Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300368
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was one day in 1985. He was working second shift at the Hurricane Creek mine in Russell County. He was running the supply motor when his supervisor, Earl Head, hollered at him and a buddy to come and share supper.
Head didn't like to eat alone. He also didn't like to lie. Head was a preacher and he didn't want to be a part of what he knew was coming.
"He just up and told us," Dishman recalls.
It was the damnedest story Dishman had ever heard. Pittston Coal's roots ran as deep in the Virginia coalfields as the precious mineral itself. Dishman had worked for Pittston nearly 30 years; his daddy 42 years before that - "long before they were union" is the way his son remembers it. The United Mine Workers had had troubles with Pittston over the years, sure, but no more than with any other coal company. By now, the UMW was a way of life in Southwest Virginia, as rugged and durable as the little country churches like the one Earl Head pastored.
Now, Head told Dishman, the company planned to change all that. Pittston had been dealing with the union as part of Bituminous Coal Operators Association, a nationwide group set up to sign a single contract with the UMW to make sure that all companies, and all workers, got the same shake. The UMW's new president, Richard Trumka, recently had negotiated an extension of the BCOA contract until February 1988 - without a strike, the first time that had happened in more than 20 years. But when the contract expired, Head now said, Pittston intended to pull out of the BCOA. Moreover, Head told his men, "they were gonna bust the union."
The mere mention of such a thing was enough to make grown men shudder.
Throughout Appalachia, the UMW is revered as the institution that lifted miners from poverty and into the middle class. To hear miners tell it, it's also the only thing that keeps them from slipping back to the days of working for a dollar a day and owing their life to the company store.
"I remember when I was a boy, my daddy left before daylight," Dishman recalls. "He'd come in way after dark and he'd be so tired, he'd just lay on the floor in the kitchen and we'd rub his back."
In those days, miners were paid by how much coal they loaded, not by the hour. If a roof caved in and a miner had to spend days hauling out rock before he could pick his way back to the seam, that was tough luck. Dishman remembers once his father was sloshing around in water up to his knees and begged a foreman to pump the mine dry. The boss refused. "There's another barefoot man waiting to take your job," he said.
Dishman didn't need to be reminded what the union had brought him. He grew up in a company house that wasn't much better than a shack. Now he lived in a nice house on a hill, overlooking the Clinch River. He was able to send a son to college. He could look forward to a pension and generous health benefits. Things were comfortable, as comfortable as life can get in the coalfields.
As Head explained Pittston's intentions, Dishman thought he had been transported back to the days of his father. Head said he and some other supervisors hoped to retire before then; holding up the company end in a mean strike wasn't for them.
From that day on, Dishman planned for the big strike. He set aside money every payday. He told his wife, Ruby, to buy whatever clothes she needed now. And he was glad his son and three daughters would be out of school and grown by the time the strike hit. He figured the strike would last a year because "one of us would probably pretty well go broke by then."
But not even Dishman could have been prepared for the force of the strike that finally hit in the spring of 1989 - a strike that jammed jails with God-fearing citizens who'd never broken the law before, a strike that saw union members seize their work place for the first time since the 1930s, a strike that focused national attention on backwoods towns with names like Carbo and Lick Fork.
\ WHILE HEAD AND DISHMAN TALKED THAT EVENING IN 1985, the distant thunder of the Pittston strike was rolling across the West Virginia and Kentucky hills.
The UMW was in decline. During World War II, John L. Lewis commanded 400,000 union miners; when Lewis gave the word, he could shut 90 percent of the nation's mines. A generation later, mechanization and foreign competition had taken their toll; there now were only about 170,000 U.S. coal miners. Moreover, the UMW was becoming a weakling even among the miners who remained - only about half now belonged to the union.
But the 1980s was a mean decade for unions everywhere, as unionized industrial jobs simply disappeared - either gone overseas or gone altogether. Then came Ronald Reagan, who set the tone for labor disputes. In 1981, he fired striking air traffic controllers and hired replacements. And the public applauded.
It was an example not lost on the coal industry.
In 1984, the Richmond-based A.T. Massey Co., the nation's sixth-largest coal company, pulled out of the BCOA and refused to sign the agreement Trumka had negotiated. Massey wanted concessions. When the UMW went on strike, the company hired replacement workers and the two sides fought to the death - literally.
The UMW long had been considered the country's most violent union, and the miners responded the best way they knew: Strikers armed with baseball bats and crowbars bashed the vehicles of replacement workers.
UMW officials from Washington stepped in to calm the situation. Unsure what to do next, the regional director from Charleston, W.Va., Eddie Burke, stumbled upon a new approach: civil disobedience. For a month in early 1985, the strikers adopted tactics of the civil rights movement and sat in roads to block coal trucks. State police jailed the strikers and the company sought court injunctions, but the union's novel methods generated attention.
The novelty didn't last long.
The UMW tried another tactic - strikers blockaded a Massey plant in West Virginia with their own vehicles. It backfired. Replacement drivers in the traffic jam outside the plant claimed strikers pelted them with rocks and then came after them with guns. Truckers smashed the blockade, wrecking 10 miners' cars. One coal truck was burned, 16 others had windshields smashed.
Two days later, a federal judge ordered the UMW to cease mass picketing and sitdown demonstrations. The UMW abided by the ruling, dispersing pickets throughout the Massey system. It was a decision the union would regret. Union leaders had little way to control their rowdy - and far-flung - members.
Snipers took potshots at Massey trucks and raked the homes of replacement workers with gunfire. Coal trucks were overturned and torched. A non-union trucker was shot to death as he hauled coal just over the Virginia line near Pikeville, Ky.
The strike dragged on for 15 months, and many of the issues weren't resolved until four years later. The UMW and Massey eventually signed a contract, but the strike was regarded as a union defeat. And just as the UMW staggered out of the Massey strike, another confrontation loomed - with the Pittston Coal Group, the nation's 15th-largest coal producer and the biggest in Virginia.
"When we sit down at the table, there's this feeling of deja vu - like this is the `Son of Massey,'" UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts sighed in February 1988.
The issues were the same: Pittston wanted out of the BCOA and demanded a separate contract and concessions. The faces were the same, too. Pittston hired the same Washington law firm Massey had. Pittston hired the same high-tech security company - Vance Security's "Asset Protection Team" out of Northern Virginia. It even hired the same trucking company to provide non-union drivers, an outfit headed by Tom Copley, the hated "King Scab."
On the other side of the picket line were the same union field workers who had been beaten in Massey.
This time, though, they vowed the outcome would be different.
They didn't know how, but it would be different.
by CNB