Bloody Past Influences Dwindling UMW : Coal Strike a Fight Union Has to, but May Not, Win

John Evans felt like he had walked into the devil’s den.

Evans, a beefy home repair contractor with a disdain for labor unions, was sitting in one of his favorite bars when he noticed from the conversation that he was surrounded by a couple dozen union men--members of the international board of the United Mine Workers, in town for a quarterly convention.

All of the talk was about the stalemated strike the UMW has been running since April against the Pittston Coal Group in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky over issues ranging from mandatory overtime to pension benefits.

Although the strike involves only about 1,900 men--less than 4% of the UMW’s ranks--it has become a cause celebre of organized labor. Once again, a union with a tradition of hard bargaining is facing corporate demands for concessions based on the ever-more-popular contention that global competition makes the old rules of the workplace outdated.

If the miners give in--as many experts predict they eventually will--the UMW will lose much of its power to make contractual demands of major coal companies, and organized labor will have to withstand more public analysis of its steady decline.

The Pittston strike attracted national attention in June and July, when 46,000 miners at other companies in 10 Eastern states walked off their jobs in sympathy, drastically reducing coal production in the eastern half of the nation.

But today the strike is bogged down, attracting few headlines beyond the coal country. The sympathy strikers returned to work weeks ago. The Pittston miners now stand in isolation, clustering in wooden picket shacks they built at each Pittston mine entrance.

Desperately trying to keep the issue alive, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and the national presidents of several other major unions plan to get themselves arrested today by participating in an anti-Pittston sit-in at a Russell County, Va., courthouse, where they will block access to the building.

Such plans were still being hatched when Evans, who was vaguely aware of the miners’ soured state of affairs and who is the kind of guy who likes a little audacity in his life, got off his bar stool and walked to a table where Bob Phalen, president of UMW District 17 in Charleston, W. Va., a region famed for its devotion to the union, was sitting with a couple of associates.

“I want to tell you guys why the public isn’t on your side,” Evans began, drawing several stares of incredulity.

Evans wanted to tell a story he had heard from somebody else--how a miner had been heard bragging about how he slept on the job and how his union would protect him. Obviously, Evans had the wrong audience, but for a reason he didn’t understand.

Evans wanted to talk in the present tense, but, in coal strikes, the present cannot be separated from the past.

Debts of Next Generation

Every coal strike is a history lesson. The struggles of the 99 years of the UMW are wordlessly trotted out as debts that the next generation of an ever-smaller fraternity of men must pay. Too many uncles and fathers and grandfathers have stories to tell. Too many miners--100,000, according to the union--have died in the mines in the last century.

Outside the post office in the isolated little hollow of Matewan, W. Va., for example, there is a plaque commemorating what is often regarded as the bloodiest struggle of the American labor movement.

In 1920, a handful of striking miners bent on bringing the UMW into Mingo County shot it out with coal company security agents who had come to evict strikers from company housing. Ultimately, the struggle moved to Blair Mountain, where four battalions of federal troops were called in before an army of 10,000 miners agreed to lay down its arms.

It was with this symbolism in mind two months ago that thousands of Pittston strikers and their supporters assembled at Blair Mountain and marched north for days to Charleston.

A Flood of Liquid Waste

The next county over from Mingo is Logan County. There, at the head of Buffalo Creek, someone has hung a wooden grave marker on a slab of land next to the entrance to a Pittston coal-processing facility. The grave marker recounts how a dam of liquid coal waste maintained by Pittston broke here in 1972 and wiped out the entire hollow, leaving 125 people dead and thousands homeless.

The handwritten grave marker adds one more sentence:

Now Pittston wants the survivors.

This kind of sentiment makes the UMW “more tradition-bound than any union I know,” said William Miernyk, economics professor emeritus at West Virginia University. To any union, so-called contractual “give-backs” are emotional. To the UMW, they are treason.

The Pittston strike grew out of the company’s refusal last year to sign a national agreement reached between the union and the Bituminous Coal Operators Assn., a group of 14 companies that includes some of the country’s biggest coal producers.

Demands Special Concessions

Pittston, the nation’s second-leading coal exporter, contends that it needs special concessions from the UMW to cut labor costs in order to remain profitable in the international coal market. It wants to end prohibitions on Sunday work and mandatory overtime, two work rules dear to the union’s heart. It insists also that it should no longer have to contribute to an industrywide trust fund that provides benefits to thousands of Pittston retirees.

Negotiations are sporadic and unproductive. Pittston accuses the mine workers of being inflexible. The union accuses Pittston of being greedy. The two sides won’t even sit in the same room. Pittston on Friday said it would not negotiate for 10 days to protest what it called continued union-sanctioned violence against strikebreakers.

Nearly 3,000 mine workers and family members have been arrested for illegal picketing. Pittston is using strikebreakers, tough court restrictions on picketing, an expensive private security force and the aid of state troopers to continue hauling some coal out of its Virginia mines.

The company, supported by its parent corporation, the Pittston Co., which owns Brinks Home Security and Burlington Air Express, says it can hold out two years. Miners, living on $200-a-week strike pay from a $100-million union strike fund, say they can, too.

