That Strange Strike

One of the most surprising effects of the energy crisis was a 17-day-long strike that ended last week in the coal fields of West Virginia. At its height, it cost 25,000 miners their $50-a-day jobs. The United Mine Workers' welfare and retirement fund forfeited $190,000 a day in royalties. The nation lost a daily output of 250,000 tons of metallurgical coal, thus endangering the steel industry. The cause of all this loss and trouble: the gasoline shortage.

It all began on Feb. 21 when a miner finished his shift at Consolidation Coal Co.'s Maitland 1G mine in McDowell County, got into his car--and ran out of gas before he left the company parking lot, where he then had to spend the night. Fellow miners blamed a gasoline conservation order that Governor Arch A. Moore Jr. had issued the day before, forbidding gasoline sales to any driver whose car had more than a quarter of a tank of gas. In protest, some miners quit working, and the strike quickly spread through nine counties. "We have men driving 50, 60, even 70 miles one way to work," argued Clyde Gibson, a union official in Welch, W. Va. "A quarter-tank of gas might get a man to the mine, but how is he supposed to get home?"

250 Miles. For weeks the strike defied all sorts of attempts at settlement. Moore tried to placate the miners by supplying more gasoline to the strike-bound counties. Then he exempted from the quarter-tank rule anyone who drove more than 250 miles to work in a week. The strikers protested that he was trying to split the union by exempting some miners and not others.

U.M.W. President Arnold Miller asked the state Supreme Court of Appeals to overturn the quarter-tank rule. When it refused to hear the case, he got both houses of the West Virginia legislature to petition Moore to rescind the order. But the government did not budge. Nor could a federal district court, acting on a suit brought by the mine operators, end the strike. It refused to order the miners back to work because gasoline shortages were not an issue subject to arbitration under the U.M.W. contract. The ruling, however, was overturned on appeal last week.

By then the effects of the strike had grown much worse. Executives of Inland Steel in Chicago and U.S. Steel in Pittsburgh announced 20% to 35% cutbacks in production of coke and iron because of the lack of coking coal. Other steel companies warned that they would soon have to take similar action. In McDowell County, a sniper wounded two picketing miners and a passerby. Governor Moore finally suspended the quarter-tank order for a month, explaining that his state had just been given its full minimum allotment of gasoline for March. Only then did the strikers return to work.

Why had they stayed out so long? Industry and some state officials charge that the U.M.W. was using the strike as part of its bargaining strategy in preliminary negotiations for a new contract. According to their theory, the union counted on frightening the steel industry, which has shown a willingness to pay a high price for labor peace, into pressuring coal companies to accept the miners' terms.

U.M.W. officials insist that the issue really was gasoline. The miners not only are completely dependent on cars to get to work; they also see their autos as an escape from their isolated hollows and as a link to luxury and freedom. Deprived of the use of their cars, they feel deprived of social mobility as well.

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