The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) was organized in 1890 to address the often horrendous working conditions associated with the mining industry. By the 1920s the UMW had emerged as a power to reckon with, both at the negotiating table and within the American Federation of Labor (AFL). However, increased competition between union and nonunion mines over the ensuing decade, coupled with a chronic depression in the mining industry, undercut many previous gains. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 further depleted membership ranks, which had declined from half a million to about 100,000 in less than a decade. Fortunately, the UMW was led by the aggressive John L. Lewis, who had already secured such benefits as higher wages and retirement pay and who now took active steps to both expand membership and also extend unionization to all industrial workers. With the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in May 1933, which guaranteed collective bargaining, Lewis waged a determined campaign to incorporate the nonunion mines in the South and Midwest. By dint of Lewis’s charisma among workers and hard bargaining with management, all remaining mines were forced to sign wage agreements in July 1933, which also boosted union membership by some 300,000 workers. However, Lewis was unhappy with the AFL’s indifference to industrial workers, so in 1935 the UMW spearheaded creation of a new labor organization, the Committee for Industrial Organization (later Congress of Industrial Organizations or CIO). Again, he proved successful and brought thousands of workers in the auto, steel, rubber, and related mass-production industries into the union fold. In fact, the efforts of the UMW probably did more to improve the wages and living standards of workers throughout the South, white and black alike, than any previous organization. The AFL responded by ejecting the insurgents, although Lewis managed a rapprochement with them by 1946.
During World War II, Lewis’s militancy remained a constant source of labor strife. He refused to sign the no-strike pledge and in 1943 led a stoppage that resulted in military control of the mines. This seemingly unpatriotic stance undermined public sympathy for trade unionism, as did defiance of many strike injunctions of the immediate postwar period. The UMW’s refusal to endorse anticommunist affidavits stipulated under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act led to further public estrangement, as did union STRIKES at the beginning of the Korean War. The more conservative-minded AFL again ejected the UMW in 1947. Since that period the UMW has experienced a period of stagnation and decline, as have many industrial unions, but under Lewis’s aegis it functioned as one of the largest and most influential organizations in organized labor.
Further reading: John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); John H. M. Laslett, ed., The United Mine Workers of America: A Model of Industrial Solidarity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
