Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301090110
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
COAL INDUSTRY APPROACHES NEW PORTAL VERY QUIETLY
There's more light inside a coal mine than the United Mine Workers union and two coal-industry bargaining groups are shedding on their current contract talks.Industry watchers speculated that the lack of news from the talks is probably a good sign. When one side or the other starts talking, it's usually to shake things up because negotiations are going badly, they say.
But they made those remarks before The Associated Press reported late Friday that the union had broken off talks with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association and was telling its members to prepare for a strike.
UMW spokeman Jim Grossfeld warned against "reading anything into" the secrecy surrounding the talks, both of which are being conducted in Washington under news blackouts.
The National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement expires on Feb. 1. That agreement, signed in February 1988, involves many of the nation's major coal companies.
It also covers 60,000 working miners - nearly half of all U.S. coal miners - and more than 150,000 retired miners.
Until late last year, health care promised to be the biggest issue facing union and industry negotiators. But in October, Congress passed a bill sponsored by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., that guaranteed health benefits for more than 200,000 retired miners and widows.
Absent the contentious health-care issue, job security seems to be the top priority of working union miners. Virginia miners made it a prominent issue in a pre-negotiations conference with union leaders last year.
On the industry side, negotiators are expected to be asking for more flexible work rules, including longer work days. Employee cost-sharing of health-care expenses also is expected to be a big issue for management. Union coal miners may be the last group of workers who have 100 percent of their health-care costs covered.
The union began contract negotiations Nov. 6 with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, the bargaining group for 14 of the nation's largest coal producers. Traditionally, the union's pact with the BCOA has been the model for the UMW's contracts with roughly 300 other unionized coal companies.
The AP reported Friday that the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail had reported that the union had broken off talks with the BCOA because the association had failed to provide information the union had requested. The paper quoted an unidentified industry official as the source of the story.
Efforts Friday to confirm the report were unsuccessful.
In October, the UMW began contract talks with the Independent Coal Bargaining Alliance, a group of four moderate-size companies whose goal - along with the union - is to reform labor-management relations. Westmoreland Coal Co., which has extensive Virginia operations, dropped out of the BCOA to join the new group.
Even coal analysts for some of the nation's largest securities firms are having a tough time finding out what's going on in either set of talks as the contract expiration draws near.
Nobody's revealing anything and the union doesn't seem to be in any rush to come to terms, noted Marc Cohen, a coal analyst for the Wall Street firm of Kidder, Peabody & Co.
"Theoretically speaking, there could be a strike in 28 days and it's like nobody gives a damn," he said last week.
But the last two national contracts were negotiated without a strike and no one really seemed to be expecting a strike this time around. But again that was before Friday's news out of West Virginia.
"The risk of labor unrest or work stoppages is very slim," said Rafael Villagran, an analyst with Shearson Lehman Brothers. The issues are manageable and with mild weather keeping the pressure off coal stocks, the union is not in a position to threaten a strike, he said.
There have been signs, however, that talks between the UMW and the BCOA might be particularly rocky this time around.
Joseph Brennan, president of the BCOA, may have been setting the tone for the industry's bargaining position during an August speech at a Virginia Tech conference on mine safety.
"We are at the end of an era begun in the 1950s, an era predicated upon an alliance between the UMW and the major employers of the coal industry," Brennan said. "That alliance is now badly frayed, and changes in the industry suggest the need for either a renewal or divorce."
The current national wage agreement is obsolete, Brennan said. Unionized coal companies need a contract that will allow them to build more competitive mines and to adapt to technological changes in the industry, he said.
But the UMW's wariness of some in the coal industry can be found in a story in the January United Mine Workers Journal.
The article singled out Consol Inc., the nation's second-largest coal company, based in Pittsburgh, as representative of companies whose goal, the UMW says, has been to weaken the union through such strategies as land transfers and the opening of non-union mines.
The "consequences of the greedy '80s are still with us and pounding away at working people's living standards," the Journal advised its readers. "Nowhere is this more clear than in the coal industry."
The union's relationship with the new Bargaining Alliance appears to be much more amicable than the one with the BCOA.
"We are interested in achieving competitiveness in a more progressive way by working together," Westmoreland Coal's president said at the start of talks between the Alliance and union on Oct. 5.
The Associated Press also contributed information to this story.