Miners on Wall Street

Wall Street is hardly the place where striking unions usually look for allies, but the United Mine Workers last week tried to organize some support there. As Duke Power Co. of North Carolina prepared to offer 4.5 million shares of new common stock, the U.M.W. spent $8,666.88 to buy a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal's Eastern editions advising investors that the shares would be a bad buy. The ad quoted at length from testimony before the North Carolina Utilities Commission last October in which Duke President Carl Horn Jr. said that "Duke Power's financial condition is currently among the poorest in the entire industry." Next day 18 miners, some wearing boots and safety lamps, picketed the New York Stock Exchange to ram home the message. The stock issue sold out anyway, but the U.M.W. plans a similar campaign next month to defeat a Duke attempt to sell $100 million worth of bonds.

The tactic seems not only imaginative but a bit desperate. For nine months, the union has struck the Brookside, Ky., mine of Eastover Mining Co., which is owned by Duke Power, over health and safety standards. Success is crucial to U.M.W. efforts to sign up the mines of Harlan County-still known as "Bloody Harlan" because of the tear gas bombings, shootings and beatings during a U.M.W. organizing drive in the 1930s. The U.M.W. is convinced that Eastover will never settle unless the parent Duke Power insists that it do so. And Eastover needs to hold out only three more months before it can campaign for another bargaining election, in which nonunion workers might be eligible to vote. Should the U.M.W. be defeated, 40 strikers could lose not only their jobs but their homes; their right to keep living in company-owned housing would be questionable. By Harlan County standards, last week's activity on Wall Street was gentlemanly, but tempers are growing short --and Stump's Gun Shop in Harlan is doing a brisk business.

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