Category Archives: UWUA Local 304 News

Your union has made every effort to make you aware of labor history, a neglected part of our American history, but now it’s time to look forward.

Union members have been the recognized professionals in all fields of trade craft. The reason is simple, they have the training, experience, and pride to do whatever job in whatever trade they are in, regardless of the circumstances. Union members are proud, tough, and honest working men and women who realize and accept the fact that they must work for a living, but also accept the responsibility that they have a duty to themselves, coworkers, and family to see that the work they perform is done correctly, safely, and has the kind of pay and benefits that make the trade off of time and skill worth it for them and their Brothers and Sisters.

The attributes that make up a good union member are those who make up any good person. The difference is that a union person expands these to his fellow union members the same way they would for family and closest friends. They include:

1. Integrity: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. Unions deal with schemes hatched by those who may have questionable integrity, to the point of overt dishonesty. Our members must hold themselves and each other to a higher standard. If a union member is wrong, then the honorable thing to do is humbly admit it, own it, learn from it, and move on.
2. Honesty: the foundation for trust in a relationship, and trust is necessary for a union to function and thrive. When you’re always honest with someone, it tells them that they can trust you and the things you say. It helps them know they can believe your promises and commitments.
3.  Fairness:  impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination. All union members are not alike, but each one needs to be treated with the same deference as any other, without bias. This is regardless of political or social views a member may hold because those are the things union busters will try to use to divide the membership.
4. Respect: is an attitude of considering someone else’s perspective and holding another fellow member in esteem. It’s shown by; listening to others, affirming people’s opinions, empathizing with different perspectives, disagreeing respectfully with being disagreeable, apologizing when you’re wrong, calling out disrespectful behavior, complimenting the achievements of others, and showing gratitude.
5. Maturity: an emotionally mature person is always adding value to themselves and those around them. A curious and learning attitude form a key part of a mature persons daily activities and goals. They are able to understand and manage their own emotions. They also acknowledge that our common goals are more important than petty gripes and personality conflicts.
6. Professionalism involves being reliable, setting your own high standards, and showing that you care about every aspect of your job. It’s about being industrious and organized, and holding yourself accountable for your thoughts, words and actions.

A union member knows themselves, their job, and that their union has their back. They don’t have to be afraid of the ‘boss’, and know that they can call on a fellow union member for help. A union Brother/Sister stands up for each other. Most of all, union workers forgive each other, when needed.

All the above may seem a tall order for someone who’s young, making more money than they ever dreamed possible, and may question what a union can do for them. The answer is simple, even if you dismiss everything above, and that is you are blessed with a good job that pays well and gives you a path into the ranks of America’s middle class, a place union membership created.

Question is, “is your job worth protecting?”

There comes a time in every working persons life when they must take stock of themselves and the people they work with. By doing this, they set their own opinions and make moral and social adjustments in whom they confer  and confide with and those they don’t. This requires and honest evaluation of one’s own wants, needs, and desires, and leads to the same examination of these in others.

A union works for the betterment of ALL it’s members, and each true union member should do the same. If you work with someone who consistently plants doubts about your union in your ear or those in your crew, and even openly attacks your union, it may be time to examine their motivations.

You have tools to help you overcome and develop within your union. One is your Collective Bargaining Agreement. Your CBA forms the foundation of your union. Your duty is to know it and enforce it when the company deviates from it. You can do this by confronting management directly (with another union member as a witness), through your steward, or by utilizing the grievance procedure in your CBA. In support of the CBA is your union’s website, which has a lot of information for our members, as well as your union’s Facebook page.

Your National Union, Local Union, it’s officers, and affiliates are the only mechanisms in place that fights for you. It is up to you to fight for it because without solidarity, there is no union.

Your union is what you make of it!

The power of the media to shape public opinion has always been with us since the foundation of our state, as well as our country. You could liken our nation’s founding to a union organizing drive, with all the elements of an indifferent and unresponsive ruler, his cruel and brutal lackeys, brave agitators and organizers who speak out in speech and print against injustice, and those under the thumb of the ruler who dare rise and and demand a better lot in life.

West Virginia was born out of internal strife within our union of the United States due to inequalities between the wealth of the industrializing northern states and the predominantly agrarian, slave holding, southern states. The West Virginia economy was more tied to that of it’s northern neighbors of Ohio and Pennsylvania, so the newly hatched state sided with the Union, with it’s first capital established in our northern panhandle of Wheeling. The reality was that the divide in our country was a bleeding gash right across the middle of our state, with the first land battle famously being fought in Philippi.

No doubt had the Confederacy won, Virginia would have reasserted it’s control over it’s western rogue territory, or, had those forming our state had sided with the southerners, the battle lines for the Civil War would’ve been redrawn and the survival of West Virginia as a separate state would have been highly doubtful.

