Behind a coal mine strike: Who cares for workers in a fading industry?
Among the rugged hills and quiet, shady woods of central Alabama, it suddenly appears – a mountain of coal, hundreds of feet high, inky black against the orange of the setting sun.
Braxton Wright points across the mine’s sprawling complex. But Mr. Wright isn’t working today – and hasn’t since March of last year. Instead, he’s standing across the road, on a picket line with a handful of other miners.
“We wanted our dignity back,” says Mr. Wright, a member of the United Mine Workers of America Local 2368, which was among those that went on strike April 1, 2021. The mine has since been kept running by nonunion workers, as a grinding impasse over wages and benefits drags on between the union and owner Warrior Met Coal.
But politically, the Brookwood miners say, their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.
“The Republicans have kind of always been anti-union,” Mr. Wright says. “And most Democrats
