaved women worked in underground mines. British Parliamentary Papers record women working in Welsh collieries as early as 1842 (House of Commons, 84, 108). In the United States, Ida Mae Stull is the first nonslave woman known to have worked underground; she was first employed in Cadiz, Ohio, in 1906 as a lantern carrier but was not discovered by mine inspectors until 1934. After fighting a legal battle with the support of the union to protect her right to employment, she continued to work underground until she retired in 1944 (Corbin, “Ida Mae Stull”). Women were employed in larger numbers during World War II, replacing men who had been drafted into military service, but they were then forced out of employment when the war ended, expected to give up their places for men (Fox, United We Stand). These women would later file for black-lung benefits when the MFD administration was elected in 1972 (Betty Jean Hall to Sarah Sedgewick, February 10, 1979, Coal Employment Project Archives, Eastern Tennessee State University, Johnson City (hereafter CEP Archives), box 1, folder 7).

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 42 13.1 LABOR undoing of his administration. The MFD emerged from a desire for a democratic union that would represent the miners’ interest in contract fights, but the meaning of union democracy had broader implications, appealing to a deeper sense of discontent that both pervaded the union and extended beyond it, to political battles for rights, especially access to health care for miners disabled by black lung disease.2 In District 5, which stretches across Western Pennsylvania from Ohio in the west to Cambria County in the east and has the industrial powerhouse of Pittsburgh as its center, in the 1973 district elections the rank and file also elected an MFD slate, led by Louis Antal.3 However, it quickly became clear to rank-and-file activists that the election of the reform slates had only represented the beginning of the struggle for a more democratic union. No one understood the need for further democratization better than the women miners who challenged their union for gender inclusion and continued workplace militancy during Miller’s presidency. Nearly thirty years after being pushed out of wartime mining jobs at the end of World War II, women finally secured their right to work underground, only to find that their battle for the right to employment had pushed them into another, internal, struggle within the union for rank-and-file democracy. Women miners entered the UMWA as the struggle for union democracy and internal levels of rank-and-file self-organization peaked, in a moment where the shortcomings of the union’s orientation toward women workers and their issues presented a challenge, but a challenge filled with possibility for radical change. Women miners’ sense of possibility across the 1970s was shaped by the long rise of labor feminism as well as by recent victories and struggles: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the successful organizing of black and women workers in other industrial workplaces.4 Yet the possibility of a broad expansion of workplace rights existed in tension with a rapidly changing economic and social reality. The decade, characterized by volatility and outbursts of collective resistance, culminated in an overall decline of union power. Katherine Lee Turk has pointed out that it was pre- cisely in this transformative period that workingwomen’s demands for broad, redis- tributive remedies to sex discrimination were reshaped into “equality of opportunity,” a concept of equality that was well suited to the restructuring of the global economy and that ultimately “helped to obscure deepening social divisions and curtail the util- ity of civil rights laws for workers facing simultaneous and systemic disadvantages.”5 Far from representing an isolated discursive shift in the law, women’s participation in unions and the workforce simultaneously molded and was in turn shaped by rapid economic, social, and political change in the world around them. The changes taking

2. Clark, Miners’ Fight for Democracy. 3. Paul Nyden, “Black Coal Miners in the United States.” 4. On labor feminism, see Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement; Deslippe, “Rights, Not Roses”; and Cobble, Other Women’s Movement. On the impact of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, see Maclean, Freedom Is Not Enough. 5. Turk, “Equity on Trial,” 17.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 43

place around them were not only women’s issues, even though they were shaped by long-standing gendered patterns of industrial work and the challenges that women mounted to those patterns and even though, in the end, women workers were disproportionately impacted by industrial restructuring.6 The economic crises of the 1970s and the resulting decline in real wages exac- erbated tensions between the rank and file and union leaders, resulting in wildcat strikes and other job actions.7 As Jefferson Cowie has noted, “[s]tarting in the 1973–74 years, real earnings began to stagnate and then slide” due to “oil shocks and inflation; deindustrialization, plant closings, and anti-unionism; and a global restructuring of work itself that would continue over the ensuing decades.”8 Adam Turl has argued that while the miners were among the last to succumb to capital’s offensive, with the 1977–78 national strike “remain[ing] the greatest expression of resistance to the neoliberal turn,” the rank-and-file revolt of the coal miners “was emblematic of the tran- sitional period in both the capitalist economy . . . as well as a historic shift from a relatively combative labor movement in the 1970s to the passive labor movement of the 1980s.”9 The project of union democratization faced many challenges, perhaps most centrally the confrontation of this reorganization of capital and labor—what today we would call neoliberalism and globalization. However, in the scramble to explain the decline of union power at the end of the long seventies as well as the subsiding of the union democracy movements that had extended well beyond the UMWA and into the labor movement generally, some have counterposed issues of union power and women’s rights in the workplace (or the rights of other historically oppressed groups). Cowie has argued that “reformed and diversified versions of individualism in post-sixties America proved more attractive than did the stumbling drive for collective economic rights,”10 and Nelson Lichtenstein has argued that “individual rights and unionism were counterposed in the 1960s and 1970s, to the detriment of both.” Work- place rights, he argues, “have an individual, racially coded character, but not a collective meaning.”11 Meanwhile, even as Jane Latour has captured how the Association for Union Democracy, founded in 1969, linked the struggles of individual women to overcome sex discrimination with the broader project of democratizing the trades in New York City,12 she also suggests that while women in the trades demonstrated a “commitment . . . to a rank and file, democratic brand of trade unionism,” women trade unionists later “learned about the limits of democracy within their unions.”13

6. Rosen, Bitter Choices; Cowie, Capital Moves. 7. Moody, Injury to All. A “wildcat” strike is a work stoppage that takes place in violation of a currently standing contractual agreement. 8. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 12. 9. Turl, “The Miners’ Strike of 1977–78,” 45. 10. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 72. 11. Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 179. 12. Latour, Sisters in the Brotherhoods, 25. 13. Ibid., 25.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 44 13.1 LABOR While it is true that the struggles for union democracy did not necessarily result in the hiring of more women, women miners demonstrated that democratization through active participation in their unions and organizing of the rank and file was intimately linked to the gains they made as individual women. Indeed, mining women were part of a group of rank-and-file militants, particularly women and black workers, who saw civil rights and union rights as intimately connected ideas that could not be achieved separately. For these workers, in some of the nation’s most powerful unions—including, in addition to the UMWA, the Teamsters, United Auto Workers, and United Steel Workers (USW)—the work of democratizing unions through rank-and-file empowerment became their central concern during the 1970s.14 In rank-and-file democracy they saw the answer both to ending discrimination and to making embattled and weakening labor unions into the weapon of the working class. As Kim Moody notes, however, “recession and the disastrous effects of restructuring,” which had begun in the 1960s but became increasingly consolidated across the 1970s, undermined the efforts of workers to democratize their unions.15 In the coal industry, women miners, alongside their male counterparts, faced a complex political landscape in an industry that contemporary commentators felt had reached its peak yet that saw work stoppages at ten times the rate of other industries.16 The rank and file attempted to address tensions over the antagonistic relationship between safety needs and productivity demands, the persistence of racism in the mines, and a rapidly restructuring energy industry not only through the use of strike action, which increased rapidly beginning in 1967, but also through the model of democratic unionism that had been set forward during the MFD election campaign, one centered around rank-and-file political activity and control of the union. The MFD campaign to elect Miller opened up new spaces for rank-and-file activism that were particularly well suited to the newly employed women miners, who until 1977 had no representation in union leadership at the local, district, or national level. For this reason, women miners saw their participation in the fight for a democratic union as the best way to ensure that their rights in the workplace were respected. Using a number of different tactical approaches—including grievance procedures, rank-and- file political mobilization, work stoppages, pursuing elected office within the union, and self-organizing among Appalachian women—women miners forged a political space for themselves within the UMWA during the Miller administration. The impact of their struggle reached far beyond their small but exponentially growing numbers. As the popularity of the MFD officials waned and the incredible levels of rank-and-file self-organization that had characterized the period from 1969 to 1972 began to disintegrate, the women, like many other women who entered the unionized

