United Mine Workers of America

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

Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada.

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.

By 2014, coal mining has largely shifted to open pit mines in Wyoming, and there are only 60,000 active coal miners.

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

However it is responsible for pensions and medical benefits for 40,000 retired miners, and for 50,000 spouses and dependents.

The UMW is founded in Columbus, Ohio, on January 25, 1890, with the merger of two old labor groups, the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 135 and the National Progressive Miners Union.

Adopting the model of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the union is initially established as a three-pronged labor tool: to develop mine safety; to improve mine workers' independence from the mine owners and the company store; and to provide miners with collective bargaining power.

After passage of the National Recovery Act in 1933 during the Great Depression, organizers spread throughout the United States to organize all coal miners into labor unions. Under the powerful leadership of John L. Lewis, the UMW breaks with the American Federation of Labor and set up its own federation, the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Its organizers fan out to organize major industries, including automobiles, steel, electrical equipment, rubber, paint and chemical, and fights a series of battles with the AFL.

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

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

During the Second World War the UMW is involved in a series of major strikes and threatens walkouts that anger public opinion and energize pro-business opponents.

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