Join us at the Cabell County Library at 2:00 pm on Saturday, April 11, at the Cabell County Library as we host Gordon Simmons, author of Mutiny in the Mountains: West Virginia Public Workers 1969–2019.

Beginning with the nation’s first general strike in 1877, that started with rail-road workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and including the early coal strikes in 1912–13 and an armed insurrection in 1921, most treatments of the state’s labor history have focused on the private sector. This is the first comprehensive history of the struggles waged by state and local govern-ment workers in West Virginia.  Relying on journalistic sources, legislative enactments, court decisions, and participant interviews, Mutiny in the Mountains accounts the fifty-year struggle of West Virginia’s public sector workers to assert power without the benefit of significant collective bargaining rights or political leverage.”

Gordon Simmons is a retired union organizer and is president of the West Virginia Labor History Association. He is now employed as a public defense investigator and an adjunct professor at Marshall University. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.