14. Benson, Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers and Paul Nyden, “Rank-and-File Movements in the United Mine Workers of America, Early 1960s–Early 1980s” in Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal- vin Winslow, Rebel Rank and File. 15. Moody, Injury to All, 221. 16. Turl, “Miners’ Strike of 1977–78,” 39.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 45

industrial workforce after Title VII, took up the mantle of union democracy, and in the process they became leaders among the rank and file.17 The first women miners in western Pennsylvania drew on a long—if uneven—tradition in the UMWA of challenging oppression in the name of building the union.18 Yet because women had rarely occupied the role of fellow worker, women’s participation in union politics had mostly been confined to the organization of women’s auxiliaries.19 Women coal miners remain largely unstudied and have been ignored in all accounts of the MFD. Scholars like Suzanne Tallichet have begun the important work of documenting women miners’ struggles in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly the crucial role women played in the Pittston strike; but without exam- ining the important years between 1973 and 1979 and considering the legacy of collective action by women in coal mining communities in shaping women miners as union leaders, it is difficult to trace a line between the entry of individual women into the industry and collective leadership by a core group of women militants who fought for maternity leave and union recognition even as the labor movement found itself under sustained attack.20

Challenging Industrial Unionism The first women miners in District 5, hired by Bethlehem Steel and its subsidiaries in 1974, entered the UMWA as women in other industrial unions grappled with the emerging tasks of building union democracy and defending the newly won right of nondiscrimination in the workplace.21 Women miners followed on the heels of women and black steelworkers fighting discrimination in their workplaces, which were often owned by the same companies, due to the large amount of coal used in steel production.22 As a result, the struggles of steelworkers, particularly those resulting in formal changes to company policy, often impacted coal miners. Bethlehem Steel developed its equal-opportunity employment policies first in response to broad organizational pressure to confront sexual and racial discrimination in its steel factories. Legal decisions began to back up the rank-and-file efforts in January 1973, when the Labor Department ordered an end to discriminatory practices at Sparrows Point, a Bethlehem Steel plant in Maryland, after black workers sued for seniority and pay they had been denied because of discriminatory job placement and transfer policies.23

17. On the decline of the MFD, see Paul Nyden, “Rank-and-File Movements.” 18. Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields; Letwin, Challenge of Interracial Unionism. 19. Merithew, “We Were Not ‘Ladies’ ”; Booth, “Ladies in White.” 20. Tallichet, Daughters of the Mountain; Dawson, “Women Miners and the UMWA”; Moore, “Women Go Underground.” 21. Witt, “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines”; “Lady Miner Digs Her Job,” Ebony, October 1974, 116–22. The women hired in District 5 were not the first: three women had been hired by Bethlehem and its subsidiaries in 1973 in Kentucky and West Virginia. 22. Cohn, “Working-Class Women’s Liberation”; Phillip Nyden, Steelworkers Rank-and-File. 23. Watson, “Md. Plant Gets Jobs Bias Fiat”; Smith, “Black Steelworkers Win Major Victory”; Stein, Running Steel, Running America, 136–45.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 46 13.1 LABOR Critically, the black workers who filed the suit, all committed trade unionists, simultaneously sued the USW for their complicity in the racially discriminatory seniority system.24 While women miners would utilize different tactics against discriminatory seniority systems, the precedent set by the Sparrow Point decision set a powerful example: not only did workplaces have to change, unions did too. Women steelworkers in Pittsburgh soon followed the Sparrow Point example: they filed claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1974 after a 17 percent cut in production resulted in 95 percent of the plant’s women being laid off.25 However, legal decisions did not provide a strong mechanism for enforcement. As grievance procedures, strikes, and other workplace actions that were organized through unions became a key mechanism for enforcing the rights that black and women workers had in law if not in practice, the union democracy movements—which demanded rank-and-file control of the union and its priorities— took on increased stakes for black and women workers.26 The pattern of concessions from Bethlehem would only be enforced with continuous pressure from rank-and-file union members. These struggles had lasting impact on employment patterns in the coal mines. Bethlehem Steel, sometimes through its subsidiaries, was the first operator to hire women miners to work underground in three states: Kentucky and West Vir- ginia in 1973 and Pennsylvania in 1974.27 By 1977, 44 percent of women miners still were in the employ of just five large steel companies, one of which was Bethlehem.28 Women miners hired by Bethlehem Steel in 1974 entered the UMWA during a moment of upheaval, as the newly elected MFD officials, both at the national level and in District 5, took office and prepared to negotiate their first national contract. The MFD saw the corruption and murderous arrogance of the Boyle regime as symptomatic of a deeper problem. Since the UMWA’s founding in 1890, the rank and file had never voted on a contract, nor did they have elected mine safety committees.29 A spate of mine disasters—including the explosion at the Mannington mine that killed seventy-eight men—made the safety issue, always a chief concern among miners, take center stage alongside the promise of black-lung benefits for disabled miners.30 Other campaign promises included reduction in officer salaries; raises in pensions; new organizing drives; election of all union officials, including mine safety committees; and arguably most important, membership ratification of all contracts.31 Miners in Western Pennsylvania overwhelmingly supported the MFD’s reform plat- form, with many areas supporting Arnold Miller’s slate over Boyle by three-to-one

24. Moody, Injury to All, 251–52. 25. Davenport, “Women Steelworkers Confront Union.” 26. For an account of this process outside the UMW and USW, see Georgakas and Surkin’s classic account of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying. 27. Witt, “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines”; “Lady Miner Digs Her Job.” 28. Swardson, “Women Dig into the Coal Industry.” 29. Scholl, “Housecleaning at the UMW.” 30. Scholl, “UMWA: Miller Team Takes Charge.” 31. Ibid.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 47

margins; in some District 5 locals, the ratio was as high as eight to one.32 The district as a whole supported Miller by nearly a two-to-one margin—much higher than in the nearby districts, which polled nearly even. The next year, in the 1973 district elections, the same miners elected another MFD reform slate, led by Louis Antal.33 Voting for a rank and file–controlled union in an election did not immedi- ately translate into the implementation of union democracy in practice. Women had, for example, played a critical role in the election of the MFD slates as the wives and daughters of miners killed in accidents and disabled by black lung, yet the National Lawyers Guild, in a report on the movement for black lung benefits—one of the principal achievements of the MFD administration—noted that sexism was preva- lent in this organizing because of “union chauvinism . . . women have been wives or mothers or widows, never union members.”34 Despite the long history of women’s support for miners’ struggles,35 the attitudes of men toward women’s involvement in union activity presented a significant hurdle for early women miners, especially since their numbers were so small, and it was rare for more than one woman to be employed at a particular worksite.36 Once hired, the hostile attitudes of male coworkers and their spouses presented the most immediate hurdle to women’s full participation in their unions and the democratization of union locals. When the United Mine Workers Journal first announced in May 1973 that women had become employed in the mines and were active members of their union locals, it ignited a yearlong controversy.37 Initial responses from male union members and their wives were extremely hostile. “I think the idea of women working in the mines is all part of this whole women’s lib thing,” said rank-and-filer Ross Spe- nilla, “[a]nd my opinion of that is that it’s the men who need to be liberated.” He also thought women would make the union vulnerable in strikes, because “they tried to organize [the textile factories], but the women just wouldn’t stay out.”38 Warren Bai- ley, a rank-and-file mechanic, added that he did not think there was “more than one in 25 that could do the work,” and laborer Earl Castle thought working in the mines would undermine women’s place in the home, especially their social role as wife and mother.39 Carol Delp, who had been a working woman before she married a miner, thought that coal mines were “no place for women to play games and experiment to see whether or not they can handle the job. . . . A woman’s presence in the mines I feel would be a hazard to safety.”40 Such an initially hostile environment did not,

