Let me say this about that
—By Gene Klare
An armed uprising
A NEW BOOK, The Battle of Blair Mountain, tells the little-known story
of how 10,000 West Virginia coal miners took up rifles in 1921 to fight against
brutal mine owners and their cohorts in a quest for justice and workers’ rights.
The author is Robert Shogan, a longtime reporter and author who has cov-
ered Washington, D.C., for more than 30
years as a political correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. The
book’s subtitle is “The Story of Amer-
ica’s Largest Labor Uprising.” The pub-
lisher is Basic Books, which is part of
the Perseus Books Group of New York
City. The paperback price is $16.95.
CECIL ROBERTS, president of the
United Mine Workers of America, said
this of the book: “Robert Shogan sheds
new light on this long-neglected episode
of the labor movement’s ongoing strug-
gle for workers’ rights. For too long, the
significant Battle of Blair Mountain has
been merely a footnote in American his-
tory books. Now, the real story of Amer-
ica’s largest labor uprising — and the
largest armed insurrection on U.S. soil
RICHARD TRUMKA
since the Civil War — comes alive. As a
native of Cabin Creek, W. Va. — and the
great-nephew of the miners’ commander, Bill Blizzard — I take personal in-
terest in reading about my union’s pivotal role in this historic rebellion for
economic and social justice.”
Richard L. Trumka, the national AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer and the
past president of the Mine Workers Union, described the book in these words:
“Here is a book about forgotten events that took place 80 years ago in a little-
understood corner of our nation. What a surprise that Bob Shogan has not
only found ample documentary evidence to convince us of the historical sig-
nificance of these battles between miners and mine owners in southern West
Virginia, but also spun a rip-roaring tale full of shockingly vivid and down-to-
earth portraits. When the tale is told, Shogan’s conclusion seems irrefutable:
Our nation paid a heavy price in economic justice and social progress when
state and federal authorities failed to ensure workers’ basic freedom to form
unions.”
PAUL JACKSON of Basic Books sums up the battle this way: “In 1921,
some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners, outraged over years of brutality and
lawless exploitation, picked up their Winchesters and marched against their
tormentors, the powerful mine owners who ruled their corrupt state. For 10
days, the miners fought a pitched battle against an opposing legion of
deputies, state police and a makeshift militia. Only the intervention of a fed-
eral expeditionary force, spearheaded by a bomber squadron commanded by
General Billy Mitchell, ended this undeclared civil war and forced the min-
ers to throw down their arms.”
The uprising of the miners ended in defeat for them and their union. Af-
terwards, authorities sought in vain for evidence that the miners had been led
by Communists. Criminal charges against the insurgents had mixed outcomes
in the courts. The cause of organized labor was damaged by the 1921 insur-
rection. Shogan wrote that it took the 1930s Great Depression and Democra-
tic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to rescue “the American la-
bor movement from near oblivion.”
BUT THE AUTHOR pointed out that the struggle of the miners and the
women who marched with them, “deserves wide recognition and respect.”
(Turn to Page 15)
PAGE 2
Oregon unions react to NLRB
rulings on ‘Kentucky River’ cases
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Strike threats and strong language
were some of the responses by nurses
unions to a National Labor Relations
Board (NLRB) ruling announced Oct.
3 that broadened the legal definition of
supervisor to include hospital charge
nurses.
Supervisors have been excluded
from any legally protected right to
unionize since 1947, so the ruling was
a setback for unions — and a victory
for health care employers that have
fought unionization.
While it’s not clear just how many
workers will be affected by the ruling,
it will be fewer than unions had feared.
The same day the NLRB announced
the Oakwood decision, it announced
contrary decisions in two companion
cases: Charge nurses in nursing homes
were not shown to be supervisors, the
NLRB said, and neither were lead
workers at a manufacturer.
Still, the decision is likely to slow
down union organizing in health care,
and lead to increased labor strife.
b h
m k
Dana Welty, co-chair of the pro-la-
bor community group Portland Jobs
With Justice, said her group will fight
any attempt by Oregon health care em-
ployers to reclassify charge nurses as
supervisors.
The 65,000-member California
Nurses Association (CNA) announced
that its members will strike if CNA
employers seek to exploit the ruling.
More than 30,000 members have so
far signed strike pledges to do just that,
the union said.
Paul Goldberg, director of labor re-
lations at the 8,900-member Oregon
Nurses Association, said the NLRB
decision is a strike at the heart of a
growing movement to unionize health
care workers, and could end up dis-
rupting health care if staff nurses re-
fuse to work as charge nurses in order
to keep union protection.
“It sets the stage to unnecessarily
polarize labor and management and
create labor unrest,” Goldberg said.
The decision has already stripped
several workers of the right to belong
to a union, Goldberg said: Five full-
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time charge nurses were excluded
from the union ranks at recently-
unionized Mercy Medical Center in
Roseburg, Ore. because both labor and
management anticipated the NLRB
would rule as it did. If the NLRB had
ruled the other way, the five would
have been eligible to become union
members.
The case arose from an early 2002
union organizing campaign at an acute
care hospital in Taylor, Michigan, a
suburb of Detroit. The United Auto
Workers petitioned the NLRB to hold
a union election to see if a majority of
the 181 registered nurses at Oakwood
Heritage Hospital wanted to join the
union. Management filed objections
— 112 of those nurses were charge
nurses either part or all of the time,
management said, and therefore could
not be unionized. The regional NLRB
director took a look at the dispute and
sided with the union. Management ap-
pealed to the NLRB’s five-member
Board in Washington, D.C. [It can be a
little confusing, but the NLRB both
administers the law, and interprets it.]
The Board didn’t have to hear the
appeal, but a 2001 U.S. Supreme
Court decision in a case called NLRB
v. Kentucky River Community Care
had called into question the NLRB’s
“tests” to determine whether an em-
ployee is a supervisor.
Here’s how the law defines supervi-
sor: “any individual having the author-
ity, in the interest of the employer, to
hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall,
promote, discharge, assign, reward, or
discipline other employees, or respon-
sibly to direct them, or to adjust their
grievances, or effectively to recom-
mend such action, if in connection
with the foregoing the exercise of such
authority is not of a merely routine or
clerical nature, but requires the use of
independent judgment.”
Do any one of those things, and
you’re a supervisor. But the devil’s in
(Turn to Page 16)
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