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

DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990                   TAG: 9004300219
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: STEVE FISHER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

STRIKE IS OVER, BUT NOT COALFIELD WOES

Pittston was out to break the union, and company officials proclaimed that they were ready to endure a two-year strike. But the union would not buckle, and eventually won company concessions on almost every crucial issue.

Union negotiators successfully fought efforts to cut pension benefits or active miners' 100-percent health-care coverage. The contract provides job-security protection, and offers laid-off miners the right to claim jobs at Pittston's non-union mines and at the mines of its contractors. Labor and citizen victories are hard to come by in the Appalachian mountains, and one of this magnitude merits celebration.

Yet, as important as this victory is to the UMW and the labor movement in general, it will not improve the quality of life in the coalfields, where a high percentage of residents fall below the national poverty line. School test-scores in coal areas are well below national averages, while the school-dropout rate is higher and getting worse. By even conservative estimates, there is an immediate housing need of at least 150,000 units in the counties of central Appalachia. Mobile homes constitute the great majority of new housing starts in most coalfield counties.

The Pittston miners kept their full health-care coverage, but their local health-care system is in disarray. Rural Appalachians have long faced the problem of too few hospitals, doctors and other health services. In the 1960s and '70s, these problems were somewhat alleviated by the development of community-based primary-care centers serving many Appalachian towns. But the Reagan budget cuts and the shift to state block-grants forced many of the clinics to close or to reduce severely services and staff.

Coalfied communities face additional health problems related to work and the environment. The new contract will not stop thousands of miners from dying each year from black lung nor will it make coal mining, one of the nation's most dangerous occupations, noticeably safer. It will not remove the health threats to coalfield residents from water pollution due to acid mine-drainage, property damage from longwall mining, or the flooding that comes with strip mines.

Some Pittston miners may have increased job security, but heavy lay-offs and mine closings over the past decade throughout central Appalachia have left thousands of families without work. Forecasts suggest that although coal production will increase, the number of mining jobs will continue to decrease. For example, Pittston will no doubt increase production at its mechanized longwall mines, where it will need fewer miners.

Nor will the new contract change the power relationships within the Appalachian region. Resources will remain tightly controlled in the hands of a few, primarily absentee, corporations that reinvest their profits outside the region while paying little in mineral and property taxes at the local level. State right-to-work laws and a pro-management National Labor Relations Board will still hinder labor-organizing efforts. Textile plants and other manufacturing concerns will continue to ship jobs abroad.

This brief but incomplete list of woes is not meant to diminish what the miners have accomplished, but rather to call attention to the widespread and deeply entrenched nature of Appalachia's problems. But these problems are not unique to the region.

Appalchia's problems may be more severe than in some other sections of the nation, but they are not fundamentally different from those faced by poor and working-class people elsewhere. And the solutions to these problems are similar to what citizen and labor movements are fighting for throughout the United States: full employment, national health insurance, effective and rigorously enforced environmental and occupational-safety laws, meaningful plant-closing legislation, a substantially increased minimum wage, and education and housing reform.

This is a national agenda that will require Appalachians to forge links with groups fighting for social and economic justice in other parts of the country. Indeed, the Pittston strike confirms the importance of such links.

From the beginning, union strategists consciously made the strike a national issue. Strike leaders brought in political figures and labor leaders from around the world. They encouraged involvement by religious leaders; won endorsements from peace, environmental and women's groups; and frequently compared their struggle to the black civil-rights movement. Union members traveled all over the country pleading their cause, while members from other unions were encouraged to visit the strike site and join the picket lines. All these activities helped bring about the federal involvement that led to a settlement.

With the strike resolved, and the union the apparent winner, it's now very easy to fool ourselves into thinking that coalfield residents have improved their lot, rather than simply held the line in one bitter skirmish. The news glare has subsided, so the reality of poverty in Appalachia can be most conveniently put out of mind.