The Sad Legacy Of John L. Lewis
Goodman, Walter
Just as an occasional disaster is required to call the nation's attention to conditions in its coal mines, so it was necessary that Joseph A. ("Jock") Yablonski, his wife, and daughter be...
...They went to the union for assistance and were rebuffed...
...Mike Trbovich, a neighbor of Jock Yablonski in the tiny town of Clarksville, Pennsylvania, is chairman of MFD...
...organizing going on, according to union sources...
...of America from its president, John L. Lewis, then they certainly have a ridiculous situation in mind...
...Since 1950, when the fund took on its present form, it has been run by three trustees—a company representative...
...I owe the coal miners better than that...
...Whence he would be hurled back by administration sup porters into the milling midst of the rank 100 and file...
...This effort has been successful—at a price...
...May the chair state," he thundered at the Indianapolis convention of 1924, "that you may shout until you meet each other in hell and he will not change the ruling...
...In pushing through the pension rise and announcing it to miners (over his signature) within 72 hours, President Boyle was making a pitch for the very large bloc of pensioners' votes...
...There is no 2 The threats, bribes, and methods of ballot-count ing used by the Boyle forces during the election make it difficult to estimate the size of their opposi tion...
...I want to go on record...
...A formidable strategist, Lewis brought order to a chaotic industry, while winning unequaled benefits for the miners...
...In several districts the counting of the votes was reminiscent of Tammany Hall in the 1920s...
...Then, amid boos and derisive whoops from the opposition, Lewis would read his report for the year, throwing the onus for repeated defeats upon the Reds, the railroads, and the operators...
...There are many union locals— "bogey locals"—that have no working miners at all...
...The potential of the pension fund as an instrument for maintaining power within the union was not fully realized until the death of John Lewis in June 1969...
...Self-preservation required that the union cooperate in bringing up-to-date technology into the mines and keeping the operators operating...
...He consoled the widows: "As long as we mine coal, there is always this inherent danger...
...Candidates were denied the right to have observers at the polls and at the counting of the ballots...
...Boyle's daughter receives $40,000 a year plus expenses for representing the UMW in Montana, though there is some mystery as to exactly what she does there...
...The out come of the December 9 election was a 2-1 "victory" for Boyle...
...Her 101 judgment was confirmed in October 1970, when a report by the U.S...
...John L. Lewis's shadow lies heavily on the UMW, his creation for better and, conspicuously, for worse...
...Thereupon the departing Communist would be waylaid in the lobby of the hall and fists would fly...
...People are well clothed and fed...
...Early in 1969, three doctors in West Virginia began a campaign for a state law that would give a measure of compensation to black-lung victims...
...A hard-nosed view—but in May, Jock Yablonski declared himself a candidate for the union presidency, thereby raising the prospect of the first contested election since 1926...
...One need not look far to account for Boyle's generosity toward pensioners in June 1969 or for the haste with which he exercised that passion...
...With the result that the administration would win the second and final round and somewhat bewildered delegates would go back to the fields to explain to their locals why, having once defeated Lewis, they couldn't make it stick...
...Comptroller General disclosed that the fund would become insolvent during the fiscal year ending June 30, 1975, if pensions continued at $150 a month and no increase was made in the rate of contributions...
...Kenneth Yablonski says: "He honest-to-God believed he was the one guy who could get this union back on the track...
...The fund has partially put 102 the miners into the coal business, and now a strike against the operators is also against themselves...
...Supporters of Yablonski spread the story during the campaign that John L. Lewis once called Tony Boyle his "biggest mistake...
...they jeered union headquarters during a march on the 104 state capitol at Charleston...
...In November, another defendant, Aubran W. Martin, was convicted and sentenced to death...
...Alliance with the operators...
...Not long ago, coal was widely judged to be a dying industry...
...The UMW is "failing to maintain records and to require its subordinate districts to maintain records"— obligations under the Landrum-Griffin Act...
...Less than three weeks later, Joseph Yablonski, his wife, and his 25yearold daughter were shot and killed in their beds...
