The New Militancy: A Cry for More
One of the minor economic miracles in the past couple of years has been the quietly cooperative spirit of U.S. labor. As living costs sailed skyward and corporate profits rose sharply, most of the nation's biggest and toughest unions accepted relatively moderate contracts that added little to the rapid pace of inflation. But that remarkable show of patience has now ended. The American workers' mood has turned increasingly bitter lately, and wage demands have climbed steadily higher.
Last week, in the middle of the most important contract talks of the year, the 120,000-member United Mine Workers went out on strike and quickly won one of the fattest settlements in labor history, a 50% raise in wages and benefits over three years. In the light of labor's understandable frustration with both inflation and recession, the increase could well set a new high goal for other unions to shoot for, with grave consequences for the economy and the nation. Last year most unions were accepting wage-and-benefit increases of little more than 6% in the first year of contracts. During the first six months of 1974, the average settlement climbed to between 8% and 9%, and by September to 11%. The miners' success in achieving 14% to 15% for the first year could easily presage even higher inflationary demands and more disruptive strikes by other unions.
The mine settlement is certain to lift the price of coal--as well as steel, electricity and myriad consumer products--adding further to oppressive living costs, which are now rising at an annual rate of close to 12%. The pact must still be ratified by the entire membership, a new union procedure that will take between eight and ten days and guarantees that the strike will paralyze the mines for at least three weeks. U.M.W. President Arnold Miller has repeatedly stated that his men will not return to the pits before the voting is completed.
Despite the stupendous size of the package, there was little jubilation among the miners in the humpbacked hills and crooked hollows of Appalachia, where most of the nation's coal is dug. Many of the men reckoned that they deserved still more. By last week's end, the union's Bargaining Council, made up of key officers, had not yet approved the contract and ran into surprisingly long arguments over its fine points. Meanwhile, the outcome of the membership-wide vote was uncertain.
First Vote. The U.M.W.'s policy of allowing every member to cast a secret ballot on industry-wide contracts at last brings the miners into the mainstream of progressive unionism. Until now, the final decision on major mine contracts was made at the top. Under the plan, the first vote is cast by the Bargaining Council. The schedule then calls for the agreement to be explained to 800 delegates from the local unions at a meeting in Pittsburgh late this week. The delegates will then take the 58-page agreement back to their local headquarters, where it will be explained in great detail to members before they vote. The union hopes to distribute a copy of the contract to each miner for study, and Miller has insisted that the agreement be written in plain language.
The settlement will cost the companies an estimated $1.25 billion. Only about a third of the package will be in pay increases, which will go up 9% in the first year and 3% in each of the next two years. That will jack up the top pay scale for miners from $50 a day to almost $58 over the life of the contract.
The U.M.W. also won its first cost of living escalator, which workers in steel, auto and other industries have had for years. The formula will increase base pay by 10 an hour for every .4 rise in the consumer price index, up to a maximum 200 a year. That could add almost $24 a week to wages over the next three years.
The biggest gains for miners were in benefits, which had been extraordinarily skimpy. The agreement calls for a dramatic $900 million increase in royalties paid by companies to support the union's health and retirement plans; the payments will jump from the present 800 per ton of coal dug to $1.55 by 1977. The money will increase pensioners' payments from $150 to as much as $375 a month and greatly expand health and hospital care for disabled miners, widows and children.
Other benefit enrichments include company-paid disability insurance of $100 a week for up to one year, five days of paid sick leave, v. none now, three more paid holidays in addition to the present nine and a new $75-a-year allowance for work clothes. The U.M.W. also scored well on improving safety measures. Every miner will get the right to leave any area that he considers un safe, and the companies agreed to bear the cost of four comprehensive mine inspections each year by the union's Miner Safety Committee.
Low Stocks. The big settlement comes at a time when the Ford Administration is struggling with raging inflation, rising unemployment and a steadily declining economy. Even a three-week strike will hurt. Coal-hauling railroads--including the Penn Central, Norfolk & Western and Chesapeake & Ohio--have laid off more than 2,500 workers. Thousands more have been let go by U.S. Steel and Republic Steel, which need coal to produce. Most electric utilities, which burn about two-thirds of the nation's coal, have adequate stockpiles for a relatively short strike. But the Government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority was so low on coal that it asked the communities it serves in seven states to cut their street lighting in half for the duration of the strike. In all, a three-week coal stoppage would cause a loss of more than $5 billion in the sagging gross national product.
