1,000 coal miners have been on strike in Brookwood, Alabama since April 2021 — and last night, Rage Against the Machine's tmorello was there to support them. The longtime labor advocate tells us what this fight means to him.
As he stood on the rickety wooden stage that had been hastily erected in front of the union hall earlier that day, Morello surveyed the hundreds of coal miners, retirees, and their families who had spread out in the grass in front of him, and smiled.
You have a personal connection here, too; as you mentioned on stage, your family were coal miners, and you come from a small coal mining town. Whatever rights and protections that exist are because of unions, and because people have sacrificed and struggled in the past, just like these Alabama United Mine Workers are sacrificing and striking now. It’s just one more link in the chain. The dynamic is identical. It’s the insistence on capital supremacy that is keeping them down. The owners have spent 10 times more on breaking the union than they could have spent to accede to the legitimate demands of the strikers.
That’s an excellent question, why is it not? It is a modern day David-versus-Goliath story, where you do have these multinational corporations, hyper-millionaires who are doing their best to stamp out an Alabama working-class movement. I think one of the most powerful things that was said [tonight] by the head of the union was that everyone on the other side of the negotiating table are millionaires.
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