What Happens When Mom And Dad Go On Strike
When the Wrights and their two young daughters joined the picket line, it upended every aspect of their lives â and that was just the beginning. Two years later, they look back at their family's role in one of the longest coal strikes in U.S. history.

Dusk had just fallen on a cool March evening in the sleepy rural mining town of Brookwood, Alabama, and Haeden Wright had her hands full. She was simultaneously unpacking a bag of donated toiletries and giving an interview to a pair of German trade unionists, while keeping an eye on her oldest daughter, 8-year-old Averi, who sat absorbed in her Roblox game nearby. A volunteer and I rifled through Dollar General bags, stocking the shelves with bottles of pink V05 shampoo under the intense gaze of John Lewis, iconic leader of the United Mine Workers of America, whose portrait hung beside grainy black-and-white photos of coal miners past. A few of the overhead light bulbs had burned out, and the strike pantry â which had been operating out of a local union hall for nearly two years â was filling up with shadows as the sun set.
The slightly surreal scene was nothing new to Haeden, a 35-year-old high school English teacher and mother of two, who had spent the past 23 months doing everything in her power to keep her family afloat.
On April 1, 2021, Haedenâs coal miner husband, 40-year-old Braxton, and more than 1,000 of his co-workers had walked off the job following months of tense negotiations between their union (the UMWA) and their employer, Warrior Met Coal. On that day, the miners â and by extension, their families â were launching what would become the longest coal minersâ strike in Alabamaâs history. Throughout the ordeal, families had to cope with the great economic and social pressures that come with holding the line during a long labor conflict, from keeping up with bills and juggling doctorsâ appointments after losing their company-provided health insurance to watching friends â and even family â cross the picket line. It was a long and grueling fight for the strikers, most of whom had to come home each day and explain what was going on to their children: The vast majority of Warrior Met Coal strikers are parents.
And then, just a few weeks shy of the strikeâs two-year anniversary, it all came to an abrupt end. On Feb. 16, UMWA President Cecil Roberts sent Warrior Met Coal an offer to have the miners return to work; the company accepted, and months later, that process is still unfolding as miners undergo medical exams and a safety refresher training in preparation for their return into the mines.
The reasoning behind the UMWAâs decision was simple: The strike wasnât having the intended effect on the companyâs ability to operate and profit. As time went on and metallurgical coal prices remained high â the coal mined at Brookwood is used in steel production â the miners themselves were the only people being harmed. Warrior Met was able to keep the mines running by bringing in outsiders to cross the picket line, and despite the striking workersâ sacrifices, the strike couldnât make a dent in the companyâs profits.
The End Of A Strike And A Town In Turmoil
The announcement came as a shock to the miners and their families. At a membership meeting in late February, emotions ran high; the minersâ reaction to the decision ranged from cautious optimism to confusion over the return-to-work process to anger over a perceived lack of transparency. Many, including the Wrights, suddenly found themselves weighing their options.
Unlike many of his co-workers, who worked the mine some 2,300 feet below the surface, Braxtonâs job as a control room operator on the late night (âhoot owlâ) shift kept him aboveground. Belowground is famously dangerous work: In 2001, 13 people were killed in a pair of mine explosions in Brookwood, at the time, the worst mining disaster in the United States in decades. âAll I done was sat and played on the computer all night,â Braxton joked about his more tech-centric work at the mine. âI gave up an easy job to fight for better.â
The strike had reshaped everything about daily life and family life for the Wrights â and would come to largely define a chapter of childhood for their two daughters, Averi and 2-year-old Everly. For Averi, who was 6 when the strike began, that meant rushing from karate lessons to rallies, helping out in the strike pantry (and playing Roblox on her tablet when the grown-up talk got boring), and joining her parents on the picket line. As for Everly, sheâd never known anything else.
Haeden and Braxton saw the strike as an opportunity to educate their kids about the values they hold dear. Both of them come from union families, and both have deep roots in coal. Braxton has worked in the mines for 17 years, as did his father and grandfather before him, and Haedenâs father is a retired miner and member of UMWA Local 2397, so the girls have grown up with the union. (UMWA opened up its first Alabama office in 1890.)
