BY NANCY COLE AND ANDY ROSE
In 1977 the coal bosses' association provoked a showdown
battle with the United Mine Workers of America. This was part
of a broader offensive against labor launched by the employers
in the United States in the wake of the 1974-75 world
recession. What the coal operators got, however, was one of the
most important labor battles in decades. Thousands of rank-and-
file miners put their stamp on the fight and won the solidarity
of millions of working people throughout the country. Below we
print excerpts of The 110-Day Coal Strike - its meaning for all
working people. This pamphlet, currently out of print, is based
on articles reprinted from the Militant. It is copyright (c)
1978 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
The 110-day coal strike was something new and different - more important than any other strike in a long time. Not just because it was big. And not just because it was long. It was different in what the bosses set out to accomplish, and different in how the miners and their allies responded.
The miners were hit with the most powerful union-busting assault any industrial union has faced in more than thirty years. And they blocked it.
They stood up to the corporations.
They stood up to the government.
They overruled their own union officials who caved in to the bosses' demands.
And despite a concerted effort to pit other working people against them, the miners won the solidarity of millions of workers across the country.
The confrontation in the coalfields became a social cause, raising issues that deeply affect every working person. Issues such as safety on the job, health care, pensions, union democracy, and the right to strike.
And the coal strike became a political battle, pitting courageous rank-and-file workers against the giant corporations that rule this country....
The confrontation came to a head when Carter ordered the miners back to work on company terms under Taft-Hartley. He threatened to fine or jail their union leaders, confiscate their union treasuries, and cut off food stamps for their families.
Yet the miners refused to bow down.
Carter was forced to retreat, and the coal companies quickly came up with a new contract offer that dropped most of their worst antiunion demands....
`Strike and be damned'
The coal strike was deliberately provoked by the mineowners
in an open attempt to cripple or destroy the United Mine
Workers of America. The big-business press freely admitted
that.
The November 7, 1977, issue of Barron's gloated over what it saw as "the desperately weak position of the UMW." This Wall Street magazine said that "so far as the mine operators are concerned, this is finally the year to tell the union: `Strike and be damned.'"
Negotiations were supposed to begin October 6, 1977, for a new contract to replace the one expiring December 6. But the Bituminous Coal Operators Association wasn't interested in negotiating. Instead its president, Joseph Brennan, delivered a tirade against "labor instability," "declining productivity," and "featherbedding practices."
The main obstacle standing between the coal industry and a future of unparalleled prosperity, Brennan declared, is "the tendency of UMWA members, for one reason or another, to go on wildcat strikes...."
Brennan didn't mention, of course, that 1,500 miners have been killed on the job since 1969. Or that thousands more die each year from "black lung," an incurable disability caused by breathing coal dust. Brennan didn't mention that nearly all wildcat strikes are provoked by coal bosses violating mine safety laws or the union contract. No, Brennan had something else in mind.
With the big emphasis on coal in Carter's energy plan, the giant corporations that own the industry had visions of turning their coal mines into gold mines of profit. The aim of the coal operators was a tremendous speedup of production regardless of the effect on miners' health and safety.
And so the BCOA laid down a set of demands to transform the role of the union.
The union must push for higher productivity, Brennan said.
The union must guarantee no strikes.
The union must crack down on "absenteeism."
In short, the coal operators insisted that the role of the union was not to defend its members but to discipline them.
If union negotiators didn't go along, Brennan threatened, "We will...see the decline and possible extinction of the United Mine Workers of America."
`Takeaway' offensive
The assault on the United Mine Workers was not an isolated
or accidental event. It was a calculated escalation of a long-
term antilabor offensive.
Under the headline, "Bigger Concessions From Unions Sought," this trend was bluntly described in the March 26 New York Times. The article began: "A new word is coming into the labor negotiator's vocabulary. It is `giveback.'
