The Daily Worker

A New Phase in the Onslaught on the Coal Miners

The arrogant and demonstrative manner in which the big coal operators' associations refused to take part in the conference arranged by Secretary of Labor Davis shows two things:

First, that the coal barons understood from the beginning that the conference was a fake and called only as an attempt to fool the miners into believing that the Coolidge administration was doing something for them. Second, the attitude of the coal barons and the insulting references to the United Mine Workers of America in their wired refusals to attend the conference clearly proves that no quarter is to be given the striking and locked out miners.

Injunctions outlaw the strike and make even the collection and distribution of relief illegal, thousands of miners' families are being evicted, the water supply of whole mining communities is shut off by the companies, coal and iron police terrorize the mining camps.

In both Pennsylvania and Ohio the chambers of commerce and the local patriotic organizations of the middle class, controlled directly by the coal companies and the banks, are denouncing the strike as "un-American" and urging the deportation of foreign-born miners.

The miners and their families are treated as an enemy population by an invading imperialist army.

In Colorado the state troops are raiding miners' homes, breaking up meetings and making wholesale arrests.

Actual war is being waged on the miners, their wives and children.

The intention is to smash all semblance of union organization and put in its place the same slave system which prevails in the open shop mines of West Virginia and other southern states.

The official leadership of the United Mine Workers and of the American Federation of Labor has surrendered to the coal barons. These leaders are tied hand and foot to the political parties of the capitalists. They are allowing the miners' union to be smashed and the mines to be turned into slave-pits.

There is in American labor history no greater betrayal than that which has brought the United Mine Workers to the verge of destruction and which has permitted, because of the failure of the Lewis machine to carry out organization campaigns, the union coal fields to be strangled by an ever-tightening circle of open shop mines.

No real effort has been made to rally the labor movement to the aid of the miners by these leaders. No real effort will be made by them. The appeal to Coolidge and to Governor Fisher of Pennsylvania by President Lewis of the U. M. W. A. in itself constitutes a betrayal.

If the miners' union is to be saved, if the brutal drive on the miners and their families is to be stopped, if the labor movement is to be placed on a war footing to meet the growing offensive, the left wing and the rank and file militants will have to do the job.

It is a job that must be done and it is a job for which willing hands will be found. The continuous betrayals of union officialdom which leave the labor movement to the mercy of the capitalists have brought thousands of workers to the realization of the fact that only two choices remain-fight or surrender.

The miners have shown that they will fight. Back of them must be placed the utmost strength the working class can muster and into this decisive sector of the struggle there must go relief and organizers. From the workers in other industries must come relief and from the ranks of the militants in the labor movement will come the organizers who will build a fighting labor movement.

The labor movement must be broken away from the political parties of its enemies and a labor party formed.

Relief for the miners must be collected and distributed in spite of injunctions. Organization campaigns must be started.

These are the methods by which the attack of the bosses can be repelled and a powerful labor movement built.

But one thing must not be forgotten. It is that the struggle to save the miners' union, establish a labor party and build the labor movement, can be carried on successfully only by a ceaseless exposure of the boss-controlled union officialdom and a campaign ending in its defeat.