âWe are as militant as you can be in the South, as far as being vocally outspoken, and thatâs part of our family,â Haeden explains. âWe talk about what a union is, what union wages do; we openly criticize in my household places like Amazon; if someone is on TV and they start bragging about paying people $15 an hour, weâre very quick to point out that $15 an hour is a poverty wage. So for our kids, I hope the strike lets them know that it is OK to demand what youâre worth. Itâs OK to say, âIâm worth more than that. You canât function without me.ââ
âWe are as militant as you can be in the South, as far as being vocally outspoken, and thatâs part of our family.â
Once the strike began in earnest, in the spring of 2021, Warrior Met Coal recruited hundreds of replacement workers from neighboring states to cross the picket line and keep the mine running in the strikersâ absence. There were clashes during the strike, and there is no love lost between the two groups, who occasionally run into one another in restaurants, shops, and community events. Tensions are inevitable â and palpable.
Brookwood, with a population of some 2,500 people, is not a big place: Over dinner with a few auxiliary friends at a local Mexican restaurant, Haeden pointed out a pair of âscabsâ â replacement workers hired by the company to work despite the strike to keep the business running â dining a few tables away. They blended in just fine and didnât look much different from the other men there that evening â they were white, bearded, husky, and clad in T-shirts and shorts or denim overalls. I wouldnât have been able to tell myself if one of Haedenâs sharp-eyed friends hadnât pointed out that one of the men was wearing a Warrior Met shirt. She told me that she was willing to bet theyâd recognized us â the traitors noshed away happily on a taco platter while the union ladies shot them dirty looks and grumbled into their $5 watermelon margaritas. The memory of the strike wonât be fading anytime soon â and itâs clear that no one is quite ready to forgive, either.
Growing Up On The Picket Line
Averi is keenly aware of the impact that these catastrophic changes have had on their lives and probably knows more about class, labor, and solidarity than most adults â let alone other kids her age. When I ask Averi why the union is important, she has her answer ready: âBecause they fight for the rights of other people.â
âMy parenting style is Iâm honest with my kids,â Haeden explains. âI talk to my kids like theyâre adults because they need to know the situation is not a game, and those people that are going in and taking not just your dadâs job but your friendâs dadâs jobs â those people arenât worthy of respect. Theyâre disrespecting your family. I donât want anyone to starve, but those type of people will never have a seat at our table because they turned their back on their fellow workers. She says that âscabs are poo,â because in our household, thatâs not something thatâs acceptable.â
Haeden is referring to one of Averiâs refrains about the workers who crossed the picket line that became something of a hit on Twitter during the first year of the strike. For the Wrights, itâs a funny line that belies a serious family value: âYou donât cross the picket line,â Haeden says.
As both Haeden and Braxton tell me, their kids were a major reason why the workers went on strike in the first place. Sen. Bernie Sanders noted in his letter to BlackRock CEO ââLaurence Fink that since 2017, Warrior Met has awarded $1.4 billion â billion â in dividends to its shareholders while also handing out $50,000 bonuses to executives. (Global asset management firm BlackRock is the largest shareholder in Warrior Met Coal.)
âMy parenting style is Iâm honest with my kids,â Haeden explains. âI talk to my kids like theyâre adults because they need to know the situation is not a game.â
Those same executives were bringing home multimillion-dollar paychecks and exporting the fruits of the minersâ labor overseas for huge profits. A year into the strike, Warrior Metâs profits had nearly quadrupled â in 2022, the company reported more than $640 million in net income â but the company remained unwilling to meet the workers at the bargaining table.
It goes without saying that this all matters a great deal to the families trying to negotiate for fair, safe working conditions at the Warrior Met mines. But it should matter to all of us â the coal minerâs strike illustrates the grim economic reality that so many working families face. Corporations continue to profit handsomely as families struggle to make ends meet, battling decades of wage stagnation, rising inflation, a lack of paid sick leave or paid parental leave, and the ever-present issue of health insurance. In 2021, about 30 million people in the United States had no health insurance at all, and 5.4% of them â about 4 million â were children. For most workers in the United States, health care is tied to their jobs, and all too often, workers find themselves forced to accept terrible conditions or low wages because the alternative â losing insurance â is untenable for their own health care needs or those of their dependents.
The Working Parent Trap
The lack of a national social safety net all too often forces working parents to make impossible choices â and it puts striking workers in a considerably more difficult position when they push back against the bosses who have been exploiting their labor. A common strike-breaking tactic is to cancel striking workersâ health insurance when they walk out, leaving the union or individual workers to pick up the slack. The UMWA jumped in to cover its membersâ health care during the strike, and that cost it millions â a serious financial drain that contributed to the eventual decision to pull the plug on the strike.
