"An Injunction on Both Your Houses"

In an interview with TIME Correspondent Don Sider. Labor Secretary Ray Marshall explained the thinking behind White House actions on the coal strike.

Q. It has been suggested that perhaps the Mayor Daley school of labor relations would have helped settle the strike--that is, a subtle word last November to both sides that if they did not reach an agreement by a certain date, there would be a heavy weight falling on their heads. Do you agree?

A. I don't think so. The problem with a threat is that you've got to be ready to come through with the "or else." You also have to believe that neither party wants the "or else." You couldn't be sure of that. Another point to remember is that it was unnecessary to threaten the negotiators to get them to come to an agreement. They reached an agreement, which was rejected by the U.M.W. bargaining council. To whom, then, should we have addressed the threat?

Q. Is there nothing more that the President could have done?

A. We think it is important to keep the President out of the collective bargaining process as long as possible. The fact that we were not precipitous, that we waited a long time, that we were not going to do anything until there was a serious problem, has made people realize that the cost of involving the President is going to be pretty high. I don't think anybody is going to sit down and say: "We're going to take a 90-day strike in order to get presidential intervention." This is the first time Jimmy Carter has had to intervene. We stayed out of the longshoremen's strike and the iron-ore strike, and they were resolved. We've communicated that we'll do everything we can to facilitate the process, to conciliate, to supply information, but it's your problem.

Q. What was your basic behind-the-scenes strategy?

A. Very early we established that whatever we did, we wanted production to resume. That meant we had to be fair to get cooperation from both labor and management. One possibility that became clear was that the workers might go back to the mines, but they wouldn't dig much coal. That's not going to help anybody. Nor is it going to help anybody to have management mad at us and not do a good job of managing. If either side decided to show that the Government couldn't do the job, it wouldn't be very hard for them to prove that.

Q. Would any changes in the labor law be helpful in a strike like this one?

A. It would be useful if we had more options in the Taft-Hartley Act. I would like to get the miners back to work under conditions other than an old contract, especially if it's a three-year contract and prices have been rising substantially. In the current strike, the union's welfare and pension funds have also been depleted. If the miners are ordered back to work, they are likely to consider it to be unfair, and we have to worry about their response. That's the reason we developed the idea of federal seizure of the mines as a way to compensate: an injunction on both your houses.

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