The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Coal Miners' Strike

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger today uttered the direst warnings about the economic future unless the country replaces oil with coal. Speaking in New York, Mr. Schlesinger said that failure by U.S. business to increase its use of coal over the next decade could cause the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression of the thirties. Ironically, as he spoke, the nationwide coal strike, begun yesterday by the United Mine Workers, began spreading to non-union mines. The union comprises about seventy percent of the nation`s miners and affects about half of U.S. coal production. But union pickets started closing non-union mines today in Ohio, Maryland and Kentucky, and there were plans to extend the picketing to West Virginia and Virginia. Mine Workers` President, Arnold Miller, said today that the nation`s soft coal producers want a one-month strike to drive up prices and to weaken the union, but they may get a walkout of three to four months instead.

Tonight, the meaning and the cost of the mine workers` strike. Jim?

JIM LEHRER: Robin, money is not the issue in this strike -- at least, not money that comes in the form of wages. The real sticking point is the so- called "wildcat" option. The union is demanding the right for local unions to strike single mines over local grievances. They could strike only after a majority vote, and there would be provisions to prevent them from spreading to other mines without further votes. But management sees it as merely a legalizing of wildcat strikes, something that has continually plagued the industry. They are adamantly opposed to any such local option striking, and in fact want provisions in the contract for docking pay and otherwise discouraging single mine strikes.

The other major issue has to do with financing and restructuring the union`s health and retirement fund, which is now near bankruptcy. Robin?

MacNEIL: Jerry Jones is a miner working for the Oldbin Coal Company in Sesser -- that`s in southern Illinois. He`s been a miner for twelve years and is president of Local 1124 of District 12 of the United Mine Workers. The district has between 14,000 and 16,000 miners; Mr. Jones` local oversees some 550 active members and 400 retired. Mr. Jones, on the issues that Jim just outlined, which of the three are most important to your members, the right to strike over local grievances, increase in pay, or your health and pension benefits?

JERRY JONES: Well, Robin, first of all, I think the benefits are very important. Here`s something that we`ve always had, under the last two contracts, and suddenly six months ago they`ve been taken away from us. Now that puts us in a hole as far as going into negotiations because here we`re trying to negotiate something -- President Miller is -- that we have always had; we`re trying to get back to be even before we ever start. To me, this is a very important issue which actually shouldn`t probably even be at the negotiating table to begin with.

MacNEIL: These benefits were taken away by some employers as a result of a certain amount of wildcat strike, were they not?

JONES: This is what information the company has put out and the press has reported. Actually, I don`t agree with this thing. In 1974 or late 1973, when this contract was being negotiated, the one we`re working under now, they took in consideration the amount of coal that had been produced in that year and they decided, here, we`re going to increase production, what we`re going to do in the next years to come under this present contract; so therefore we`re establishing our royalty fund, which is x number of dollars per ton, plus so many dollars per man hours worked, and then we`re going to establish this fund to pay the benefits and the health and retirement. So it`s divided into four different, separate funds. The 1950 plan, which is the retirement fund that was in effect when it came in in 1950 in the contract there, this is still in. People on that fund draw like $225 a month.

MacNEIL: I guess what you`re saying is that they said the more coal produced, the more money would go into the funds.

JONES: Well, my point is, they projected what would be produced; in other words, an increase in production -- and that hasn`t been so. The production has not increased. I think there is a great number of reasons for this, and they`re always trying to lay that to the working miner.

MacNEIL: To the wildcat strikes.

JONES: Yes.

MacNEIL: But that isn`t the only reason, you think.

JONES: No.

MacNEIL: Can I ask you one other question? Your district did not support Arnold Miller in the recent leadership election, they voted against him. But now you`re behind him in this strike. Can you explain, because the owners have been saying, the operators have been saying that Mr. Miller needed this strike himself to consolidate his leadership of a disunited union.

JONES: Well, in any election, whether it be in labor or anywhere, you have two sides -- or this time we had three parties running. Actually, our district supported Harry Patrick as secretary-treasurer, and he won --he got the most votes in our district. But now let me say that one of my close friends and fellow workers did not support Arnold Miller; in fact, he went off on a totally different slate, and he was very much anti-Miller. But he made a statement to me the other day that

I thought summed it up pretty well. He said that there was talk that they didn`t want Arnold to even be on the negotiating team because they said he couldn`t comprehend, he couldn`t understand the contract language and what was going on in negotiation. All right, if that is so, then if they`re going to write a contract and send it down to us working miners, and if he can`t understand it there`s no way we can work with it, so we`re going to get behind him. We`ve got to get behind him.

