UMW Leader Assails ‘Anti-Worker’ Stance of Business in ‘80s

Richard Trumka, president of the embattled United Mine Workers Union, said Monday that organized labor’s mission in the 1990s should be a rebellion against “the anti-worker, multinational” corporation philosophy of the 1980s, which Trumka said has turned working life into a joyless and insecure existence.

Speaking to an audience of 800 at the 43rd annual Labor Day breakfast of the Catholic Labor Institute of Southern California, Trumka said the country’s standard of living has plummeted since the Reagan Administration and its allies in the business community “tried to instill their vision of America.”

He described that vision as an all-consuming demand for profits at the expense of workers, with consequences ranging from a longer workweek to shrinking health benefits to the exporting of hundreds of thousands of jobs to Third World countries.

‘Prison of Work’

“Americans are being trapped in a prison of work that has no allowance for families, for hobbies, for community service,” he said.

Trumka, whose union’s 5-month-old stalemated strike against Pittston Coal Co. in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky is widely considered a metaphor for the weakening hand of organized labor, said federal labor laws drafted in the 1930s to ensure a system of collective bargaining are breaking down under new tactics by management.

“The labor laws have become a cruel hoax,” he said. “They are a no-win situation for us.”

Trumka, who was honored as “citizen of the year” at the breakfast, echoed a frequent complaint of American labor leaders, who say management now often refuses to bargain seriously with unions in order to force a strike and then replace strikers with non-union personnel.

These critics say rulings by the National Labor Relations Board under the Reagan Administration eroded protection of workers during union organizing, bargaining and strikes. Labor lawyers say companies now use the board to delay union elections or bargaining over contracts.

About 1,900 Pittston miners have been on strike since April after working 14 months without a contract. Even though the UMW has engendered substantial public sympathy--about 3,400 of its members have been arrested, most in civil disobedience actions, and a regional NLRB office found that Pittston engaged in unfair labor practices in West Virginia--Pittston has shown no signs of compromise.

The coal company wants to reduce labor costs by subcontracting more work, dropping limits on overtime and leaving a multi-employer pension fund. While the UMW was working without a contract, Pittston cut off retiree health benefits for a year. The company also refuses mine worker demands to guarantee that laid-off union members will get first crack at new jobs and to guarantee that mines would stay unionized if they were sold.

Trumka, a miner-turned-lawyer, said Pittston “wanted the right, in essence, to do away with the mine workers,” whose national membership has fallen to 70,000 from 250,000 in the early 1970s. Pittston, with assistance from hundreds of Virginia state police and unsympathetic judges, “wanted to break our will. They wanted to break our spirit. They wanted to say it’s OK for a rich company to break its social contract,” he said.

“We said . . . you will not beat us in this strike!” Trumka said to thunderous applause. “You will not deny hope to our children.”

While the breakfast attracted the traditional Democratic Party allies of labor, including Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, state Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp and Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, it was without the equally traditional presence of Los Angeles’ Roman Catholic archbishop.

Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, whose relationship with labor has been strained because of his active resistance to a campaign to organize the archdiocese’s cemetery workers, notified the Catholic Labor Institute in June that he would not attend the breakfast. Mahony celebrated a Labor Day Mass on Sunday at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.

Mahony subsequently said in an interview that the main reason for not attending the Labor Day breakfast was to ensure a higher attendance at the Mass by making it a separate function. He also said he had been offended by the political partisanship of the breakfast.

The schism began in February when the archdiocese’s 140 cemetery workers voted by a narrow margin to be represented by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. The archdiocese objected to the union’s organizing tactics. A three-member arbitration panel has held hearings on whether the vote should be upheld, and a final decision is expected soon.

In the homily for Sunday’s Mass, Mahony--long an ally of organized labor--said, “Many misunderstandings have occurred, and much energy has been spent which has tended to divide the traditional alliance between the Catholic Church and the labor movement. This is regretable, and no one has benefitted from this time of tension.”