"For 30 years bargaining has focused on union demands: seniority rights, pay, pensions, layoff protection, time off and medical care. But in recent months," the Times continued, "the spark points in contract talks have been management demands for givebacks or `takeaways' - the cancellation of some of labor's old gains." The Times went on to give examples of hard-line employer demands against the coal miners, aerospace workers, transit workers, construction workers, railroad workers, and even newspaper writers....
In forcing the United Mine Workers out on strike, the coal interests - including some of the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world - were making a calculated probe.
This was their first attempt in more than thirty years to break the power of an established industrial union.
They believed the UMWA was a ready target. Its "unruliness," as the coal operators saw it, stemmed in large part from the measures of union democracy the miners had won when they ousted the corrupt regime of Tony Boyle in 1972 and elected a reform leadership. The miners union not only stood in the way of profits from the projected coal boom, but it also provided an undesirable model of rank-and-file insurgency for the members of other unions.
First among the democratic rights enjoyed by the UMWA membership was rank-and-file contract ratification. Miners also had another "unruly" idea - they thought they should decide the bargaining demands.
No mood for `givebacks'
At the 1976 UMWA convention in Cincinnati, 2,000
delegates - nearly all of them working miners - deliberated for
days to come up with a detailed series of demands. These
included the right to strike, full-time union health and safety
committeepersons paid by the company, a six-hour workday,
expanded health benefits to include full eye and dental care,
equal pensions for all retired miners, and a substantial wage
increase.
The miners were in no mood for "givebacks."
The December 6, 1977, contract deadline came and went. The coal operators still refused to engage in serious negotiations. And so 160,000 miners, honoring the UMWA tradition of "no contract, no work," found themselves out on strike.
The operators were cocky at first.
Coal stockpiles are high, they said.
The UMWA can shut down barely 50 percent of coal production, they said.
The union leadership is weak and the ranks are in a state of anarchy, they said.
With no strike benefits or medical coverage, the miners can't hold out for long, the coal operators assured themselves.
One month went by. The miners were still holding tough.
Police began to step up harassment of UMWA pickets, while the news media played up lurid accounts of alleged violence by strikers. But they devoted little or no attention to the murderous violence of the coal companies. "We've got the best guns money can buy," boasted a scab operator in Indiana, pointing to his M-16 semiautomatic rifles and assorted handguns. "And we aim to use them."
On January 6 a company guard fired six bullets into Mack Lewis, a sixty-five-year-old retired miner, who had brought some coffee and encouragement to a UMWA picket line near Ivel, Kentucky.
Five weeks went by. Then six. Stockpiles of coal were starting to look smaller.
With effective picketing and the sympathy of many unorganized miners, the UMWA had shut down not half but more than two-thirds of the nation's coal production. Utilities in Ohio and Pennsylvania began to talk about an "emergency." Power cutbacks would soon be necessary, they declared.
Meanwhile, on February 3, another striker - thirty-three- year- old John Hull -was shot and killed by scabs at a mine near Petersburg, Indiana.
`Ball and chain' contract
On February 6, UMWA President Arnold Miller and the BCOA
announced agreement on a contract. Miller called it "the best
agreement negotiated in any major industry in the past two
years." It was the best - for the bosses. It gave in to every
one of their demands:
Automatic twenty-dollar-a-day fines for any miner who honored a picket line.
Firing of any miner who has "picketed, threatened, coerced, fomented or otherwise been involved in the cause of an unauthorized work stoppage."
Elimination of the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds, to be replaced by commercial health insurance with miners paying up to $700 a year for services that had been free to them for decades.
Drastic curbs on the power of union safety committees, which under the 1974 contract had been authorized to pull miners out of an area of "imminent danger."
Strict penalties for "absenteeism."
Imposition of speedup "incentive pay" schemes and seven- day workweeks.
Also included were a host of other union-crippling provisions that had never even been publicly discussed:
Elimination of the cost-of-living escalator for wages.
A thirty-day probation period for new miners, during which they would be deprived of many union rights.