...In recent years some of this money, earmarked for miners' welfare, has been diverted to the uses of the union hierarchy...
...The representative of the coal operators, George L. Judy, who had taken on his trusteeship role only three weeks before, was presented by Boyle and his cohorts with a proposal to raise miners' pensions from $115 a month to $150...
...The men must get out and organize the nonunion tonnage under the contract so that more coal companies will pay into the welfare fund the 40 cents a ton royalty...
...John Chamberlain wrote in the 1940s that Lewis, with the "finest mind in the labor movement," made the "men around him seem like dull, creeping clodhoppers...
...One of the remaining defendants is a local UMW official, and the Yablonskis continue to insist that the killings were directly related to the election...
...A Department of Labor report issued in November 1969 suggests that UMW officials do not stint on creature comforts: Some officials have claimed reimbursement for hotel expenses during periods when they were at their places of residence, some have claimed expenses for hotels and travel for practically every day of the year, and some have claimed identical amounts for hotel expenses and automobile travel for every day spent in travel...
...Yet those who supported Jock Yablonski 2 see the UMW hierarchy as a bunch of aging men (Boyle is 67), long out of the mines, whose main concerns have little to do with the workers' well-being...
...There are no accurate figures of the incidence of pneumoconiosis, or "black lung" disease, among the nation's coal miners—in part because company-town doctors have preferred to attach other labels, such as "asthma" or "bronchitis" to this pervasive and serious ailment...
...if they think they can separate the membership of the United Mine Workers 1 To F.D.R.'s "plague on both your houses" remark during a coal dispute (after receiving nearly$500,000 from the UMW for his 1936 campaign), Lewis responded memorably and typically: "It illbehooves one who has supped at labor's tableand who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace...
...The UMW constitution was violated, in that many locals failed to elect tellers or to hold mem bership meetings to settle the time and place of the election...
...The chair would then refuse official recogni tion to Alex Howat, who would come charg ing down the middle aisle, to scramble over the press table onto the platform...
...Trbovich understands that despite a recent election victory for anti-Boyle forces in the only district where full autonomy prevails, the union machinery is so twisted and rusted that only the courts can straighten it out: "We have so many charges filed against Boyle, I can't remember all of them...
...Judy was assured that the raise was actuarially sound and, furthermore, Boyle gave him to understand that Josephine Roche went along with the raise, so that his approval was not strictly needed...
...The vistor who goes to America's coal communities expecting to find himself in a setting out of How Green Was My Valley is likely to be agreeably surprised...
...Labor historians have found in the nature of the work and the qualities of the worker explanations for the miners' intense loyalty to their union: the physical demands of the job and the toughness of the men...
...An official, by his own admission, has spent varying periods of time on vacation and claimed expenses of $20 a day for his entire vacation...
...It seems safe to say that no fewer than half the working miners favor the insurgents...
...Whether it will actually be scraped out remains uncertain...
...Lewis, with his small tolerance for independent associates and demo cast their ballots in a manner that enabled others to identify their choice...
...Boyle's in bed with the operators," a Pennsylvania miner told me, and indeed the union leaders have carried their affair with at least one major operator past the point of discretion...
...Miss Boyle, who is considered a capable young lawyer in Billings, has her own practice or work that occupies her and is not connected with District 27...
...The analogy was not far-fetched...
...Although the constitution of the UMW had been developed with attention to democratic paraphernalia, Lewis's own constitution was anything but democratic...
...Next business...
...Those who remain are enjoying good times...
...Lewis beat back opposition to his oneman rule without mercy and without apologies...
...Lewis would ask an objector...
...105 cratic procedures, bequeathed to the miners an autocratic structure in the grip of timeservers...
...At a UMW convention in 1948, when Lewis was again under government attack, the union's vice-president, Thomas Kennedy, said...
...The company man allowed himself to be talked into voting for the increase—an action that cost him his post as trustee when his fellow operators learned of it...
...Of his praise for Boyle during those weeks, his son Kenneth explains, "He was just playing the union game...
...Only now is the rot at the center of a once proud union being exposed...
