Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 24, 1990 TAG: 9006280586
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORTON LENGTH: Medium
"I was mad that my brother could cut through the mine yard and I couldn't," said Davis, who is now 42 and director of a national support group for women coal miners.
Back in Ellsworth, Pa., a small coal mining town, women were prohibited from even walking on the mine yard, she said during a break in the Coal Employment Project's annual meeting. The possibility of a woman working inside the mine did not exist.
The Coal Employment Project, based in Knoxville, Tenn., was formed in 1977 to help enforce court rulings that upheld the right of qualified women to hold mining jobs, said Shirley Harkins, the group's spokeswoman.
"In the earlier days, women used to dress up as men and boys and went into the mines," Harkins said.
While women have had the right to work in the mines since the mid-1970s, they still represent only about 2 percent of the coal mining work force, Harkins said. "The percentage seems to remain constant."
There were 3,800 women coal miners when the U.S. Bureau of Mines took its last census in 1986.
Women miners also are still fighting sexual harassment on the job and discrimination in hiring and training for advanced work assignments, conference participants said.
"It's a constant fight for job training and being treated equal," said Bonnie Boyer, 32, a shuttle car operator from Shelocta, Pa. A seminar on how to fight sexism and racism at work had the largest crowd at the weekend workshops.
Davis said there are psychological as well as practical reasons for gathering every year. "Not many women work at any one mine. We feel isolated."
Davis applied for a job at a Bethlehem Steel mine in 1976 when the Carter administration was putting pressure on mining companies to hire minorities. At the same time, Davis' uncle, a coal miner who raised her, and her brother, also a coal miner, tried to pressure her to stay out.
A year later, she was helping cut coal more than 560 feet below ground.
"My uncle didn't approve," Davis said. "When I was hired, he helped me get properly fitted with safety equipment and said he had just two things to say to me: `You go to the union meetings and never run away from a fire.' "
Davis, who is black, said she has experienced no racial discrimination inside the mine. "Underground, there is no black or white. Everybody depends on one another for their lives. I joke with the guys, `Once you get down here in the darkness, we're all black.' "
Both Davis, who has been out of a job since a March 1988 fire at the mine where she worked, and Connie Weiss of Norton said they ignored opposition by family members, neighbors and male co-workers because of the wages paid to coal miners.
"My family at first didn't think I would last because the job is so physical," Weiss said. "And they worried about the danger, like every family of a coal miner, man or woman."
Weiss, 34, said she was working as a grocery store clerk for $1.35 an hour and trying to support her two preschool daughters on her own when a vocational school classmate told her she could make $50 a day in the mines.
"That was a fortune in 1976," Weiss said.
Weiss said men in the mine looked at her as if they were thinking, "Why isn't she in the kitchen?"
"These are Southern men and they are raised to believe mom stays home and dad works and it's hard to change those attitudes. But they are changing," she said.
Because of the massive layoffs in mining in the last decade and the generally high unemployment in coalfield communities, people are finding out it's better to have two working parents, she said.
"To this day when I meet somebody and say I'm a coal miner, they look surprised and say, `Oh, really.' I still hear it's not a job for a woman," Weiss said, adding that she has a stock answer:
"I say, `I've got a family to raise just like you. Why shouldn't I be able to make the same wages you make if I am capable of doing the same job?' A job has no sex."
by CNB