Aviva Chomsky - Unwanted People

The city took on a festive atmosphere as thousands of workers and their supporters held massive meetings, marches, and fundraisers. Support poured in from other unions and organizations. The mill argued that increasing productivity was to the benefit of all. If the mill remained profitable, it could remain in Salem, while other factories were relocating in the south. Moreover, increased efficiency could keep prices low, which would help consumers and increase production. True, the work pace would be increased and some workers would be laid off, but this, they argued, was the cost of progress.

Workers defined their goals differently: by the quality of their working lives, and by their collective identities. They were fighting, they claimed, for the rights of textile workers everywhere. If they agreed to accept worse working conditions, workers in other mills would also be forced to accept them to keep their mills “competitive.”

Salem’s strike engaged with key questions of twentieth century labor history. Should workers collaborate with management to lower production costs and increase sales, in order to maintain profitability and keep jobs from moving? Or should they fight to maintain decent working conditions, and challenge the race to the bottom? Are workers in other regions—and other countries—their potential allies in the struggle of labor against capital, or their competitors, in the struggle of one region or country against another? To what extent should government regulate labor relations? Finally, is constantly increasing production and consumption a viable economic model for the national, or the world, economy?

These questions come to the fore again in a late twentieth-century struggle in Salem, over its 1950s-era coal fired power plant. Local environmental groups organized to regulate or close the plant, which studies and local experience showed it to be emitting hazardous levels of coal dust and increasing rates of asthma, cancer, and other illnesses in its environs. Plant officials protested for exemptions from environmental regulations. The union at the plant and city officials opposed the environmentalists, arguing that the plant was essential to the city’s tax base, and for the jobs it provided. Labor and environmentalists lined up against each other.

In Kentucky and West Virginia, where most of the plant’s coal came from, parallel battles over regulation and production were taking place as the region’s underground coal mines were being increasingly replaced by a surface mining technique known as “mountaintop removal.” Appalachia’s mountains began to be blasted away one by one as mining companies sought more efficient, less labor-intensive, access to the coal hidden within them.

The mining union, the UMWA, was torn. Mountaintop removal cost the jobs of underground miners, but created new sectors to organize, even if it required far fewer workers overall. Local residents—many from mining families—were outraged at the destruction of the mountains so central to their history, identity, and local economies beyond coal. Many there felt that the extractive economy had only entrenched the region’s poverty over the past century, and that mountaintop removal would only accelerate the process. The battle lines were drawn over regulation. The union fought alongside grassroots environmental organizations for greater regulation of surface mining in the 1970s, but by the 1990s had reformulated its position to become part of the “coal lobby” that argued that the environmentalists were standing in the way of progress and jobs. 5

By the 1990s Salem’s plant was moving increasingly to imported coal from Colombia, South America. Major U.S. coal producers like Exxon and Drummond had begun to close their U.S. mines in order to invest in Colombia where labor was cheaper and regulation minimal. By the 1990s northern Colombia boasted two of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines, and had become one of the world’s major coal exporters. Most of it went to the eastern seaboard of the United States, including Salem’s plant.

Battles were being fought over coal mining in Colombia, too. The mines began a process of displacement of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities that had practiced subsistence farming and herding in the area for centuries. As the communities protested, they sought allies in Colombia’s mining union, and also among those who consumed the coal. During the first decade of the twentieth century, numerous representatives of these communities and of Colombia’s mining union visited Salem to educate residents about the human costs of their use of coal and their energy consumption.

Community activists described the impact of the constantly-expanding mines that took over their lands, contaminated their water and air, and destroyed villages and cultures. Union leaders described abysmal working conditions, and a climate of anti-labor violence that had claimed the lives of dozens of union activists in the coal region, and thousands nation-wide, in Colombia. They accused the mining companies of colluding with right-wing paramilitary forces to destroy the union movement.

Like Salem’s workers in the 1930s, though, they refused to accept the paradigm that posited an inevitable conflict between jobs and progress, on one hand, and human rights and decent working conditions on the other. Like Salem’s workers, they demanded a redefinition of “progress” that was based on quality of life rather than increasing production at all costs. “Without the river, there is no water. Without water, there is no life. Without life, there are no jobs,” the union president told a group of visitors in 2012, when asked how it could be that a union was opposing the mine’s plan to expand—and create more jobs —by diverting the region’s major river. 6

Salem was invisibly connected to these events in Colombia because of its regular imports of coal from these mines. The invisible connection became visible through community activists in both regions who challenged the idea that increasing jobs and consumption was a goal to be pursued regardless of the costs.

In a petition in 2006 (Primary Source 2) the residents of one indigenous village affected by the mine asked a visiting delegation from Salem and other coal-consuming communities to take responsibility for the damage that their coal consumption was causing. Students—like the visitors who were handed this petition—can reflect on the hidden ways in which people in distant regions are connected. Seeing the devastation caused by Colombia’s mines led some people to ask whether there was something wrong with the economic model of “development” itself. Could it be that our search for ever-increasing “standard of living”—i.e., consumption—was inherently unviable? Residents of Salem, of the Appalachian coal fields, and the Colombian coal fields engaged in fruitful dialogues about these issues over the course of visits and meetings over the years.

Salem came closer to Latin America in other ways in the second half of the twentieth century as well. The Pequot mill closed in the early 1950s, moving, as had so many other New England mills, to South Carolina and then to Mexico. As the mill’s tenement houses emptied of their French-Canadian residents, they were filled with new immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It was a pattern repeated throughout the region. As industry migrated to Mexico and the Caribbean, Mexicans and Caribbean peoples migrated to the declining mill towns. They were attracted by the cheap housing stock, but even more so by the jobs created by the declining industrial economy. The few, small factories that couldn’t afford to relocate sought ever-cheaper workers in order to compete with those that had moved abroad. Meanwhile deindustrialization created a new, low-wage service economy. Those that profited from the process sought more personal services (like nannies and landscapers). Those that lost out in the process also needed more services, as they worked longer hours and had to scrape by on less. In the second half of the twentieth century struggling middle class families relied more on fast and processed food, (produced cheaply by immigrant workers), childcare, and other expanding, low-wage sectors that underlay continued high consumption in the deindustrializing economy. 7