The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1928-09-08
The Miners National Convention
at Pittsburgh.

Sunday marks the opening at Pittsburgh
of the most important trade union conven-
ton in the United States in many long years
1t is the convention which must mark the
definite foundation of the national union Of
the bituminous and anthracite coal industry
in the United States.
The United Mine Workers Union was in
its day the backbone of the American trade
union movement. The corruption of the
bureaucracy of that once-great union, its
collaboration and conspiracy with the mine
owners against the vital interests and needs
of the workers, eliminating in the most
brazenly open betrayal by the Lewis
machine during the crisis in the industry,
when Lewis and his henchmen in all dis
tricts deliberately starved out and broke the
strike-has resulted finally in the downfall
and hopeless destruction of the union.
Upon the pitiful fragments of Union
which, when it lived, had been the greatest
mass organization that trade unionism in
this country had been able to produce
upon the wreckage of the United Mine
Workers Union, sits discredited, unmasked
and desperate gang of strikebreakers
headed by John L. Lewis and calling them
selves still by the meaningless name of the
dead union. This wreckage is transformed
into nothing more than a machine for
strikebreaking and the prevention of the
organization of the coal industry. Those
who control the machine of this union are
but gunner and strikebreakers in the viz
tual, and sometimes literal pay of the coal
operators. Lewis only bid for survival is a
bid to the coal operators to make use of him
and his machine as instruments for the
strangling of the movement for organiza-
ton in the industry.
Within the eight years of the power of
John L. Lewis over the union, the employers
with his assistance have beaten the organ
lied section of the workers in the industry
down from the position where they once
held 70 per cent of production, down to
where even the most charitable have ceased
to claim 80 per cent of production as
unionized.
Never fully organized, the coal mining in
dustry required, from the point of view. of
the workers, above all the organization
during this crisis of the unorganized fields
which were being used as lever to crush
the unionized workers. With the shrewd
ingenuity of specialist in strikebreaking,
Lewis and high-salaried bureaucracy went
into this situation, not with the necessary
energetic drive for the organization of
the unorganized fields, but with the slogan
borrowed from the scab mine operators to
squeeze out of the industry a quarter of
million coal miners When in spite of the
Lewis bureaucracy the unorganized miners
of Western Pennsylvania formed their own
locals applied for admission to the interna-
tional union and joined the strike of 1922,
the Lewis bureaucracy cut the Threats of
these miners by making settlement with
out their inclusion. In the struggle of 1919,
the bureaucracy of the United Mine Work
ers betrayed the mine workers. In 1922
again the leaders sold out the strike. In
1925 again. And in the long and bitter
struggle of 1927 and 1928 Lewis and his
district lieutenants deliberately played the
game within the union of wrecking the or
SANITATION in order to defeat the strike.
The national nominating convention of
the Workers (Communist) Party last May
said in its platform:
"District after district lost for the
United Mine Workers under the leadership of
the Lewis machine. In 1919 the miners strike
tied up 20 per cent of production; the present
strike only 20 per cent. Lewis and the opera