Coldness Ahead?

Heads at Atlantic City hold many thoughts -- some have ideas for pleasure, some have plans for profit, some have inscrutable designs. It was so with the meeting of anthracite operators and miners, which resumed its Conference there after a week's adjournment. The miners had made eleven demands for a new wage-and-working-conditions contract to supersede the present contract expiring on August 31. Four of the miners' demands -- lesser ones -- were agreed on. The first of the remaining seven demands brought disagreement and an end to the Conference.

Nine men sat down to discuss the miners' demand for a "checkoff" system in the anthracite mines. Four of them were operators' representatives, four miners' officials, and one was Rinaldo Cappellini, who was seated unofficially because on Aug. 1 he was to have officially displaced one of the miners' representatives.

The "check-off" is a system by which the mine operators take union dues and union assessments from the pay envelopes of the members of the mine union. This system is in use in bituminous coal mines. The operators do not like it because they are obliged to collect funds which may be later used against them. The union miners demand it because it is a sure way of collecting dues. The operators object to it, asserting that it is illegal, un-American and that in effect it forces a closed shop, giving the United Mine Workers a labor monopoly. The miners' officials demand it, declaring that it is not illegal and gives them the only sure hold over their members in enforcing the miners' contract with the mine operators. The miners further assert that the check-off is successfully used in the bituminous coal fields. The operators in turn deny this.

The joint subcommittee which was conferring on this question met at 10:30 A. M. The discussion grew hot; the committee forgot to have lunch. At 5 :00 P. M. the Conference adjourned with no results achieved. Next day it was resumed. John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers, presented a resolution:

"Resolved: That the principle of complete recognition of the United Mine Workers and the check-off as expressed in Demand No. 1 be adopted."

The operators retired for a caucus. They returned and a vote was taken. The four miners voted "Aye"; the four operators voted "No."

" If your judgment is final," said John L. Lewis, " this Conference may as well adjourn, sine die, here and now."

The operators were unwilling to adjourn without prospect of renewing the Conference. At their suggestion the Conference adjourned until the next day, to give both sides " time to think it over."

Next morning the Conference met again. Neither side would yield. The miners again proposed adjournment, sine die. The operators proposed that the miners accept either a renewal of the present wage contract till April 1, 1925, with such additions as had already been agreed on, or an agreement that there would be no strike on September 1, and that the questions of the check-off and of a 20% raise in wages be settled by arbitration. The miners refused. At the suggestion of the operators the Conference adjourned -- to meet again at the call of the Secretary if either side so desires.

"A cold winter," sighed the public in print and at home. " Is this a dramatic gesture by both sides, each trying to make the other yield? Have they strategy in their heads or obstinacy?"

Members of the U. S. Coal (Fact Finding) Commission -- Chairman John Hays Hammond, Thomas R. Marshall and others -- meanwhile took frequent opportunities to say that they did not think that the miners or operators would plunge the public again into the hardships of a coal strike.

The operators took occasion to inform the public that if there should be a coal strike on September 1 there would probably be sufficient coal on hand to keep off the chill till February of next year.

"Let the Coal Commission, Secretary of Labor Davis, Secretary of Commerce Hoover or President Harding intervene," said the press. The Coal Commission has no power that it can exercise except moral force. Secretary of Labor Davis is in Europe. Secretary of Commerce Hoover is in California. The President is ill.

Harking back to the question of the checkoff, a special committee of the National Coal Association (soft coal operators) issued a statement denying that the check-off was satisfactory in the bituminous mines. The committee stated that it had filed a request with the Coal Commission for the abolition of the checkoff. Said the committee : " This system was originally accepted in the bituminous industry in the hope that it would tend to lessen strikes and breaches of agreement. The result has been just the opposite. . . . Under the check-off the United Mine Workers raise every year more than $17,000,000. From this huge sum they paid the expenses of the armed invasion of West Virginia in 1921. ... By it (the checkoff) they recently raised $900,-000 in Illinois to defeat justice against the Herrin murderers. . . ."

"Gratuitous effrontery," was what John L. Lewis called the statement of the National Coal Association --" merely propaganda in behalf of non-union coal operators." The bituminous operators have a fund of $10,000,000, Mr. Lewis asserted, for use against the United Mine Workers.

" Without coal, we are cold," said the public.