Yablonski’s murder, as it turned out, galvanized the insurgency, which came to include a group called the Miners for Democracy. After a federal judge invalidated the election results and ordered a do-over, the membership organized the first rank-and-file convention in U.S. labor history. Their candidate, Arnold Miller, would go on to defeat Boyle by fourteen thousand votes. “Arnold Miller and his band of reformers used Jock Yablonski’s assassination to encode functional democracy into the UMWA’s DNA,” Bradley writes. They ratified almost all of Yablonski’s expansive platform. But not one of the major labor leaders came forward to congratulate Miller on the victory.
Miller had some successes, but he was ultimately an inadequate leader, and the fortunes of coal were soon on the decline. Oil and gas were bringing down the price of coal, and coal companies slowly began to leave Appalachia while increasing production in the largely non-union western United States. But the revolution for a democratically controlled union that began in the UMWA soon spread to the other major unions, including the Teamsters and the United Steelworkers of America. Workers across the board were empowered to strike in the long 1970s, what labor scholar Cal Winslow calls the “decade of the rank and file.” In 1970 alone, there were 5,716 strikes involving more than 3 million workers, many of which were self-organized, sometimes illegal, wildcat strikes. One wildcat strike of postal workers involved over two hundred thousand workers. Teachers unions often led the way. In 1966, fifty-four strikes were called involving forty-five thousand teachers. A secretary of the radical National Education Association said at the time that “strikes are illegal, yet teachers are calling them and making gains with them.” During the 1975–1976 school year there were 203 strikes.
This continues to the present day. In 2010, a group called the Caucus of Rank and File Educators took over the once-conservative Chicago Teachers Union and organized a crippling strike in 2012, one of the largest strikes in the United States this century. Like the miners, the teachers’ demands were expansive, going beyond the self-interested demands of higher wages and benefits. They wanted to decrease class sizes and high-stakes testing, as well as increase music, art, and gym offerings. Six years later, teachers in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia participated in a series of wildcat strikes, the likes of which had not been seen since the 1970s. Recently, NBA basketball players, foregoing union approval, led a wildcat strike to draw attention to the latest wave of Black men murdered by police.