Before they walked out, miners at Warrior Met Coal were working 12- to 16-hour days, six to seven days a week â with many workers shouldering âtemporaryâ pay cuts in excess of 20%. The contract theyâd been required to sign with the company in 2016 had included forced amendments, reducing wages, and replacing their 100% health care coverage with an 80/20 split that further strained familiesâ budgets. Warrior Met had bought up the mines in 2015 â when the previous owner, Walter Energy, went bankrupt â and rehired most of the laid-off workers with the stipulation that they sign the amended contract, which the company promised to improve upon in the next round of negotiations. Five years later, miners say those improvements still hadnât come, and the UMWA leadership decided to call an unfair labor practices strike.
âThe company had made it to where he couldnât be a part of his family,â Haeden said.
As Braxton told the United States Senate Committee on the Budget in February 2022, âBefore the bankruptcy contract, many spouses stayed home because the pay and benefits allowed for families to live well. After the bankruptcy, many spouses were forced to work outside the home while still being the primary caregiver for their home and family. So children saw both parents less as a result of the cuts in the bankruptcy contract.â
That same 2016 contract also made it nearly impossible for them to call out for family or medical emergencies without being penalized by the companyâs strict four-strike policy. (After the final âstrike,â or disciplinary note, you were out of a job.) But any parent can tell you, emergencies donât happen on a schedule â and for the Wrights, the restrictive system caused considerable stress and heartache. âWhen I was pregnant with Everly,â says Haeden, âI thought I was having a miscarriage on my birthday, [but] he was heading into work. So I called my sister, had her come and stay with my older daughter, and drove myself to the hospital. And when my other daughter was born, she had a fractured skull. She was in the hospital for, like, four days. He went out to go into work, then drove to Birmingham to be at the hospital, and drove back into work, because he wasnât allowed to be off with his family.â
âIf you were involved in an accident, had a medical emergency, your child was sick or hospitalized, your spouse was in labor or hospitalized, it did not matter,â Braxton had told the Senate committee. âIf you could not give 24 hoursâ notice, you would receive a strike. My brothers and sisters have been given strikes for having accidents on the way to work and being late. Our spouses learned to not call to tell us about accidents or emergencies at home until after our shift out of fear that we would receive a strike.â
A Family In Flux
When the strike pulled them out of the mines, all those workers who had become unhappily accustomed to seeing their spouses and children for only a few hours each week suddenly found themselves cooling their heels at home when they werenât on picket line duty. For Braxton and many of the other fathers, the adjustment was difficult to navigate at first. âWe worked so much before we went on strike that we didnât get to spend as much time with our family, but then once we were at home every day, it was kind of learning how to be with our family,â he explains. âThat part was tough in the beginning. I just wasnât used to being at home that much. Most of Averiâs life, I was at work.â
âWhen my oldest daughter was little, he was gone all the time,â Haeden adds. âSo their relationship isnât as close because he wasnât around as much. I coached her T-ball team, not her dad. I took her to gymnastics. I took her to doctorâs appointments. If she was sick, I stayed up with her. He couldnât â itâs not that he didn't want to â but the company had made it to where he couldnât be a part of his family. You might have been providing a check, but you didnât actually get to live with your family.â
As the strike stretched on into its second year, many of the strikers picked up side jobs or new employment, including Braxton; heâd first started working at Amazon about an hourâs drive away in Bessemer, where heâd become involved in the ongoing union campaign there, and later found work at an iron pipe company that pays significantly more per hour than he can expect under the current Warrior Met contract. As a parent with two growing children, heâd had to put his family first, and itâs unlikely heâll be returning to the mine.
âWe worked so much before we went on strike that ⊠once we were at home every day, it was kind of learning how to be with our family.â
The strike created a seismic shift in familiesâ schedules, and the children werenât the only ones who had to adjust to a new status quo. It was a big change for the minersâ spouses, too, who had long been accustomed to running the show while their partners were underground. Since their time off was so scant and precious, it was reserved for what Haeden calls âfun time â getting the groceries, going to the movies, going to the zoo.â With their partners suddenly back in the picture, both parents had to renegotiate shared household tasks, child care, and discipline. âThat was a balancing act for all of our families too,â she says. âWhen youâre used to having a spouse thatâs only home a couple hours a day, itâs a different dynamic than having to figure it out â actually doing that as partners like it should be â because youâre used to being able to have a set way to do things.â
While Averi had to share her dad with Warrior Met Coal for most of her young life, Everly, the baby, canât remember what it was like before he was around.
