West Virginia teachers set an example of courage nationally

West Virginia teachers galloped into the national spotlight with their 55-county nine-day walkout that brought a 5% pay raise to lift them from No. 48 among the states in teacher pay.

They were named among Time Magazine’s 100 more influential people and organizations.

They were listed among Fortune Magazine’s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.

West Virginia teachers ranked No. 31 on Fortune’s list of 50. They were in some remarkably amazing company: The Parkland Schools massacre survivors, Me, Too movement founder Tarana Burke and special federal prosecutor Robert Mueller, investigating possible Russian interference with America’s presidential election.

And the teachers did it while spending their money to feed children who got free lunches when school was in session so that those kids would not go hungry over the walkout.

And in a once solidly Democratic state that gave billionaire Donald Trump, whose policies often benefit the wealthiest among us at the expense of the poor and middle class, nearly 68 percent of its votes for President.

And the West Virginia teachers started a national movement among teachers that spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky, New Jersey, Arizona and other states.

“Seeing what happened in West Virginia gave us some hope, an outline of what to do and what not to do,” said Mickey Miller, an economics teacher at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa.

West Virginia has a history of being critical to the labor movement. The Washington Post labels West Virginia “the birthplace of the American labor movement.”

Octogenarian Mother Jones, who actual name was Mary Harris Jones, and legendary United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis had some of their best success in the Mountain State.

West Virginia miners are the only Americans bombed by their own government during their efforts to organize coal mine employees in 1920 in what is called The Battle of Blair Mountain. 

And coal operators routinely hired goons to beat those who tried to better the coal miners’ situation.

Coal miners went from mine to mine, and at times committed violence, where cheap non-union labor was used.

Despite a lot of deaths by protesting miners, it took the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to skyrocket union membership in West Virginia and elsewhere. But the Mountain State has been the bedrock of unionism for more than a century.

West Virginia’s teachers picked up that baton admirably and won the day.

Much of the union progress in West Virginia was beat back by greedy, out-of-state coal operators … and machinery.

Machinery began to replace miners during the late 1940s and continued unabated at the turn of the 21st century. The number of miners declined from 127,304 in 1950 to 59,098 in 1960, and by 1999 only about 20,000 miners remained in West Virginia.

Politicians like John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump came into the state in election years and made grand promises that unemployed coal miners and their families grasped like straws clutched by a drowning person. But mine employment steadily dwindled with one continuous loader able to do the work of 100 miners.

The New York Times lauded the teachers, and deservedly so. “Strikes as broad as the one in West Virginia are vanishingly rare. But when they do happen, they prove that our labor history is not that deeply buried. If workers are pushed hard enough, those ghosts will rise.”

West Virginia teachers’ actions were not a piece of cake. As the New York Times pointed out, “The 2011 labor uprising in Wisconsin looked very similar to this one, and ended in defeat.”

Not this time. You don’t mess with West Virginians.

Personally, I was on a 1932 picket line in Monongah opposite a line of company goons on horseback before I was born. My mother, Lena Futten Olesky, was eight months pregnant with me. 

My father, John W. Olesky, Sr., was such a relentless force for the UMW as a checkweighman that, when he was injured in his second cave-in that had four or more feet of coal before rescuers got to any part of his body, Consol dropped him from the payroll.

When he didn’t die and returned to the mines after 18 months of recovery, he had to seek employment at other mines in Carolina and Four States.

His crime? When the company checkweighman would announce the weight of a coal car brought out of the mines as, say, “20 tons,” my father would say, “25 tons.” They would settle on a number between the two. That cost Consol a lot of money and put a lot of food on miners’ tables.

So Consol got even with a Polish-American miner and his Italian native wife and their children, John Olesky, Jr., Class of 1950, and Jackie Olesky Straight, Class of 1955.

I guess the union bug got to me, too. When I was at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News I was fired and blackballed for my union activities at the union-hating Atlanta-based Cox Media paper. 

I had my Cinderella native (adjacent to Williamson) wife Monnie Turkette Olesky and three children paying the price for my principles. 

It took five payless weeks, and having my applications followed by derogatory blackballing letters from Daily News editor Jim Fain, before I found a newspaper, the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, and an editor, Ben Maidenburg, who said, “After 15 years (of me being employed in Dayton), it must have been their fault.” 

So I was hired and worked for 26 years at the Beacon Journal, owned by John S. Knight, probably the best newspaper owner in American media history. 

As it turned out, my financial fortunes, career and respect improved immensely at the unions-friendly Beacon Journal.

I have been retired since 1996. I have been able to afford travel to 56 countries, 44 states, take 14 cruises and spend 25 winters (as long as four months each time) in Florida.

And kept my principles.

The West Virginia teachers out-did me far better. 

Kudos to them.