MacNEIL: I see. We`ll come back. Jim?

LEHRER: To further analyze where the union stands is a man who has been active in coal labor management disputes for several years, Thomas Bethell, a former United Mine Workers` research director. He participated directly in their 1974 bargainings. He is now editor of an industry publication called Coal Patrol. Was this strike avoidable, Mr. Bethell?

THOMAS N. BETHELL:I really don`t think it was, but I don`t think it`s a strike that was primarily provoked by the mine workers. I think that the industry had a choice over the past two or three years, as the situation developed and as labor relations problems became more and more obviously severe, of whether they were willing to come to the bargaining table with an imaginative approach that would meet the needs of an obviously very rapidly changing work force with changing expectations and demands. Instead it`s obvious, and more obvious every day, that the industry came to the bargaining table not prepared for that kind of approach but insisting on coming in with a big club to go after a problem that simply is not going to be resolved that way. Under the circumstances it seems to me that any UMW president, be he Mr. Miller or anybody else, would have been forced into a situation where you now have the sides in a strike. I think it was avoidable, but I think in terms of the last several months, when people started focusing some attention on it, no; by that time the damage was done.

LEHRER: All right. Mr. Jones laid out the basic union position on the pension issue. Let`s talk about the wildcat issue, or the local strike issue, however you want to phrase it. Is that a non-negotiable item from the standpoint of the union?

BETHELL: I suppose to an extent it`s true in any negotiations that any item is negotiable, but the union has taken a very, very publicly strong stand on winning this right. And it will be difficult for the union to go back to its membership and get ratification--this is only the second UMW contract that`s had membership ratification -- without that demand in the contract unless the contract is otherwise very, very solid. So to an extent the union is locked in on that position.

LEHRER: All right. Now from the union standpoint, why is that so important, the right to strike a local, single mine?

BETHELL: Probably the single most important reason is the overwhelmingly strong feeling on the part of members of the union that there is now no way to resolve a grievance speedily and fairly, that it is all too easy for management simply to postpone and postpone and postpone resolution of a grievance and take it farther and farther away from the point of production and more and more into the hands of people who didn`t really have anything to do with it in the beginning; and that the local union and its members have no effective penalty system to impose on management for repeat violations of the contract. The right to strike could be structured in such a way that it would not be irresponsibly used. If it were structured in such a way, I think, it would be used very, very rarely. But it would be a clear-cut right to strike as opposed to the complete mess that you have now, with unauthorized strikes -- strikes that are illegal under Supreme Court decisions over the past several years.

LEHRER: And everybody spends all their time in courts as a result of it.

BETHELL: Yeah, which is obviously the last place to resolve these kinds of things.

LEHRER: Have the internal problems of the union itself, that Robin just touched on with Mr. Jones -- the election, the whole thing with Arnold Miller re-elected with forty percent of the vote, and so on -- have these affected the union`s bargaining position going into this?

BETHELL: I think industry counted on that happening; I`m not sure that it has happened. I think that the very fact that the union members know that they`ve been through a difficult time makes it doubly important for them to stick together in the strike now that the strike is under way, and the signs are that they`re going to do that and that they`re going to back Mr. Miller pretty strongly at the bargaining table. I think industry has miscalculated that point.

LEHRER: All right, thank you. For a look now at management`s side of the dispute, a long-time observer of the coal industry, John Hoerr, Labor Editor for Business Week magazine. How much does industry stand to lose in this strike going in, Mr. Hoerr?

JOHN HOERR: I think in terms of monetary loss, very little at the beginning, because there is a tremendous amount of coal already stockpiled. Utilities have between two to three months of coal in the stockpiles; steel mills, two months. Data Resources Incorporated, a consulting firm, recently did a study which indicates that even if the strike had not occurred on December 6 the enormous stockpiles would have demanded a cut in production of about twenty percent. So management stands not to lose anything monetarily.

I do think management stands to lose a good deal in the labor relations sense if this does become a bitter and prolonged_ conflict.

LEHRER: In other words, there would be no problem for a few weeks, but if it got to be a prolonged strike for several months then it could be very serious for them in the industry...

