Coal Mining: 1. The Union

When John Stofea, a loyal union man for twenty-three years, turned around in his seat on the first day of a recent United Mine Workers’ convention, he couldn’t believe what he saw. His boss at the U. S. Steel Company’s coal mine at New Eagle, Pennsylvania, was sitting behind him. Stofea had heard stories of his union’s coziness with the coal industry, but this was too much. He headed for the nearest microphone to protest. But several men wearing miner’s hard hats seized him and beat him into submission. He was led bleeding from the floor. While Stofea’s experience was probably the worst, recent UMW conventions have been grim lessons for all among the rank and file who have opposed the will of W. A. “Tony” Boyle, the union’s president since 1963. Boyle is the man the late John E. Lewis chose to carry on his policies when he retired after forty years as the UMW’s president in i960. Lacking the eloquence and bearing that made Lewis a legend among miners and a giant in the labor movement, Boyle has faced an increasingly restive membership. But he has stuck to the course charted by Lewis in the days after World War II when the coal industry was in dire economic straits. And he has taken strong measures to ensure that control of the organization rests with him, not with the men who dig the coal.

Today, some twenty years after Lewis made his decision that the UMW should permit, and even help finance, the mechanization of the nation’s mines, the soft-coal industry has made a recovery from its postwar slump. The comeback of coal has been costly, however, and the miners have paid the highest price. Mechanization, which has kept the price of coal almost steady for the past twenty years, has reduced employment in the soft-coal fields from 440,000 men in 1948 to fewer than 140,000 as this year began. Mechanized coal operations have prospered, but many once-busy mining communities have become ghost towns. The burden of poverty in Appalachia, where most of the nation’s coal is produced, has gotten worse. Although the UMW’s actual membership is a closely guarded secret, knowledgeable U.S. Labor Department officials estimate it lias dropped below 100,000 active miners, a sixth of what the union boasted in its heyday.

The accidental deaths for which mining is notorious have continued unchecked. They may even be increasing. Last year, 307 men were killed in soft-coal mines, 94 more than in 1967. Another 9000 were injured. These figures, which rank coal mining as the nation’s most dangerous industrial occupation, do not include those killed or disabled by the epidemic of “black lung” disease, which the U.S. Surgeon General has said may afflict as many as 100,000 active and retired miners. Known medically as coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, “black lung” is caused by the inhalation of fine particles of coal dust. It is an incurable ailment that gradually destroys the lungs’ ability to transfer oxygen to the bloodstream, leaving its victims chronically short of breath and vulnerable to emphysema and heart failure. “Black lung” has been recognized as an occupational hazard of coal mining in Britain for twentyfive years, but is only beginning to receive serious attention in this country.

Coal miners today are among the highest paid workers in American industry, with wages of more than $40 per day. But the contracts which have provided these wages lack benefits which other unions have had for years. There are, for example, no sanitary facilities in the mines and some mines are without bathhouses. Sick or injured workers receive no pay while they are off the job. The UMW’s Welfare and Retirement Fund provides free medical care to many miners and their families, but these benefits are cut of! after a year if a man becomes disabled before reaching retirement age. The fund’s pensions, which were recently raised $35 a month, are still less than $2000 per year.

The UMW is divided into twentythree geographical districts in the United States, each with a set of officers whose job it is to enforce contracts with the industry. A complaint heard throughout the mining regions is that these officers, virtuallv all of whom are appointed by Boyle, not elected, seem to feel their job is to keep the coal flowing rather than to look out for the men. In one instance this year, the UMW’s vice president was called in by district officers in Kentucky to add muscle to their efforts to end a wildcat strike at a large mine. The same officers, however, have done nothing about the fact that a number of mines in the same area have not paid union wages for years.

Rank-and-file dissatisfaction with recent contracts and their enforcement has led to countless wildcat strikes in the past six years. Discontent is also hurting the industry in another important way. Some 50,000 new miners are expected to be needed to meet growing demand by 1974. But such is coal’s reputation that even in the one-industry economy of Appalachia, many young men are refusing to go into the mines.