The nation's real output of goods and services has declined for the past nine months; the drop is expected to continue at least until mid-1975, thus marking one of the longest slides since the Great Depression. Last week, with the election over, the White House ended its verbal contortions and permitted Presidential Press Secretary Ron Nessen to concede what most non-Government experts already knew: the U.S. is now in a recession. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, added that the economy had stood up fairly well until late September, but "some time in the past four to six weeks there has been a marked weakening." The economy is likely to get worse in the next few months.
A most ominous factor is labor's new and growing restiveness. Until recently, labor militancy had been muted in large part because more and more workers were covered by cost of living escalators. In the past year alone the percentage of union members covered by such clauses jumped from 40% to just over 50%, bringing the total to more than 10 million people. Many workers lulled themselves into believing that these escalators would keep their wages in line with prices--but they did not. The average U.S. worker's buying power in September was down 5.2% from a year ago and down 7.4% from 1972.
Then the growing specter of recession cast a lengthening shadow over the economy, layoffs spread, and by the end of September, 5.5. million people were out of jobs. The unemployment rate is now 6% and is expected to scoot up to 7% or more by mid-1975. Though the ax is falling in many industries, no group has been harder hit than the auto workers. A combination of consumer uncertainty, high gasoline prices and substantial increases in 1975 model prices sent car sales skidding to an annual rate of 6.2 million in October; at that pace, auto sales for the year would be the lowest since 1961.
As a result, the 1.4 million-member United Auto Workers union reports that as many as 150,000 of its members are out of work. The number may soon swell to 230,000 because Chrysler Corp. is expected to take the unprecedented step of closing down virtually all of its U.S. assembly plants for five weeks beginning Dec. 2. Says U.A.W. Vice President Irving Bluestone: "The auto industry is not in a recession--it's in a depression." In Bluestone's arguable view, auto demand would quicken somewhat if General Motors, Ford and Chrysler lowered their prices and the oil companies reduced the cost of gasoline by taking lower profits. Reflecting labor's new anger, Bluestone, a militant unionist, adds: "If the oil firms continue to gouge the public, then we'll call for regulation of the industry or, if need be, its nationalization."
Fortunately for the nation, the bargaining calendar for the next year is relatively light, and none of the big pacesetters like steel and autos are up for contract talks. Yet there are a number of important, potentially explosive negotiations in the wings. Bargaining will begin next week for the railroad workers' contract, which expires at the end of December. "We gotta get more money, no question about it," says Al Chesser, president of the United Transportation Union, one of the railroad brotherhoods.
Big Boost. The rail workers are aiming for a three-year 45% to 50% increase in wages alone. At present they earn an average of about $45 a day. The railroad workers are also worried about job losses. Like other craft unions, the rail unions have historically responded to this threat by jiggering contract work rules that limit the amount of labor one man can perform and thus spread more work around. That featherbedding, of course, guts productivity and lifts inflation even higher.
The construction workers will be coming to the bargaining table early next spring, and they will press for skyscraping settlements. Other union members with contracts expiring next year --airline mechanics, insurance workers, oil and refinery employees and the 600,000 postal workers--will be out not only to catch up with prices but to get ahead of them, thus further fanning inflation.
Robert Nathan, a member of TIME'S Board of Economists and a leading labor specialist, is frightened by the intensity of the anger that he finds among union people. "There is talk of violence and rioting in the street," says Nathan. He believes that inflationary pressures will become so great that unions that have already signed settlements without an escalator clause will be back to reopen their contracts in order to get one. "If I were an employer," says Nathan, "I would be receptive to such demands." The alternative, in his view, is worker slowdowns and sputtering productivity.
Beyond the bargaining table, labor is using its clout more and more on the political front. Its aim: to push through the new Congress, which takes office in January, a long list of legislative proposals. Many of the newly elected legislators had the solid support of top labor chieftains--and their $3 million campaign kitty. Now AFL-CIO President George Meany has passed the word that these Congressmen are honor bound to reciprocate or face labor's wrath in the next election.
Health First. High on labor's list of priorities is the national health security bill sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. The most expansive of several plans before the Congress, the Kennedy bill would establish a federally funded hospitalization and medical plan for all U.S. citizens. In addition, the union leaders want: 1) curtailment of imports of clothing, electrical goods and other foreign items that compete with U.S. products; 2) tax reform aimed at the rich and the big corporations; 3) expansion of Government financial aid to the mortgage market; and 4) the repeal of state right-to-work laws, which weaken labor's authority by permitting nonunion help to work in unionized shops.
