Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300439
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On Nov. 9, two days after Stump's election, contract talks resumed in Arlington, super-mediator William Usery presiding.
The one-time Georgia welder once had been a union man - a top official, in fact, with the International Association of Machinists. Then he changed sides, and earned a reputation as one of the nation's top labor dispute trouble-shooters. Although Usery was a Democrat, the Nixon administration made him assistant secretary of labor and later head of the Federal Mediation Service. President Ford appointed him secretary of labor. Now Usery headed a private labor relations firm in Washington, but still was consulted regularly by whomever happened to be in office.
The day Elizabeth Dole returned from the coalfields, she met with Usery and asked him what her options were. One suggestion he offered was that she appoint a "super-mediator" - a well-known figure who could replace the anonymous federal mediators who had been shuttling notes back and forth. Usery didn't mean for it to be him, but he was the obvious choice. Usery's reputation was legendary. He'd settled more than 800 strikes, including the three-week Chicago teachers' strike in 1983 and the six-month auto workers' strike against Deere & Co. in 1987.
This one, he later found, would be his toughest.
From the moment Usery took over, it was clear things would be different. He declared a news blackout, robbing both sides of their propaganda efforts. Soon, a cease-fire in the coalfields was arranged to match the one in the media. Strikers holed up in their picket shacks or went home to lay in firewood for the winter; the rock-throwing halted. Most of the state troopers were pulled out of the coalfields. Virtually all of Pittston's security guards disappeared.
UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts headed the union team; Joe Farrell, executive vice president, led the Pittston delegation. Usery had wanted to hold the talks in Washington - after all, that's where his office, the union's office and Pittston's law firm were. But Pittston didn't want to risk doing anything in the District of Columbia that would prompt a lawsuit against it there; Washington's black and blue-collar juries might not be favorably disposed toward a multinational conglomerate. So the talks began across the Potomac in Virginia, on the 19th floor of the Sheraton National Hotel near the Pentagon. "We had a great view of Washington but not much time to enjoy it," union negotiator Mike Buckner says.
While calm prevailed outwardly, behind closed doors Usery laid on what Buckner calls a "full-court press."
"I went to the first bargaining session with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper," Usery says. But he kept the negotiators meeting until late in the evening almost every day. The first week, he concentrated on getting each side to lay out what it truly needed. Details were brushed aside. "The object," Usery says, "was to get everybody to listen to everybody."
After a week, Usery called a week-long recess.
When they returned, a change seemed to have come over the participants. "It was a time when both sides began to accept the other in good faith," Usery says. After nearly eight months of a bitter strike, both sides realized this might be their last chance to settle, Buckner says. If things fell through, the alternative would be a fight to the death.
Both sides had dug themselves into a hole full of animosity that was hard to crawl out of, Usery says. But throughout the talks, Usery did whatever was necessary to keep the negotiators focused on the issues, "whether it would be a hammer or a slight nudge," Buckner recalls. As long as the talks weren't acrimonious, Usery let them continue without offering suggestions of his own.
Initially, everything "kept leading us back to Pittston withdrawing from the [health care] funds," Usery recalls, the same issue that Farrell had pounded his fist on the table about when Judge Glen Williams had called both sides together back in the summer, the issue that the union saw as breaking the industry's promise to take care of pensioners whose employers had gone out of business.
Sometimes, Usery called Williams to bounce ideas off the judge. One idea was to collect the fines levied against the union but let them go into the health fund. "Apparently he got nowhere with that," Williams says. Another time, Usery told Williams that Dole had expressed a willingness to look into the health funds matter.
That idea eventually grew into one of the key aspects of the settlement.
There were no breakthroughs, though, no great leaps forward. "It really doesn't work that way, who's going to blink first," Buckner says. "It was a matter of talking through what the needs were and listening to the other side."
And that was a slow process. The negotiators rented rooms in the hotel. "We never left the hotel," Buckner says.
Usery set a Christmas deadline. The strike had been going on so long that time meant nothing to the negotiators, so "you have to work against a deadline" to have a sense of urgency.
In late December, Trumka and Douglas joined the meetings, a sign of progress. On Dec. 22, Dole's office alerted reporters that a settlement was imminent. First an announcement was set for 1 p.m., then 2:30, then 4, then pushed back until sometime before midnight - and then dropped altogether.
The sides recessed for Christmas, then met again Dec. 27. This time Usery set a New Year's Day deadline. And now Pittston agreed to move the talks into Washington, to the Capitol Hilton. It was a sure sign that the end was near: Both sides needed to be closer to the copying machines at union headquarters and Pittston's law firm.
Usery vowed "round-the-clock" negotiations and he wasn't kidding. He worked the last three days without changing his clothes.
On New Year's Eve, the tension at the table increased. An agreement appeared near. "When you get to that point a mistake can be critical," Buckner says. About 10 p.m., there were only a couple of issues to be resolved. It was a fragile time, Usery says, because two issues can quickly become eight or 10 and the whole agreement can unravel. Roberts, Trumka, Douglas and Farrell huddled for a private meeting. Usery says he could see "it was going to go together."
Sometime between 11 and 11:30, Trumka and Roberts reached across the table to Douglas and Farrell and sealed the agreement with handshakes. "It was very emotional," Usery says. "I think tears flew from many people. They'd been through a long battle, you understand."
The Hilton dining room was closed, so they couldn't get champagne. They settled for beer and ordered pizza. Dole was supposed to be in Miami, but she had stayed in town in anticipation of a settlement. Usery phoned and she came over to the Hilton, to usher in the new year - and a new contract - with a celebration that lasted into the night.