HOERR: I`m saying it could be serious for them, I think, in a human relations sense. Monetarily, once again, I think a couple of months would not really hurt the industry that much.

LEHRER: All right. We talked about the internal problems within the union. How unified is industry going into this?

HOERR: Industry has its divisions. They are unified on what they conceive to be the main point, in a general sense, and that is, they feel they need labor stability, they need an end to the walkouts -- wildcats -- they need a reduction of absenteeism, they want the union to give what it bargained for in 1974, and that is a labor force that is on the job when it should be on the job. So they`re unified in the general sense, but I think on how you go about achieving that in the contract there is some disunity. Now, whether that will result in a major loss of bargaining leverage is unclear at this point.

LEHRER: Well, we just heard what Tom Bethell laid out, the union position on a "responsible" right to strike over local grievances. What`s management`s position on that? They don`t want that under any circumstances, do they?

HOERR: That`s right, Jim. Absolutely, that seems to be one of the specific things they are unanimous about: no right to strike in the contract. In reply to the statement, Well, if it`s a limited right and if it`s done with qualifications and so forth, why not then? Industry`s response is, If the United Mine Workers were, for instance, like the United Auto Workers, which does have a right to strike on a limited basis in the auto industry over certain kinds of issues but it has a lot of political discipline --if the United Mine Workers were that kind of union, it might not be so bad. But the industry worries that with the long tradition of honoring anybody who goes out and pickets a mine, even though the local votes not to strike, suppose a guy goes out and pickets the mine anyway and the fellows refuse to cross the line. That`s industry`s worry.

LEHRER: That`s exactly, of course, what`s happening with the closing of the non-union mines now, is it not? I mean, there are people who are not members of this union who are honoring picket lines and closing down the other mines.

HOERR: Oh, sure. This generally happens in a strike time, especially in the non-union mines that are adjacent, in Appalachia, to the union mines. These people live close together, and it`s a bowl of ferment.

LEHRER: Let me ask you both, back to you also, Mr. Bethell, and then I want to bring you in too in a moment, Mr. Jones: how is this thing likely to be resolved? Let`s take this issue of single mine strikes. It seems to me from what both of you have said that there`s not a whole lot of room for give there. Where`s the resolution going to come?

BETHELL: Well, I`m not sure that I can predict where it`s going to come. I think...

LEHRER: Where is there room for give, let`s put it that way.

BETHELL: I think that both sides to a remarkable degree are locked in where they are now, much more than you would expect at this point in time. Obviously the nature of negotiations is to give on both sides.

The union probably could modify its position on the right to strike if it were fairly sure that no punitive clauses were going to wind up in the contract penalizing those who strike or those who are absent without an excuse, which I think actually is probably more of an issue to the industry than the wildcats themselves; it`s really the question of whether you can count on somebody being at the mine every day. But it`s not clear at all that they`re going to be able to get that kind of an agreement.

LEHRER: Let me ask you, Mr. Jones, speaking for you and your local and your view of this particular issue, are you willing to give on this? Do you see any room in there for negotiation, or are you adamant?

JONES: Well, first of all, I don`t think we`ve touched on in the whole thing about what a right to strike is, in limited form. What we`re talking about is what Tom got on there a little bit about making a quicker way of handling grievances. Now, the way I see a limited right to strike to be would be, say we`ve got a problem at the mine site. We go in and talk to management. Management says, "Well, you know, let`s slide it up, we`ll just arbitrate it." This is the way it happens now. We go into an arbitrator, who actually doesn`t know what goes on in a coal mine. And to give you a good example, the company is able to go hire qualified and very competent people to write these grievances for them. They`re wrote up as a legal document. At the company I work for, the personnel man had a degree in psychology plus a degree in law. Now, how am I, with a high school education, going to write a grievance that would do justice to my fellow worker when I have to go against something like this? So if we had a limited right to strike, then the company would say, "Okay, if we don`t handle this problem and try to make a sincere effort to settle this thing, the mine is going to go on strike." See, I can go back to my people and say, "Okay, if a majority vote, then we`re going to walk, we`re going to come out."

LEHRER: In other words, your answer is, you want the limited right to strike and if it`s not in that contract your people aren`t going to support it, is that right?

