German Unification May Mean Unemployment for Miners in the Ruhr : Economy: Pressures from the high costs of rebuilding the eastern economy may result in the end to subsidies that keep the mines operating.

The industrial Ruhr has changed a lot since the days when locals had to shake the grit from their clothes each morning and toil under a brooding sky of pollution-tinged gray.

Although the Ruhr remains one of Europe’s largest industrial centers, the skies have cleared.

The coal and steel that underpinned Germany’s military machine twice this century--and then provided the foundation for the country’s famous “economic miracle” in the years after World War II--today account for less than one-fifth of the Ruhr’s production.

The number of operating coal mines has dropped from 150 in 1953 to 19 now. Not one is situated along the Ruhr River, which runs along the southern reaches of the 1,200-square-mile region that carries its name.

White-collar workers, meanwhile, make up the majority of the region’s 1.6-million-strong work force these days.

In the snappy shopping malls and office blocks of this and other Ruhr cities, there is a pride that the transition has come with so little strife and only modest suffering.

German unification may change that, however.

Until now, phased early retirements, hefty retraining schemes and the growth of new industries were able to absorb much of the surplus manpower in a process that represented the best of Germany’s smooth labor relations.

“Through it all, we sent no one to the unemployment line,” said Guenter Dach, spokesman for the Assn. of German Coal Producers in Essen. “That’s something we’re proud of.”

But today, the Ruhr miners stand to become the first western German unemployment victims of the unification process, poised to join the more than 2 million eastern Germans who have lost their jobs or are working only part time as a result of unity.

Under financial pressures stemming from the unexpectedly high costs of rebuilding the eastern economy, German Economics Minister Juergen Moellemann has embarked on a program to cut liberal state subsidies--including those that keep the proud, but no longer competitive, Ruhr coal mines operating.

Sustained mainly on national security grounds--that is, to ensure a viable domestic energy source--the Ruhr mines exist on a package of state handouts and consumer surcharges on electricity that total about $6.8 billion per year.

Coal mined in the deep, narrow seams of the Ruhr costs up to three times world export prices. The industry would collapse without government support.

Aside from budgetary pressures, the addition of eastern Germany’s large soft-coal reserves to the nation’s resources has diminished the national security argument, Moellemann claims.

“Reducing subsidies remains an urgent necessity,” he said in a position paper distributed earlier this month. “The coal industry, as an extremely large recipient of subsidies, cannot remain protected from this.”

Still, his plan to cut the industry’s support by $650 million during the next three years--a plan offered without guarantees of coal’s longer-term survival--has appalled industry leaders and unleashed forecasts of mass layoffs.

“Forty thousand jobs (will be lost) in the mines and at least as many indirectly,” predicted Heinz Horn, chairman of Germany’s largest producer, Ruhrkohle AG.

Dach said the industry had already been preparing to close two mines as a result of lost European Community subsidies. It also was ready, in principle, to discuss further reductions. But Horn contends that the Moellemann plan would bring unnecessary hardship.

“It’s much too much to digest without having to consider mass layoffs,” he said. “It’s the difference between a soft landing and an outright crash.”

In addition to the specter of layoffs, the proposed cuts would also be one more blow to a way of life that helped shape both a strong sense of community and a tough, no-frills work ethic in the Ruhr, despite its troubled history.

A series of bitterly fought mass strikes between the 1880s and the eve of World War I brought Germany’s first trade union-negotiated wage agreements. But the unrest left the country’s imperial leadership so wary of social upheaval that it avoided basing troops or founding universities in the region for fear of providing the ingredients for a student-soldier-worker opposition.

Occupied briefly by France in 1923 when Germany defaulted on its Versailles Treaty obligations, then heavily bombed in World War II, the Ruhr quickly became the cornerstone of West Germany’s post-war recovery.

Ruediger Hamm, an economist at the Rhine-Westphalia Economic Research Institute, said the region’s diversification away from mining and steel during the past two decades will ease the impact of the proposed reductions.

“This hasn’t come all at once,” he said. “It’s part of a process that has been going on since the 1960s.”

But a powerful coalition--Ruhr industrialists and a miner’s union with a strong emotional following among opposition Social Democrats--has joined to resist the changes anyway.

As a result, politicians--including Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s own Christian Democrats, who have roots in the region--have distanced themselves from Moellemann and are urging compromise.

Miners themselves have launched sporadic, unofficial protests, including one group of 450 miners that staged an unprecedented, weeklong, mine shaft sit-in 1,800 feet below ground, an action many Ruhr residents say reflected the intensity of emotions.

“I can’t recall a time when the mood was so explosive,” commented Rudolf Heim, spokesman for the miners’ union, IG Berbau.

Moellemann has met with coal industry leaders once to search for common ground; two more rounds of talks are scheduled for early next month. Economics Ministry officials in Bonn say agreement must be achieved by Nov. 11, the day before next year’s federal budget is presented to parliament.

Moellemann’s contention that other industries--such as aerospace, shipbuilding and agriculture--have also been targeted for cuts has not dampened the strong feelings. Nor has Kohl’s admonition to the miners that those in the western part of the country must also share the burdens of unity.

“People feel betrayed,” explained Evelyn Kroker, an historian at the Ruhr’s mining museum in nearby Bochum. “Ruhr coal was the foundation of the economic miracle. But with unification, it is suddenly no longer of interest. There’s a feeling of real bitterness.”