Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 13, 1995 TAG: 9502130013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
William J. Usery has brought labor peace to arenas where men wear hard hats, wrestle heavy machinery and wield pickaxes; but so far he has been unable to work his magic with the guys in knee pants who toss a ball around for a living.
President Clinton named Usery mediator for the baseball players' strike Oct. 14. The strike, which began Aug. 12, has centered on efforts by club owners to hold down players' salaries, which average nearly $1.2 million a year.
Last week, Usery and the two warring parties missed a deadline Clinton had set for ending the strike. The president has asked a reluctant Congress to impose binding arbitration on the talks.
Back in 1989, Elizabeth Dole, George Bush's secretary of labor, called Usery a ``supermediator'' when she asked him to try to settle the United Mine Workers' high-profile strike against the Pittston Co.
Usery entered the Pittston negotiations in November 1989 when the strike was seven months old and lived up to the title Dole had given him. Within two months, he reconciled a sometimes violent dispute that had kept hundreds of Virginia state troopers in the coalfields and had cost Pittston's coal group, based in Russell County, millions of dollars in security and lost profits.
``I'm an incredible admirer and fan of Bill Usery,'' said Mike Odom of Abingdon, president of Pittston Coal at the time of the strike and now a vice president with the coal group's parent company.
Usery has a talent to understand the concerns of each side in a labor disagreement quickly, Odom said. ``He has just a tremendous ability to empathize and understand the unique situations each party finds itself in.''
Odom said Usery has tremendous stamina and an innovative mind that was always searching for ways to bring each side to common ground. Usery, he said, will talk with the disagreeing sides together and separately and use whatever techniques the situation demands to reach an agreement.
``He keeps you at it; he kept you focused on [reaching an agreement],'' Odom said. ``He would wear you out, and you were only getting half of his time.''
When a settlement looked achievable in Pittston, Usery kept the two sides at the bargaining table 96 hours straight, allowing about four hours' sleep in that time. The baseball players and owners have never gotten close enough in their bargaining positions for Usery to use those up-all-night tactics.
``This is a very harsh reflection on the two parties at the table that they're not considering anything other than their own positions,'' Odom said, referring to the baseball talks and Usery's talents for solving disputes.
One significant difference between the Pittston dispute, which was about health care, work rules and job security, and baseball's labor strife is that the Pittston miners don't make the kind of money the major leaguers do, said Herb Fishgold, a top Usery aide involved in both Pittston and the baseball talks.
``Missing a paycheck [for the miners] means something,'' Fishgold said. But for many ballplayers, missing a paycheck isn't all that significant, he said.
He noted that much of the dispute has occurred during what is normally the off-season, when players would be on vacation and wouldn't be drawing a check anyway.
``We weren't optimistic at all [going into the baseball talks],'' Fishgold said. ``We knew the legacy we were inheriting.''
He was referring to the last eight baseball negotiations, which involved either lockouts or strikes. ``We've never seen such deep mutual hatred and mistrust as we've seen in this dispute,'' Fishgold said.
Another difference between Pittston and baseball, he said, is that a miner can expect to have maybe another 25 years of work with his company, while the length of a ballplayer's career can be only four or five years.
The fact that baseball is a monopoly without the competitive pressures faced by a Pittston takes the labor negotiations to a totally different level, Fishgold said. Some, he noted, have described the dispute as one between the millionaires - that is, the players - and the billionaires, the team owners.
Usery, Fishgold's boss, was unavailable for an interview.
A native of Hardwick, Ga., Usery began his career as a union welder and rose to a top position with the International Association of Machinists in Georgia. A Democrat who served on a labor-management commission during the Kennedy administration, Usery was named an assistant secretary for labor-management relations under George Shultz, President Nixon's secretary of labor.
Usery became the highest-ranking Democrat in the Nixon administration when Nixon, impressed with Usery's handling of a postal strike, named him to head the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in 1972. Usery helped settle the National Football League players' strike in 1974, served as President Ford's secretary of labor, and afterward set up his own labor-management consulting firm in Washington, D.C. After Pittston, he helped settle the UMW strike against the Bituminous Coal Operators Association in 1993.
Michael Buckner, a UMW negotiator in the Pittston talks, recalled afterward that no big breakthroughs characterized the bargaining. ``It was a matter of talking through what the needs were and listening to the other side,'' he said.
Usery set a Christmas 1989 deadline for a settlement in the Pittston strike. When labor and management missed it, he called negotiators back after Christmas for three days of around-the-clock negotiations, with a new deadline set for New Year's Day.
Sometime after 11 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1989, Pittston executives and UMW negotiators shook hands across a table at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, sealing an agreement that ended the strike. Joined by Secretary of Labor Dole, they celebrated together with pizza.
by CNB