Miners, Pittston Announce Pact in Bitter Strike

Negotiators in Washington announced Monday they had reached a tentative settlement of the bitter nine-month strike by 1,900 members of the United Mine Workers against Pittston Coal Group, a labor dispute that cost tens of millions of dollars in lost profits and court fines and resulted in more than 3,000 arrests and an equal number of smashed windshields in three Southeastern states.

The strike against Pittston’s mines in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky over issues of health and retirement benefits and job security was one of the angriest labor disputes of the 1980s. To America’s organized labor movement, its power slipping on various fronts, the strike personified the troubling phenomenon of a profitable business trying to squeeze concessions from a withering union.

The settlement terms were not disclosed, pending ratification by strikers. The announcement that bargainers had reached agreement late Sunday night was made by Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who stepped into the negotiations stalemate two months ago.

After visiting coal fields in Virginia in October, Dole appointed former Labor Secretary William J. Usery as a “supermediator” to bargain directly with Richard Trumka, the mine workers union’s president, and Paul Douglas, chief executive officer of the Pittston Co., the coal company’s parent corporation.

Negotiations, occasionally lasting through the night and on one occasion for 96 consecutive hours, had proceeded steadily for the last 2 1/2 weeks. Yet many observers continued to feel that the strike’s key issue--Pittston’s decision to end contributions to the union’s national retirement and health trusts, which cover 130,000 workers and retirees--was beyond compromise.

Pittston, the nation’s largest coal exporter, stopped paying into the trusts in 1988 when it refused to sign a national coal contract and sought to fashion an individual contract with the union. Pittston insisted that the amount of the contributions made it impossible for the company to remain competitive in the international market.

The UMW said Pittston’s pull-out--in which the company substituted lesser benefits through an independent plan--could cause other coal companies to follow suit, destroying the retirement and health trusts.

Every national coal contract since 1950 has required participating companies to provide complete health coverage to miners as well as to retired miners, disabled miners and their widows and orphans. This landmark agreement was negotiated by then-union President John L. Lewis in exchange for allowing coal operators to introduce mechanized equipment that has subsequently eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Danny Wells, a board member of UMW District 17 in West Virginia, echoed a common union sentiment in an interview last week, saying the rank-and-file could not be content with anything less than an agreement by Pittston to resume contributions to the national health and retirement funds. Pittston officials had insisted throughout the strike that they would never do that, and had suggested they were willing to absorb a strike of as long as two years. Several respected labor analysts had suggested that the union was too weak to force a settlement.

Yet at Monday’s press conference with Dole, both Trumka and Douglas, while refusing to go into specifics, insisted that the benefits issue had been settled. Both said they thought the settlement was fair, and Trumka called it “a victory . . . for the entire labor movement.”

“We came to what I really believe is a . . . reasonable solution,” Usery said.

Douglas expressed some surprise that an agreement had been reached. “I never guessed in my wildest dreams that his (Usery’s) predictions of a settlement by the holidays was really practical, given the depth and the intensity of the issues,” Douglas said. “We think we’ve met the essential objectives of all the parties involved.”

Dole said she will appoint a commission to review the stability of the national mine workers trusts. However, both sides at the press conference insisted that the settlement was independent of the commission.

Trumka, whose union’s membership has fallen to less than 70,000 from 250,000 in the mid-1970s, said the union will not discuss the pact until information has been sent to the rank-and-file next week.

He also said ratification of the settlement is contingent upon agreements with federal courts and the National Labor Relations Board--which received more complaints in the Pittston strike than any strike in recent memory--to dissolve all strike-related litigation. The union faces fines of $63.5 million for violating court orders limiting picketing and other strike activities.

The strike’s national impact was blunted because, unlike most coal strikes in this century, it was aimed only at a single company--and because no one died. The vast majority of the arrests were for civil disobedience actions. Flamboyant gestures like the arrest of AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland at a demonstration in August and the occupation of a Pittston plant by 98 miners in September received little national news media coverage.

Nevertheless, for organized labor, the Pittston strike came to symbolize much of what was a frustrating and sometimes devastating decade.

For example, the health-and-benefits issue in the strike is being played out in virtually every collective bargaining session in the nation, as companies try to shift some employer-paid health costs to their employees.

In addition, the fact that Pittston is part of a multi-pronged corporation, and thus able to more easily absorb a long strike, is a trend that has sharply cut down organized labor’s willingness to strike.

Traditionally, strikes had power against independent companies. But Pittston Coal Group, whose parent corporation owns Brinks Home Security and Burlington Air Express, continued to hold out against the union despite losses of $13.4 million in the second and third quarters, compared to profits of $16.4 million in those quarters in 1988.

The coal group mined some coal in its Virginia mines by hiring $15-an-hour strikebreakers from the vast ranks of unemployed miners, but spent $20 million on security and housing its strikebreakers. Industry analysts have predicted the strike will cost Pittston as much as $60 million.

Another national issue that surfaced in the Pittston strike was the union’s complaint that Pittston, like many American companies desperate to find cheaper, non-union sources of labor, was creating non-union subsidiaries and then subcontracting work to them. Before contract negotiations broke down in 1988, the union asked the company for a “successorship clause,” a device many unions seek to guarantee job security. The union wanted Pittston to 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. Pittston refused.

Pressure for the strike began building in early 1988 after Pittston refused to sign the union’s national contract with Bituminous Coal Operators Assn., a group of 14 companies that includes some of the country’s biggest coal producers. Union members subsequently worked 14 months without a contract before striking last April 5.

A hard-line crackdown by state police on union efforts to block roads leading to Pittston mines in Virginia resulted in thousands of arrests and sparked a brief sympathy strike in 10 other Eastern states in June by 40,000 other miners--70% of the country’s unionized mine workers. The strike then settled into a stalemate peppered by more demonstrations, arrests, rock throwing, shotgun blasts and findings by a regional office of the National Labor Relations Board that Pittston had engaged in unfair labor practices before the strike. As a result of that finding, Pittston will not be permitted to make permanent employees of its strikebreakers.

At strike headquarters in southwest Virginia, not far from Pittston’s headquarters, fatigue-clad striking miners, supported by $225-a-week payments from a $100-million union war chest, received visits from members of dozens of other unions, including representatives of Poland’s Solidarity union.

The union believed that Dole’s intervention in October significantly helped its cause. In addition, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators put pressure on Pittston last September by introducing legislation that would obligate Pittston to continue payment to the benefit plans it had left.

In Montgomery, Ala., where he was bass fishing, President Bush on Monday said through a White House spokesman that he was “delighted” by word of the agreement.