\ IT IS SPRING AGAIN, and most of the miners are back at work.
"There's still some that don't speak and some just grunt at you," says Ed Rudder, Pittston's safety inspector at McClure No. 1. For the most part, though, "they've come back a lot better than anybody expected. It's like it never happened."
Yet the pain lingers, in one form or another.
Bill Patton of Clinchco is still seeing a doctor in Kingsport about the back he says was injured when troopers dragged him to the prison bus that first day of mass arrests.
Bob Bailey of Spring City still has a court date for when he was rounded up with a group of out-of-state miners charged with throwing rocks; the court dockets remain filled with strike cases.
Circuit Judge Donald McGlothlin's fines - which finally topped $64 million - are pending against the union.
And miners still curse the businesses they say didn't support them during the strike.
Some say things will never go back to the way they were.
That might be good, the miners and their families say. They see the world differently now. They see themselves differently, too. "I thank Pittston Coal Co. for helping us build our confidence," says former miner Cosby Totten of Tazewell. Before the strike, Roanoke was a distant unknown. "Now Roanoke almost feels like home to me," she says. "We found out Roanoke was a nice little town."
Others think nothing now of traveling farther afield.
Edna Sauls, the miner's wife whose world previously had been her Russell County hollow, has become a world traveler. She was cited by Mother Jones magazine for her union work and flown to England for a conference. In March, she was off again, this time to Rochester, N.Y., to help organize women there for a strike against Kodak. Other UMW women went to Chicago in March to picket with striking Greyhound bus drivers.
Gail Gentry of Wise looks back on the strike with fondness. "I just learned what a great thing brotherhood is. This wasn't a struggle between a union and a large corporation. It was a struggle between a large corporation and families. It was the most rewarding thing I've ever participated in. . . . I was shown more consideration and kindness than in the whole 10 years prior to it." He'd spent those 10 years in a wheelchair, paralyzed from a roof fall.
The strike unearthed a new political power in Southwest Virginia - the union membership, St. Paul lawyer Frank Kilgore says. He predicts a new generation of local leaders will grow out of the strike. "The biggest thing the strike taught the people in Southwest Virginia is they can make a difference. I don't think that seed is going to die."
The strike got Carmen Mullins, the Clintwood High School student who organized the student auxiliary, thinking about a career in politics. It persuaded Angie Mullins, the Ervinton High School student who led the walkout there, to become a reporter. She thinks she could be more objective than the reporters who covered the strike. "Sometimes they really favored one side or the other," she says.
Already the strike has spawned songs, like the union organizing campaigns of old.
Carmen Mullins wrote one about Jackie Stump: "He was standing as proud as he could be/with his thumbs up in solidarity." Her brother, Randall, wrote two more, in rap. Miner Kermit Rife of Buchanan County recorded a tape of strike songs, including one remembering the "Moss 3 Hotel," that has become an underground hit in the coalfields. The Rabbit Ridge Pea-Pickers, who became the official band at union rallies, has been invited to a 10-day folk festival at the Smithsonian.
The contract Pittston and the UMW signed was hailed as a model for moving the coal industry into the 1990s.
The union granted Pittston the flexible work schedules the company said it needed to be more productive in an international market.
The company agreed to keep the 100 percent health-care coverage the union had insisted on, but set up incentives for workers and retirees to avoid unnecessary visits to the doctor: Pittston now pays $1,000 a year to union members under age 65 to cover the first $1,000 of health care costs. If they don't spend it on medical bills, they can keep it as a bonus.
An artful compromise was struck on the divisive issue of the trust funds: Pittston will pay $10 million into the health care trust that covers miners who retired before 1976, then drop out. In return, Dole appointed a commission to study the larger issue of health care in the entire coal industry. Its chairman: William Usery.
Other, more complicated, compromises were forged to encourage Pittston and its subcontractors to hire laid-off union miners instead of non-union ones and to limit - but still allow - the company's transfers of coal reserves from union subsidiaries to non-union ones.
The fate of 13 men - whom Pittston had vowed to fire for criminal acts during the strike and the union had vowed to defend - was left to an arbitrator.
The doomsday rhetoric that each side had used against the other is gone now. Pittston's coal division lost $27 million in 1989 because of the strike, but the company's new annual report features a picture of Douglas and Farrell standing with Trumka and Roberts, looking like the best of friends.
Pittston says the contract will allow it to invest in new mines, bringing jobs to depressed Appalachia. Rudder, the safety inspector, says he wouldn't be surprised to see 500 new jobs open up in the next few years.
For now, though, the settlement remains bittersweet for Eddie Calo of Lick Creek.
Before the strike, he was one of 90 men who worked at the Old Smith Gap strip mine. During the strike, replacement workers mined it out and opened up new mines - Screaming Eagle, Blue Thunder, Rolling Fork. Under the contract, Pittston was allowed to retain any replacements who opened new mines during the strike. With Smith Gap closed, that means Calo and his co-workers don't have a job. They're first in line for any new ones, but who knows when that will be?
Pittston's right to retain replacements at recently opened mines was one of those fine-print compromises that no one paid much attention to; on paper, it certainly didn't seem to take anything away from the union families who had endured an 11-month strike.
All Eddie Calo knows is that before the strike he had a job and now he doesn't.
"Some of the men," he says, "came back and said if we'd known that, we'd have never voted for it."
But condolences don't put money in his pocket or food on his family's table.
by CNB