coal

A short history of a strike by coal miners organised in the syndicalist One Big Union in Alberta which was repressed by bosses and the state.

During the 1984-85 British Miners’ Strike, women’s groups emerged in various forms and for various purposes. Calling themselves ‘Women Against Pit Closures’, these groups across the country organised not only strike-oriented activities, support and community needs provision, but also came to act autonomously on gendered interests. In what follows I outline a brief history of the miners’ strike, the origins of womens’ activities within this strictly gendered strike and the ways in which womens’ roles were transformed through struggle, not only with the Thatcher government and the NCB, but also with men and the NUM.

Something happened in Tennessee, something almost unimaginable to the mine owners and politicians of that
state. When the companies tried to intimidate their workers by bringing in convict labor to take over their jobs, the workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains bound for Nashville and Knoxville and places far away...The Tennessee convict war was one of the largest insurrections in American working-class history. And yet, unfolding at exactly the same time as the more publicized labor wars in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, it was largely ignored.

A short account of the national coal miners’ dispute in the winter of 1973-4 which led to the three-day week, the collapse of the Conservative government and a 35% pay increase for the miners.