32. “1972 UMWA International Election Results,” United Mine Workers Journal, January 1, 1973, 6–32. 33. Paul Nyden, “Black Coal Miners in the United States,” 41. 34. “Black Lung Movement,” Labor Newsletter 19, February 1977, CEP Archives, box 58, folder 2. 35. Merithew, “We Were Not ‘Ladies’ ”; Booth, “Ladies in White.” Merithew and Booth document the heavy involvement of women’s auxiliaries in the coalfield wars of the 1920s and 1930s. 36. Betty Jean Hall, notes at the Woodruff Conference, November 23, 1977, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 37. Witt, “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines.” 38. “The Rank-and-File Speaks,” United Mine Workers Journal, May 15, 1973, 13. 39. Ibid. 40. Delp, letter to the editor.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 48 13.1 LABOR however, deter women from their fight for employment underground or dissuade them from being active members in their locals.41 In fact, their numbers in District 5 increased exponentially from the years 1974 to 1979. From 6 women initially hired by Bethlehem Mines in 1974, the number of women miners grew to 219 by 1977 and doubled again by September 1978, when women constituted 11.4 percent of all miners hired to work underground, up from 4.2 percent the previous year and 0.1 percent in 1974.42 The attitudes of male miners also proved fluid, in many ways quicker to change than those of the union’s leadership. Despite the initial hostility women encountered upon entering the mines, they remained optimistic about the potential for change in the attitudes of male miners. Viola, a black woman miner from District 5, recalled in an interview these “changing attitudes”: most men were initially “dis- tant” when she began to work underground, but over time, they began to accept her as a worker and a union member.43 Within one year of the United Mine Workers Journal article that had ignited the debate over women miners, attitudes had begun to shift. When in June 1974 a letter to the editor from Wanda Harless, a miner’s wife, was published in the journal, the extent of that shift and the role of women miners in bringing it about became clear in the responses. Harless had written to “remind the women that they are still under the men” and that “no woman has the right to work underground in dark holes with someone else’s husband.” She claimed that “more women than you think” supported her opinion that women miners were unfeminine and that women were naturally unequal to men by God’s design.44 Among the string of letters to the editor that followed, however, many were from men and women who openly defended women’s rights, as did Lawrence Childers, who responded to Harless in the July issue. “No one who is, as Mrs. Harless puts it, under someone else, can be a full woman, or a full man either, for that matter,” he wrote. “I have worked with many women, many different places, both married and single women, and have never seen it fail. Women who respect themselves on the job are greatly respected by the men.”45 In the next issue, a woman miner, Pam Schuble, indirectly chastised Harless for concern over the hiring of women and refocused the issue as a question of union power: “All readers should not be so concerned over the sex of brother or sister workers, but what kind of union member this person is going to be. Only if we are united, will we

41. Looney, “First Women Get Jobs Underground.” 42. Statistics from Betty Jean Hall, notes at the Woodruff Conference; “Women Miners Increasing in Numbers,” Southern Appalachian Ministry in Higher Education Newsletter, June 1979, CEP Archives, box 84, folder 5; Betty Jean Hall to Sarah Sedgewick; A. P. Watson and C. L. White, “Workplace Injury Expe- rience of Female Coal Miners in the United States,” Archives of Environmental Health, Washington, DC, 1983, 286, box 49, folder 3; Betty Jean Hall, “Women Miners Can Dig It Too!,” manuscript, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7. 43. Viola [no last name given], District 5 Miner, interview by Betty Jean Hall, 1977, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 44. Harless, letter to the editor. 45. Childers, letter to the editor.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 49

remain the strongest union in the United States. . . . The new women in the mines must help their men maintain their powerful United Mine Workers of America.”46 The debate in the pages of the journal showed a shift in political consciousness among male miners, one that reflected the struggles and organizing taking place in the coalfields. In 1976, Billy Baynes, a woman employed at the District 5 Vesta No. 5 mine, said that “the men have even begun to defend us as good workers, as buddies.”47 The same year, Rosa Pitts, another District 5 miner and a black woman, was informally elected as an interim secretary for her local at Bethlehem’s Marianna mine.48 The small number of women miners, most of whom had become active members in their union locals,49 had undone the gendered segregation of their workplaces and unions and played a central role in the male miners’ changing attitudes. Soon after being hired to work underground, women threw their political force behind the union. Women miners made a deliberate choice in choosing to support a union with a leadership that resisted recognizing their efforts until 1979, a choice shaped by the economic landscape of Western Pennsylvania—which, outside Pittsburgh, provided few employment opportunities with living wages other than coal mining.50 Indeed, women miners cited the wages as the primary reason for apply- ing for the underground positions. Olivia Rowe, one of two black women hired by Bethlehem Mines in the initial program, had previously been employed as a domestic worker earning only $50 per week. When she began working in Bethlehem’s Nanty Glo mine as a laborer, one of the lowest-paid positions in the mine, her wages jumped nearly 500 percent. Access to a unionized mining job “signaled the end of a nearly destitute life” for Rowe, who was a single mother of eight children.51 Barbara Phil- lips, a white woman who was hired in 1978, saw her wages increase more than 1,000 percent, from $35 dollars per week working as a diner waitress to an average of $400 weekly for her work loading coal.52 Other women entered the mines from the textile industry, which ran piecework operations throughout central Appalachia. The piecework paid very poorly, usually no more than $15 to $20 a day.53 Then there was also the question of dignity: Linda Thompson had worked “in dress shops for mini- mum wage and if the boss didn’t like you, you didn’t get a raise . . . [and] I hated office work . . . in an office, you can’t say ‘hey, you’re discriminating against me.’ But in the mines you can.”54 In addition to drastically higher wages, union mining jobs also offered myriad other workplace rights denied to women in nonunionized, low-wage employment, providing women miners with strong incentive to challenge sexism

46. Schuble, letter to the editor. 47. “The Rank-and-File Speaks,” United Mine Workers Journal, May 1, 1976, 12–13. 48. Ibid. 49. Witt, “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines.” 50. Baker, “Mining Women Stand Firm.” 51. “Lady Miner Digs Her Job,” 116–19. 52. Kreck, “Women Drawn to Mines.” 53. Witt, “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines.” 54. Baker, “Mining Women Stand Firm.”

