Most work at least two part-time jobs, including at local Amazon and Walmart locations, to provide for their families. Miners tell the World Socialist Web Site that some of the pickets have experienced foreclosures and repossessions while many rely on local food banks. Just weeks before, Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed a new law designating mines and gas pipelines as “critical infrastructure.”Īt the same time, the struggle has revealed the burning necessity for Warrior Met miners to break the stranglehold of the pro-company United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which has deliberately isolated the courageous miners and kept them on poverty-level strike benefits of $400 a week.
Late last month, without the slightest evidence, the company accused striking miners of blowing up a gas pipeline near a mine entrance, raising the specter of a company-government frameup of militant miners. Company-friendly judges in Alabama have issued strikebreaking injunctions, pickets have been harassed by private security guards, hit by vehicles driven by scabs, and had guns drawn on them. The year-long strike-the longest by US coal miners in decades-has thrown light on the intense level of class conflict in the United States. On April 1, 2021, more than 1,100 miners hit the picket lines to demand the restoration of pay cuts and health care and pension concessions imposed on them in 2016. Last Friday marked one year since the beginning of the strike at Warrior Met Coal in central Alabama.
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