Marie Justice—coal-mine truck driver, president of Mine Workers Local 1620, union organizer and grandmother of two—says being a Navajo woman in the union movement means feeling a great responsibility for her fellow union members.

"I come from a matriarchal society: In the old days, the women kept charge of most of the assets in the family. It affected who I am. Sometimes I feel like I’m a mom to everybody in my local."

The Navajo Nation in northern Arizona where she grew up is vastly different from the mainstream culture. "Out here, you can go 10 or 20 miles without seeing anyone. When you see their home, they might not have a phone, no electricity, no running water. And when you come across someone, you ask them their clan [to] see if you’re related."

Justice says her childhood was good preparation for her years as a union activist. She learned about unions from her father, a union construction worker who took her to the picket lines after the workers had a strike and were locked out of the dam.

In 1988, after raising her son and daughter, Justice went to work at Black Mesa Mine, a bituminous coal operation, driving a truck that hauled coal. "I had to work harder because I was a woman, to prove myself" both to management and to her fellow workers, mostly men. But Justice won them over and says, "One of the good things about the UMWA is that anytime you had issues with things like that, they tried to help you out as much as possible."

Some four years later, Justice joined Local 1620’s Safety Committee. Soon after that, she was elected vice president of her local. In 1999, she was elected president of the local with 75 percent of the vote.

Then, last year, Black Mesa Mine closed, and Justice and her co-workers were laid off. Black Mesa’s sole customer, Southern California Edison, had not complied with a consent decree and had delayed installing scrubbers (environmental equipment) in one of its coal-burning generating stations. During the layoff, Justice is doing everything she can to keep the local together. "We still have our union meetings," she says. "The responsibility I still have to them is important."

She’s also been involved in a successful campaign by some 6,000 employees of the Navajo Nation to organize into the UMWA. The organizing campaign took eight years. Justice is focused on the 600 Head Start workers in the Nation, and when she joined the campaign last year, "[one supervisor] told me I couldn’t talk to anyone on that property. I said, ‘I can’t believe you’d even tell me that. This is the Navajo Nation—this is all my property!’"

Why did Head Start workers sign the petition? "Management people were not listening to them. They were making unfair demands of the workers, and they were forgetting they were there to serve kids. And the pay was horrible. One worker had been there 15 years and never gone over $11 an hour."

Justice says her work as a UMWA activist fits exactly with who she is as a Navajo. "In the old days," Justice says, "the way things were done was with respect. That’s what we’re asking for as workers. That’s what we’re doing in unions. We just want to be treated fairly."