The 1989 Pittston coal strike was a nine-month labor struggle over proposed cuts to miners’ wages and retirees’ health-insurance contributions. For Sister Beth Davies and Sue Ella Kobak, standing with striking miners was part of a longer commitment to the region’s working families—a history that later informed their opposition to Purdue’s efforts to win local support.

Background and Demands

In 1989, Pittston Coal Company sought major concessions in its union contract, including reduced contributions to retired miners’ health insurance and wage cuts. The dispute placed the security of workers and retirees at stake. The strike continued for nine months, with miners and their families maintaining picket lines through a prolonged confrontation with the company.

The book places that dispute within a region where coal-company power had shaped livelihoods and community life. Years later, as industrial work contracted and disability claims rose in rural Virginia, the struggle over miners’ wages and health benefits stood as an earlier instance of the same underlying question: who bore the costs when powerful companies sought to protect their own interests?

Solidarity on the Picket Lines

Sister Beth Davies and Sue Ella Kobak took part in the strike alongside miners and their families. Sister Beth lay on the ground to block coal trucks. Sue Ella stood with the strikers while carrying her six-month-old baby in a carrier. The different forms their participation took made the picket line a visible expression of solidarity across generations and roles within the community.

Their presence was not an isolated act of support. The account describes both women as having faced threats over years of social activism. In one earlier instance, Sister Beth persuaded a coal miner who could not read not to sign away a company’s liability for a mining accident. That history helps explain why the strike’s demands were not merely contractual to them: questions of wages, health care, and corporate accountability were bound up with the ability of workers and their families to defend themselves.

A Memory That Shaped Later Resistance

The strike became part of the history behind the women’s response to Purdue. When company representatives later approached local people, Sister Beth and Sue Ella were not, in the book’s account, figures whose support could simply be purchased. They had already spent months standing with miners against a company seeking reductions in pay and retirees’ health coverage, and they had seen the costs of challenging corporate power.

Sister Beth understood the Purdue approach as another version of a familiar pattern: outside wealth arriving in the region, attempting to secure peace with money, and then leaving local people to live with the consequences. Her account of that pattern linked the coal industry’s history to the emerging drug crisis without treating the strike as its cause. The strike instead supplied a remembered example of collective resistance and a lens through which she interpreted later corporate conduct.

Regional Significance

The book’s broader account follows the decline of factory and coal employment, increasing disability, and the expansion of opioid prescribing through rural communities. These developments are presented as converging pressures, not as consequences of the Pittston strike. In that wider history, the strike matters because it records a community’s earlier confrontation with economic power and the weakening of protections for workers and retirees.

That history also clarifies the continuity in Sister Beth’s later work with Art Van Zee. As they conferred over patients at the Addiction Education Center, the effects of the opioid crisis appeared in settings that included schools and the criminal-justice system. The strike did not resolve the region’s conflicts with powerful institutions; it gave Sister Beth and Sue Ella a shared history of standing with people who faced those institutions, and helped shape how they recognized later attempts to manage dissent through money.