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 50 13.1 LABOR from within the already existing union structure rather than leave the industry due to instances of discrimination or harassment. The strategy pursued by women miners in District 5—to challenge their union for inclusion—emulated the examples of other union women, especially those entering other traditionally male-dominated unions like the USW, who pursued similar demands, such as ratification of the ERA and increased representation of women in union leadership.55 Linda Jenness, a leader in the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) and a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which would later industrialize women into the mines, appealed to women workers in 1973: “The best way women workers can fight against job discrimination is through the unions. . . . But we know there is a need for change in our unions. We see that we are underrepresented. Our unions have not taken our needs seriously.” Jenness saw the endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by an increasing number of labor organizations as evidence of the growing influence of women in the unions. “Union women forced that change,” she wrote. “We are demanding that the unions take us seriously and women’s issues seriously.”56 By March 1974, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, of which the UMWA was part, had endorsed CLUW, becoming the first statewide labor body to do so.57 The move came at a critical point for women seeking employment in the mines, women who in Pennsylvania would first be hired in April of that year. By endorsing CLUW, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO had also endorsed their mission, which, among other things, contained strong language about affirmative action in the workplace: “Employers continue to profit by dividing workers along sexual, racial, and age lines. This encourages segregation of job classification and results in wage and benefit losses to women. . . . The Coalition will seek to encourage women, through their unions, to recognize and take positive job action against job discrimination in hiring, promotion, classification, and other aspects of work.”58 Rather than focus on past sexual discrimination by the unions, the mission statement focused the women’s efforts on using the political moment to transform both their employment opportunities and their unions. CLUW was not the only organization orienting women union members toward a fight for democracy. The Association for Union Democracy (AUD), a national nonprofit founded in 1970 that published material to educate and train union democracy activists, reached out to women in 1973 and held a conference in Novem- ber of that year.59 The AUD saw the increase of women’s activity within unions as deeply connected to the rise of the women’s movement. “As the determination of women to win equal rights in society rises, their activity in the unions increases,”

55. Mary Zins to conference steering committee, April 3, 1979, CEP Archives, box 32A, folder 9. Women miners and women steelworkers attended each other’s conferences, and two women steelworkers spoke on panels at the first national conference of women miners, held by the CEP in 1979. 56. Jenness, “Union Women on the March.” 57. “CLUW Wins Support of Pennsylvania AFL-CIO,” Militant, May 3, 1974. 58. “CLUW Statement of Purpose,” reprinted in Militant, April 5, 1974. 59. Benson, Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 51

noted Susan Jennick in her invitation to women miners to participate in the conference. “Some are delighted to find their unions can be counted on to back their goals,” she noted, while others had to struggle for recognition and acceptance within their union before they could be sure of union backing in the workplace, and some women faced outright hostility from their union brothers. The goal of the conference was to help women “deal with this whole range of situations, with special attention to the need to defend women’s rights inside their unions and to help them exer- cise those rights.”60 The AUD also thought this struggle would be transformative for the unions in which women were members: the fight against sexual discrimination would strengthen the emerging fights for union democracy.61 This strategy did not mean that union women subsumed the struggle against sexism to their work in the union; rather, they saw the two as intimately linked: fighting discrimination at work was impossible without a strong union, and without the full participation of women, a democratic union was infeasible.

Wildcat Feminism Lacking a formal organizational structure that District 5’s mining women could use to challenge discrimination in the workplace, they engaged in activism within their changing union to improve conditions where they could. This included participation in the national strikes in 1974 and 1977–78 as well as numerous wildcat strikes that characterized a period of “rank-and-file revolt.”62 During strikes in 1973 and 1974, relationships between women strikers, male strikers, and their wives were initially tense. Linda, a woman miner, recalled her first experience of striking: “I mean even on the picket lines! They’re having a fit because we’re on the picket lines. And we work with them. We got to go on [those lines] or they would give us a hard time when we [return to work].”63 Women on the picket lines were catapulted into the national spotlight by the role of the Women’s Club during the union recognition strike at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. National news papers like the New York Times placed the Brookside Women’s Club in the context of the nationwide feminist movement but incorrectly stated that the strike represented “the first time in coal union history that women are so actively involved in a strike.”64 In contrast, the United Mine Workers Journal valorized the Brookside women and placed them in a long tradition of women union militants in the coalfields that stretched back to Mother Jones.65 Although the members of the Brookside Wom- en’s Club were not miners themselves, the central role they played in the victory at

60. Susan Jennick, AUD Women’s Project Director, 1973, CEP Archives, box 50, folder 11. 61. “Using Union Democracy to Fight Sex Bias,” Union Democracy Review, 1972. 62. Cohn, “Working-Class Women’s Liberation.” 63. Linda [no last name given], interview by Betty Jean Hall, 1977, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 64. Klemesrud, “Coal Miners Started the Strike.” 65. “Women and the UMWA: From Mother Jones to Brookside,” United Mine Workers Journal, March 1, 1976, 10–12; Brody, “We Stood by Our Men.” Also see the United Mine Workers Journal’s regular cov- erage of the Brookside strike, which often featured the women, from November 1973 to September 1974.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 52 13.1 LABOR Brookside legitimized the presence of women—whether they were miners or auxiliary members—on picket lines nationwide.66 However, most miners’ strikes from 1973 to 1979 were not strikes for union recognition or contract strikes but wildcats, which did not receive formal union support. UMWA leadership tended to counterpose wildcats—which, by the mid-1970s, were occurring at the rate of one hundred per month nationwide—with the grievance procedure outlined in the contract.67 Because the leadership felt undermined in their capacity to negotiate the next contract, they came out publicly against the wildcat strikes. They argued that wildcats occurred when miners were young, imma- ture, and inexperienced.68 Commentators suggested that the wildcats were evidence of rank-and-file dissatisfaction with leadership, but Miller was easily reelected in 1977, beating the closest opponent by nearly six thousand votes, and his margin of victory in District 5 was higher than it had been in 1972. In 1977, Miller won by more than two to one.69 Yet there was a spike of wildcats, beginning in the late 1960s and lasting almost to the end of Miller’s presidency. How could this be explained? The membership had a more diverse set of views than the union leadership on the wildcat strikes plaguing operators. A significant group—the group most represented in the United Mine Workers Journal’s “Rank-and-File Speak” section— opposed the wildcats because they resulted in loss of pay. These miners encouraged others to wait for the next contract to strike unless there was an immediate threat to safety.70 However, others saw the wildcat as one of many methods at the disposal of union workers, something that could be utilized alongside the grievance and petition, committee meeting and lobbying effort, demonstration and contract strike. As miners debated their priorities for the 1977 contract, the right to strike during the life of the contract was the number one demand of District 5 miners.71 Their perspective was less broadly publicized, but its existence is substantiated by the large number of wildcats throughout the decade. Additionally, the same miners who initiated and participated in wildcat strikes also filed grievances. These tactics were taken in concert, not in opposition to each other. They were indicative of both the desire for rank-and-file control of the union and the inadequacy of the existing structures in the union, the workplace, and the contract to accommodate rank-and-file decision making. And in District 5, the locals with the most women—1190 and 2874—also engaged in the most wildcat strikes.72

66. Kopple, Harlan County, USA; “Women and the UMWA.” 67. Witt, “Wildcat Strikes.” 68. Ibid. 69. “Results of the UMWA International Election for 1977,” United Mine Workers Journal, July 16, 1977, 12–45. 70. Witt, “Wildcat Strikes.” 71. Local union contract priority submissions, 1977, and District 5 contract priorities for the Interna- tional Executive Board, September 9, 1977, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 2B, 1977 Wage Conference folder. 72. Correspondence records between district and locals, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 25.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 53