Since 1865, our state has yet to establish itself as an integral part of the fabric of America and distinguish itself with a unique culture and identity of our own. This despite the many famous people born in or with strong ties to our state. Educators Booker T. Washington and Henry Lois Gates; novelists like John Knowles, Stephen Coonts, or Jebediah Purdy; famed aviator Chuck Yeager, WWII Medal of Honor recipient Hershel “Woody” Williams, and Basil L. Plumley who featured prominently in the Vietnam War movie “We Were Soldiers“. We’ve had our share of other famed entertainers and sports figures. Coaches Lou Holtz, Jimbo Fisher, and Nick Saban all hail from West Virginia, as well as entertainers Steve Harvey, Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Adams Family), Morgan Spurlock, John Corbett, Virginia Egnor (Dagmar), Conchata Ferrell, Kathy Mattea, Peter Marshall, as well as many others.

Sadly, if you ask someone unfamiliar with our state, they will inevitably identify us as progenitors of the Hatfields and McCoys. Those famed feuders have long, and wrongly, been stereotyped as backwards, uneducated, crude, hard-headed, moonshine drinking hillbillies. Anybody actually familiar with the circumstances of the troubles between the two families know it was a tale that included politics, business, and power between two determined and shrewd patriarchs of rugged pioneering dynasties in direct opposition to each other.

That’s where the story of West Virginia ends, as far as what the rest of the country is concerned. The media has portrayed us by those long set preconceptions, as we labored quietly powering the country by harvesting and selling off our abundant natural resources, with the hard work of our fellow Mountaineers.

But why quietly?

It has been said that history is written by the victors, which explains why no other perspective has ever been offered to counter the notion of violent and stand-offish inbreds who sit around on their front porch spitting tobacco and taking potshots at neighbors as well as strangers who dare enter their domain.

Truth is, the Hatfields and McCoys are a relatively harmless and safe piece of our heritage that the media has edited, massaged, and expounded on for easy consumption by the American public. It’s a multi-layered story that can be safely tapped into to siphon off  profit in literature, movies, and by marketing the lore surrounding those colorful characters involved in the long running dispute.

True West Virginia heritage and culture  is firmly rooted in America’s labor history and unions. It’s a taboo subject that those of power and influence have sought to erase, hide, or gloss over in our society.That’s why you get Hatfields and McCoys, not Frank Keeney and Fred Mooney, you get Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and not “General” Bill Blizzard, you get the “Mothman” and not “Mother” Mary Harris Jones. On a larger scale, there have been a multitude of movies depicting the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but only one notable film that depicts the Matewan Massacre; plenty of gangster movies showing one group of mobsters against another, while The Battle of Blair Mountain remains shrouded in murky history and legend. They give you Jesse James, when what our nation sorely needs is Sid Hatfield, who battled and died in the service of others and not for his own enrichment; sure, everyone knows the names Al Capone and John Dillinger, but not John L. Lewis, Eugene V. Debbs, or Joe Hill.

So why is such an important piece of our West Virginia, as well as American, heritage being suppressed?

It’s because the “great” industrialists who wrongly get the credit for building our country wish it so. Men like Andrew Carnegie of US Steel, or John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil, Financier Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, the Vanderbilt railroad empire, Henry Ford, and many others and their sycophants would have to answer for the crimes they either perpetrated themselves or, as more the case, had their heavily bribed and corrupt politicians, policemen, and thugs. Heavy-handed Baldwin-Felts detectives the coal mines employed as private security, as well as enforcers, and more the same for the Pinkerton Detectives. If these forces were too small, the rich could always rely on a corrupted county or statehouse to dispatch  Sheriffs Deputies and their posses, the State Police, and even the National Guard to beat back workers who refused to be shackled into economic and perpetual slavery at the hands of their employers.

A shameful number of men, women and children were assaulted, maimed, starved, or killed at the hands of employers they served. Here in West Virginia, mothers and fathers were thrown out into the street with all their belongings and left to the mercy of the elements because someone told a gun thug the worker possessed, talked about, or supported the union. These families were forced to the backs of hollers with nothing between them and nature but a thin canvas tent. In those small clusters many died of starvation, disease, exposure, or the frequent bullets that seemed to always be flying around.

Whether it was the Pullman Strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. the Haymarket Riots, the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike, the Ludlow Massacre, or many other major eruptions of frustrated and desperate workers, the masters of business and industry would have a lot to answer for. The indiscriminate beatings, destruction of property, denial of constitutionally granted rights, subversion, spying, and almost any other indignity that can or can’t even be imagined.