Despite the legacy of death, discontent, and poverty which Lewis left in Appalachia, few who know the coal industry question his wisdom in encouraging the mechanization ot the mines. The conversion of railroads to diesel power and tiie loss of the home heating market to oil and gas put coal in deep competitive trouble in the late 1940s. The only hope seemed to be largescale automation which could hold down the price oi the luel and make it attractive to utility companies for use in steam-generating plants. Moreover, Lewis’ decision was not made without important concessions from the industry. The Welfare and Retirement Fund was established in 1948 and was regarded at the time as a stunning bargaining achievement. Financed by a royalty (it has been 40 cents since 1952) on every ton of coal produced in union mines, the fund made UMW members among the first workers in American industry to receive job pensions and free medical care. But the fund also gave the union a vested interest in coal production. This has led some to wonder if the fund, coupled with the union’s desire to see the industry healthy again, has not caused the UMW’s assistance to the major coal companies to go beyond cooperation to collusion. This view has been supported by two recent federal court decisions which found the union guilty of a collective bargaining conspiracy with certain large coal companies to give them a monopoly in the industry. The courts awarded more than Sio million to small mining concerns which they ruled had been put out of business by UMW contracts tailored to the needs of the big producers.

Lewis seemed to feel the medianization and consolidation of the industry could be accomplished with only a minimum impact on the mining regions. The larger companies, many using capital furnished by the UMW, would gradually take over and modernize most of the coal production. Displaced workers would be absorbed by the expanding postwar economy. It was to be an orderly process, and for a time, it was. But the recessions ol the late 1950s disrupted the program, reducing coal demand, increasing layoffs, and making other jobs extremely scarce. The result was that many small mines which had closed because they could not meet tlie terms of UMW contracts reopened, using labor supplied by the layoffs at the large mines. The union contract was no longer an issue. Men were desperate lor jobs, and, primitive though they were, these so-called dog-holes offered work. Soon these nonunion operations had taken over a sizable share of the coal market by undercutting prices charged by their larger competitors. Lewis never seemed to doubt that his plan was working. “It has not been a social revolution of any magnitude,” he said in 1960 of the impact of automation. That year, 10,000 men were put out of work, and union membership declined sharply as coal struggled with its worst slump since 1949.

The passing of the recession and tHe extraordinary growth of the electricity market put coal, union and nonunion, squarely on its feet by 1963, the year Tony Bovle took office. If it seems surprising that the shrewd Lewis never lost faith in his policy of working closely with the major coal companies, it is perhaps more surprising that his successors have not come up with a new program.

Out of place

In contrast to life in the coal regions is the scene at UMW headquarters in Washington, where the union hierarchy holds forth in a baronial old building that once housed a downtown men’s club. With its paneled walls, high ceilings, and brass chandeliers, the six-story structure seems out of place in an age of glass-walled skyscrapers. But it is symbolic of the men who occupy it.

William Anthony Boyle is a volatile, five-loot-six-inch Irishman with a pallid complexion and sandy hair that has receded exactly halfway back on his head. The son of a Montana coal miner, he worked in the mines himself until his election as president of the union’s district in his home state in 1940. Eight years later he was brought to Washington to become Lewis’ administrative assistant and protege. When Lewis retired, Boyle was appointed vice president of the organization, replacing the aging Thomas Kennedy, who became president. When Kennedy fell ill in 1962, Boyle became acting head of the union and automatically took over as president when Kennedy died in 1963. A dapper man, Boyle always sports a rose in his lapel and is fond of brightly colored shirts and ties. At sixty-four, he is the youngest of the three top UMW officers. George Titler, the cigarchomping, three-hundred-pound vice president, is in his seventies and John Owens, the secretary-treasurer, is almost eighty. Owens, who has fallen a year and a half behind in his semi-annual financial reports to the membership, lately has been trying to project a more youthful image. He wears a powdery-looking gray wig which makes him unrecognizable from earlier photographs which show him completely bald.

