It'd Better Be Good

LABOR It'd Better Be Good

Along the creek runs, the hollows and slate hills where they take coal from the ground, the hard-bitten and taciturn West Virginians were confused and worried. "That John," said an Irish-born shot-firer in the Kanawha coalfields, "he be the greatest man of the 20th Century, but I be damned if we'uns can figure him out this time ... I think John be a thinkin' o'hisself."

The men sat restively before their weather-seamed shacks, slicing their tobacco thin, and talking. Eight weeks of strike had been too much for the 380,000 United Mine Workers. Almost three months of the wizened pay of the three-day week had been uncomfortable enough, but the strike that followed had nearly emptied the flour sack and gobbled up the last flitch of bacon. The kids went off to school with scrimpy breakfasts.

Despite all the suffering, John Lewis was still king of the coal miners. "All we got, we owe to him," said a miner with finality. "Twenty years ago we worked 20 hours for $2; now we get $15 for eight, that's what." But the king, it was plain, was no longer above timid, hesitant reproach. It wasn't too safe to criticize him openly: the old men didn't dare risk being blackballed by the union; they were too near pension time. And a coal miner's wife in Cinderella, W. Va., who wrote a letter to the editor protesting that John Lewis was "far too old and power mad," had bricks and rocks thrown through the window of her company bungalow last week.

White Flag. But never in his 29 years of imperious reign had John L. Lewis fumbled so badly, and the miners knew it. His three-day work week and the strike had won them nothing--not even a crisis in the nation's coal supply. He had methodically bullied and insulted the coal mine operators into hard and adamant opposition to his demands for higher pay and a bigger slice of royalties for his U.M.W. welfare fund. The fund itself had dwindled until it was necessary to cut off all but emergency benefits--at the worst possible time. He had alienated the public and angered most officials in Washington. And the Supreme Court, in an ironically timely decision, had reaffirmed the $1,420,000 fine imposed on him and his union last year.

In Chicago last week, where he held a hastily called "yes man" meeting of his union policy committee, John Lewis raised the white flag. Without warning, he ordered his coal diggers back to work immediately on the same terms that he had haughtily rejected. But he served notice that the strike would be on again Dec. i unless the "arrogant and brutal" mine owners came to terms. At a news conference, where he tried to look ferocious but looked instead like a tired and harried hoot owl, John L. tried to explain that it was not a retreat but simply a gesture of good will.

Swallowed Anger. Next day, Lewis made another gesture. He got an invitation from Federal Mediator Cyrus Ching, one of his few useful friends left in Washington, to meet with the mine operators for another try at bargaining. Lewis dashed off a quick and churlish reply, addressed simply to "Ching," and arbitrarily setting the time for the meeting four days later than Ching had proposed. Calm old Cy Ching swallowed his anger, wired Lewis again and generously suggested that "there is some misunderstanding." Then he and the operators waited for Lewis and his aides. They did not appear, but old John repented enough to send a milder and more courteous explanation (until this week, he said, he would be "fully occupied in securing maximum resumption of coal production"). Realizing that he might have made a gaffe, Lewis announced that he would be sitting at his desk in Washington anytime the operators ' wanted to talk business.

If Lewis was seriously planning to resume the strike on Dec. 1, the Administration, fed up with him, would probably thwart him with a special fact-finding board or the sterner injunction process of the Taft-Hartley law. "Brother," growled one miner, "whatever John Lewis does at midnight on the 30th, it'd better be good."

Sign Here

Getting into line after 56 other steel companies had already signed up with the C.I.O. United Steelworkers, U.S. Steel, the biggest of them all, squiggled its own signature to a contract last week. The 42-day-old steel strike was all but over.

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