In District 5, miners also utilized grievance procedures to rectify safety and discrimination issues as well as to maintain the threat of work stoppages and slow- downs. Grievances and wildcats were not always explicitly connected but rather loomed next to each other, distinct forms of the same basic process: the protesting of working conditions. During the MFD administration, miners at Bethlehem Steel’s subsidiaries—where women were disproportionately employed because of the gains made by women steelworkers—filed more grievances than any other District 5 locals. Some, such as Local 1190, filed hundreds of grievances during the Miller presidency, contradicting the company-created image of Bethlehem Steel a safety-conscious, diverse company.73 Most grievances dealt with work safety issues or denial of hours or pay, but they were also used to explicitly confront racial and sexual discrimination, both by the company generally and by particular members of management.74 Addi- tionally, as the steelworkers at Sparrow Point had demonstrated, categories and practices that might initially appear race and gender neutral in fact aided in the repro- duction of discriminatory employment practices. Thus grievances filed by black and women miners over seniority or work assignment were buttressed by legal cases that had established patterns of discrimination on the basis of race and sex in these areas. In this way, black and women workers politicized their unions. William Paterson Jr. and Oscar Clemons both filed multiple grievances against racial discrimination in job assignment with the full and unambiguous support of the local’s mine committee. Paterson and Clemons, along with a woman miner, Carol A. Stotka, were then named to a committee to make suggestions to the company on behalf of minority workers. Even though the company had agreed to the committee of minority workers in the name of “mutual cooperation,” management refused to pay the committee members for their work. The mine committee demanded that the newly appointed committee members receive the full rate of pay for their work even as the mine manager claimed there was “no contractual provision for pay.” Under pressure from the rank and file of Local 1190, management conceded and agreed to pay each committee member $25 for their work.75 In another grievance filed by Paterson, this time after being denied overtime that was then given to a white coworker, the mine committee asserted that “Mr. Paterson has worked in this mine for eight years under severe discrimination by not being given the opportunity to achieve equality in pay with his white brothers.”76 The miners used the language

73. Local 1190 was the local for Ellsworth #51 mine, operated by Bethlehem Mines, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. 74. Safety, always a key issue for underground miners, appears less in the grievances from this period than one might expect, probably because dangerous working conditions were the most likely to be met with a wildcat strike. 75. BCOA [Bituminous Coal Operators’ Association]-UMWA Standard Grievance Form, Oscar Clemons, on behalf of William Paterson, Jr., Carol A. Stotka, and himself, Local Union 1190, settled 1978, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 25, folder 20. 76. BCOA-UMWA Standard Grievance Form, William Paterson, Local Union 1190, settled 1978, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 25, folder 20.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 54 13.1 LABOR of civil rights legislation in their grievances against racial and sexual discrimination. They understood that the threat of legal enforcement could pressure operators and mine management into quick concessions, but they also understood the centrality of workplace organizing to the successful pursuit of grievances. Few cases that reached the highest level of legal arbitration were decided in favor of the union during this period. Miners’ best chance was to force concessions early through collective action.77 Success was more likely when the grievance procedure coupled with some form of job action—most commonly the delivering of a petition to mine management. Women participated widely in this form of action: almost all petitions delivered in District 5 from 1973 to 1979 had women signatories, affirming the United Mine Workers Journal observation that women “are very active in union affairs.”78 Women also filed or acted as signatories on many safety grievances, and they were more likely to file a grievance than their male counterparts79 even though, as John Moore—a male miner interviewed about his experience working with women miners—noted, mine management would “constantly [be] looking for an excuse to fire a woman to get rid of her.”80 Still, he pointed out that “women tend to be very quick to file grievances . . . because a woman can file almost any kind of grievance and get action, where a man would be laughed out of the mine for doing the same thing.”81 Women could back up the grievance with threats of a discrimination lawsuit if the problems outlined in the grievance were not addressed, and in the process, they could improve working conditions for all workers—men and women—in the mine. Even though women in District 5 proportionately filed higher numbers of grievances than male miners, women’s grievances rarely framed the central com- plaint of the grievance explicitly as sex discrimination. They were more likely, as Local 287482 member Rosa Pitts did, to discuss instances of discrimination in terms of seniority and job assignment, which by the mid-1970s were clearly gendered and racialized categories as a result of antidiscrimination cases like the one at Sparrow Point that was decided in 1973. In 1977, Pitts, a black woman, filed a grievance after being the only mason not called in to work over two days in early March. “I do not feel this is fair,” she argued, “and I think I should be paid for two shifts.”83 The mine

77. In the hundreds of grievances surveyed during this research, none that reached third-stage arbitration were decided in favor of the union. 78. Looney, “First Women Get Jobs Underground,” 7. 79. However, the number of grievances filed by women seems small—only forty or so remain on file in the District 5 archives for the years 1973–79—considering that the number of women employed in District 5 during this time never breached 250. The number of grievances filed per woman miner was much higher than the number filed per male miner. See UMWA District 5 Archives, boxes 26 and 31. 80. Betty Jean Hall, interview notes from conversation with male miner John Moore, October 3, 1977, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 81. Ibid. 82. LU 2874 is the local for the Marianna Mine, operated by Bethlehem Mines, a subsidiary of Beth- lehem Steel. 83. BCOA-UMWA Standard Grievance Form, filed by Rosa Pitts, LU 2874, settled March 24, 1977, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 31, folder 12. About two-thirds of the grievances filed by women related to seniority issues.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 55

committee agreed and implied that failure to settle the grievance might result in a deterioration of management-union relations—in other words, a wildcat strike. Man- agement agreed to pay her for one shift in second-stage arbitration.84 Despite this high level of women’s activity within their locals during the first four years of their employment underground, women still had not found an effective method to balance their union activity with their struggle within the union for recognition of the special problems that women faced in the workplace. That the early woman miner was often the only woman employed in her particular mine com- pounded this problem. As Betty Jean Hall, a feminist Appalachian attorney who would later found the Coal Employment Project (CEP), noted, “Lone women on the job site . . . almost always invites [sic] problems.” When two or more women worked in a mine, “they provide support for each other, [and] hazing problems are less likely.”85 Rank-and-file women echoed this sentiment. “Maybe if a few more women are able to get in the mines, the few that are there won’t have quite as much harassment [sic] to put up with,” wrote Annette Burres, a District 5 miner, to one of her union sisters.86

The Coal Employment Project By the late 1970s, the question of how best to organize mining women loomed large. CLUW never recruited many women miners to their ranks and had little influence among them, even though CLUW and mining women shared many goals, including the passage of the ERA and the expansion of affirmative action programs. The organized left made small inroads among women miners but never gained broad membership among them. However, the SWP recognized the importance of women miners’ struggles inside the UMWA. Between 1977 and 1979, at least four women members of the SWP got mining jobs and played a role in organizing women miners into the CEP after 1978. They served on the steering committee of the CEP’s conference for women miners, where they connected coalfield struggles for union democracy and gender equity to similar battles in the USW (where the SWP had a longer organized presence) and the Teamsters union.87 Ultimately, it was the SWP’s willing- ness to work inside the union while critiquing the union leadership’s failure to uphold a working-class ideal of solidarity—among workers, between men and women—that gave their revolutionary politics a hearing in the 1970s even if their overall impact remained relatively small. On the other hand, the CEP, founded in 1977 by Hall through her work with rank-and-file women, was by far the most important organization for women