Labor has enough influence in the new Congress to get much of what it wants, but it still could be stymied by President Ford's veto power. Thus Meany and his lieutenants are gearing up a major drive to put a more amenable man in the White House in 1976. Says Meany: "We just can't wait for the economic theories of [Federal Reserve Board Chairman] Arthur Burns or these other people to bring us out of this thing. The unemployment picture is getting worse and worse. It adds up to a national disaster."
If workers in many industries are angry, none have more justification than the men who mine America's coal. For decades, the miners' bargaining strength had been reduced by the nation's increasing reliance on oil and natural gas, which now supply almost 80% of U.S. energy needs. As coal demand diminished, company profits shrank, and miners' wages and benefits lagged behind those in other industries. But coal's prospects have changed dramatically in the past year in the face of quadrupled petroleum prices. Last fall's Arab oil embargo raised supply worries everywhere and prompted a rapid switch to coal.
Today coal is king, and orders are running far ahead of the companies' ability to fill them. Voracious demand has enabled mine operators repeatedly to renegotiate prices upward. Contract coal now sells for an average of $15 per ton, almost double what it was a year ago. Noncontract coal (spot purchases) has leaped by as much as 1,000%, to as high as $120 per ton. The rise in company profits is colossal. For example, in the third quarter, Consolidation Coal (owned by Continental Oil) earned $15.9 million, up from $200,000 in the same quarter last year, and Island Creek, the third biggest company (owned by Occidental Petroleum) went from a loss last year to a profit of $35.2 million. The oil industry has a big stake in coal; petroleum companies now control 70% of the nation's reserves, which total 1.3 trillion tons. Indeed, the U.S. has about half of the world's known deposits and is often called "the Saudi Arabia of coal."
Costs Up. The mine operators contend that after years of slumping sales, they are entitled to the higher prices that the surging demand for coal has brought. This year coal companies' return on investment will average about 23%, v. an average of 12% for the rest of industry. Last year, however, the return in coal was only 9%, and the year before 7%. Coalmen assert that the cost of the new labor contract also justifies increased prices. Most important, company officials note, they will need massive amounts of capital to meet the Government's goal of almost doubling production in the next ten years.
Though the miners insist that the companies can well afford to grant them their rich package without an inflationary boost in coal prices, they doubt that that will happen. Says Lou Antal, president of U.M.W. District 5 in Pittsburgh: "Every time in the past when they've given us two bucks, they raised the price of coal by three."
Much more than prices and wages was at stake in last week's confrontation. The union had its future, possibly even its very existence, on the line (the Steelworkers union has long been ready to swallow up the miners). Two years ago, the miners ended a half-century of bullying and often exploitative union rule when they elected a reform slate of former miners, headed by Miller. Since then, the new leaders have entirely rewritten the union's old, restrictive constitution and have given back to the locals the right to elect their own officials instead of having them rammed down from the top. Yet democracy is a fragile bloom in the coal fields, and Miller needed a resounding negotiating victory to strengthen his still tenuous grip on the presidency as well as prove that miners can govern their own affairs. "We have to show that we're not just a bunch of dumb asses," he says.
Such talk would probably have brought a haughty sneer from John L. Lewis, the union's legendary leader from 1920 to 1960, whose autocratic legacy still burdens the U.M.W. In his early days, however, Lewis was a mighty force for progress. Only a decade or so before he took over the union, much of the nation's coal was dug by youngsters, some barely into their teens, who labored in appallingly dirty, unsafe conditions for only a pittance. Lewis was the Paul Bunyan of unionism, standing up to companies, courts and even Presidents with fiery bombast. When Franklin Roosevelt threatened to bring out the U.S. Army to break a U.M.W. strike in 1943, Lewis replied with classic defiance: "They can't dig coal with bayonets."
In the '30s, Lewis made the U.M.W. the battering ram of organized labor, the strongest union in the nation. But he ran the organization like a feudal fief, stripping the membership of all elective power, making all decisions himself and swatting down any opposition. He bought a bank for his union, loaned money to troubled coal companies, and acted as the final arbiter for the entire industry, labor and management alike.
