Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300388
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
His father counted John L. Lewis as a best friend; his stepmother marched with Martin Luther King in Selma.
His father was Paul H. Douglas - U.S. senator, Democrat, arch-liberal, organized labor's good friend when he represented Illinois from 1949 to 1967.
But there were more differences between father and son than their middle initial.
"I've tried to make my own way in life," the younger Douglas would say. "My father sort of felt I was on the wrong side of the fence when I went into business."
Douglas spent three decades climbing the corporate ladder with Freeport Minerals, one of the nation's largest natural resources companies. When a merger took Freeport into oil and gas, Douglas left. Oil and gas were too risky for his conservative nature.
In 1984, Douglas became chairman of Pittston, a conglomerate whose holdings included coal, Brink's armored cars and Burlington Air Freight. The job seemed to fit Douglas. And based in blue-blooded Greenwich, Conn., one of the nation's wealthiest suburbs, the job had a special appeal: It was within commuting distance of Douglas' beloved Manhattan.
He later admitted he wouldn't have taken the job if he had known the bad shape Pittston was in.
Pittston had hit a gusher when oil prices boomed in the late '70s and early '80s. Coal profits neared $100 million. Then the Arab oil cartel fell apart. Before long, so did U.S. coal prices.
When Douglas took over, the company was losing $79 million a year. Almost half that loss came from the coal division. Douglas ordered his first annual report printed in black-and-white to dramatize how bad things were.
He cleaned house in Greenwich: By 1989, 24 of the 25 people on the corporate staff were new. The fleet of company cars and the corporate plane were sold. At Brink's, he cut wages and benefits and busted the Teamsters union. Profits soared from $1.7 million in 1984 to $25.5 million in 1988. At Burlington, he cut jobs and turned three straight years of losses into a $5 million profit.
Douglas turned his attention to Pittston Coal.
Douglas contended Pittston was different from other U.S. coal companies and shouldn't be governed by the same labor contract: Other companies mined steam coal for power plants; Pittston mined metallurgical coal used to make steel. Most coal companies focused on the domestic market; Pittston's customers are overseas - mostly in Japan. But Pittston claimed Australia could deliver coal $6 to $7 a ton cheaper, and the gap was widening. Douglas' mandate was clear: Find a way to cut costs.
Pittston began by laying off 4,000 union miners over five years. Next, it dropped out of the BCOA and demanded union concessions - flexible work schedules, leasing some jobs to non-union firms, holding down health costs by paying only 80 percent of benefits instead of the traditional 100 percent. But most of all, Pittston wanted to stop paying into an industry-wide health insurance fund for retired miners.
The fund was one of John L. Lewis' great legacies. In 1950, Lewis had wrested this benefit from coal companies in return for his cooperation on mechanization. All companies paid in, all retirees drew out. In effect, companies were obligated to subsidize retirees from companies that had gone out of business. By the late 1980s, half the fund's beneficiaries - 59,000 retirees - were from defunct companies.
Pittston claimed the fund cost it too much, and the price was going up every day because of soaring health care costs. Pittston would take care of its own retirees, but not ones from other companies. The union feared this would lead to a mass exodus - and the bankruptcy of the 1950 trust.
The UMW's response: Pittston's trying to leave old folks in the cold and bust the union.
The union cast the fight in terms of a Northern robber baron trying to wring more money out of Appalachian miners. The company put it in the language of modernization and global competition. Either way, this was a traditional industry coping with a modern labor dispute. Wages weren't the issue; job security and health benefits were.
Douglas got what he wanted from Brink's and Burlington. But even from his office in Greenwich, Douglas didn't underestimate the tenacity of the UMW. He spoke of enduring a two-year strike if that's what it took.
"If it gets done before I leave" at retirement in 1991, he said once the strike started, "I'll be very happy. If it doesn't get done, I'll be a little wistful, I suppose, but I think I'll feel pretty good about the effort I've undertaken."
\ IN 1988, UMW PRESIDENT RICHARD TRUMKA NEGOTIATED another national contract without a strike, enhancing his image as someone companies could work with.
Pittston wouldn't sign. Trumka threatened a strike.
Pittston tipped its hand.
On Jan. 27, Pittston Coal President Gene Matthis announced he would follow Massey's example and hire replacements. To Trumka, this was confirmation: Pittston intended to break the union.
In previous strikes, coal companies would shut down and let a strike run its course. They'd keep a few supervisors on duty to keep equipment working. Mostly, though, they sold off stockpiles and waited for a settlement.
When the contract ran out Jan. 31, Pittston announced it was cutting health benefits to 1,500 widows, retirees and disabled miners. This was what companies traditionally did when contracts ran out and the union struck.
Except there was no strike.
The UMW motto had always been: No contract, no work.
This time, Trumka kept his miners on the job, a well-planned chess move of his own. Trumka was convinced Pittston was trying to goad him into a strike he couldn't win. Trumka could see the demise of Lewis' union yawning before him, one debilitating strike at a time: First Massey, now Pittston. If Pittston won, other companies would follow - until the whole union and its cherished national contract unraveled.
