Case Study 2: The Pittston Coal Strike and Camp Solidarity

A Company Walks Away

In the spring of 1988, the Pittston Coal Group — one of the largest coal companies in the Appalachian coalfields, the same corporate entity whose subsidiary had built the dam that failed at Buffalo Creek in 1972 — announced that it would no longer honor the healthcare provisions of its contract with the United Mine Workers of America.

The decision affected approximately 1,500 retired miners and their dependents — men who had spent decades underground, who had breathed coal dust until their lungs hardened, who had survived roof falls and gas explosions and the hundred other ways a mine could kill them. Many of these men had black lung disease. Many had workplace injuries that required ongoing medical care. All of them had worked under contracts that guaranteed healthcare benefits in retirement — benefits they had bargained for, struck for, and understood as a sacred obligation.

Pittston argued that the rising cost of healthcare made the benefits unsustainable. The company wanted to shift the costs to the miners, to reduce benefits, and to free itself from what it characterized as an onerous financial obligation.

The UMWA argued that a contract was a contract — that the miners had earned their benefits through decades of dangerous labor, that the company had agreed to provide them, and that a unilateral decision to renege on that agreement was a violation of both the contract and basic decency.

When negotiations failed, approximately 1,900 UMWA miners at Pittston operations in Virginia and West Virginia went on strike on April 5, 1989.

The Decision to Be Nonviolent

The Pittston strike was different from its predecessors in the Appalachian coalfields — different from the armed confrontations at Paint Creek and Blair Mountain, different from the gun battles of Harlan County, different from the violent picket line clashes of earlier decades. The difference was a deliberate, strategic choice: the strikers would be nonviolent.

The UMWA's president, Richard Trumka — a young, charismatic leader from a coal mining family in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania — understood that the political and media landscape of 1989 was fundamentally different from that of 1921. Armed resistance would not produce sympathy. It would produce a military response and a public relations disaster. The way to win was to claim the moral high ground and hold it — to demonstrate that the strikers were disciplined, courageous, and right, and that the company was greedy, indifferent, and wrong.

The commitment to nonviolence was not easy to maintain. The coalfields had a long memory, and that memory included the armed resistance of Blair Mountain, the gun fights of Harlan County, and the tradition of meeting force with force. Some miners were skeptical of nonviolence — not out of bloodlust but out of a realistic assessment of the power differential. The company had money, lawyers, and the backing of the state. What did the miners have? Their bodies and their solidarity. In previous generations, that had meant rifles. Now it meant sitting down in the road.

The UMWA organized nonviolent resistance training for the strikers — workshops in which miners learned the principles and techniques of civil disobedience, modeled in part on the civil rights movement. The connection was explicit: Trumka and the UMWA leadership drew directly on the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., the Freedom Riders, and the sit-in movement. They also drew on the Highlander Folk School tradition described in Chapter 25 — the tradition of education as organizing, of disciplined collective action, of the community standing together.

The training was taken seriously. Strikers who could not commit to nonviolence were asked not to participate in direct actions. The discipline held, through months of provocation, through arrests and pepper-spraying and the infuriating spectacle of replacement workers ("scabs") crossing the picket lines to take the jobs of men who had spent their careers in the mines.

Camp Solidarity

When the strike began, supporters from across the coalfields — and eventually from across the country — needed a place to gather. That place became Camp Solidarity, established on private land near the Pittston operations in Dickenson County, Virginia.

Camp Solidarity started small — a few tents, a makeshift kitchen, a banner — and grew into something that no one had quite planned: a village, a rally ground, a meeting place, a cultural center, and a symbol. At its peak, Camp Solidarity covered several acres and hosted hundreds of visitors daily. There were sleeping tents for visiting supporters, a community kitchen that served three meals a day, a stage for speeches and music, a communications center, and an atmosphere of purposeful, collective defiance.

The camp was organized and maintained primarily by miners' families — the wives, mothers, daughters, and children of the striking miners. The women of Camp Solidarity ran the kitchen, organized logistics, maintained morale, and, in many cases, participated directly in picket lines and civil disobedience actions. Their role was not auxiliary. It was essential. Without the women of Camp Solidarity, the strike could not have been sustained.

"The men were on the picket line," recalled one woman who worked in the Camp Solidarity kitchen throughout the strike. "But somebody had to feed the picket line. Somebody had to take care of the families. Somebody had to keep everything running so the men could keep fighting. That was us. We didn't get on the news as much, but we were in this fight every day, from before dawn until after dark."

The cultural life of Camp Solidarity was rich and intentional. There was music — labor songs old and new, gospel music, country music. Hazel Dickens, the legendary West Virginia singer whose voice had become synonymous with coalfield struggle, performed at the camp and lifted spirits that months on the picket line had worn thin. There were speeches — by Trumka, by visiting politicians, by rank-and-file miners who stood at the microphone and told their stories in the plain, direct language of people who knew what they were fighting for.

There was also something harder to name — a sense of collective purpose, of community, of being part of something larger than any individual grievance. The miners at Camp Solidarity knew their history. They knew about Blair Mountain and Harlan County and the long tradition they were extending. They wore camouflage clothing as a uniform of solidarity (a deliberate echo of the red bandanas of Blair Mountain, updated for a new era). They named their actions and their gathering places after heroes of earlier struggles. They were consciously, proudly, defiantly continuing a tradition.

The National Response

The Pittston strike generated a level of national and international solidarity that surprised both the company and the union.

Labor unions from across the country sent delegations to Camp Solidarity. Autoworkers from Detroit, steelworkers from Pittsburgh, teachers from New York, nurses from California — they came by the busload, walked the picket lines, donated food and money, and went home to tell their own communities about what was happening in the Virginia coalfields.