...The union used dues money "to promote the candidacy of its incumbent international officers...
...Of the 190,000 members of the UMW, about 70,000 are dues-paying pensioners...
...In the mid-1960s, about $74 million of the fund's assets were deposited in a no-interest checking account in the National Bank of Washington...
...One rule which denied a man a pension if he was working in a nonunion mine at the time of his retirement—even though he might have chalked up 20 or 30 years in a union mine before taking his last job—was judged invalid by a federal court in 1969...
...In 1960 the three major officials of the UMW—the president, vice-president, and secretary-treasurer —guaranteed themselves lifetime salaries of $40,000 to $50,000 a year out of the union treasury on their retirement—a benefit that was not reported in the UMW Journal and became public knowledge only after a government investigation...
...In 1950, there were more than 300,000 union members in the bituminous coal fields...
...Yet the union has been anything but insistent about safety measures...
...Instances are cited of operators being allowed to pay their workers less than the going rate as long as the pension fund gets fed...
...Today, only one of the UMW's 26 districts has full autonomy, that is, power to elect all its own officers...
...Miss Roche, despite differences with Boyle over the pension rise, shares responsibility for years of manipulation of the fund and was also relieved of her trusteeship by the federal judge...
...Boyle has this to say about his elevation: "John Lewis said, publicly and otherwise, that he could have selected anyone out of 500,000 men, WALTER GOODMAN and he selected Boyle and he made no mistake...
...In fact, the lady in charge of the office declares there is little of anything to be done in Billings...
...He demanded protection of rank-and-file dissenters from union goons and of miners from safety violations by operators...
...It would be as reasonable to expect to separate his Holiness, the Pope, from the Catholic Church in the world...
...Lewis considered it his monument...
...The challenge now before Miners for Democracy, the insurgent group formed after Yablonski's murder, is not merely to oust the Boyle machine, but to reawaken rank-andfile participation in the governing of their union...
...Soon after the murders, the Department of Labor, which out of some combination of administration policy and bureaucratic inertia, had been unresponsive for months to 3 The Labor Department investigation has resulted in the filing by the Justice Department of quite a number of charges against the UMW: The union failed to provide safeguards to insure a fair election, and allowed campaigning at the polls...
...He built a powerful instrument for his inimitable use and left it to be demeaned and corrupted by men intent on self-preservation and self-aggrandizement...
...Lewis could defy the world...
...In 1968, the UMW was ordered to pay $4 million in damages for conspiring with ConTHE SAD LEGACY OF JOHN L. LEWIS solidation Coal Co., the country's biggest operator, to force a middle-sized Kentucky company out of business...
...Unlikely as it may seem in light of its present condition, the UMW for most of its history was fortunate in its leaders...
...106 WALTER GOODMAN...
...there is little coal mining in these areas—some 4,000 laborers and 3,000 pensioners...
...There is a well-grounded suspicion that money from the international union's treasury, which has been passed on to local unions purportedly for "organizing," has been used to buy support for incumbent officers...
...The monument was undermined by his own power...
...When finally the opposition steam was blown off...
...Ralph Nader reports: The U.M.W...
...According to his supporters, his dissatisfaction with the Boyle regime had been growing for some time—"He knew that Boyle was incompetent and in league with the operators"—but it took the Farmington disaster—"Farmington tipped Jock way over"—and the black-lung campaign to make him act...
...Nevertheless, the cause gathered support...
...Boyle has been forced to give up his post as director of the National Bank of Washington because of the charge of embezzlement, and has been ordered out of his trusteeship role in the welfare and retirement fund by a federal court because of the way he used the fund to woo votes...
...The UMW's general counsel, Edward L. Carey, issued a statement: "There is no relationship of any kind between `a man named Tony...
...a union representative, Lewis himself until his death in 1969...
...They know how they got their jobs, and they know how to keep them...
...nearly all of the state's 42,000 working miners joined in a wildcat strike, defying Boyle's orders to return to their jobs...
...They have to have a chance.' " Whatever Yablonski's motives, his rebellion was vigorous...