JONES: I would say so, yes. But what I`m trying to say is that the whole picture is not just the idea that we`re going to be out here stopping coal mines, stopping mines from working; this is what`s happened now.

And I think there would be less strikes, less problems.

LEHRER: Of course, Mr. Hoerr, that`s not the way management sees it at all. Is there any give in their position? They`re not going to handle even a limited strike -- they`re not going to accept that, are they?

HOERR: They say that they would take a strike over that, which they are doing right now. You know, they have made other proposals to in effect penalize -- although they call it "reward" workers for being at work all the time. But it`s very difficult not to call it a penalty, Because what it amounts to is in any bi-weekly pay period if a person is absent because of a strike, the rest of the time he is at work he only gets sixty percent of his regular wages. And if he`s absent for any other kind of unexcused reason, he gets only seventy percent of his wages. And yet a further kind of penalty is a striker would have to pay back into the health and welfare funds a total of twenty-two dollars a day, that being his assessment.

LEHRER: Let me ask you, then, John, you`re as familiar with the labor side of this as you are with the management side; where do you see the give?

HOERR: I think Tom Bethell pointed out an obvious place for tradeoff. Now, whether that will happen or not I don`t know. Neither one of us is sitting at the bargaining table. That is, if management is willing to move off this business of penalizing people -- and I think a lot of union people are really very disturbed about that; I`ve talked to rank and file miners who feel that why should the management have the ability to penalize if we don`t have the ability to penalize them for violating the contract?

LEHRER: Meaning, the right to strike.

HOERR: That`s right -- well, no, but why should one side have the ability to penalize if the other side doesn`t? And I think if this is put out for ratification, for instance, a lot of miners will take this very common- sense point of view. And union officials I talk to are very worried about getting ratification of any contract that has this kind of provision in it. So the question is, can the union move off the right to strike; can industry move away from this penalty system?

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: Yes. Mr. Jones, your union leader, Arnold Miller, said today that the strike might last three to four months. Could your members hold out anything like that long? Let`s tick off the things: you have no strike pay in the union, right? There`s no strike fund.

JONES: No.

MacNEIL: In many states and, I believe, yours in Illinois, you do not normally qualify for unemployment insurance if you`re on strike.

JONES: That`s correct.

MacNEIL: Your health benefits have stopped with the strike.

JONES: Yes.

MacNEIL: How are your guys going to hold out?

JONES: Well, I would say that most of the people, with the exception of maybe the very young miners who`ve just started, have known for quite some time that we were going to have a strike this time because we could see from the way things were going, just like Tom Bethell pointed out, that we were headed directly into a strike. So therefore we have prepared ourselves to a certain extent. Of course, it takes a lot of money to keep...

MacNEIL: You mean you`ve been saving?

JONES: Sure; we`ve been saving money.

MacNEIL: A miner`s basic pay now is about sixty dollars a day, right? That is the official basic pay.

JONES: Yes, it`s about average.

MacNEIL: What can a miner make who`s sort of working full-time, in a week now?

JONES: Basically, in a week -- I`m using my mine for an example -we produce coal five days a week, and then we work the idle day on Saturday, which doesn`t mean everyone works; I`d say about seventy-five percent of people work...

MacNEIL: What`s the average take-home pay, would you say?

JONES: Okay, I would say that would be, before check-off, somewhere around $375 or $380.

MacNEIL: I see. So they`ve been able to save out of that. So you think they`ll be able to hold out for some time. Your own members, would they be able to hold out?

JONES: I think it`d put a hardship. Don`t get me wrong, I think that we`ll have to adjust our way of living. But if it comes down to a heads-up battle, which it looks like it`s going to -- and to me there`s no reason for this -- I think that we`ll stay behind Arnold.

MacNEIL: Jerry, you were shaking your head a while ago when in Washington Tom Bethell was talking about the amount of coal that industry has stockpiled. Do you not believe that it`s stockpiled as much as it says it has?

JONES: No, sir, Robin, I don`t really believe this, because all their figures that the BCOA has put out and the company has put out, they say production`s down this year, we`re not producing coal; so therefore, where are they getting this coal? Of course, I realize that there`s been some increase in production in the West, but this is a different quality of coal than what we have here. You`ve got to have the coal from Illinois, the coal from West Virginia and the areas out here to mix with this coal to have the amount of Btu`s.