W.A. ("Tony") Boyle, a Montana local chief who came to the Washington headquarters in 1948, succeeded to the presidency in 1963. He tightened the dictatorship. But the union became a shambles, membership fell off, and corruption and terror tactics grew. Boyle and his cronies milked the union's pension and health funds for their own purposes. Bob Wingrove of Moundsville, W. Va., a Boyle opponent, recalls: "I was threatened many times. They used to call up my wife and ask, 'Are your kids in school? Are you sure?' Then when I'd come home, my wife would be crazy with worry. I had my phone taken out. I carried a gun."
Shot Dead. Finally, Boyle's leadership was seriously challenged in a 1969 election by Joseph ("Jock") Yablonski, a member of the U.M.W. executive board. Yablonski lost the election, but for daring to defy the leadership's code of blind loyalty, he, his wife and daughter were brutally gunned to death in their beds on New Year's morning 1970 --on the orders, it later came out, of Tony Boyle, who was eventually convicted of murder and is now in prison. The murders sent shock waves of indignation across the coal fields. Shortly afterward, Miller, who had risen to prominence in West Virginia as president of the insurgent Black Lung Association, was chosen at a meeting of anti-Boyle factions to succeed Yablonski and lead the reform movement.
In the Government-ordered and monitored election of 1972, Miller's campaign took on the air of a crusade, attracting the support of widely diverse groups, including poverty-fighting VISTA volunteers. He beat Boyle by 70,000 votes to 56,000--the first time in recent labor history that any upstart from the rank and file had ousted the president of any major U.S. union.
To the miners of Appalachia, Miller has become a symbol of new possibilities in their lives. Like Miller, they are mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock. On the whole, they are proud, patriotic, sometimes violent and yet often deeply religious. For them, the mines are generally an alternative to grinding rural poverty. Those who do not flee to the city love the raw, knobby hill country and the sense of freedom from urban constrictions and pressures.
The miners today lead far better lives than their fathers did, both in and out of the pits. Gone is the image of the fatalistic miner mournfully characterized two decades ago in Tennessee Ernie Ford's rendition of Sixteen Tons:
You load sixteen tons, What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go--
I owe my soul to the company store--
Still, among major industries, mining is the most dangerous work in the U.S., running far ahead of construction, which is the second most hazardous. So far this year 122 miners have been killed on the job and thousands more injured. Part of the problem, Miller asserts, is that the federal mine-safety inspectors have not been strict enough with the companies.
Many miners lose an eye, and many more lose fingers; the Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration estimates that three out of every five miners who have been in the pits for 20 years or more have lost a finger in a conveyor belt or some other machinery. In addition, 215,000 miners are disabled by black-lung disease, caused by breathing coal dust. Says Miller: "A miner who gets black lung gives up ten or 15 years of his life. And it's a helluva way to go. It took my stepfather five years to die of it, and in all that time he couldn't breathe when he lay down in a bed. The only rest he got was sitting in a reclining chair."
Eerie Digs. The dangers that miners face routinely each day would be considered harrowing by most American workers. At the Shoemaker Mine near Benwood, W. Va., for example, a miner's day begins at the bathhouse, a big stark room with showers. Miners' work pants, boots, jackets and gloves are in buckets hung from the high ceiling on ropes that look like stalactites. After changing, the men hang their numbered brass tags on a board at the mine entrance; a tag that is still there after the shift ends alerts the rest of the crew that a miner is missing.
Next the miners descend in an elevator to the mine, far below the surface. There they file into a tiny rail car for the ride to the mine face, the wall of solid coal at the end of the tunnel where the coal is actually extracted. During the four-mile journey, the beams from the lamps on the miners' hats bore through the darkness, picking up eerie, abandoned passageways, diggings of another day. The foreman carries a small naphtha lamp; if the lamp's flame flares up, it indicates the presence of flammable methane gas and the threat of fire; if it goes out, it means that the oxygen has been depleted to dangerous levels. Each man has clipped to his belt a small canister with an hour's supply of oxygen.
As the men near the mine face, visibility diminishes, and the air thickens with black dust. The miners begin to clear their throats and spit. The area around the mine face looks like a small construction site, with piles of boards, bolts, rails, ties and electrical power equipment. The wires on this equipment are regularly checked lest a miner be electrocuted. Facing the wall of coal is a continuous coal mining machine called "the beast." The machine's whirling blades chew into the seam with a roaring noise like an avalanche, spewing chunks of coal back into waiting coal cars, which are equipped with robot-like "gathering arms" that channel the flow. The load is then trundled back along the tracks and automatically unloaded onto a conveyor-belt system that lifts the coal to the surface.