...Their eldest son works days and takes college courses in the evening...
...To judge by the results of the election, Boyle's pension-raising tactic worked...
...In accord with the coal contract signed in November, the contribution has gone up to 600 this year and will reach 800 during the course of the three-year agreement...
...The International Union does not require its officials or employees who travel to submit any receipts or any other evidence of the travel performed or money expended...
...the isolation from the world outside the mine and the solidarity within...
...A study by the Senate Labor Subcommittee staff shows that in 292 locals without active members, Boyle received 93.25 percent of the vote...
...But if it hadn't been Boyle, it would have been another like him...
...Those who have left the mines are part of the national catastrophe that goes under the name Appalachia...
...A Senate Labor subcommittee, under Harrison A. Williams, has been holding informative hearings on both the election and the pension funds...
...The Boyle forces put their all into attempting to block Yablonski's nomination and to intimidate his supporters...
...The meal to which I was invited by one Pennsylvania miner and his family featured enormous platters of fried chicken, and meatWALTER GOODMAN balls and spaghetti, and a variety of vegetables and fruit...
...The abuse of power in the UMW over the past decade is on display in gross form in the operations of the Mine Workers Welfare and Retirement Fund, whose creation by John Lewis after World War II was a pioneering event in U.S...
...If you want to go on record, write it on a slip of paper and hand it to the secretary...
...Boyle's use of the pension fund for his private purposes was blatant, but the nature of the fund is such as to discourage militant unionism, even among more vigorous and higher-minded unionists than Tony Boyle...
...The greatest of them was John L. Lewis, who became acting president in 1919 and did not relinquish control for nearly a half-century...
...On April 1, about two months before Lewis's death and Boyle's emplacement as trustee, Boyle was reported in the UMW Journal as saying: "If the coal miners want more benefits and higher pensions there is a simple way to get these things...
...It was an unusual meeting in several regards...
...For what purpose does the delegate arise...
...Given the violent history of the coal industry, the accord between the union and the operators in the past couple of decades may be taken as an edifying, not to say flagrant, example of what used to be called enlightened self-interest...
...In his book Men and Coal, McAlister Coleman gives this description of a typical union convention of the 1920s: Following the opening prayer and the ad dress of welcome by the mayor of the city where the convention was held, the first or der of business was to have the chairman instruct the sergeant at arms to eject Powers Hapgood and other insurgents from the hall...
...Why did he wait until 1969 to stop playing...
...A week and a half after his death, Tony Boyle had himself named the new trustee, and a day later, June 24, he called a meeting of the fund's trustees...
...In the 1930s, it was Lewis who began the great campaign to Organize the Unorganized, sending out apostles like John Brophy, Powers Hapgood, Van Bittner, and Philip Murray to organize steel, auto, rubber, and to build the CIO...
...Miss Roche, far from supporting Boyle's move, opposed it vehemently, not out of niggardliness toward old miners, but because the pension fund's income, already below its expenditures, could not bear the additional outlay of $30 million a year...
...With every sign of perturbation, William Green, in the first years of the dec ade, would read his treasurer's report, skip ping hurriedly over the "miscellaneous" sec tion of the expenses of the national office...
...Over the years, the benefits available to miners and their families have not kept pace with similar programs in other unions, and the fund's regulations have been changed in arbitrary and bewildering ways...
...Union funds and "organizers" went to work for the Boyle campaign...
...Boyle and his cohorts, full of reverence for John L. Lewis, are attempting to kick Trbovich (a 50-year-old veteran of 25 years in the mines with a case of pneumoconiosis to prove it) out of the UMW on the grounds that he is practicing dual unionism —exactly the charge that the AFL raised against Lewis more than 30 years ago...
...Demand for coal is on the rise, and so is its price...
...Among those urging him to make the race were Ken Hechier, a strenuously anti-Boyle congressman from West Virginia, and Ralph Nader...
...During the war he defied everyone—and his men stayed with him...
...it was good and filling...
...He broke with the AFL and then with the CIO...