The AFL-CIO — the national federation of labor unions — made the Pittston strike a priority, channeling resources and organizing support across the country. International unions sent solidarity delegations. Religious organizations — the National Council of Churches, the Catholic Conference of Bishops, local and regional religious bodies — expressed support and in some cases sent representatives to walk the picket lines.

The national media covered the strike extensively. The images — of miners sitting peacefully in roads as state troopers approached, of women linking arms on picket lines, of the Camp Solidarity tent city with its banners and its music — were powerful and sympathetic. The UMWA's communications strategy was sophisticated: the union maintained a press operation at Camp Solidarity that provided journalists with access, information, and compelling stories. The narrative was clear: hardworking miners who had spent their careers underground were being denied the healthcare they had been promised, and they were fighting back with courage and dignity.

The Moss 3 Occupation

The boldest single action of the strike came on September 17, 1989, when ninety-eight miners and one minister — Reverend Jim Sessions of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia — entered and occupied the Moss 3 coal processing plant in Carbo, Virginia.

The occupation was planned and executed with military precision — a reflection of the organizational skills the miners had developed over months of sustained action. The occupiers entered the plant at 4:00 a.m., secured the facility, and announced that they would remain until Pittston agreed to negotiate in good faith.

Inside the plant, the miners maintained perfect discipline. They caused no damage. They made no threats. They communicated with the outside through a designated spokesperson and through Reverend Sessions, whose presence provided moral authority and a link to the religious community. The occupation was a sit-in — an act of civil disobedience in the tradition of the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement — applied to an industrial facility.

The occupation lasted four days. It attracted intense media coverage and generated enormous political pressure on Pittston. The spectacle of nearly a hundred coal miners peacefully occupying a processing plant — men who could have, in the tradition of their grandfathers at Blair Mountain, brought guns instead of prayers — was a powerful demonstration of the new character of coalfield resistance.

The occupiers left voluntarily, and the legal consequences were modest. But the Moss 3 occupation signaled to Pittston and to the nation that the strikers were committed, disciplined, and capable of escalation — and that their escalation would take forms that denied the company any moral justification for a violent response.

The Settlement

The Pittston strike was settled on February 19, 1990 — ten months and fourteen days after it began — through the mediation of Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole. The settlement restored the healthcare benefits for retirees that Pittston had attempted to eliminate, established a joint employer-employee benefits fund, and resolved the immediate grievances that had triggered the strike.

The UMWA declared victory, and by the terms of the specific dispute, it was. The retirees got their healthcare back. The company was forced to honor its obligations.

But the larger picture was more complex. The Pittston strike was the last great coal strike — the last time that the UMWA was able to mobilize a community-wide action of this scale and sustain it for months. The coal industry was in the early stages of the long decline that would accelerate in the 1990s and 2000s. UMWA membership was falling. Mechanization and the shift to surface mining were reducing the number of miners — and therefore the number of potential union members — in the coalfields.

The Pittston strike was, in retrospect, both a culmination and a farewell. It was the culmination of a century of coalfield labor organizing — the tradition that began with Mother Jones and the UMWA's earliest campaigns and ran through Blair Mountain, Harlan County, and the black lung movement. And it was a farewell to the era in which that organizing was possible — the era in which the coal industry was large enough and the workforce was concentrated enough to sustain community-wide collective action.

Legacy: What Camp Solidarity Built

The Pittston strike ended, Camp Solidarity was dismantled, and the miners went back to work. But the experience left marks that lasted far longer than the strike itself.

The organizational skills developed during the strike — community mobilization, nonviolent direct action, media strategy, coalition building — were carried into subsequent struggles by the people who had acquired them. Many Pittston strike veterans became involved in the anti-mountaintop removal movement, the environmental justice movement, and other forms of Appalachian activism in the decades that followed.

The model of community-wide resistance — in which the strike was not just a workplace action but a community action, involving men and women, miners and non-miners, the church and the kitchen and the picket line — influenced subsequent organizing efforts across the region. The women who had sustained Camp Solidarity went on to sustain other campaigns. The networks of solidarity that had been forged during the strike persisted and were activated for new purposes.

And the moral framework of the Pittston strike — the insistence that working people have rights that corporations cannot unilaterally revoke, that a promise made is a promise that must be kept, that dignity is not a negotiable commodity — remained alive in the coalfield communities even as the industry that had shaped them declined.

Camp Solidarity was not just a place. It was a demonstration that, even at the end of the twentieth century, even in the face of overwhelming corporate power, ordinary people could stand together and win. That demonstration has not been forgotten.

Discussion Questions

1. The Pittston strikers chose nonviolent resistance rather than the armed confrontation that had characterized earlier coalfield labor conflicts. What were the strategic and moral reasons for this choice? Was nonviolence the right strategy for the Pittston strike? Would it have been the right strategy at Blair Mountain in 1921?

2. Camp Solidarity became more than a logistical support base — it became a community and a symbol. What functions did Camp Solidarity serve beyond material support for the strike? How did its cultural and social dimensions contribute to the strike's success?

3. Women played essential roles in the Pittston strike — running the Camp Solidarity kitchen, maintaining morale, participating in picket lines and direct actions. Yet their contributions have been less recognized than those of the male miners. Why? How does the gendered history of the Pittston strike compare to the role of women in earlier coalfield conflicts?

4. The Pittston strike is described as "the last great coal strike." What made it the last? What structural changes in the coal industry and the labor movement explain why no comparable action has occurred since?

5. Pittston strike veterans went on to participate in environmental justice organizing in the coalfields. What skills, values, and networks from the labor movement carried over into environmental activism? How are labor organizing and environmental organizing similar, and how are they different?