Qualla: Pittston Coal Strike

Pittston Coal Strike: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. They worked fourteen months without health benefits before they walked out. Some of the men whose checks Pittston Coal had stopped covering had spent forty years underground. Some of the widows had buried husbands killed in the mines. When the United Mine Workers finally called the strike on April 5, 1989, the fight was not about wages. It was about whether a company could simply decide, after the men had already done the work, that the deal was off.

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Pittston Coal Strike: A Promise Made in 1950

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. The Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement of 1950 had built a benefit trust to take care of miners who retired before 1974 - the men who had worked through cave-ins and black lung in an era before federal safety law. By 1987, with coal prices falling and non-union mines undercutting the...

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Pittston Coal Strike: Camp Solidarity

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. When the strike began, supporters started arriving from across the country - from West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, from union halls a thousand miles away. The towns around Castlewood, Virginia tried to put them up, but there were not enough beds. A local recreational park became Ca...

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Pittston Coal Strike: Daughters of Mother Jones

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. The women named themselves after Mary Harris Jones, the white-haired organizer who had walked the coal camps a century earlier. The Daughters of Mother Jones organized housing, cooked the food, raised the money, and held a continuous protest outside Pittston headquarters in Leban...

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Pittston Coal Strike: Moss 3

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. By late summer the strike was grinding. Over 4,000 people had been arrested. Union pay had dropped to about $210 a week - less than a third of normal wages. Union leadership picked 99 miners from Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky and told them almost nothing until the morning...

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Pittston Coal Strike: What the Miners Won

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AFL-CIO, CC BY 2.0. The settlement came on February 20, 1990, after ten months. Health and retirement benefits were restored. In 1992, drawing directly on what had happened in southwest Virginia, Congress passed the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act - the Coal Act - which made it law that min...

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Image: AFL-CIO | CC BY 2.0