| By James Branscome NEW MARKET, Tenn. -- "Mother" Jones, that elderly rabble-rouser who beat coal operators with brooms and became a coal-field legend in the bloody United Mine Workers organizing drives earlier in this century, promised when she got to heaven she would harass the Lord about the pitiful conditions of West Virginia coal miners. "Either Mother Jones did not make it up there or the Lord is a coal operator." a retired U.M.W. organizer said recently. The Mother Jones dilemma aside, it is still hell to be a coalminer.  On Nov. 12, a nation at peace with the oil-rich Arabs could be at war with the Appalachian coal-miners. On that date, when the union's contract with the nation's coal and oil corporations expires--coal production in the United States is heavily owned by the major oil companies--the hell the miners have been getting may be visited upon the rest of the nation. Gasless Sundays are only inconvenient; cold days and dark nights are something else. The coal miners' outrage is easily understandable. From 1839 to the present, more than 120,000 miners have died in United States coal mines and 1.5 million more have been maimed and disabled. The death toll averages out to more than two lives lost every single day for 135 years. Last year 132 coal miners, out of a total work force of 164,000, were killed and 11,067 were injured. So far this year 58 have been killed. Each year 3,000 miners die from black lung, a suffocating disease caused by coal dust and corporate and governmental negligence of mine conditions. In the new contract, the reform leadership of the union's president, Arnold R. Miller, is demanding higher wages, new safety standards, sick pay, increased pensions and a number of other benefits long enjoyed by other industrial unions. Coal miners, among other union members--in steel, rubber, the auto industry--work in the most hazardous conditions and are the lowest paid. Publicly, the bituminous Coal Operators Association, the combine which negotiates for the industry., has promised nothing. Privately, they say they are willing to trade moderately increased wages and benefits for a guarantee against wildcat strikes, usually over safety conditions, which arer as sacred to miners as their oath of obligation. Even if Mr. Miller dared to negotiate on this point, it is certain that the contract would not be ratified by the rank and file, which this year intends to look the deal over with an enthusiasm fired by the right, won last December, to approve the contract. No mater how good the contract looks. come observers are predicting that coal miners may also decide to get in a lick against Mr. Miller., who is maintaining a strange silence on the shift of the coal industry from Appalachian deep mines to Western strip miners. Coal miners who remember John L. Lewis's decision to allow mine mechanization in order to drop the miners' rolls from 535,000 to 200,000 in a decade, ushering in the new era of Appalachian poverty, see a familiar threat in the move West. Silence on the East-to-West shift combined with Mr. Miller's refusal to do anything to get a meaningful strip-mine bill from this Congress have agitated the coal miners. They do not intent to struggle to keep from dying in the ground only to emerge and be killed on the surface by a strip-mine-induced flood or landslide. Mr. Miller, who used to call for abolition of strip mines, is headed toward a showdown with his own restless membership. Should a coal strike come, it would be up to President Nixon to end it. he could invoke a Taft-Hartley injunction for a cooling-off period, but coal miners might not even obey their own leader's call, let alone Mr. Nixon's, for a return to work. As long as there has been a Taft-Hartley law, there has been a miner saying that Mr. Taft and Mr. Hartley can mine the coal." Coal supplies at utilities are already down dramatically from normal stockpiles. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the country's largest utility, has only a 26-day supply at one of its steam plants. On the East coast, only Massachusetts utilities have the normal 70-to-100-day stockpiles. some steel mills have only a fifteen-day supply. Even if a strike should last only two to three weeks, as union spokesmen optimistically hope, for the sake of their beleaguered medical and pension fund, which draws 80 cents for each ton of coal mined, there could be selective brownouts and layoffs, particularly in the East. Unquestionably, a frenzied coal hunt this fall by utilities, which already have some coal priced at $33 a ton, have some coal priced at $33 a ton, three times its production cost, will force, utility bills to rise even further. Even if a miners' strike is somehow avoided, that does not lessen the importance of this nation's collecting its corporate and moral body and repenting its sins in the coal fields. Unless that happens, coal miners may have to use coal's rising fortunes to get Mother Jones's message across themselves. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- James Branscome at the time of this writing was a freelance writer on staff of the Highlander Center which was doing organizing and educational work on coal mining and other Appalachian issues. 1974 |