Management Victory Seen

“There’ll be a settlement, but it will be on management’s terms,” said Leo Troy, a labor economist at Rutgers University.

“The mine workers live in communities that are extremely devoted to the union,” Troy said, “but they’re looking at a history that isn’t going to repeat itself.”

To labor and industry observers, Pittston’s demand for concessions took advantage of a weakened union that is trapped in a downward spiral. In the 1970s, the UMW had 250,000 members and produced 70% of the nation’s coal; today, because of layoffs due to improved technology and the growth of non-union strip-mining in the West, only about 70,000 union miners remain, producing only about a third of the nation’s coal.

No matter how UMW President Richard Trumka responded to Pittston’s demands, he could not win, Miernyk and Troy said. If the union had avoided a strike by making a separate deal with Pittston, other members of the national coal operators’ association would probably have demanded similar concessions in the next contract.

Can’t Call National Strike

Once the union struck Pittston--after working 14 months without a contract--the spontaneous sympathy strikes at other companies temporarily put pressure on Pittston to return to the bargaining table. But the UMW cannot call a national strike to duplicate this pressure; that would violate its contract with the coal operators’ association.

In the formative years of the mine workers’ union, its president, the legendary John L. Lewis, assailed coal bosses as troglodytes--outdated relics who would be dragged into a more enlightened age of better treatment by the union.

Today, inside Pittston’s headquarters on a huge grassy hill in Lebanon, Va., Pittston Coal Group’s president, Michael Odom, is trying to turn the tables.

Odom, a boyish-looking 38-year-old Georgia Tech and Harvard Business School graduate who holds daily press briefings during the strike and likes to call reporters by their first names, contends that the UMW is the dinosaur, a prisoner of its past.

“Everything they’re doing is ducking reality,” he proclaims.

Wages are not the issue. Pittston is willing to pay the going rate, about $630 a week. But the company insists that, to achieve “continuous production,” it needs to require Sunday work and be able to order overtime as needed.

Union Seeks Special Clause

The union, which believes Pittston is systematically transferring coal reserves to non-union subsidiaries to slowly reduce its union work force, is demanding a “successorship clause,” a device many unions seek to guarantee job security. The clause, which Pittston will not add, would pledge that, if the coal group sold any of its 12 unionized coal companies, the new owner would honor the union contract and keep the union work force.

But the most emotional issue is Pittston’s demand to reduce costs by ending its participation in retirement and benefit funds jointly maintained by the coal producers’ association. Pittston wants to install its own pension and health plan. The union says Pittston’s withdrawal would jeopardize the fund by putting additional pressure on the remaining coal companies.

When its union contract expired early last year, Pittston cut off medical benefits to retirees and widows, a decision that was not reversed for more than a year.

“It’s like a credit card that expired,” a Pittston spokesman said. “Theirs expired.”

Such remarks have not been forgotten.

“They get on us for violence? Hell, that’s what I call violence--what happens to these old people laying at home and dying because they don’t have money for a doctor,” said Bernard Evans, a Logan County union organizer.

Strikers Watch TV

On a hot, humid day, Evans, a big, bearded man, drove his pickup truck through the narrow, meandering roads of his native county, stopping at each picket shack, visiting with strikers who wait out the days by watching television or whittling or swatting mosquitoes.

The men, most wearing camouflage fatigues, long ago quit assuming that the strike would end early. They were bitter at Pittston--particularly at Odom, its president, who supervised some of the Logan County operations a few years ago--but felt as though they had no other cards to play. This was a last gasp.

“I can wait as long as Odom can,” said one miner, Robert Necessary.

“This isn’t just about the UMW. It’s about organized labor,” said another, James Doczi. “Where else can I go?”

The next night, down in Virginia, was the night that John Evans (no relation to Bernard) walked into the bar full of UMW leaders and began to talk about why the public wasn’t on the miners’ side, why people didn’t trust unions, why the UMW had an image problem.

Bob Phalen, the Charleston-area district president, a taciturn man, remained quiet. But it was late and everyone had drunk several rounds and, eventually, one of Phalen’s assistants, Danny Wells, an organizer in Logan County, couldn’t take it.

He began grilling Evans about whether Evans paid his laborers union wages, whether Evans had ever seen a mine, whether he knew what it was like to work in a 36-inch-wide hole, whether he knew what it was like to work in water up to his waist.

Finally Phalen spoke up.

The hell with what the public thinks, he said, using an expletive. Hell, he told John Evans, my best friend was killed in a mine. How could the public know what that meant? Did the public know what the union had done to make mines safer? Did the public know that a miner still gets killed somewhere every week? Did the public know how many times miners had struck to keep their Sundays free, to guard against unrestricted overtime? Did the public think the miners were supposed to give this up without a fight, like so many file clerks?

The conversation disintegrated into hazy rhetoric until four Canadian miners at the next table, overhearing the tumult, began to sing a dirge about a cave-in. It ended like this:

All the town cries

For the 10 men who died in the mine,

But all the town sighs

For the one man alive in the mine.

And then, for several moments, nobody said anything.