Kentucky’s last union mine shuts down

‘Bloody Harlan’ gun battles marked state’s history of labor strife.

HARLAN, KY.— Kentucky coal miners bled and died to unionize.

Their workplaces became war zones, and gun battles once punctuated union protests. In past decades, organizers have been beaten, stabbed and shot while seeking better pay and safer conditions deep underground.

But more recently, the United Mine Workers in Kentucky have been in retreat, dwindling like the black seams of coal in the Appalachian Mountains.

And now the last union mine in Kentucky has been shut down.

“A lot of people right now who don’t know what the (union) stands for are getting good wages and benefits because of the sacrifice that we made,” said Kenny Johnson, a retired union miner who was arrested during the Brookside strike in Harlan County in the 1970s. “Because when we went on those long strikes, it wasn’t because we wanted to be out of work.”

Hard-fought gains are taken for granted by younger work- ers who earn high wages now, leading the coal industry to argue that the union ultimately rendered itself obsolete. But union leaders and retirees counter that anti-union operators, tightening environmental regulations and a turbulent coal market hastened the union’s demise in Kentucky.

The union era’s death knell sounded in Kentucky on New Year’s Eve, when Patriot Coal announced the closing of its Highland Mine. The mine in western Kentucky employed about 400 hourly workers represented by the United Mine Workers of America.

For the first time in about a century, in the state that was home to the gun battles of “Bloody Harlan,” not a single working miner belongs to a union. That has left a bad taste in the mouths of retirees like Charles Dixon, who heard the sputter of machine gun fire and bullets piercing his trailer in Pike County during a strike with the A.T. Massey Coal Company in the 1980s.

“I had my house shot up during that strike,” said Dixon, the United Mine Workers local president at the time. “I was just laying in bed and next thing you know you hear a big AR-15 unloading on it. Coal miners had it tough, buddy.”

Johnson, Dixon and union leaders worry that the union’s disappearance in Kentucky has opened the door for coal operators to lower worker standards. Phil Smith, a national spokesman for the miner’s union, pointed to operations run by former Massey Energy chief Don Blankenship, who closed union mines in the 1980s and now faces criminal conspiracy charges in the 2010 deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 workers.

But industry leaders argue that higher wages and safer mines in recent decades have reduced the desire for workers at non-union mines to organize.