MacNEIL: Tom Bethell, how accurate are the figures on the coal stockpiles? Are you satisfied with them yourself?

BETHELL: That was John Hoerr who gave those projections...

MacNEIL: I beg your pardon.

BETHELL: But I would have to agree with him. I do think, though, that there is a tendency to exaggerate the amount of time that a strike will go on without impact on the basis of saying there`s ninety days of coal in the ground. If the utility gets down below, say, a thirty-day supply, it goes into a state of cardiac arrest about what it`s going to do.

MacNEIL: So when will the crunch begin to be felt, and in which parts of industry first -- either of you; Mr. Hoerr, do you have a view on that?

HOERR: You know, the steel industry is very depressed on a worldwide basis, and one of the strange anomalies was that as late as last week before the strike started, the high-quality metallurgical mines in southern West Virginia were on two- and three-day weeks, even before the strike started. So it shows right there that the steel mills don`t really need very much coal, even on a world-wide basis. And so I don`t know, I would suppose that the utilities, given Tom`s cardiac-arrest principle, would be the first to feel it.

MacNEIL: What about private users of coal? Are there still many schools and buildings and things heated by coal that would begin to feel it sooner who mightn`t have been able to stockpile enough?

HOERR: Tom?

BETHELL: I think the answer to that really is no, in terms of a statistically significant amount of coal. You only have about eight percent of current production going into that particular market.

MacNEIL: I see. In other words, Tom, have those people been right who over the last month have been in effect discounting this strike because unlike the days when John L. Lewis could practically bring the country to a halt with a nationwide coal strike, it is not going to have that effect immediately?

BETHELL: I would say that they are only partially right and that that is not entirely true in the sense that the major mines in the country, the major deep mines, all the metallurgical mines are UMW mines.

They will continue to be UMW mines into the foreseeable future. And they determine the pattern of production in the country even though it`s true that you have a lot more production now coming out of the West from nonunion surface mines. But it`s absolutely true what Jerry said about the differences in the quality of the production coming out of the West and those other variables. Even though the UMW accounts today for only about sixty percent, incidentally, not fifty percent...

MaCNEIL: Thank you.

BETHELL: ... of production, that sixty percent is critical to the country. In Jerry`s area, for example, if you`re just talking Illinois, they control more than ninety-five percent of the production. So anybody who`s talking about consuming Illinois coal is talking about consuming UMW coal. In West Virginia, which is where your real heavy trouble spot is and has been for the past three years, that`s about ninety percent UMW. So when you segregate by market or you segregate by type of consumption or type of production, the UMW is still basically the only game in town, and the operators, if they attempt to ignore that fact, I think are buying themselves three, five, or whatever many more years of terrible labor relations with some major consequences for the country as a whole.

MacNEIL: So Mr. Hoerr, is all this discounting of the effects of the strike a bit of psychological warfare?

HOERR: To some extent, sure; that always goes on. I think Tom is right that the operators would be unwise to rely on that. But I would like to point out that you brought up the subject of John L. Lewis and how he seemed to have what commentators used to call a "stranglehold" on the country. Back in the forties, I believe some eighty percent of all production was controlled by UMW; indeed, in 1933, if you would believe it, ninety percent of production was controlled by the UMW. And Tom makes some valid points about the segmented markets, but even in Appalachia today -- in Ohio and Pennsylvania, for instance -- less than sixty percent of the coal produced is UMW coal. And that`s a rather startling figure when you think about what you normally think of as traditional UMW strongholds.

MacNEIL: Mr. Jones, finally, do you fear that this strike may actually have an effect of weakening your union over the long run? Are you worried about that?

JONES: Actually, I`m not worried about that point. I don`t believe that it`s going to weaken the union. I think that actually if you want to break it down that the BCOA, the operators, are having more problems than we are internally. Every day there`s some companies that`s talking of dropping out, wanting to negotiate separate contracts. Now, that`s not good from our standpoint as far as we`ve got to spread out and we`re going to have to be working under more than one nationwide agreement. We`d rather be under all one agreement. But this points to the fact that the BCOA does have problems, too, internally.

MacNEIL: Thank you. We have to leave it there. Thank you both very much in Washington. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Good night, Jim. That`s all for tonight. I`ll be away for a few days starting tomorrow, and sitting in for me here will be Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who joined The MacNeil/ Lehrer Report this week. Thank you. Good night.