Cutting in half (from ninety days to forty-five) the much needed training period for new miners.
Elimination of royalties paid to the union benefit funds on nonunion coal sometimes purchased by unionized companies, giving them a green light to step up this practice.
Increasing from 1,000 to 1,450 the number of hours a miner must work in a year to qualify for pension credit-another measure to crack down on wildcats and "absenteeism."
And, with a final twist of the knife, even the benefits paid to widows of UMWA members were cut back.
When the news of these provisions reached the coalfields in early February, the union ranks exploded with outrage. Thousands of miners joined in meetings and rallies to discuss and protest the contract terms. Meetings of local union officials in district after district repudiated the settlement.
Hundreds of miners boarded buses to Washington to demonstrate February 10 at the national UMWA headquarters, where the union bargaining council - composed of district presidents and members of the international executive board - was to vote on the agreement....
Fighting for our rights
The miners had won some rights in previous battles - such
as free medical care - that set an example for other workers.
Worst of all from the bosses' point of view, the miners were fighting to defend these rights. And that example made it harder to take away the rights of others.
The incredibly high cost of decent medical care - or any medical care at all - is one of the biggest problems facing workers throughout the country. But through hard-fought strike battles in the 1940s, the UMWA laid the basis for the most comprehensive health-benefits plan of any union.
Miners and their families received a medical card. It entitled them to free services at any clinic or hospital that was part of the system. No forms. No paperwork. No insurance company. No "deductibles."
All costs were paid from a UMWA benefits fund, which was financed by payments from the coal companies based on the amount of coal mined and the number of hours worked. Not only the miners benefited. With the aid of the UMWA fund, new clinics and hospitals were built throughout Appalachia. Health care for the entire region was transformed, since these facilities provided low-cost care to all.
From the beginning, however, the health-fund system suffered from one fundamental weakness - just like every other pension or health benefit that is limited to a single industry or union rather than provided for all by the government as a social responsibility - it tied the miners' benefits to the well-being of the companies.
When the industry was in decline, as it was throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, benefits were cut back. Thousands of miners, widows, and pensioners had their cards taken away. The coal industry recovered during the 1960s and has been booming in the 1970s - ever since oil prices went up 400 percent and coal became a more attractive energy source again. But despite soaring profits for the industry, payments into the fund did not keep pace with the even steeper increase in health-care costs.
The companies, however, blamed the fund's financial crisis on wildcat strikes. In July 1977 - hoping to weaken the miners before the national strike - they engineered an unprecedented slash in the medical benefits. These couldn't be restored without "labor stability," the bosses claimed.
Then when negotiations opened, the coal operators set out to cut their costs even more by abolishing the UMWA fund and the free medical-card system altogether.
By turning health coverage over to private insurance companies and forcing miners to pay hundreds of dollars a year in "deductibles" for doctors' visits, prescriptions, and hospital care, the companies stood to pocket millions of dollars a year in extra profits.
And what about health care for people in the mining areas? Without the subsidies they got from the UMWA fund, seventy clinics and sixty-one hospitals would have to cut back services, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission. Many would have to close....
Job safety and right to strike
Every day that they go underground, miners know they may be
crushed by falling rock, blown up by exploding methane gas or
coal dust, suffocated by inadequate ventilation, or mangled by
heavy machinery in the cramped mine shafts.
But for the profit-greedy operators, safe work practices are just an obstacle to production and profits.
Russ Stilwell, a rank-and-file miner from Local 1189 in Indiana, told an Indianapolis strike support meeting: "The only thing the coal operators promote in the mines is production. Production first, production second, and production third. And way down here at the end of the tail is safety. We're going to have safety or we're not going to mine coal."
But how can miners assure safety?
They know they can't rely on the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (formerly the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration). While some MSHA inspectors are honest and dedicated, many more cater to the companies' wishes.