...Even Lewis, with all his bravura and shrewdness, was affected by this in-built dilemma, and the lesser men who took over from him have not been disposed to do anything that might disturb the flow of company payments—especially when the fund's assets could then be transmuted into union assets and employed to keep its officers in office...
...It needs exorcism as well...
...Since 1952, they have paid into it 400 for every ton of coal produced...
...He hit hard at gangsterism, nepotism, and sweetheart contracts...
...He was named acting director of Labor's Non-Partisan League, the union's lobbying arm, three weeks before announcing his candidacy on May 29, 1969...
...Trbovich and the Miners for Democracy, full of reverence for John L. Lewis, are resorting to the arms of government which he disdained and repeatedly defied...
...Belatedly, the workings of the UMW are being opened to inspection, and much of what Jock Yablonski had charged is being confirmed...
...Lewis liked it that way...
...Yablonski had been a member of UMW officialdom for many years, starting out as president of a Pennsylvania local and moving up to a place on the union's international executive board...
...In July, the Justice Department finally brought to court its long-pending case against the UMW "trusteeship" system, which has deprived regional districts of autonomy for decades...
...He said, `I can't just walk away from it...
...On his retirement in 1959, the office passed to an ailing Thomas Kennedy, and from him to a group of Lewis hangers-on headed by Tony Boyle...
...the children play in more wholesome surroundings than city streets...
...Many members were required or permitted to THE SAD LEGACY OF JOHN L. LEWIS pleas by Yablonski supporters to supervise the election, took action to set aside the results as fraudulent.3 A number of local UMW officials have been convicted of embezzling union funds in behalf of the Boyle campaign, and Boyle himself is under indictment for his use of union money...
...Our meal was served by the miner's 17-year-old daughter because his wife, who had prepared it, was off at her job...
...It was held not in the fund's office, but in a UMW office...
...By 1890, when the UMW was created, the coal miners already had earned their title as the "shock troops of American labor...
...Tony Boyle was a bank director...
...Although in his organizing years Lewis was an inspiration to many young union builders, he broke with the most independent of his followers and gathered around him the kinds of yes-men who live comfortably with despots...
...Last June, Claude E. Vealey, one of five accused of the murder, pleaded guilty and said that a man named "Tony," otherwise unidentified, had ordered and paid for the killings...
...The latest contract will bring skilled miners up to $50 a day...
...Each day's pay is important, and everybody works...
...Some locals failed to hold the election at all...
...There is only the rarest need for any legal advice or work...
...He would point suddenly at a Communist in the gallery and intone: "All day there has lurked in that gallery the arch prince of communism in the United States who makes his annual visits to Moscow to make his reports and receive his orders...
...The insurgents—through Yablonski's two lawyer sons, Kenneth and Joseph, and the ever-reliable Joseph Rauh—had repeatedly petitioned the Department of Labor during the campaign to investigate their charges against Boyle & Co., but it was not until after the murders that the government roused itself to the job...
...He was an unabashed autocrat—and in his early years the union needed the strong personal control he brought to it...
...today there are about 100,000...
...The miners are still good union men, but their union needs more than reform...
...The show of rank-and-file defiance in West Virginia was the spark that set off Yablonski's effort to end Boyle's rule...
...Her uncle gets $25,000 plus expenses as president of District 27, based in Billings, Montana...
...office in Billings is composed of four small rooms, with only one lady— not Miss Boyle—in attendance...
...As a matter of embarrassing fact, Tony Boyle had few more dedicated publicists in early 1969 than Jock Yablonski...
...Whatever vouchers are submitted are paid without question...
...They're not representing the miners," charges Ken Yablonski...
...Ironies intrude...
...John Lewis's biographer, Saul Alinsky, discerned this in 1949: "The welfare fund is dependent upon coal production, and stoppage of the latter also means the cessation of payments to the fund...
...Of 4,200 miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia examined as part of a government survey, 40 percent showed evidence of the disease...
...A few weeks before his murder, Yablonski had lost his try for presidency of the union to the incumbent, W. A. ("Tony") Boyle...
