It was presided over by a new union president, Sam Church, and watched closely by the coal companies, intent on seeing whether the UMWA would at last provide them with a “trouble-free” work force.

Many mine workers and union observers forecast that this year’s meeting would be one of the most important conventions in the UMWA’s history.

For union miners, two problems cloud the future. The first is that UMWA miners account for only half of the coal production in the country. New strip mines in the West are opening largely non-union, and in the East, especially in coal-rich Kentucky, the UMWA’s grip on production is slipping.

The second is a development since the 1977-78 strike: 20,000 UMWA miners are on layoff.

For the coal companies, this year’s gathering was a test of whether Church could exercise “control” over the membership and avoid another convention like the one in 1976 in Cincinnati, “a raucous affair,” as one pro-business newspaper described it last month.

The facts known, the 1976 convention was one of the most democratic union conventions ever held in the United States. It was this democracy that the coal operators and their friends in the news media wagered would be curbed at the Denver convention. Contrary to advance reports of what Church and his predecessor Arnold Miller had planned, no major retreats on union democracy were proposed.  
 
January 10, 1955
A momentous event is scheduled for the last week in April at Bandung, Indonesia—an Asia-Africa conference to which 30 nations of the two largest continents have been invited. This conference will be attended by government leaders of countries inhabited by more than half the world’s people. Most of them have been freed only recently from direct western imperialist rule or exploitation.

Among the countries invited are new China and North Vietnam, which has just been won from imperialist France through a revolutionary independence struggle. Also invited are Turkey, Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Central African Federation (the Rhodesias, and Nyasaland), Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Syria, Thailand, South Vietnam, and Yemen.

Conspicuously absent from the invitation list are Australia and New Zealand, two of the eight countries, including the United States, England, and France, which make up the so-called South East Asia Treaty Organization organized by the western imperialists last September in Manila. South Africa, dominated by white racists, was also not invited.

Whatever the deliberations and decisions of the conference, the mere fact that it is held will be of historic significance. It will be a visible symbol of a revolutionary transformation that has taken place in the world the past 15 years—the crumbling of the vast colonial empires of the advanced capitalist nations and the emergence of new independent nations hostile to imperialism. It will be a graphic demonstration that the western powers do not speak for the Asian and African people and can make no claim to their unquestioning support.  
 
 
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