Black-Lung Hillbilly in a Big Job

When Arnold Miller took over the presidency of the United Mine Workers in 1972, the victor in a vituperative campaign, he promptly cut the salary for that position from $50,000 to $35,000 and auctioned off to members three of the union's Cadillac limousines. Even as he planned to raise the incomes of U.M.W. members, he declined to adopt a princely life-style at their expense. Unlike most U.S. union chiefs, who rose through a series of headquarters jobs, Miller carried fresh in his mind the memories of rank-and-file travails. Just two years before, he had been down working in the mines, and on the eve of his ascent to power he had been supporting a family of four with part-time jobs and a $106-a-month war-disability check from the Government. Now one of the dozen more important U.S. labor leaders, he is still struggling to build the executive expertise his position demands. At the same time, he brings to his job a gift for empathy.

At 51, Miller looks a dozen years older--as many veteran miners do. His face pallid, his hair steely white. Each morning he soaks in the shower for up to an hour, just to get his arthritic body ambulatory. It is the legacy of 22 years in the mines.

"I'm a hillbilly," Miller says with an Appalachian twang, "and I'm proud of that." The son and grandson of miners, he was born in the town of Leewood (pop. 250), in the Cabin Creek region southeast of Charleston, W. Va. After finishing a ninth-grade education ("It was all they had"), he went down into the mines at 16. He eagerly enlisted in the Army in World War II and fought in North Africa, Sicily and the Normandy invasion, where his face was horribly disfigured by machine-gun fire. Miller spent two years in military hospitals, enduring 19 operations to reconstruct his features. His left ear is still two-thirds chewed away.

When Miller returned home, his old employer claimed that he had no jobs. Miller protested, invoking his status as a veteran--and found himself mining coal while standing in ten inches of water. He quit to enroll in an auto mechanics' apprenticeship program but returned to mining in 1951. This time Miller was placed in a mine so dusty that he soon had trouble breathing, but "the companies told you that coal dust didn't hurt you." Ultimately, suffering from black-lung disease, he switched to another mine--one so wet that it brought on his arthritis. In 1970 he finally became too sick to work, but he was too young for a pension.

That physical impairment helped pave Miller's road to power. In 1969, while working at the wet mine, he helped organize strikes in West Virginia to force passage of a state law declaring black-lung disease a work-incurred ailment worthy of compensation pay. His unauthorized activities enraged U.M.W. panjandrums, and Miller became a leader of the insurgents who ultimately brought down Tony Boyle, U.M.W. president for a decade.

Today Miller sits in an opulent office that is a relic of the U.M.W.'s autocratic era. "I am not comfortable here in Washington," he told TIME Correspondent Mark Sullivan. "I would prefer being down in the coal fields with the membership." He lives in a simple bachelor apartment in the capital, returning on weekends to the Cabin Creek hamlet of Ohley. His wife Virginia remains there in a tiny, plain frame house on an old road near the creek. The Millers have two children, Larry, 22, an electronics technician, and Vicki, 20, a student. Some day Miller intends to move U.M.W. headquarters into coal country so members can drop by.

Whenever he can, Miller visits the mines, bridging the gap cultivated by his predecessors. "I want to know what's going on," he says. "I respect any man's opinion. I was a rank and filer, and I still am." His is a new-found confidence, and he wants to make it contagious. "I felt for many years because I had no formal education --this is a feeling that is consistent with most coal miners--that we miners were handicapped," he says. "We were not very vocal about the problems we had."

Miller's voice is anti-Establishment without being extremist. "If a guy has been stepped on as long as some of the members of my union, then it's about time he howled," he says. "But we're not radicals just because we're tired of being sold out and passed by." Above all, Miller's voice rings with a keen and painfully won knowledge of the workingman. This knowledge, along with a plain-spoken but tough style, made the tireless Miller a formidable negotiator. As he remarked, after one sharp exchange in the last days of the bargaining: "I know. I was there in the mines. I know what it's like."

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