There is a fourth member of the hierarchy who may be more important than all the rest. She is Suzanne V. Richards, a bossy, capable, fortytwo-year-old spinster who is Boyle’s executive assistant. A self-made woman who worked her way up from clerk-typist, she now holds a law degree and is paid $40,000 a year—as much as Owens and Titler and only Si0.000 less than Boyle himself. Reports of Miss Richards’ authority vary, but few doubt that Boyle relics heavily on her judgment.

Since taking office, Boyle has worked diligently to improve the economic lot of the coal industry. He is chairman of the National Goal Policy Conference, an unusual joint industry-union lobbying organization to which the UMW annually contributes at least $75,000. He makes frequent trips to Capitol Hill to warn against the dangers of atomic energy, which is regarded as the chief threat to coal’s future. Until the Farmington disaster, the Boyle regime did not support a single piece of new mine safety legislation. it did. vigorously endorse a measure to bring mines employing fewer than fifteen men under the jurisdiction of existing federal laws, but even tins effort reeked of collusion with the big companies, which had long chafed at the small mines’ exemption from tire laws. The National Bank of Washington, which the UMW controls, has loaned millions of dollars to coal companies to help them modernize. A UMWowned holding company, Lewmurken, Inc., has also invested in coal. Tire hierarchy justifies these capitalist adventures as efforts “to enhance the employment opportunities of UMW members.” But in at least one case, the opposite has occurred. Lewmurken has loaned $375,000 to a firm called the Freeport Coal Company to enable it to keep intact a 20,000 acre tract of coal land in northeastern West Virginia. The investment has been unprofitable and Freeport has yet to pay back any of the money. Furthermore, it is now leasing the land to a nonunion operator.

It would no doubt create quite a stir among miners if it became known that their dues were being used to support a nonunion operation. But the union’s official organ, the United Mine Workers Journal, tells the membership only what the hierarchy thinks it should know. The Journal publishes no letters to the editor and devotes much of its space to a Chinese-wall-poster-style glorification of Boyle and his fellow7 officers. “The big three,” it adoringly calls them.

“More democratic”

The rank-and-file voice in union policy is supposed to be heard at the UMW’s quadrennial conventions, which Boyle says are “more democratic than the United States Congress.” In practice, as John Stofea learned in 1964, the conventions operate quite differently. The hierarchy has kept in existence about 600 locals composed entirely of inactive miners, despite clear provisions in the union constitution that such locals be disbanded. The delegate credentials for these locals are distributed by the international officers to members friendly to their cause, and they attend the conventions without being elected. To make the trip more pleasant for the hierarchy’s handpicked delegates, they are often appointed to one of the more than 500 $6o-a-day convention jobs, such as acting as ushers or serving on various committees. Fhe exact number of appointed delegates varies, but there is little doubt that it is at least a majority.

In 1968, the convention was flooded with resolutions drawn up by the international but signed with the names of various locals. These boiler-plate measures called for Boyle’s election to a life term (which would be illegal) and the doubling of his salary. Boyle modestly turned them down. Meanwhile, certain controversial proposals, calling for such reforms as the election of district officers, mysteriously got lost and never appeared in the records of the convention.

Nevertheless, there is hopeful talk these days among reform-minded UMW members. Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia and Ralph Nader, the consumer and safety advocate, have embarrassed the hierarchy with a series of well-publicized attacks on its close ties to the industry. And Joseph Yablonski, a respected member of the union’s executive board who is opposing Boyle in the union’s elections in December, has won a fight to gain enough local union endorsements so that his name will appear on the ballot. (Boyle pushed a constitutional amendment through the 1964 convention raising the number of local endorsements needed from five to fifty.) Whatever the outcome, Yablonski’s candidacy is the first serious challenge to an incumbent UMW president in almost fifty years, and that alone might be enough to produce some major changes. If not, reform may come anyway—by court order. The government’s long-delayed suit to force the election of district officers is expected to be decided this year. And a group of miners and widows filed a sweeping $75 million federal suit in Washington in August against Boyle and his fellow officers, the welfare fund, the union’s bank, and a number of coal companies. The suit charges that the fund has been “plundered” in recent years to advance private economic interests (not specifically mimed) at the expense of the rank and file. The union officers are apparently taking the matter seriously. They have hired led ward Bennett Williams to defend them.