84. Union representative’s notes from arbitration, March 24, 1977, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 31, folder 12. 85. Betty Jean Hall, notes from meeting with Rosalyn D. Kane, November 28, 1977, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 86. Annette Burres to Joyce Dukes, 1977, CEP Archives, box 69, folder 40. 87. Steering Committee for National Conference of Women Miners to Arnold Miller, May 7, 1979, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7; “Women Miners and the UMWA,” Occasional Paper no. 11, 1992, UMWA District 5, Local 1197, Pittsburgh.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 56 13.1 LABOR miners alongside their union and represented a major breakthrough organizationally. Although the UMWA had “generally encouraged the new policy of women’s employment,” women miners and their grievances were still seen as afterthoughts to the union’s organizing efforts.88 Better than any other organization, the CEP balanced the desire of women to work through their unions with the dire need of women miners to address the specific issues they faced in the workplace and to organize themselves as a united force within the UMWA. The CEP represented a working- class feminism that was also sensitive to the Appalachian regional identity of many women miners. The project’s early days in 1977 focused the attention of the staffers on gathering statistical data, interviewing women miners and the men with whom they worked, and establishing a network among Appalachian women, women’s organizations, legal resources, labor solidarity groups, and unions. By 1978, the CEP had begun to galvanize women miners and their allies as a collective political force. The task before the organization was enormous. Connie White, the CEP’s program coordinator, concluded that women were “discouraged from learning new equip- ment, unfairly passed over for advancement opportunities, sexually or in other ways harassed, just to name a few.”89 By February 1978, however, the CEP had clearly iden- tified a dual purpose: to encourage and support women as they sought employment in the mines and to train them in how to become union activists.90 Rank-and-file members of the CEP advanced the organization’s project by compiling the Coal Women’s Support Team! newsletter, a monthly publication that allowed women miners to gain a national perspective on their struggle, to share ideas for organizing at work, and to support those women who were alone at their work sites.91 As its first major project, the CEP organized a national conference of women miners, the first meeting of its kind, which took place in the summer of 1979. Many organizations supported the CEP conference, including the SWP, the National Orga- nization for Women (NOW), and the Teamster democracy movement, Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). The TDU from western Pennsylvania reached out to the women, offering copies of their literature on how to address sexism in the workplace, but their central purpose in reaching out to the women was to link the fight for democracy in the UMWA with the TDU struggle: “The needs being the same in any union for a grassroots flow of energy, our movement could have a cross-fertilizing influence in the coalfields, in much the same way that the 1978 miner’s strike gave direction to our work, not to mention inspiration. The possibility of a women’s caucus emerging from the June conference as a permanent (and inevitably expanding) force in the UMWA is an exciting prospect as well,” TDU member Danny Kablack wrote, implying the importance of women union members to the ongoing, cross-industry struggles for union democracy.92

88. “Lady Miner Digs Her Job,” 120. 89. Connie White to Jane Danisman, May 8, 1979, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7. 90. Meeting minutes, February 11, 1978, CEP Archives, box 32A, folder 6. 91. Betty Jean Hall to Cherry Harman, February 25, 1978, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 2. 92. Danny Kablack, W. Pa. TDU, to Steering Committee, April 29, 1979, CEP Archives, box 32A, folder 9.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 57

Notably absent was the UMWA. The conference’s steering committee reached out to the UMWA national leadership,93 but Miller did not attend the conference, nor did he send a representative, though two women who worked at the international office attended as independent observers without participating in the proceedings.94 The Black Lung Association (BLA), an organization of disabled miners and miners’ widows—whose self-organizing efforts to secure disability benefits for miners who contracted black lung had, alongside new safety measures to decrease its incidence, laid the groundwork for the election of the MFD95—actively participated in the conference, and the BLA’s president, Bill Worthington, a black retired miner, attended the conference and provided the invocation. Speaking as a retired miner with thirty- three years underground, he stated that he had seen real progress in his time, but he had also witnessed the decrease of the most radical union in the world. “Don’t go back,” he warned; “[l]et’s go forward and keep moving strong!”96 Worthington’s speech made clear that the women’s struggle had implications for the UMWA as a whole. Florence Reese,97 an icon of the mine wars of the 1930s, was the conference’s keynote speaker, and she spoke strongly against the tradition of keeping women out of the mines. “They said, ‘Don’t let the women go in the mine or a man will get killed.’ So the women stayed out of the mines and the men got killed anyway.” It was the operators—not the women—who were to blame for the danger of the mines.98 NOW provided financial support for the conference, but women miners did not necessarily perceive NOW as an organization for union women. When organizers asked if women’s organizations should be invited to present at a national conference of women coal miners in 1979, many women surveyed responded ambivalently. “Let’s push our own sisters before we lose sight of our goals,” wrote Pam Schuble. Carol Brittian insisted that “only unions” be allowed to present at the conference, and Barbara Angle wrote that while there was a real need for the conference, it needed to have “more specific intentions than just a ‘jam session’ for the women.” The sur- veys suggested a desire for union women to have their own organization, even as conference attendees suggested other ways to engage with the mainstream women’s movement. Suggestions for keynote speakers at the next conference included Barbara Walters and Erma Henderson, president of the Detroit City Council, because miner Sandra Bailey, who submitted Henderson’s name, thought that she would be a good speaker on the issue of sisterhood. In addition, many women miners supported the idea of an organization like NOW or the YWCA giving a presentation on a women’s

93. Steering Committee for National Conference of Women Miners to Arnold Miller, May 7, 1979, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7. 94. “Women Rally at National Conference,” Mountain Life and Work, July-August 1979, 4–5. 95. Triolo, Black Debacle, 117–23. 96. Minutes from the closing session, July 4, 1979, CEP Archives, box 32A, folder 6. 97. Reese, a miner’s wife, wrote the iconic labor song, “Which Side Are You On?” during the Harlan County mine wars in the 1930s, when the county was known as “Bloody Harlan.” 98. “Women Miners,” Southern Appalachian Ministry in Higher Education Newsletter, June 1979, CEP Archives, box 84, folder 5.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 58 13.1 LABOR issue that was centrally important to mining women, such as childcare, even if the women were opposed to the organizations’ setting up recruitment tables.99 Rather than suggesting that women’s class identity trumped their identification with the struggles of other women, the complicated relationship between women miners and feminist organizations suggests that they were acutely aware of the intersection of these identities and believed workingwomen needed organizations that would represent their specific needs and interests. The attitudes of women miners toward the UMWA were equally complex. On one hand, the women advocated for the inclusion of their union brothers and other unions outside the mining industry at the conference. “What is good, and helpful to me, also has to be the same for my union brothers. Unity and peace has to be there. Not one of us working in the mines can forget this. . . . We need to unite not as woman miners but as the United Mine Workers of America,” argued Schuble. Pau- lette Shine echoed her, asserting, “A woman’s place is in the UMWA!”—a declara- tion that was later adopted as the conference slogan.100 Pennsylvania’s women miners who filled out the survey unanimously thought men should attend and participate in the conference.101 But they also chided the leadership for its failure to address women’s issues and for the lack of women in union leadership positions. “Why aren’t more women higher up in the union?” asked Bailey.102 It took until 1977 for a woman to be elected head of a union local, and at the time of the conference, the UMWA had never seated women delegates at its constitutional convention.103 The conference was a success, drawing more than two hundred participants, the majority of whom were women miners. Also in attendance were male miners, Appalachian community organizers, journalists, and women who were union activists in other industries, particularly the auto and steelworkers.104 At least seven women miners from three District 5 locals attended.105 The women at the conference reaf- firmed their commitment to the union. “I’m a union member first and a woman second,” declared miner Shine, making an argument to the men in the audience: women miners were committed to the union, but the union needed to be committed to them too.106 The conference also had immediate impact on the women’s struggle within their union. The UMWA scheduled a conference for November, called “Union

