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March 4th, 2018 
Awake Goy The issue has expanded beyond the plight of teachers. “I don’t think I recall seeing so much anger being openly expressed,” said Gordon Simmons, an organizer for the United Electricworkers, which represents state and local workers. “My phone and email have been blowing up with state workers asking what they can do to support school employees. Historically, state government has played teachers, who are highly unionized, against everyone else. The PEIA issue has put all public workers in West Virginia in the same boat, and the resulting sense of solidarity is awesome.”
The protesting teachers are beginning to link their efforts to the state’s long history of worker activism. “I feel that history is repeating itself,” said Gore. “And I’m talking way back to the coal camp days, when the miners were paid in scrip and they were basically owned by their employers.” Gore’s county, Logan, is the home of Blair Mountain, where an anti-union sheriff and union-busting detectives bombed and shot at striking miners. Gore’s mother grew up near Blair.
A recurring complaint during the strike is the state’s low severance tax of about 5 percent on coal and natural gas extraction. Other states have higher tax rates, and raising West Virginia’s rate could help fund PEIA. “Even a modest increase to 7.5 percent, while leaving plenty for the industry, would have a big impact on the state’s finances,” the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy wrote on February 26.“Increasing the severance tax rate to 7.5 percent would increase severance tax revenue by $93 million in 2019, and at total $585 million from 2019 to 2023.”
And so the issue comes back, as it so often does, to West Virginia’s coal and energy industries. Solving PEIA’s financial woes means the legislature would have to confront those industries. “No one is at the point of violent revolt, it’s been a peaceful protest. But the parallel between then and now is that our state is in poverty and will continue to be in poverty because these industries come in and tell our representatives how things are going to go. Our legislators bow down to them,” Gore complained.
Justice proposed a special session to raise the severance tax on natural gas, but some members of his own party seem reluctant to change the status quo. On Tuesday, Senate Republicans voted to shelve a measure that would have diverted some existing severance tax revenue to PEIA. And on Thursday evening, not long after killing the pay raise bill, Senate President Mitch Carmichael expressed further opposition to raising the tax. “Carmichael said raising the severance tax on natural gas could cause West Virginia to be less competitive than its neighbors, Ohio and Pennsylvania,”reported the West Virginia MetroNews. (Last year, Carmichael had supported a measure that would’ve reduced the severance tax even further.)
“This has moved from a strike to a movement to a reckoning,” Gore said. “And that reckoning is on public officials who are in the pockets of big energy.”
Source Article from https://popularresistance.org/the-west-virginia-teachers-strike-takes-aim-at-coal-and-gas/
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