No Alarm

Last week from the dank black recesses of the mines, great brown rats, black with coal-dust, scampered. Up long, inclined shafts they crawled, their beady eyes blinking in the light. Not long before, the miners, their faces smudged a ghastly grey, had straggled wearily up the shafts. The soft coal strike began in the central competitive area, including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, and in the adjoining states of Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

About 200,000 union miners left their jobs, most of them with money in the bank, some prepared to raise chickens and vegetables, others ready to work in factories. Manufacturers and railroadmen, who are the largest consumers of bituminous coal, refused to be alarmed. Ninety million tons are above ground, in storage, in freight cars--and, then too, the non-union mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee produce 65% of the nation's soft coal needs.

For the first time in many a year, nobody outside the coal industry cared what happened to the coal people. But however languid and reluctant the miners, however nonchalant the operators, the fight is one to the death.

Cause. The published cause of the strike was the expiration of the Jacksonville minimum wage agreement* on April 1. The actual cause is the Union of United Mine Workers' fight to avoid practical extinction.

Significance. In this strangest of strikes, the striking miners are reluctant; the Union is working with all its might to have the operators continue operation under the old agreement, until terms are arranged. But the mine operators face hard facts. The best veins in the bituminous mines of the Central Field are worked out; production can be maintained only at increasing cost. And they face the competition of the easily mined non-union fields.

Pittsburgh is the operators' capital. There, 18 months ago the largest bituminous coal operator in the world, the Pittsburgh Coal Co., went nonunion. April 1, when the strike began is a Union fete day; in Pittsburgh, past smoke-stained buildings, union miners paraded to honor John Mitchell, champion of the eight-hour day. They timed their march to pass the shops of the Pittsburgh Coal Co. as the noon shift changed; they hoped by display of power to draw non-union men into the striking ranks. But non-union men, indifferent, raised no cheers. Only heart-breaking news came to the marchers; another company, the huge Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Corp. had decided to go nonunion. And then Sheriff Robert H. Braun of Allegheny County ordered the police to disperse all groups of pickets. Meanwhile, in Ohio the Powhatan Mining Co. informed strikers that they must either pay rent or get out of the company's houses. The Union, disheartened, settled down to a long, long wait. The operators, sat back, hoping, if not expecting that the Union would smash itself.

*The $7.50 wage is the minimum per day for day workers. Miners paid by the minimum rate per ton, $1.08, may earn as much as $10 or $12 a day.