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Vol.63/No.34       October 4, 1999  
 
 
Illinois miners resist company attempts to weaken union  
 
 
BY MARIAN RUSSELL 
PALMER, Illinois – One year after the beginning of the 98-day strike by 350 coal miners against Freeman United Coal Co., three miners got together to discuss the aftereffects of that battle. Dave Yard, Bob Bockewitz, and Greg Mahan, members of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Local 1969 at Freeman's Crown II mine agreed that the workers are stronger after the walkout despite concessions won by Freeman from the union.

"The guys who went with us through the strike are more open with each other," Yard began. "There is more friendship. You know who you can trust."

Mahan, who is the president of UMWA Local 1969, added, "The three locals are together. We know almost everyone now at the Crown III and Industry mines. Before the strike, Freeman played us off against each other."

The long strike was against cuts in medical care for retirees, as well as against job combinations and attacks on seniority and bidding rights. It lasted from September 11 to December 17, 1998. At the end, a four-year contract, which included a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), was ratified in a sharply divided vote with 55 percent voting for and 45 percent voting against.

The miners had reached out for support through rallies, expanded pickets, an Adopt-a-Family Program, Miners' Relief Fund, food bank, and strike fund. Yard said that the strikers had received donations from just about every state in the nation. Much of the Food Bank surplus was given to United Auto Workers strikers at Tazewell in Pekin, Illinois.

The miners explained that several factors were decisive in the majority vote for the MOU. Representatives of the union's international officialdom publicly lauded the proposed pact. In addition, the company threatened to turn strikebreakers they had hired into permanent workers and to hire more scabs. The bosses also threatened to close the Crown II mine.  
 

Attendance and retiree health care

With regard to health care for retirees, no one has yet retired whom the new provisions would affect. The MOU ended company-funded health care in favor of a system of cash payments that forces each family to buy their own medical insurance. "Some 40 miners retired right before December 21, 1998," explained Mahan, "putting them under the 1993 benefit plan. So we don't know exactly how it will work out yet, but the concession on medical care could have a snowballing effect" in the industry. Recent meetings in Alabama, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Utah, attended by thousands of retired miners and widows of miners, protested moves by coal companies to renege on contractual obligations to provide miners lifetime medical care.

The MOU also initiated a stricter Attendance Control Program for miners recalled from layoffs. Up to this point, no recalled miners have been discharged under it.

Two miners among those who were on the job prior to the strike have been fired since last December for absenteeism under the old attendance program. They didn't get their jobs back. Co-workers collected $3,000 for them.

Miners have been recalled to work from the panel of laid-off miners, but hundreds have declined to return to work at Freeman.  
 

Company attacks seniority

The real problems so far, the miners explained, have come through the job combination provisions. There are only four job classifications now: "Inby" (those who work at the face where the coal is cut), "Outby," "Repairman," and "Mine Examiner." An employee can choose to be "enhanced," that is, to receive further training and higher pay, to be reclassified to one of these four categories. Workers who were employed by Freeman before the strike may retain their old classification. Most have declined to be "enhanced." All recalled workers and anyone who bids on a job must do so in the new, combined job classifications.

"Safety-wise the new system is horrible," Bockewitz said. "People are not as well trained." When you are on one job, the miners said, you get very good at it. But not when you move around.

Some 150 grievances have been filed since the strike. Most concern the assignment of overtime out of seniority because the company gives preference to those in the new, combined classifications. Workers who are not "enhanced" have been fighting to defend their seniority. This has been expressed by a struggle for equitable distribution of overtime on "idle days" (maintenance days).

This led to a July 21 ruling by an arbitrator in a grievance by 13 members of Local 12 at the Crown III mine, which was a mixed bag. On one hand, the grievance was sustained. "The MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) does not take away the right to idle-day opportunities from employees choosing to stay in their traditional classifications," the ruling states. But the miners "are entitled to back pay only up to the time that the 'Inby,' 'Outby,' 'Mine Examiner,' and 'Repairman' classifications comprise more than fifty percent (50%) of the workforce." Once that happens, "the Employer is entitled to change the method of scheduling idle day work to accommodate the new classifications," the arbitrator ruled.

"We were supposed to be 'grandfathered' in," said Bockewitz. Instead, the miners agreed, the company aims to gut seniority rights by giving preference to "enhanced" workers when layoffs come.

At the same time, Mahan said, "The guys who are enhanced are not going to get a day off. The big issue now is 'we want time off.'" He added, "Arbitration is not fair or equal to the working man. It's time the rank and file have a say in this."  
 

Solidarity activities continue

Yard enumerated activities in solidarity with other embattled workers the miners have been involved in. "On April 1 we held our first annual Mitchell Day Celebration commemorating the winning of the eight-hour day and invited other local unions. We sent all proceeds to the UMWA strikers at the Jeddo mine in Pennsylvania. We sold raffle tickets in order to assist the Blue Shirts of UAW Local 974 in Peoria in their efforts to raise funds for the Tazewell strikers and we attended their benefit. Memorial Days are being called on holiday weekends to give us more time off. And we have been informing other UMWA locals about the terms of the MOU."

They also helped workers at a local coal pelletizing plant to organize into the UMWA, and sent assistance to strikers at Beverly Farm in Godfrey, Illinois.

Several miners have started Miners for Clean Water and have joined in solidarity with local farmers and others opposed to a planned large-scale confinement dairy farm in the area. Such an operation would be the largest of its kind in Illinois and would pose a threat to the aquifer under Palmer that supplies water to many farmers as well as to a number of towns.  
 
 
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