99. Program questionnaires, CEP Archives, box 32B, folder 9. 100. Paulette Shine, quoted in “Women Rally at National Conference,” 9. 101. Ibid. 102. Program Questionnaires, CEP Archives, box 32B, folder 9. 103. “President of UMW Local Is a Woman,” New York Times, October 9, 1977; Joan Schrock Phillipi Papers, box 1, folder 5, manuscript group 91, Stapleton Library Special Collections, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA (hereafter Phillipi Papers). 104. “Women Miners,” Southern Appalachian Ministry in Higher Education Newsletter, June 1979, CEP Archives, box 84, folder 5. 105. Conference registration file, CEP Archives, box 32A, folder 7. 106. Quoted in “Women Rally at National Conference,” 5.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 59

Women in the Mines,” to “focus on issues of concern to women, including contractual rights, safety, arbitration, job bidding, shift assignments, and union-management relations.”107 This time, Miller attended the conference and participated in the workshops, though the conference was still led by the women miners.108 The conference represented a major shift in the attitude of the UMWA toward its women members— namely, that they were finally acknowledged as full members of and an organized force within the union, capable of mobilizing small but significant sections of the rank-and-file membership. In addition, the UMWA International Executive Board unanimously voted to move the 1979 constitutional convention from Miami to Den- ver, refusing to host the meeting in a state that had not ratified the ERA.109 In its press release after the announcement that the convention would be moved, the CEP noted the significance of the decision to women miners: “It really means a lot to women miners to know that their union is backing them up. . . . [W]e applaud the decision of the UMWA to affirm its support of equal rights for all workers.”110 At the convention, once again, the women from District 5 were at the center of women’s participation within the union. Of the nine women elected as delegates, two were from District 5.111

Conclusion By the time Arnold Miller resigned on November 16, 1979,112 the UMWA had been transformed by women enforcing the practice of union democracy as they reentered the industry and as their numbers increased exponentially throughout the decade. The women miners, despite their small numbers, played an important role in push- ing for the implementation of the ideological promises of the MFD movement once the reformers were in office and the organization that had elected them had decayed. The women of western Pennsylvania’s District 5 used the dynamic spaces opened by the MFD movement to strengthen the rank-and-file organization of all miners, male and female, as they filed grievances and walked out on strike; and they organized themselves to support each other through the difficult first years of their employment and to struggle for full equality within the union. The women’s struggle took its lead from the MFD campaign but also pushed in its own pointed ways for union

107. “Union Sponsors Women Miners’ Conference,” United Mine Workers Journal, October 1979, 6. 108. “Union Sponsors Women’s Conference, First in History of UMWA,” United Mine Workers Jour- nal, November 1979, 8–9. 109. Betty Jean Hall to Arnold Miller, May 10, 1979, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7. 110. “UMWA Changes Convention Site in Support of Women” (press release), April 27, 1979, CEP Archives, box 1, folder 7. 111. Credentials Ephemera, Phillipi Papers, box 1, folder 3. 112. Miller, who was a disabled miner, resigned after suffering a heart attack. According to UMWA bylaws, his office passed to the vice president of the union, Sam Church. While Church took office as part of an MFD slate, the end of Miller’s presidency—what otherwise might have been a symbolic shift in power— coincided with an escalating backlash from operators and from capital more generally. The “rank-and-file revolt” on a national scale waned as the 1970s drew to a close and was decisively extinguished by the bitter defeat of the PATCO strike at the beginning of the next decade. (For a national perspective, see McCartin, Collision Course; and Cowie, Stayin’ Alive.)

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 60 13.1 LABOR democracy. The women in District 5 succeeded in being elected as delegates to the 1979 UMWA Constitutional Convention, being elected to leadership positions within their locals, winning back pay and seniority that had been denied to them on the basis of gender, vastly increasing their numbers, and winning the respect of many of their union brothers, which resulted in decreased sexual harassment and better working conditions. Women miners secured these victories by organizing themselves within and across their union. From the moment of their entry into the mines, women were committed union members who believed in the capacity of their male coworkers to see them as equals. At the same time, the women recognized the need to be organized as women across the coal industry in order to effect change inside the union. Being a union activist and CEP member was for mining women part of a unified project to secure, through collective action, the promises of equal rights at work that, beginning in 1964, were the law of the land. Yet despite the massive strides women made in their first six years underground, in terms of both individual workplace protections and union organization, and despite the successful organizing that continued around issues like parental leave throughout the 1980s,113 the women of District 5 were not immune from the restructuring of capitalism—the result of the economic crises that began in 1973—and the ideological attacks that accompanied it. Both decimated the labor movement nation- ally, and women workers in industrial occupations suffered disproportionately. In the coal industry, women had entered an industry that already had suffered massive declines in employment numbers due to mechanization—from more than 885,000 in 1923 to a mere 146,000 in the early 1970s.114 When layoffs began during the economic crisis of the 1980s, women in District 5 were disproportionately affected. Miner Clif- ford McConnell, who worked for a Bethlehem Steel subsidiary, said, “We got two or three [women] up there now. A lot of them’s laid off. We had ten or fifteen up there at one time.” The women were targeted for layoffs even though many “worked a lot harder than some of the guys up there.”115 In addition, when work became avail- able again, women were less likely to be recalled. In a letter to District Secretary- Treasurer Pete Sabo, Linda Butcher, a welder, expressed frustration that she had not been recalled for more than three months in District 5 and asked to be moved to another nearby district.116 Still, the struggles of District 5’s women miners—whose numbers expanded so rapidly in the 1970s, a time when coal’s future was uncertain—remain important because of the transformative role these women played within the union, linking the struggle for inclusion to broader projects of worker solidarity and linking the fate of union democracy to the fate of women miners. By forcing the inclusion of women

113. Tallichet, Daughters of the Mountain, 103–34. 114. Dix, What’s a Coal Miner to Do? These numbers include both bituminous and anthracite miners. 115. Clifford McConnell, interview by P. Nissirio, July 16, 1992, tape IFP92-PPN#-C, Collection 76, Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission, Folklife Division, Stapleton Library Spe- cial Collections, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 116. Linda Butcher to Pete Sabo, July 1, 1978, UMWA District 5 Archives, box 14, folder 25.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 61

and their needs at every level of the union, these women gendered union democracy and broadened its potential meanings to include the capacity to transform not only the union’s structures but its members. The story of the struggle for a more democratic union in the UMWA’s District 5 sheds light on the vacillating and often con- tradictory state of the labor movement during the 1970s as well as the present day. The too-familiar story of working-class decline in the 1970s looks different when we examine it through the lens of the women who carried on the torch of militancy and democracy even after it had faded from the vision of the union leadership. The fail- ures of the unions and their decimation at the hands of capital appear more contin- gent and beg us to reexamine at what point decline became a self-reinforcing process. And the questions raised by the women miners of the 1970s endure for labor militants today: how can unions best build an inclusive solidarity that fights the discrimination, individual and systemic, faced by workers of color, women, immigrants, and queer workers? How can the fight against social oppression be rooted in the workplaces? Indeed, these questions have been renewed by the current economic crisis and the failure of most unions to confront neoliberal austerity agendas that disproportionately affect those people forced to the margins of state budgets due to racism, sexism, or other forms of oppression.117 One of the few unions to stand up to encroaching austerity in the United States, the Chicago Teachers Union, a union with a majority-women membership that in 2012 waged a successful contract battle, including a ten-day strike, stands out not only for its success but also because of the approach it took—building a slate of rank-and-file candidates who took power and championed union democracy at the same time as they took up sexism at work and the racism that pervades every aspect of the American public school system.118 The continued expansion of the drive to austerity, betrayals by union officials, and esca- lated attacks on the remnants of organized labor in the United States have only raised the stakes for understanding historically how workers have organized to transform themselves and their organizations.

