The Coal Miners Walk Out

A national strike over the issue of local strikes

Faces covered with grit and hearts filled with distrust toward both union and company leaders, the nation's 165,000 male and 800 female unionized coal miners walked off their jobs last weekend, 48 hours before the expiration Monday midnight of the United Mine Workers' contract with the coal companies. (With so little time remaining, few miners felt compelled to work beyond the shift ending at midnight Saturday, and the companies were not scheduling Monday production.) Thus began what will probably be a long stoppage, perhaps twice as long as the 32-day walkout in 1974, over a strange issue: the U.M.W.'s demand that its locals be given the right to strike individual mines when a national agreement is in effect, provided that 51% of a local's members approved.

Some production certainly will be lost. Even if an industrywide agreement were reached before midnight Monday, at least ten days would be required for a U.M.W. vote to ratify it--and in the mine union "no contract, no work" is a religion. But the economy will not be hurt for a long time, nor will the strikers and the companies be subjected to pressure from major coal users to settle quickly. As of early November, the users' bins were overflowing with 150.1 million tons of coal that had been stockpiled in anticipation of a strike. Electric utilities held a 90-day supply, and they could switch to oil-fired reserve boilers when that is gone. Steel mills had enough coal to feed their coke ovens for 50 days, and major industrial users had a 44-day stockpile.

For the U.M.W. the strike represents a new low in its transition from a powerful centralized union to a loose collection of squabbling locals. Union President Arnold Miller was forced by militant U.M.W. district leaders to embrace the idea of legalizing local walkouts during his re-election campaign this year (he won with barely 40% of the vote in a three-way race). Miller now contends that granting strike rights to locals would promote peace in the coal fields. His reasoning: locals armed with the right to strike could push mine owners to settle quickly grievances that now fester until workers' tempers explode in wildcat walkouts. Wildcats by U.M.W. locals so far this year have cost the coal companies 2.3 million man-days of work. Miners of District 17 in southern West Virginia struck for ten weeks last summer.

Employers and growing numbers of union members, who have backed off from earlier support of "right to strike," see it differently. They contend that the demand, if met, would do little more than legitimize wildcats called by undisciplined local union leaders. Worse still, it would deprive the companies of the main benefit they get from any union contract: the assurance that labor will be available. That would happen at the very time when the Carter Administration's energy program, even in its currently ravaged form, still calls for nearly doubling coal production, to more than 1 billion tons annually by 1985, and encouraging big users to switch from oil and natural gas to coal. Says a coal management official: "You take long strikes over gut issues. Getting that work force when we need it is our gut issue." Joseph P. Brennan, president of the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, adds that any contract clause that "puts the decision of whether or not coal miners work on any given day in the hands of local union officials is ludicrous. It flies in the face of all logic and the stability that a national agreement is supposed to deliver."

The companies have come up with several blatantly unacceptable proposals --such as making union members pay for their own health insurance--that seem designed to be dropped in return for a U.M.W. backdown on local strikes. The companies also hold a more powerful trump card. The U.M. W.'s retirement and benefit funds are about to run out of money because wildcat strikes have reduced coal production and hours worked, on which company payments into the funds are based. About 901,000 miners (86,000 of them retired) and dependents are covered by these funds. Claims made for benefits after the strike started will not be honored, and pension payouts for most retirees will stop on Jan. 1 unless the companies put up more money. That sets the stage for the most probable tradeoff to end the walkout: the union drops "right to strike" and the companies sweeten the pension funds. Says a U.M.W. official: "What's dearest to the hearts of the operators is stability. What's most important to the union is the funds."

Wages are no real issue in the strike; although the U.M.W. has asked for a pay boost, it has not even got around to specifying how much it wants. On the company side, the mine owners have no illusions that a big settlement, such as the 50% pay and benefits boost negotiated in 1974, will pacify wildcatters. Says one coal official: "We thought then that bribery would get us there." Instead, the operators must deal with a fractious labor organization whose declining membership digs only about half of all U.S. coal. The U.M.W. has only 6,000 members in the coal-rich Western U.S. and would like more, but it stands little chance of getting them so long as wildcatting breeds anarchy in the Eastern mines. qed

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