Fine Issue Delaying Miners’ Pact Vote

Union ratification of a tentative settlement in the United Mine Workers’ bitter 10-month strike against Pittston Coal in three southeastern states is being delayed by the union’s insistence that all court fines stemming from the strike be dropped, union President Richard Trumka said Friday in Los Angeles.

Trumka, who was addressing a reception of nearly 100 representatives of local unions who donated money or made trips to aid the mine workers’ strike, said it will be at least two more weeks before the court actions are resolved and the settlement is formally submitted to the union’s 70,000 members for ratification.

Negotiators for the mine workers and Pittston’s parent corporation, the Pittston Co., announced Jan. 2 that they had reached a compromise to end the strike, which was one of the ugliest in recent years and became a rallying point for members of many unions.

During the strike, the union was fined more than $60 million by federal and state judges in Virginia for civil disobedience actions by some of the 1,900 miners who struck Pittston over the company’s refusal to continue participating in several health and retirement trusts. When the settlement was reached, the union said it was contingent on dismissal of the fines.

The terms of the settlement have been kept secret, but several sources have indicated that the agreement calls for Pittston to resume its contributions to the trusts and grant union members laid off before the strike the right to most future job openings. In return, the union will permit the loosening of work rules, including the redefinition of job descriptions to improve efficiency in mines.

Trumka on Friday thanked members of Los Angeles union locals, ranging from machinists to garment workers, for their support of the Pittston strike, characterizing their actions as the beginning of an era of solidarity.

“As opposed to labor unions, we’re seeing the labor movement again,” he said.

Union members are growing more militant toward corporations, he said, telling them, “We’re darn sick and tired of seeing you sweeping crumbs off the edge of the table and telling me I ought to be happy with that.”

Trumka, one of the most charismatic figures in a national labor movement that is regarded as sorely lacking articulate spokesmen, said he believes the 1990s will see changes in federal labor laws.

In an interview earlier Friday, he said the existing National Labor Relations Act, passed in the mid-1930s, no longer puts sufficient burden on employers to bargain in good faith, and that widespread practices by employers in the 1980s that include permanently replacing strikers with strikebreakers has “seriously injured . . . the institution of collective bargaining.”

“We’re going to rejuvenate collective bargaining . . . so that working people maintain a fair share of the wealth that they produce,” he told the reception.

Trumka, 40, a former miner who holds a law degree, was voted to the executive council of the AFL-CIO last year after the mine workers’ union reaffiliated with the AFL-CIO. Though he is regarded as one of several union presidents who could ultimately become president of the 14-million-member labor federation, he said Friday he has no such ambition.

“My goal is to retire in my 60s as president of the mine workers’ union,” he said.

A collection of Los Angeles-based rock music performers were scheduled to perform at a benefit concert in West Los Angeles on Friday night to raise about $10,000 for the mine workers’ union.