by Junior Walk of the Daily Yonder
I carry coal company scrip in a little zipper pouch in my wallet everywhere I go. It’s a few little coins, with holes punched in them. I bought them from ebay over a decade ago and they jingle around any time I pull my wallet out of my pocket. They have the name of the town I grew up in stamped on them, along with the name of some long-dead coal company along with various denomination marks.
They remind me of how hard the people here in my home of West Virginia have had to fight for basic human dignity. How hard the people have had to fight for the rights that most of the United States takes for granted these days, that we no longer enjoy here in the hills and hollers of the Central Appalachia.
Rights and protections like the eight hour work day, collective bargaining, health insurance, and the weekend.
For the right to be paid in real legal tender.
The home I grew up in was an old coal-camp house, just a few feet from the main road and the train tracks. These houses, all in a row, were built by coal companies in the days when they paid their workers in scrip. They used these homes as storage for their workers, until the people here fought for the right to own their own homes.
These days, coal mines here in West Virginia generally run on a 12-hour shift, often times more. You work whatever days your boss tells you to work. Unions have lost the focus and membership that once made them a powerful force for good here. The United Mine Workers of America once stood for the people of West Virginia. Over time their priorities shifted to helping the coal companies run as much coal as possible to keep their pension fund solvent.
That scrip I carry in my wallet also reminds me of the many things these leeches known as coal company executives have taken from all of us in southern West Virginia. The things they have stolen away from us like access to healthy and clean groundwater, air that isn’t full of blasting dust, coal dust, and exhaust fumes. They’ve also taken our life expectancy and our ability to live without fear of increased rates of cancer, birth defects, heart disease, and other health impacts that have been proven in numerous peer-reviewed studies.
Want to know what else they’ve taken from us here in West Virginia? The ability to have elected officials or regulatory agencies that know what it’s like to go a single day without the taste of boot leather in their mouths from appeasing their wealthy owners.
The people of the Mountain State have paid the price, for generations. We have paid the externalized costs of corporate greed. We have paid with their sweat, blood, lives, and their very breath in their lungs to send the children of coal company executives to private schools. We have paid with the cancers that ravage the bodies of their loved ones, and the black sludge that flows through their creeks for the Ferrari parked in a driveway in some cul-de-sac in another state owned by a man who looks at us as collateral damage. We are not collateral damage.
There’s a saying attributed to coal-company bosses like Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Energy: “If a tool is broke, you throw it away and you get a new tool. If a worker is broke, you throw it away and you get a new worker.”
I ask the people of the coalfields this: When have we paid in full all we are owed? When do we say enough is enough and you will poison us no more? When will we say enough is enough and you will exploit my labor and force me to poison my neighbor no more?
For my neighbors in West Virginia, just do me one favor and maybe think about this the next time you elect a governor from out of state who was a lobbyist for some of the same drug companies that caused an opioid epidemic in our state.
Maybe think about everything your grandparents and great grandparents fought and died for the next time your boss tells you who you need to vote for to make sure you can run the most coal.
Junior Walk is an activist from southern West Virginia. His work to stop mountaintop removal coal mining has included lobbying in Washington, D.C., gathering scientific data, providing standing in lawsuits, and being arrested for direct action. This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