...Three local officials have lately been convicted of this kind of hanky-panky and Boyle himself faces an array of related charges...
...The Journal, a house organ of the hierarchy, had to be forced by a court order to cover the Yablonski campaign...
...The houses are not Great Neck, but they are a match for suburban communities not usually deemed disaster areas...
...They're working 24 hours a day for Tony Boyle...
...the miner's skills and self-reliance, and his dependence on his mates...
...Boyle says that, to the best of his recollection, he never told Judy any such thing—"but, if I did, it was said in a joking manner, or jest...
...In the 1920s and 1930s, he took over leadership of most of his union's districts in order to prevent the coal operators from playing off one against the other in piecemeal bargaining...
...Still, there isn't much financial margin for the miners' families...
...In West Virginia, with 55,000 union members, not a single district official is elected by the men he ostensibly represents...
...and a "neutral" third party, Miss Josephine Roche who was in fact a crony of Lewis...
...Boyle declared: "We're not going to destroy the coal industry to satisfy the frantic rantings of self-appointed and ill-informed saviors of coal miners...
...other fuels were thought to be taking over...
...But it is certainly of epidemic proportions...
...Their concerns center, instead, on • The perquisites of office...
...From the beginning, the fund has been supported by a tax on the coal operators...
...President Boyle and Secretary-Treasurer John Owens have blood relatives holding down high-paid union jobs...
...Boyle, a former coal miner from Montana, became UMW president in 1963, and inherited a structure that invited misuse by just such as he...
...labor relations, introducing to this country the kinds of benefits that the socialist government was then bringing to Britain's workers...
...the freedom from direct supervision and the sense of the company as an outside force...
...Members were denied the right to support candidates without being subject to reprisal...
...Coal-mining is celebrated for its high death and injury rate—three times as high as manufacturing industries and 50 percent higher than the hazardous construction trades...
...The maintenance of power...
...It was attended by several union officials in addition to Boyle, but it was not attended by Josephine Roche, the most experienced trustee, who was recovering from a hip injury...
...There have been 100,000 deaths in coal mines in this century and many hundreds of thousands of disabling injuries...
...Indeed, when 78 workers were killed in 1968 in a Consolidation mine at Farmington, West Virginia, President Boyle took the occasion to praise the company for its safety record...
...and the president of the United Mine Workers...
...The UMW owns 74 percent of the stock in that bank, and was earning $1.5 million a year from its operations...
...When a blacklung bill was passed, the UMW Journal, which had managed to ignore the subject for many years, took credit unto President Boyle...
...He is not bound for the Ivy League, but he will not be going into the mines either...
...With provisions for medical care, disability payments, a pension, and cash for survivors, it was referred to by miners as their "before the womb and after the tomb" program...
...Thus, earnings that would have gone into the pension fund had the $74 million been sensiTHE SAD LEGACY OF JOHN L. LEWIS bly invested were going into the union coffers instead...
...The surrounding country is very pleasant, except where the strip-mining machines have had their way...
...Holding fast to the public address amplifier on the platform, Lewis would boom his defiance of the opposition...
...He broke with Franklin Roosevelt,' and with many of his closest associates in the UMW and other unions...
...and wearied delegates, their expense money running low, were thinking about adjournment, the Lewis forces, often defeated in the opening days, would put through quick motions for reconsiderations of measures which the opposition had previously passed...
...Just as an occasional disaster is required to call the nation's attention to conditions in its coal mines, so it was necessary that Joseph A. ("Jock") Yablonski, his wife, and daughter be murdered to call attention to conditions in the United Mine Workers of America...
...One set of concerns ranks higher with the miners and their families than with union leaders: the safety of the mines and the soundness of the workers' limbs and lungs...
...The latter job has been passed on to General Counsel Carey...
...During the 1920s, a bad decade for coal, he rallied his men with the slogan, "No backward step" and so forceful was the chief that his followers shouted it even in retreat...
...He was not above promising a big pension increase to WALTER GOODMAN anthracite miners...
...The miners, particularly those old enough to remember other times, are not unappreciative of what they now have...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
