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‘Unions are why these things happen’: UMWA president emeritus Roberts to deliver keynote remarks at Marion County Labor Day Picnic

MANNINGTON - Chuck Knisell drew a crowd when he rolled into the Marion County Labor Day Picnic at Mannington's Hough Park last year.

He was behind the wheel of his late dad Larry's 1955 Chevrolet 3100 pickup.

Vintage rides always generate an audience.

It's not super-fancy, Knisell, the younger, said then of the vehicle.

And, as long as he was talking about it, it's not always that easy to drive, either.

But once it gets going, he said, he really gets going, the coal miner and union organizer allowed.

Things smooth out.

Things are doable and drivable.

If that's not a metaphor for unions in the Mountain State, Cecil Roberts said Friday afternoon with a chuckle, he doesn't know what is.

Roberts, the president emeritus of the tenacious United Mine Workers of America, is delivering keynote remarks at Hough Park on Sunday afternoon for the 2026 version of the county's gathering and celebration of all things union.

It all takes place from noon-4 p.m. at the park in the center of the northern Marion County town.

The food is free and so is the ice cream, but you are asked to bring your lawn chair if you want to stay a bit.

Roberts wanted to stay a bit.

He came back home to his native Kanawha County from the jungles of Vietnam after his military hitch was over. He went to work as a coal miner in 1971.

Just three years before, and just down the road from the park in this northern Marion County town, the Farmington No. 9 Mine blew.

A total of 78 miners died in the explosion, some right where they stood. Another 19 remain entombed to this day because it just wasn't safe for recovery crews to keep going back in.

It didn't take long for a new miner to become a seasoned union advocate, both in his industry and everywhere.

"Unions make a lot of good things happen. Unions mean that the men and women who actually work for a living are being watched out for. Unions build the middle class."

Or they did anyway, he said, across West Virginia and Appalachia.

Union wages, he said, are barometers of healthcare, whether or not the school or hospital stays open.

They just might be the litmus test, he added, of whether or not your kid stays here to raise a family - or moves somewhere else to make a life out of necessity.

Roberts retired from his union presidency last year, but that didn't mean, he said, he was stepping away from the cause.

Don't get him started on AI, he said.

Same for tariffs: "They just drive up costs," he said. "They’re a tax increase and somebody has to eat that."

"Somebody," he said, as in working West Virginians and others who make up the middle class.

Over the past two years, Roberts has been battling a form of leukemia that may have been hastened by his combat tour in Southeast Asia.

He's currently in remission. He credits his doctors generally and his health insurance most particularly.

"The insurance is because of the union. That's all the fighting and all the organizing."