And with ludicrously low fines - a lot of which are never collected - the federal enforcement system isn't set up to penalize mineowners to begin with....
Steve Shapiro, president of UMWA Local 6025 in Bishop, West Virginia, explained during the strike why miners "have come to see the wildcat strike as the only means available to them to enforce their contractual job rights."...
The power of the miners
From the outset, the strategy of the coal operators relied
on two main weapons. First, a divide-and-rule campaign to split
the ranks of the miners and to pit other working people against
them. Second, strikebreaking action by the government, which
the employers control through the two-party system.
As soon as the union ranks hurled the February 6 contract back in the bosses' faces, the operators turned more openly to the government to crush the miners.
On February 11 President Carter proclaimed the state of Ohio to be suffering an "energy emergency." Three days later he declared that the strike "cannot be allowed to continue," and called for negotiations to be held at the White House. Carter threatened to invoke Taft-Hartley and said he was readying federal force for "protection of life and property."...
On February 20 a separate contract was announced between the UMWA and the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Company.
Now an elaborate and highly publicized display was begun of BCOA "opposition" to the P&M contract and of White House "pressure" on the operators to accept it as the basis for a national pact. This was calculated to give the false impression that the contract included big concessions to the miners, while also trying to restore Carter's tarnished image as a "neutral."
After a few days of this charade, Carter announced on February 24 a second national contract agreement. The terms were virtually identical to the P&M pact.
If this deal was not "approved without delay" by miners, Carter threatened to take "drastic and unsatisfactory legal action" to end the strike. He called on miners to support the contract as a way of showing "dedication to your country."
When miners saw the contract, however, they immediately recognized it as merely a rehash of the February 6 "ball and chain" agreement. The P&M miners signaled the general sentiment and blocked the splitting move by decisively rejecting their settlement. And when the votes on the national contract came in on March 5, miners had voted it down by a more than two-to-one margin.
The next day Carter announced he was ordering the miners back to work under Taft-Hartley. The terms of the injunction were sweeping. It prohibited all union officers and staff from "continuing, encouraging, ordering, aiding, engaging, or taking part in" the strike. It banned any activity "interfering with or affecting the orderly continuance of work in the bituminous coal industry."
Violators would be fined or jailed, the government warned. Food stamps would be cut off for strikers, since their walkout was now "illegal."
Showdown
To drive home the threats, federal marshals hand-delivered
copies of the order to every UMWA local president. The aim was
to intimidate those who had provided much of the day-to-day
leadership of the walkout.
Government officials announced that state troopers, the National Guard, the FBI, and even federal troops were ready to move against anyone who interfered with production or transportation of coal.
The predictions of mass layoffs in other industries became frantic. If the miners did not give in, three million workers would be jobless within weeks, the administration claimed. Provocative speculation about "violence" filled the news media.
It was a historic test of strength - all the power of corporate wealth and governmental might versus 160,000 determined workers. And the coal miners showed where the real power lies.
On March 13 - the first day the injunction was in effect - the companies admitted that fewer than 100 miners in the entire country showed up for work.
No one was jailed.
No one was fined.
No coal was mined.
And the government was powerless to enforce its order.
The very next day, the coal companies came up with a third offer. This one dropped all provisions for disciplining wildcat strikers. It dropped the attempt to limit the authority of union safety committees. It dropped the probation period for new miners, along with a series of other "givebacks" the operators had demanded in their earlier offers. The medical card was not restored, but the maximum yearly payment by any miner was lowered to $200. Pensions were raised slightly but not equalized.
The utter defeat of the Taft-Hartley injunction was dramatized when - as the miners prepared to vote again - the federal judge who issued the order refused to renew it. Miners were "not paying attention to what I do anyhow," he admitted.
Voting on March 24, miners reluctantly approved the new offer by 57 to 43 percent. They hadn't won what they were fighting for, but they had blocked the coal operators' offensive and shattered the bosses' dreams for a housebroken work force.