She was only 4 months old when the strike began and spent most of her young life being toted along to rallies and passed around to various union aunties as her mom and dad kept busy with strike work. Now, sheâs old enough to run around after her sister and grab the phone from her mom during interviews (hi again, Everly!), and her dad has seized the chance to build a strong relationship with his youngest. âI remember him texting me the first day he had [Everly] home by himself and being like, âYouâve got to come home. I donât know what to do. She wonât stop crying. She doesnât know who I am,ââ Haeden recalls. âAnd then a few weeks later, thatâs the one person she wanted because he actually got to be there for her. She got to know him as being her parent because he got to actually be present in her life when she was young enough to remember.â
âI missed so much of Averi being little, and then with Everly for the first year, that was Daddyâs girl,â Braxton remembers with a smile. âMe and her spent a lot of days just sleeping in the recliner. She didnât want nobody but me. Once I went back to start working, she got to where she wanted Mom or Grandmom, but to start with, all she wanted was Daddy.â
The Next Generation
In spite of all the disruptions, the past two years have been positive and memorable for Averi, who seems to have enjoyed the heck out of the strike. Haedenâs volunteer job as the president of the UMWA Auxiliary, a support group of spouses, family members, and retirees, meant she spent untold hours organizing events, cooking and serving food at rallies, distributing groceries and other essentials to strikersâ families, and stocking the unionâs strike pantry â usually with Averi right there beside her amusing herself while her mom worked or running around with the other union kids she calls her âstrike cousins.â
âMan, if unions could all be like kids, if every worker could be like these kids,â Haeden says. âThey always wanted to go to the picket line. They always wanted to be at the rallies. They wanted to talk to people, and they were excited. If we could have all had that energy, weâd have a whole lot more unionized workers.â
The beginning of the strike had demanded big adjustments of Averi and Everly. But the latest chapter in the years-long saga â a strike ending without a clear or satisfying resolution â requires even bigger adjustments and another round of careful parental explanations to kids whose settled routines are changing once again.
When we last spoke, Braxton was wrestling with the idea of leaving his job of 17 years on uncertain terms. âI spent so much of my adult life there,â he explained. âNow, Iâm kind of starting over at 40 years old at a new place.â
And he was also struggling with the question of how to explain his decision to Averi, since his own emotions were still fresh. He and Haeden were still working out how best to process with their girls that after two years of chanting strike slogans like âno contract, no coal!â alongside their strike cousins, most of their dads would be heading back to work without a new contract.
âOur children were the motivators to where we were willing to fight this long and to fight this hard,â Haeden says.
âThis is kind of upheaving their lives; theyâre used to having a schedule,â Haeden reflected. Averi was having a particularly tough time, because she hadnât been allowed to go to the meetings in which the return-to-work order was discussed, and she was still upset about it. âEvery other Wednesday, weâre supposed to have a rally, and sheâs supposed to see her friends, and sheâs supposed to hear [UMWA District 20 President] Larry [Spencer], and sheâs supposed to hear [UMWA President] Cecil [Roberts], and she canât understand â âWell, if youâre having a meeting, thatâs a rally; why canât I go?â So for them, itâs hard because this has become their community; this has become their family; they have their own support system. Her biggest concern, when I even brought this up, was âWell, when am I going to see my friends?â Theyâve seen each other so much that thatâs their concern, like, âWhere does that leave us?ââ
So where did it leave them? The UMWA continues to negotiate with Warrior Met Coal and continues to try to hammer out a new, improved contract that its membership can approve, but the strike as the Wrights (both big and small) knew it is over. Many of the workers have returned to the mine, but many wonât be going back (in some cases, for the first time in generations) â wherever their stories go next, the workers and their families are a part of labor history.
For the Wrights, the sacrifice, stress, and struggle were worth it. They made it through two difficult years together, brought their girls along for the ride, and feel their family has emerged stronger for it. As Braxton works to settle into a new job and a new industry, and the girls settle into yet another new normal, Haeden is moving forward with the fight. She recently accepted a summer organizer position at Jobs to Move America with an eye to becoming a researcher and spent June boning up on her corporate research skills at Cornell Universityâs School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
âFor me, and I know for a lot of the families, our children were the motivators to where we were willing to fight this long and to fight this hard,â Haeden says. âI want to teach my girls to look back and see that no matter what the outcome was â because this wasnât the outcome we wanted, and itâs hard to explain to a child what this outcome even means â what matters is that we fought because it was the right fight to take. That we fought because it was an injustice. We fought because we were being exploited. And we fought for families that we didnât know before the strike.â
This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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