Cops Keep Serving Those Stomping on Workers

A protest that began with five men blocking a train full of coal has grown into a small 24-hour tent city along some railroad tracks next to the highway. It has become a pilgrimage site for labor activists, a rallying point for the community — “a tailgate party on steroids,” as one local official approvingly put it.
...
The railroad blockade began in late July, about a month after Blackjewel, the two-year-old company where the miners worked, suddenly declared bankruptcy. Blackjewel owned mines in four states, and employed over a thousand miners in central Appalachia. ... Workers received no pay for their last week on the job. Then they learned that their paychecks for the previous two weeks had bounced.
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One of the company’s assets was a trainload of coal, over a million dollars’ worth, at the Cloverlick No. 3 mine in Harlan County. The coal, dug up by the unpaid workers, had been sold, but had not yet been transported to the buyer. On the afternoon of July 29, the train rolled slowly out of the mine. It did not go unnoticed.

“They was doing it as quiet as could be,” said Dalton Lewis, 20.

A fellow miner called him with the plan: “Come on down here, we’re going to stop this train.”

The Justice Department later declared the trainload of coal to be a "hot asset", which I gather means that the sale of the coal would be treated 100% as income to the mine. So the train stays put until everyone can agree what to do with the proceeds of the sale of the coal. The workers want the money to go to the wages that the company, in essence, stole from them.

Missing from the NY Times story, quoted above, was this nugget, reported locally:

At one point, [state] police told the miners they couldn’t be on the tracks but the protest continued, according to WYMT.

Unlike in past decades, the cops didn't try to solve this Harlan County labor issue with gunfire. Which I guess is progress.