If Douglas was willing to stake his company on this fight, Trumka was forced to stake his union. A line was drawn in the coal dust. Here is where the UMW would make its stand.
But how?
If the UMW struck, the courts would regard it as an economic strike - meaning the company had no legal obligation to rehire the strikers once the dispute ended. If Pittston could find enough replacement workers - with double-digit unemployment in most coal counties, that'd be no problem - it conceivably could ignore the union.
But if this could be transformed into an unfair labor practices strike, the company would be obligated to rehire the strikers.
The UMW filed charges against Pittston with the National Labor Relations Board, and waited for the paperwork to wend its way through the bureaucracy.
The decision wasn't popular with miners. "There were a lot of guys who wanted to strike when the contract ran out," Richard Dishman recalls. Pittston's move to cut health benefits for retirees especially rankled. The union was keeping its end of the expired contract; why wouldn't the company?
For 14 months, the union worked, waited - and wondered.
\ MARTY HUDSON WANTED TO BE A PREACHER in the Church of God.
He became a coal miner instead. When you grow up in Sylvester, W.Va., the odds work that way. Eventually, he came to preach a different kind of gospel - the union gospel. He was a Trumka man, one of the new breed taking charge of a vicious old union. Hudson, 32, moussed his hair. He wore crisp white shirts and designer glasses. And he looked back on the killing in the Massey strike with a sickness in his stomach. "I felt it was senseless, useless, a wasted life for nothing at all," he says.
He'd been a picket line leader there, and felt helpless as he watched the strike spin out of control. Since then, he'd become an aide to UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts. In early 1989, a strike against Pittston appeared inevitable. Neither side had budged in negotiations; each accused the other of inflexibility. If a strike came, Hudson would run it. And he was damned sure it would be run differently than the Massey strike.
But how? In late 1988 and early 1989, the union leadership grappled with that question. The union knew it needed to generate popular support. Yet the union had felt it had fought Massey in a vacuum; except for the violence, no one seemed to notice. The union couldn't shout loud enough to get its message heard beyond the West Virginia hollows. What could the UMW possibly do to attract attention?
It started by hiring Abernathy & Mitchell, a Washington public relations firm, to help plot media strategy. In December 1988, Trumka staged a news conference in the coalfields, while Roberts held one in Washington, to drum up stories about the Pittston dispute. This time, the UMW would try to fight in the news media - and it would try to set the agenda, not Pittston.
Trumka had instructed Hudson: "This strike has got to be a strike without violence." But it took the union leaders longer to grasp that a non-violent strike might be newsworthy, that the union could use peaceful protests to gain public support.
They remembered the attention the UMW had generated when it sat in the road to block Massey trucks. "It was something that just happened that day," regional director Eddie Burke recalls. "I'm sure a lot of old fellows would say this was crazy, but it worked for a while and then we got chewed up in the courts."
"When the courts issued injunctions and began fining the union, we stopped," Roberts remembers. "After that the strike spread out and got violent and the strike lost its effectiveness."
What if the union ignored the courts this time?
Union officials began studying the history of non-violent protests, the civil rights movement in particular, until they could drop quotes from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Cecil Roberts carried a dog-eared copy of Taylor Branch's book "Parting the Waters" and shoved it at almost everybody on the UMW staff, forcing them to read it.
The experiences of black Americans demanding equal rights came as an eye-opener to many of the Appalachian-born union leaders, who had grown up in all-white mountain towns. The union's new-found faith in peaceful protest also came as a relief to Jackie Stump, a preacher's son. This would be his first strike since becoming president of the UMW's Virginia district in 1987. "I didn't want anything that had violence with it because I didn't think we could win anything with violence. So I welcomed the civil resistance."
One UMW spokesman, Gene Carroll, had once worked for Nuclear Freeze; he led the union to Nancy Heskett, a founder of American Peace Test, a group opposed to nuclear tests. She introduced the UMW to George Lakey, an internationally known writer on left-wing activism.
In January 1989, Heskett and Lakey met with union leaders in Washington. Eddie Bowling, the UMW's director of selective strikes, explained one of the reasons the union had turned its back on violence: The rank-and-file was turning gray. When the mines were filled with young men, the union could win strikes out of strength and endurance. Now, there weren't as many miners, and the ones left were growing old. Even the younger miners "all had mortgages and kids," Heskett says. That was the beauty, though, of civil disobedience. It uses everyone - women, children, old people, the disabled. And it attracts allies.
The union wanted to know about ways to block roads and occupy offices. Heskett and Lakey suggested the union make an even more dramatic gesture - by occupying a mine for a short period of time. But Trumka was worried. Mines are dangerous places to be.
\ STILL, THE UNION LEADERSHIP was getting excited about the potential of civil disobedience. Lakey and Heskett were invited to meet with about 70 UMW field representatives from throughout the East.
At the Executive Inn in Charleston, W.Va., on the afternoon of Feb. 18, 1989, they acted out "hassle lines" where one person took the role of the provoker, another the rank-and-file. They learned how to lock arms in sitdown demonstrations, how to march through taunting mobs of company guards, how to reign in union members who might get out of hand.