The war goes on today. Powerful forces have used their media mouthpieces, slick political lapdogs, and vast sums of money to pit neighbor against neighbor, American against American, and justify their treachery both in court and in front of the news cameras. All the while they incrementally push the working class closer and closer to the coal camps they left only a couple of generations ago, while proclaiming themselves servants and pillars of Christianity.

How bad is it?

The tern “redneck” used to refer to the red kerchiefs strikers wore to recognize friends from foes, but now it’s used in a derogatory sense to indicate the ignorant and uncouth.  They call trade unionists communists, socialists, and/or fascist to the point that, though describing different political philosophies, the words have mutated into synonyms for each other.

To clear this up, a fascist is one man at the top calling the shots and holding all the wealth themselves. A communist believes no one should be rich, A capitalist believes in oligarchy, made up of many want to be fascist willing to sacrifice anybody as long as it increases their coffers. A socialist has no problem with people being rich, they just believe in a wealthy society no one should be so poor that they cannot live.

Before unions, every employer was a fascist; “my way or the highway.”

Many try to paint unionism as socialist or communism (which is not true since you can’t be either and belong to an American union), but what unions actually do is bring democracy to the shop floor, for every worker equally.

To fight this trend, working people have to actively search and study their missing heritage for themselves and reclaim the rights granted them by the blood and tears shed by men, women, and children for all workers to have a better life for them and their families.

Let this be your New Years resolution!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

   So far, 28 states have enacted RTW (Right To Work) laws, predominantly in the South and Southwest. While right-to-work laws have nothing to do with rights, work, or guaranteeing jobs for workers, some in the business community view it as a strategy for attracting new businesses to locate in West Virginia, despite its downside risks of lowering wages and hurting unions that helped build the middle class in our country.

Here are five important things you need to know:

1. It’s about lowering wages and eroding workplace protections. As an economic development tool, the professed aim of RTW is to reduce the power of unions by depriving them of resources (dues), which ultimately weakens the union and strengthens the employers’ hand in bargaining for lower pay and benefits. By decreasing the likelihood that businesses will have to negotiate with their workers, this will lower labor costs, reduce the cost of doing business, and will supposedly be an incentive for out-of-state manufacturers and other businesses to locate in West Virginia. If RTW didn’t lower wages and weaken workplace protections across the board, there would be no incentive for companies to move to West Virginia. This, in a nutshell, is the hope of RTW supporters such as the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce.

2. Academic research is unanimous that RTW reduces unionization. While there is no strong evidence that RTW laws help or harm a state’s economy, there is a broad academic consensus that it weakens labor unions. If this happens, it could mean even worse economic and social outcomes in the state. This is because unionization is strongly associated with higher economic mobility, less income inequality, higher wages, safer workers conditions, better benefits and larger voter turnout.

3. The WVU report on RTW is fundamentally flawed. While a recent study by John Deskins at West Virginia University concluded that RTW would boost jobs in West Virginia, the study is fraught with basic design problems. For example, the WVU study misidentifies that Texas and Utah adopted RTW in the 1990s, when both states adopted RTW before 1960. The WVU study also failed to adopt a standard academic practice that accounts for unobserved differences between states, such as the advent of air-conditioning in the South, access to oversees markets, and other important state characteristics. When researchers at the Economic Policy Institute accounted for these problems and replicated WVU’s findings, they found no relationship between RTW status and employment growth. Tim Bartik, an economist with the Upjohn Institute and one of the country’s leading economic development experts, recently reviewed the WVU study and concluded that it “does not provide any convincing evidence that a state that adopts RTW laws will, as a result, experience faster job growth.” The flaws with the WVU study highlight why state policymakers should not rely on its conclusions to adopt RTW.

4. RTW is not about “workplace freedom.” While RTW proponents define ‘workplace freedom” as letting workers opt out of paying a representation fee to pay for the benefits they are receiving under any negotiated union contract, most would define workplace freedom as being treated with dignity and respect on the job. That means getting paid an honest wage for an honest day’s work, and having access to benefits such as paid sick days, paid family leave, health care, and a retirement plan. The only freedom workers would receive if RTW were enacted is the ability to get something for nothing.

 5. Low workforce skills are the central reason for West Virginia’s economic woes, not lack of RTW. A recent in-depth study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky that explored why the state is so poor found that the shortage of skilled workers – not RTW – was the central reason for the state’s relative poor economic performance. Since West Virginia faces many of the same social and economic problems as Kentucky, policymakers would be well advised to promote polices that improve the skills of the state’s workforce instead of RTW that could reduce workforce training.

     The legislature in West Virginia must learn that we can’t build West Virginia by tearing down working families and unions. Instead we need  to focus on the policies that we know work, such investing in early childhood education, research and development, higher education, workforce training, and effective ways to help more people get out of poverty.