Heerlen The annual meetings of ACORN organizers and leaders from around the world are not for the faint of heart. Combine jet lag and often overnight travel for many with dormitory conditions and group meals, and it can be a physical test of endurance as well as a mental challenge in dealing with the barrage of information for twelve hours a day. We were going to try something different this year in the Netherlands.
Plan A would have had us seeding organizing drives by joining with Dutch partners and hitting the doors in Heerlen Nord where our constituency makes their homes. That didn’t work out. Plan B would have had our ACORN organizers flyer several of the communities that might launch organizing drives and talk to whomever we saw. For various reasons, from will to weather, that plan seemed impractical under the circumstances. We went with Plan C, where we would join with Ron Mayer of the National Program on a bus tour of Heerlen Nord and a brief visit with one of the community leaders, so everyone would get a sense of the community. Ron added another stop to our excursion: a visit to the Nederlands Mijnmuseum or Dutch Mining Museum.
Coal mining defines Heerlen from the Roman times until today. Much of Heerlen Nord and the city itself was built on top of mines, their shafts, and houses constructed close by for workers. When coal was king, here were its subjects. In fact, the venue where we were meeting and sleeping had been a coal owner’s mansion back in the day. The grounds in front of city hall where we conducted our training recently were fenced in to allow archeologists to determine the level of ruins at that location before construction was finished.
The museum began with a look at miners, their tools, and working conditions underground. A volunteer docent showed us a metal cage carried by miners and a bronze one carried ty foreman and supervisors that held the canaries that provided the warnings of toxic gases for the workers. These workers lived the expression that has survived their time underground about “canaries in the mine shaft” warning of danger. When the canary collapsed, the miners had to run to get out of the shaft before they went down as well.
Other floors of the museum showed the health consequences of what they called “dust lung,” which in the US is called black lung disease. The top floor allowed you to hear the Prime Minister’s speech almost exactly fifty years ago at the end of December 1974 when he ordered the mines closed, and 75,000 miners in Heerlen were suddenly thrown out of work along with 80,000 workers in mining support industries. The entire reason for the existence of the national project is to deal with the fact that Heerlen is the poorest community in the Netherlands because of the lingering poverty that came from that calamitous shutdown for the workers and their community.
The organizers enjoyed the break in the meeting schedule, but they understood the message from the mines as well. Our communities are always precarious. The impacts of decisions by capital and government often leave our members and constituency as afterthoughts, facing the consequences unprepared and paying the penalties for generations. Metaphorically, are we the contemporary canaries in the mineshaft, or are we paying attention to the canaries that exist?
In other workshops, we talked about preparing for climate change and being able to respond to our members needs both in disasters and ahead of them. Can we ever be really ready or will it as much a matter of being able to react quickly and adapt to change? The museum might have been a surprise twist in the organizers’ expectations of this meeting, but there might have also been some lessons there worth learning.