In one exercise, the trainers borrowed a pickup truck and staged a mock sitdown in the parking lot. A woman drove; a man sat beside her, pretending to be a guard videotaping the scene. On the first try, there was no sitdown. The guys pretending to be strikers simply rushed the little pickup, flung their coats over the windows to block the camera, then picked the truck up, rocked it back and forth and eventually turned it around. Some started letting the air out of the tires.
Heskett marched her students back inside the motel. "Now how would this look on the 6 o'clock news?" she asked.
The trainers were stunned, recalls Joe Corcoran, then the UMW's press spokesman. This was going to be more difficult than they thought. On the second try, though, the guys sat down as told, others directed traffic, and the exercise went over peacefully.
Lakey found the miners more physically oriented than other activists he had trained; he drilled one lesson over and over. A sitdown demonstration is not about territory; it's about politics and public relations. If the struggle is physical, "the opposition can eventually break you," he told them. "You're playing a game you're sure to lose. Play the game you can win - for the hearts and minds of people."
Some of the older union men were uncomfortable with the role-playing, if not the whole idea of non-violence. Some were nostalgic about the often-violent strikes of the past. But the trainers stressed that, if the union was going to pull off a civil disobedience campaign, the leaders had to be committed. People had to be in the field to reassure the men that "this was OK, this is not unmanly," Corcoran remembers.
When Lakey asked the union men to fill out evaluations, "the negatives were almost all `There wasn't enough time. We'd like to get into this more deeply.' "
Selling the idea of a sitdown protest to the rank-and-file might be harder.
Marty Hudson called his strike coordinators together. "I am the boss," he warned them. He took orders only from Cecil Roberts and Richard Trumka, and the coordinators had better take his. "What I didn't want was different things going on in different places," the way things had gone on at Massey, he recalls. "Our strike was orchestrated, everybody had to follow orders."
They fanned out into the union halls of Southwest Virginia, home to 1,200 of Pittston's 1,700 union miners, to preach passive resistance. "I had folks in the [local weekly newspapers] telling me civil disobedience was crazy, impossible," Hudson recalls. The miners "were the same people that was watching television in the 1960s and thought the police were right. They [the miners] wouldn't do this."
But most went along. "We thought it was a good idea," Eddie Calo of Lick Creek says. "It had never been tried." If miners didn't believe in the idea outright, they at least trusted Trumka and other union leaders enough to do whatever they said.
Looking back, union officials now believe civil disobedience was particularly suited to the Pittston strike. "Southwest Virginia is particularly conservative, very religious, God-fearing, patriotic," one union official said. "Historically, these people play by the rules." Moreover, he said, they're disciplined - and civil disobedience requires discipline, something the union found lacking in the Massey miners.
\ AS 1989 WORE ON, THE TWO SIDES MANEUVERED but never budged from their negotiating positions. Trumka proposed three former Republican secretaries of labor - one of them Bill Usery - as mediators; Pittston said no.
The company advertised in local papers for "permanent" replacement workers. The union hired a church activist to organize a campaign to carry the fight to Pittston's hometown in Connecticut. Both sides worked the news media.
The coalfields braced for a strike.
Yet many didn't expect it to last long.
Not the financial analysts. Marc Cohen of Kidder, Peabody in New York offered assurances about Pittston: "I believe they will strike and the company will merrily go about replacing the work force. Some of the men will cross the picket lines. There are a lot of unemployed people out there."
Not the company. Cohen said Pittston officials had told him that enough union men would break ranks that the strike could be over in 90 days.
And not the miners, either.
Of course, union leaders knew all too well the high stakes they were wagering. "We felt like we had seen the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, and we felt we'd read the signals right," District 28 Vice President Don McCamey says. "I thought it was a life-and-death struggle."
But it wasn't easy for union officials to get that message to members, many of whom thought the strike would go a month or so and then it would be back to business as usual. "I guess it's like telling a fellow he's got cancer," McCamey says. "He wants to put off acceptance of it as long as he can. . . ."
Peace activists Heskett and Lakey had suggested that the union cultivate local heroes, who could personalize the strike for the public so it wouldn't be another anonymous dispute between a union and a company. The UMW's PR firm urged the same thing. Some union leaders were skittish. "Some people in the Mine Workers simply underestimated the power of putting the people out front," one outside adviser said. "They underestimated the romance of the coalfields," especially for the national media. "I think there's a national preoccupation with mining. There's a real mystique there."
Nevertheless, the UMW assented. In mid-March, an Abernathy & Mitchell crew went to district headquarters at Castlewood to drill 100 or so miners and their families on ways to deal with the journalists the union hoped would come to the coalfields. Some miners were videotaped as they answered likely questions, their replies played back and critiqued until they became as polished with sound bites as any politician.
Corcoran also emphasized that, when talking to reporters, the miners should go easy on the economic issues and play up health care and job security. "Except for the New York Times or Washington Post," he told the miners, "you are making twice as much as the reporters and they will not be sympathetic to the economic issues."
On March 23, the National Labor Relations Board agreed to hear the union's unfair labor practices charges. Thirteen days later, the UMW went on strike.
by CNB