The United Mine Workers of America (UMW or UMWA) is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners.

[1] Although its main focus has always been on workers and their rights, the UMW of today also advocates for better roads, schools, and universal health care.

The UMW was left with 35,000 members, of whom 20,000 were coal miners, chiefly in underground mines in Kentucky and West Virginia.

The UMW grew to 800,000 members and was an element in the New Deal Coalition supporting Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Lewis broke with Roosevelt in 1940 and left the CIO, leaving the UMW increasingly isolated in the labor movement.

During World War II the UMW was involved in a series of major strikes and threatened walkouts that angered public opinion and energized pro-business opponents.

After the war, the UMW concentrated on gaining large increases in wages, medical services and retirement benefits for its shrinking membership, which was contending with changes in technology and declining mines in the East.

The Union's emergence in the 1890s was the culmination of decades of effort to organize mine workers and people in adjacent occupations into a single, effective negotiating unit.

At the time coal was one of the most highly sought natural resources, as it was widely used to heat homes and to power machines in industries.

With the owners imposing reduced wages on a regular basis,[2] in response to fluctuations in pricing, miners sought a group to stand up for their rights.

The main reason for the success of this group was the president, John Siney, who sought a way both to increase miners benefits while also helping the operators earn a profit.

The founders, John McBride, Chris Evans and Daniel McLaughlin, believed that creating an eight-hour work day would not only be beneficial for workers, but also as a means to stop overproduction, which would in turn help operators.

The conference passed resolutions requiring the Knights of Labor to give up their secrecy and publicize material about its members and locations.

[2] When the union was founded, the values of the UMWA were stated in the preamble: We have founded the United Mine Workers of America for the purpose of ... educating all mine workers in America to realize the necessity of unity of action and purpose, in demanding and securing by lawful means the just fruits of our toil.

A major player in the labor movement and national politics, in the 1930s he used UMW activists to organize new unions in autos, steel and rubber.

(Following the 1939 German-Soviet pact of nonaggression, the Comintern had instructed communist parties in the West to oppose any support for nations at war with Nazi Germany.

[7]) Lewis was an effective strike leader who gained high wages for his membership while suppressing his opponents, including the United States government.

He was one of the most controversial and innovative leaders in the history of labor, gaining credit for building the industrial unions of the CIO into a political and economic powerhouse to rival the AFL, yet was widely criticized as he called nationwide coal strikes damaging the American economy in the middle of World War II.

Coal miners for 40 years hailed him as the benevolent dictator who brought high wages, pensions and medical benefits.

[8] The union's history has numerous examples of strikes in which members and their supporters clashed with company-hired strikebreakers and government forces.

The most notable include: By June the demand for coal began to increase, and some operators decided to pay the workers their original salaries before the wage cut.

[19] This crisis led to the Nova Scotia government acting in 1937 to improve the rights of all wage earners, and these reforms served as a model across Canada, at both provincial and federal levels.

Led by new president Arnold Miller, the new leadership enacted a series of reforms which gave UMWA members the right to elect their leaders at all levels of the union and to ratify the contracts under which they worked.

[20] Diana Baldwin and Anita Cherry, hired as miners in 1973, are believed to have been the first women to work in an underground coal mine in the United States.

This action was based upon Executive Order 11246 signed in 1965 by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, which bars sex discrimination by companies with federal contracts.

The end of wartime price controls introduced competition to produce cheaper coal, putting pressure on wages.

The United Mine Workers ran candidate Frank Henry Sherman under the union banner in the 1905 Alberta general election.

Roosevelt in 1943 was outraged when Lewis threatened a major strike to end anthracite coal production needed by the war effort.

[36] In 2021 the union urged him to revisit his opposition to President Biden's Build Back Better Plan, noting that the bill includes an extension of a fund that provides benefits to coal miners suffering from black lung disease, which expires at the end of the year.

The UMWA also touted tax incentives that encourage manufacturers to build facilities in coalfields that would employ thousands of miners who lost their jobs.