Magazine preview: 'The Devil is Here in These Hills' book review

In the next issue of the Teamster Magazine, Eric Arnesen, the James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor in Modern American History at The George Washington University, has another fascinating book review.

Below is the full version of Arnesen’s review of James Green’s “The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom.” (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015)

The current assault on workers’ rights is the latest chapter in a long and ugly history. In that history, the battles that raged across southern West Virginia in the early 20th century stand out as among the most vicious labor conflicts in the American past. Operators in the nonunion coalfields resolved to keep their mines union-free, employing an arsenal of weapons, some legal, others extra-legal, to maintain the upper hand. The results were brutal. Appalachian coal country, one writer observed, was “an American heart of darkness.”

It is this world that historian James Green vividly and movingly recreates in his compelling new book, “The Devil is Here in These Hills.” West Virginia miners’ list of grievances was long and depressing. Many lived in company towns, where owners’ complete control made a mockery of democratic rights. Wages were low. Working conditions were horrific, with accidents—mine fires, explosions, and collapses—regularly taking the lives of hundreds of men and boys. (The state’s mine safety laws were “the weakest in the nation.”) Efforts to challenge the industrial order were met by brute force, as armed guards, professional strikebreakers and the state government violently repressed efforts at resistance.

Those conditions and miners’ determination to challenge them turned the region into virtual a war zone. Time and again, company guards, Baldwin-Felts detectives, vigilantes and state militiamen occupied communities and broke strikes; blacklists and yellow-dog contracts routed out—temporarily—union organizers. Declarations of martial law empowered military officials to arrest and hold hundreds of trade unionists without charge. During a “mine war” in 1920, military officials barred the circulation of the state’s labor newspaper and police arrested anyone caught reading it. “The big advantage of this martial law is that if there’s an agitator around you can just stick him in jail and keep him there,” explained one government official. “Justice is dead, freedom is a thing of the past, and liberty is but a dream of the future,” a local labor journalist concluded.

But the book is “more than a litany of strikes and lockouts, evictions and blacklists, gun battles and armed marches—more than another gruesome chapter in the history of American violence,” Green argues. “It is, above all, the story of a people’s fight to exercise freedom of speech and freedom of association in workplaces where the rights of property owners had reigned supreme.” He recounts the efforts of countless men and women to contest the mine owners’ reign of terror. Their challenges—including the march of some 10,000 armed miners amounting to what Green calls the “largest civil insurrection the country had experienced since the Civil War”—proved no match for the power of the mine operators and their allies in state government.

Until, that is, the coming of the Great Depression and the arrival of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. A changed political environment—one that was far less anti-labor than the one that preceded it—allowed a revitalized United Mine Workers of America (UMW) to achieve in 1934 what it had failed to do for the preceding three decades: Organize West Virginia’s miners, win union recognition and engage in collective bargaining with coal operators. As the result of the UMW’s success, wages rose; working hours fell; safety improved; and the reign of armed company guards came to an end. The “Bill of Rights finally had real meaning to the people who lived and worked in the coal country of West Virginia,” Green concludes. Their “long march toward freedom” finally bore fruit.

Although historians have long been familiar with aspects of West Virginia’s sorry past, “knowledge of this enduring conflict has been all but lost to American memory,” Green observes. His dramatic book effectively addresses that problem. He hopes that a revived memory of these struggles will serve as a “potent resource for contemporary movements to save Appalachia, its people, and its natural wonders from the forces that have been wreaking havoc in the region for more than a century.”

What West Virginia’s miners “could not have understood at the time was that their struggle would broaden and deepen the meaning of freedom in all of industrial America,” Green tells us. In the current anti-labor climate, the lessons Green recounts are well worth remembering.

Another murdered Colombian trade unionist – brought to you by “free” trade

Oscar López Triviño

Meet Oscar López Triviño. He’s the latest victim of so-called free trade.

On November 9 Oscar was shot dead by paramilitaries in the Colombian city of Bugalagrande. Why? Because Oscar was a union member.

Several days before his murder, Oscar’s union, SINALTRAINAL, had launched a hunger strike in front of a Nestlé factory where Oscar worked for more than 25 years. The company withdrew from negotiations several months ago and was trying to dump the union. Nestlé workers were demanding the company respect various agreements with the union.

Any worker action, especially a strike, can be a deadly one in Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world to be a union member.

The day before Oscar was killed, members of his union received death threats from paramilitaries. Amnesty International reports:

On 8 November, the paramilitary group Los Urabeños sent a death threat by SMS to the phones of José Onofre Esquivel Luna and Álvaro Varela Pérez, who are both leaders of the Bugalagrande branch of SINALTRAINAL and work for Nestlé. The death threat read: “Guerrilla fighters son-of-a-bitch you continue to mess with Nestlé [,] no more forgiveness [,] we will cut you up [,] death to all communists of SINALTRAINAL.”  

