Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 29, 1993 TAG: 9306290135
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DIRK BEVERIDGE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
The United Mine Workers of America has launched what it called a political and social campaign against Hanson PLC, the corporate parent of Peabody. The miners hope to gain allies among Hanson's stockholders and workers at its many British businesses, ranging from tobacco to bricks to construction.
London's financial district might seem an odd place for UMW officials whose constituents are likely to live in the hollows of Appalachia. It is, but as more companies go global, the miners are trying to do the same.
"The American coal industry is `American' only insofar as that is where the mines and the miners are located," said Kenneth S. Zinn, special projects coordinator for the UMW.
"Increasingly, our industry is owned by multinational corporations, which may be based in any number of countries but whose only flag is the almighty dollar," Zinn said. "Hanson PLC is one such company."
In this war of words against the legendary British corporate raider Lord Hanson, the once-rowdy brawlers from the UMW are maintaining their softer stance of recent years, even adopting a bit of an English accent.
UMW officials visited a Hanson stockholders meeting Friday, with leaflets calling the strike "a tonne of trouble for Hanson shareholders," using the British spelling for the standard measure of coal.
At a news conference Monday with the Trades Union Congress, Britain's equivalent of the AFL-CIO, Zinn slipped deftly into British speech.
Zinn told reporters he would be speaking Tuesday to "city financial analysts," using the local term for stock experts that Americans would generically call "Wall Street analysts."
The union's message: Peabody is being shortsighted by refusing to settle a strike that has 14,000 miners off the job at Peabody and five other companies in West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. The company is refusing to give UMW miners the right to jobs at new, non-union subsidiaries, which the union says discourages productivity at mines that are running out of coal.
The UMW hopes investors will agree this is bad business, and Hanson may be pressured to change its ways. The union senses Hanson may be vulnerable after Lord Hanson apologized to shareholders Friday and withdrew a proposal to limit their right to speak out at Hanson meetings.
London is not the only stop in this battle. A few weeks earlier, Zinn was in Germany, working on a similar campaign against Rheinbraun AG, half owner of the No. 2 U.S. coal producer, Consolidation Coal Co. Peabody is the largest U.S. coal producer.
Hanson told shareholders last week he was willing to take short-term losses at Peabody rather than cave in to the union. Peabody says UMW miners make $5 per hour more than non-union miners but are 28 percent less productive.
Christopher Collins, Hanson's director of business development, said the miners' approach seemed novel in Britain, where years of rule by the Conservative Party has stripped labor unions of much power.
British unions, for example, would be breaking the law if they staged sympathy strikes at Hanson companies.
Britain's Trades Union Congress says it is supporting the UMW in part out of fear that successful anti-union tactics by Hanson in the United States could be repeated here as British Coal is privatized.
by CNB