References Baker, Deborah. “Mining Women Stand Firm.” In These Times (Chicago), March 8, 1978. Benson, Herman. 2004. Rebels, Reformers, and Racketeers: How Insurgents Transformed the Labor Move- ment. Self-published. Booth, Stephane E. 1996. “Ladies in White: Female Activism in the Southern Illinois Coalfields, 1932–1938.” In The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity?, edited by John H. M. Laslett, 371–94. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Brenner, Aaron, Robert Brenner, and Calvin Winslow. 2010. Rebel Rank-and-File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below in the Long 1970s. New York: Verso. Brody, Charlotte. 1976. “We Stood By Our Men, but We Stood Up for Ourselves Too.” United Mine Work- ers Journal, March, 12–15. Childers, Lawrence. 1974. Letter to the editor. United Mine Workers Journal, July 1, 21.

117. Weiner, Future of Our Schools, 55–72. 118. Sustar, “Lessons from the Chicago Teachers Strike.”

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 62 13.1 LABOR Clark, Paul F. 1981. The Miners’ Fight for Democracy: Arnold Miller and the Reform of the United Mine Work- ers. Ithaca: New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Cobble, Dorothy Sue. 2005. The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohn, Candace. 2013. “Working-Class Women’s Liberation and Rank-and-File Rebellion in Steel.” Inter- national Socialist Review 90. isreview.org/issue/90/working-class-womens-liberation-and-rank-and -file-rebellion-steel. Corbin, Dave. 1982. “Ida Mae Stull, Intent, Fought for Her Rights.” United Mine Workers Journal, Febru- ary 1, 12–13. Cowie, Jefferson. 1999. Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni- versity Press. ———. 2010. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press. Davenport, Sue Em. 1975. “Women Steelworkers Confront Union on Discriminatory Layoffs.” Militant, September 5. Dawson, Kipp. 1992. “Women Miners and the UMWA.” Occasional Paper no. 11. Pittsburgh: UMWA District 5, Local 1197. Delp, Carol. 1973. Letter to the editor. United Mine Workers Journal, June 15, 20. Deslippe, Dennis A. 2000. “Rights, Not Roses”: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dix, Keith. 1988. What’s a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fox, Maier Bryan. 1990. United We Stand: The United Mine Workers of America, 1890–1990. Washington, DC: United Mine Workers of America. Gabin, Nancy F. 1990. Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women in the United Autoworkers, 1935–1975. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Georgakas, Dan, and Marvin Surkin. 2012. Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Chi- cago: Haymarket. Harless, Wanda. 1974. “Letter to the editor,” United Mine Workers Journal, June 1, 21. House of Commons. 1842. Parliamentary Papers. Vol. 15. London: House of Commons. Jenness, Linda. 1973. “Union Women on the March.” Militant, December 28. Kelly, Brian. 2001. Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921. Urbana: University of Illi- nois Press. Klemesrud, Judy. 1974. “Coal Miners Started the Strike, Then Their Women Took Over.” New York Times, May 15. Kopple, Barbara. 1976. Harlan County, USA. New York: Criterion. Kreck, Carol. 1979. “Women Drawn to Mines for One Reason: The Money.” Denver Post, December 18. Latour, Jane. 2008. Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Letwin, Daniel. 1998. The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lewis, Ronald L. 1987. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980. Lex- ington: University Press of Kentucky. Lichtenstein, Nelson. 2002. The State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Looney, Bill. 1974. “First Women Get Jobs Underground.” United Mine Workers Journal, January 16, 7. MacLean, Nancy. 2008. Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McCartin, Joseph A. 2011. Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. New York: Oxford University Press. Merithew, Caroline. 2006. “We Were Not ‘Ladies’: Gender, Class, and a Women’s Auxiliary’s Battle for Min- ing Unionism.” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2: 63–94.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Kahle / Women Miners and the Struggle for a Democratic Union 63

Moody, Kim. 1988. An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. New York: Verso. Moore, Marat. 1996. “Women Go Underground.” In The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Indus- trial Solidarity?, edited by John H. M. Laslett, 484–512. University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer- sity Press. Nyden, Paul. 1974. “Black Coal Miners in the United States.” Occasional Paper no. 15. New York: Ameri- can Institute for Marxist Studies. ———. 2010. “Rank-and-File Movements in the United Mine Workers of America, Early 1960s–Early 1980s.” In Rebel Rank-and-File, edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Calvin Winslow, 173– 97. New York: Verso. Nyden, Phillip. 1984. Steelworkers Rank-and-File: The Political Economy of a Union Reform Movement. New York: Praeger. Rosen, Ellen Israel. 1987. Bitter Choices: Blue-Collar Women in and out of Work. Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press. Scholl, Marvel. 1973. “Housecleaning at the UMW.” Militant, June 1. ———. 1973. “UMWA: Miller Team Takes Charge.” Militant, January 12. Schuble, Pam. 1974. Letter to the editor. United Mine Workers Journal, July 16, 12. Smith, Baxter. 1973. “Black Steelworkers Win Major Victory.” Militant, February 9. Stein, Judith. Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Sustar, Lee. 2012. “Lessons from the Chicago Teachers Strike.” Presentation at “Building Power from the Bottom Up: How CTU Members Transformed Their Union,” Teamster Local 705 Hall, Chicago, IL, October 4. Swardson, Anne. June 1977. “Women Dig into the Coal Industry.” Coal Age 82, 170. Tallichet, Suzanne. 2006. Daughters of the Mountain: Women Coal Miners in Central Appalachia. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Triolo, Melvin. 1991. The Black Debacle: From a Thundering Voice to a Confused Whisper (Recollections and Observations on the United Mine Workers and Collective Bargaining in the Coal Industry). Parsons, WV: McClain. Turk, Katherine Lee. 2011. “Equity on Trial: Women and Work in the Age of Title VII.” PhD diss., Uni- versity of Chicago. Turl, Adam. 2010. “The Miners’ Strike of 1977–78: Resisting the Employer’s Offensive.” International Social- ist Review 74, 39–46. Watson, Douglas. 1973. “Md. Plant Gets Jobs Bias Fiat: Blacks Must Gain Equality at Bethlehem.” Wash- ington Post, January 17. Weiner, Lois. 2012. The Future of Our Schools: Teacher Unions and Social Justice. Chicago: Haymarket. Witt, Matt. “Textile Workers Seek Jobs in Mines.” 1973. United Mine Workers Journal, May 15, 12. ———. “Wildcat Strikes.” 1978. United Mine Workers Journal, August 1, 6.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article-pdf/13/1/41/437502/LAB131_05Kahle_Fpp.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021