When the machine has dug ahead 4 ft. or so, it pulls back. Then two members of the crew bolt boards in place on the mine roof to support it; drilling holes for the bolts is one of the most dangerous jobs in mining because the unsupported roof can easily give way. When the supports are up, the mining machine goes back to work, and the process is repeated over and over until the shift ends. For all the hazards, miners insist that there is a great deal of satisfaction in coal mining. Says Miller, a third-generation miner: "There are always going to be dangers. After a couple of years, you learn to accept the realities of mining."
No Fans. Veteran miners know how much those realities have improved. For example, Raymond Echard, 58, has spent four decades in West Virginia mines. When he started out at age 13, he loaded coal for 17-c- per ton--earning about $4.40 a day. Companies then forced miners to buy then-own picks, shovels and other equipment and did not even provide fans to blow away the coal dust. Echard lost a thumb coupling coal cars and injured his back three times. Yet he encouraged his grandson to get into the mines. "I told him it was a good job," says Echard. "Coal's the thing of the future."
Off the job in their small communities, miners generally do not live as well as auto workers or steelworkers, but they have begun to enjoy more of the amenities of middle class life. Bob Wingrove, 49, a miner for 27 years and the popular president of the U.M.W. local at the Ireland mine near Moundsville, speeds to work in a sports car, returns each evening to his modest frame house, which he is renovating. On days off, he drives to Pittsburgh, 90 minutes away on Interstate 79, for concerts or sporting events.
Neither Wingrove nor his brother "Peach," 36, was dissuaded from mining because of their father's death in a mine fire in 1966. Although Peach was disabled for a year after a roof fall, he still works the mines, and today he lives fairly well. To supplement his income of about $12,000 last year and to help save for retirement, his wife works in an enamelware plant. Last summer the couple and their three teen-age daughters vacationed in their travel trailer for two weeks at South Carolina beaches. "Mining's getting better," says Peach. "I know I'm not going to be a millionaire. But as long as things go the way they are, I'm not complaining."
Many young men choose to follow their fathers and brothers into the mines. Pat Callebs, superintendent of the giant Shoemaker Mine, has hired miners with college degrees. "I asked one of the college men if he'd like to train for a management job," says Callebs. "He told me, 'Nope. I like what I'm doing just fine.' " Callebs tries to hire sons, brothers or cousins of miners; they know what they are getting into and usually stick with the job.
Dick Parsons, 20, has been in the pits for two years, earning $47.25 a day as a roof bolter at Ireland. He is a member of what older miners call the industry's "Pepsi generation"--young, eager, willing to work topsy-turvy schedules to build seniority that will put them in line for permanent day-shift jobs. Two weeks ago, he slept days and worked nights. Three weeks ago, he worked days. A month ago, he worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift. On summer weekends, he and his wife Martha go camping in the Appalachians. His two older brothers are also miners. Parsons' goals are set. "I'd just like to live a nice peaceful life and raise a nice small family," he says.
Yet many miners and their families still live in skittery, weather-bleached houses in scores of coal-camp villages that are little more than rural slums. Life is worst for retirees on minuscule pensions; they spend their last years living from hand to mouth. "You know, $150 a month barely pays your heat and utility bills," argues Miner Jim ("Catfish") Barlow, 27, of Moundsville. Adds Co-Worker Rod Lash, 24: "The old guys got stuck. They didn't get what was coming to them. But it doesn't make sense for us to take that too."
Fed Up. The union's fat new settlement should go far in righting many of the inequities that miners have long been forced to live with. Whether it goes far enough to satisfy the rank and file is still uncertain. Like the rest of organized labor, they are fed up with waiting to catch up with inflation. Miller believes that labor's problems go well beyond issues of wages and to the very heart of the union movement. In his view, labor leaders and their membership have grown too complacent, too willing to accept the status quo. "We are all guilty," says Miller, "because we sat back and waited for someone to do something."
The gathering threat of a wage explosion is already raising fresh cries in Congress and elsewhere for a return to some form of wage-price controls. Even Meany has said that he is willing to accept controls, provided that they keep as tight a lid on prices as on wages. On this and other issues, big labor, bolstered by its new political muscle, is now moving into open conflict with President Ford and his top economic aides, who vigorously oppose any further Government intervention and most of the other measures that the union chiefs want. The stage is set for what could well be two years of turbulent confrontation between labor and the Ford Administration over how to meet workers' rising demands for a better shake in a troubled economy.
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