Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 7, 1990                   TAG: 9003071847
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: LEBANON                                 LENGTH: Medium

MINERS GIVE NEW OFFER TO JUDGE/ UMW PROPOSES TO TRIPLE COMMUNITY SERVICE TIME

Judge Donald A. McGlothlin Jr., who was in a jury trial and unable to study all the documents pouring into his office Tuesday, gave Pittston Coal until Monday afternoon to respond to the UMW brief.

The UMW ended a 10 1/2-month strike against Pittston Feb. 19 when its members ratified a new contract.

Pittston has joined the union in asking McGlothlin to end all injunctions and drop all fines generated during the strike. The UMW was found to have violated state and federal court injunctions limiting strike activities.

A Springfield-based legal foundation, meanwhile, is urging the judge to let the fines stand.

The Center on Labor Policy Inc., a conservative non-profit legal foundation, criticized Pittston for joining the request to drop the fines, which arose from charges made by the company.

The center also criticized the state attorney general's office for "cacophonous silence" instead of taking a position on the fines, since taxpayers provided at least $7 million in added state police protection during the strike.

"It would appear that considerations of elective politics have weighed more heavily in their silence than the paramount consideration of the rule and enforcement of the law," said foundation attorney Michael S. Arif in a friend-of-the-court brief.

In a Feb. 12 hearing, the union offered to perform 10,000 hours of community service and promised to abide by the law in future labor disputes. McGlothlin said the offer was insufficient and gave the union 10 days - a deadline later extended through Tuesday - to come up with another.

The union legal brief that arrived Tuesday by overnight mail gave no new offer, but cited new cases to support its argument that parties in a civil suit should be allowed to settle their differences themselves.

"Indeed, it would be startling to hold that the parties to a private civil litigation . . . cannot settle that litigation and resolve all differences between them," the brief said.

"To hold now that vindication of judicial authority should inhibit settlement can only mean that the contempt fines have been imposed for the purpose of punishing criminal contempt - but without affording the defendants the required rights and safeguards.

"The reality is that the fines, whether properly or improperly imposed, were assessed in a private civil proceeding that may be settled by the parties to it."

Shortly before 3 p.m., the court received a second brief from the union by facsimile machine which - without backing off from the legal arguments in the first one - offered to perform 20,000 hours of community service in addition to the 10,000 already required by a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge Glen Williams, in reducing his fines against the union from $960,000 to $228,000 on Feb. 14, imposed several requirements on the UMW including 10,000 community service hours.

The brief said the community service would be planned with representatives of local governments, civic and religious groups and community people. It would include such projects as helping with youth sports facilities, scouting and YMCA/YWCA activities, landscaping and repairing schools, helping teach vocational skills, painting and rebuilding homes for the elderly and disabled and doing plumbing and electrical work for them.

But the labor policy group charged that "the appearance of the parties arm in arm before this court is nothing less than an absolute disregard for the adjudicative position of the court in assessing the fines, motivated by nothing more than their own economic interests."

It maintained that the court's goal of obedience to the law should not be sacrificed to the idea of labor peace "once the conflict is over, and the parties finished consuming the court's time and use of the judicial process to strengthen their strategic bargaining positions . . . "

"If the UMWA is permitted to walk away from the year of terror it unleashed on southwestern Virginia without substantial penalty, the court's jurisdiction will be subject to the same impotence as all other courts who caved in to the UMWA over the years," the brief concludes. "The losers will be the citizenry, who can only expect further terrorism from the UMWA, well knowing the court cannot protect them."

Along with the 24-page brief, the Northern Virginia foundation submitted a thick large-size paperback book on labor law for McGlothlin's consideration. McGlothlin said Tuesday he did not know how long it would take to study all the material.