This is what life is like for union members under the reign of a trade deal in a country that is notorious for anti-union violence.

Armed corporate goons like Los Urabeños have been responsible for the murders of 11 other union members in Colombia this year alone. A recent report by US Reps. George Miller and Jim McGovern concluded that threats, assaults and disappearances are on the rise. Last year 22 union members were murdered in Colombia. None of the murderers have been brought to justice.

Since its inception in 1982, SINALTRAINAL alone has seen more than 20 of its members killed by right-wing death squads. Among slain SINALTRAINAL members, 13 worked for Nestlé. The company has of course denied any connections to paramilitary violence.

Oscar’s death is a tragic reminder of what can happen when governments enact trade deals to enrich corporations while providing no say or protections for workers – especially in a country like Colombia.

Yet that’s what is happening again with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an anti-worker trade deal being negotiated behind closed doors by Pacific Rim countries. Among those countries is Vietnam, a country that is rife with labor abuses including sweatshop conditions, poverty wages and child slavery.

If conditions in Colombia tell us anything, it’s that without public pressure the TPP will not only allow labor rights violations to continue in places like Vietnam, it will make them worse.

Fortunately, members of Congress are waking up to the fact that trade deals that are not fully vetted hurt workers and the environment. More than 190 members of the House are on record opposing fast-track authorization for the TPP. That means they want a full debate on the entire agreement, not the quick up-or-down vote that has allowed bad deals like the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement to be ratified.

Jim Hoffa wrote in the Huffington Post this week:

Fast track is an attack on democracy. Americans have been kept out of the loop on how the TPP will affect their everyday lives. The last thing we need is for politicians to fast-track a Pacific trade deal through Congress that allows them to build in secret provisions that help their campaign contributors, but hurt working- and middle-class families. 

The death of union members like Oscar in Colombia is every reason for bringing the TPP into the light of day. In the meantime, workers need to hold governments accountable when they allow unionists to be assassinated with impunity. Nestlé workers in Colombia should enjoy the same rights that Nestlé Teamsters enjoy here in the U.S.!

You can sign the petition here to tell the Colombian government to bring Oscar’s murderers to justice and provide security to other SINALTRAINAL members who remain at risk.

¡Oscar presente!

Trade deal didn't end anti-union violence in Colombia. What a shock.

Unionists are still being murdered, threatened and forced to work as temps in Colombia despite promises that an 'action plan' would prevent it, according to a staff report by U.S. Reps. George Miller and Jim McGovern.

The action plan -- called the U.S.-Colombia Labor Action Plan (LAP) -- was created in April 2011 to give cover to U.S. politicians who wanted to vote for the job-killing trade deal with Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world to be a union member.

Ostensibly the LAP would correct violations of labor rights (like murder and violence) once the trade pact was implemented on May 15, 2012. It didn't happen. Working conditions for most people in Colombia are worse than they were before the trade deal. (No surprise there.)

The failure of the Colombian trade deal portends a similar outcome in Vietnam if the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is approved. Vietnam, one of the Pacific Rim countries involved in TPP talks, tolerates squalid working conditions, poverty wages and child slavery.

Eleven Colombian union leaders were murdered last year. At least that's better than the 22 union leaders murdered with impunity the year before. But threats, assaults, and disappearances are reportedly on the rise, according to the report.

Worse, violence is escalating against human rights workers. In the first six months of this year, 37 human rights defenders were murdered in Colombia and 153 were attacked.

The so-called benefits of so-called free trade have not flowed to ordinary Colombians. Indigenous people are being thrown off their land. Farmers' livelihoods are threatened by a surge of subsidized agricultural products from the United States. In the port city of Buenaventura, gruesome dismemberments and murders drove 9,000 poor people from their home. Misery and violence prevail.

The two congressmen visited Colombia in August to see whether the action plan was working. They arrived in the middle of social unrest:

Colombian farmers took to the streets and went on strike, joined by miners, truckers, public health care workers, students and others. The reasons for the strike given by many included: high fuel prices, expensive agrichemicals, government neglect of rural areas, and the free trade agreement with the United States. 

They concluded the trade deal has made life worse for most Colombian workers:

...individuals have been murdered in 2013 and death threats continue. Impunity is still a huge and unaddressed problem. Internationally recognized labor rights are not protected. And in the absence of an effective enforcement system and lax accountability, new forms of indirect hiring and phony unions are proliferating.

A Latin American human rights group agreed with the congressmen. Said Gimena Sánche, senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America:

Basic labor protections, including the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, continue to be violated on a national scale...

Let's be honest: these so-called trade deals aren't about trade. They're about empowering corporations at the expense of workers around the globe. That's why no one should be surprised the Colombian 'action plan' didn't work. Or that the TPP, if passed, will not have happy consequences for workers.