Reaching and Teaching Young Union Members
How can we get more young members involved in the union?
I could have retired a lot sooner than I did if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that lament from a graying labor leader in my neck of the western Kentucky woods.
“It helps when you have some issue, some struggle that appeals to them,” says Mine Workers ( UMWA ) President Cecil Roberts, “that, and social media.”
Roberts who was recently in Paducah, Ky., where I taught history at the community college for two dozen years, says the UMWA is no stranger to struggles. “If you read our history, you’ll see that companies have resisted us every step of the way,” Roberts says.
I have studied UMWA history, and Roberts is right. Often, coal companies stubbornly and violently resisted the union, notably in the eastern Kentucky coal fields in the 1930s, when mine owners hired gun thugs and scabs to keep the UMWA at bay.
Roberts adds that thousands of young miners have embraced the union’s current struggle against Peabody Energy, Arch and Patriot coal companies. “They know what’s at stake,” Roberts says.
A number of these young miners have dads and mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers faced with losing their health care and benefits. That’s the kind of issue young people can relate to.
Absent a big issue, how do you get young trade unionists involved? It’s not always easy, admits Roberts, who is a member of the Executive Committee of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council.
I tell people this all of the time: that in some ways, we’ve done too good a job. Let’s take a 19-year-old coal miner in southern West Virginia. The day he goes to work in the mines, he’s in the middle class. He buys a new vehicle and maybe a new boat. The next thing you know, he’s going on vacation. But he doesn’t really know how he got all that.
Roberts says veteran union members need to do a better job of explaining to young members that their good pay and benefits were union won, not company given.
We need to make them understand that it took a lot of fighting, a lot of suffering and a lot of struggling for that young miner to be able to walk into that coal mine and make $75,000 a year and have health care and a pension. All of that came from the union.
Roberts, 66, from Cabin Creek, W.Va., is a sixth generation coal miner who grew up in a UMWA family.
I learned about the union in the house. But that doesn’t always happen today. Somehow, we’ve got to make a connection with these young people. If not in the house, it has to come through education or through the unions themselves. We’ve got to do a better job of telling young people our story.
Social media is a great way to do just that, he adds. “I don’t tweet, but I’m going to have to come to grips with that,” Roberts says with a chuckle. “The young people follow the social media. They get their news off the Internet, not from television or radio or newspapers.” Adds Roberts:
If young people don’t become part of the struggle, don’t understand the benefits of unions and what unions do, and don’t know why we are here and how unions are important.
Editor's note: Want to learn more about engaging young members? Watch a message below from AFL-CIO Young Worker Coordinator Tahir Duckett who has some ideas about engaging younger members, and take a look at the young worker toolkit .
