MINERS FOR DEMOCRACY
Benson, H. W.
In the back seat, the coal miner sitting next to me said something about miners' caps. "No," said the driver, "we don't want any miners' caps at this convention." He kept his eye on the...
...Any ultraleftist radical can continue to enjoy a cultivated contempt for hard-hat city workers as a privileged labor aristocracy and still indulge a Marxistical taste by idealizing some imagined underground proletariat...
...We don't intend to stop," he said in Wheeling, "until Tony Boyle is behind bars where he belongs...
...Their union, they are convinced, doesn't protect them because, they say, their officials are in collusion with the mine owners...
...They had driven to Wheeling from mining towns throughout the whole region, paid their own travel expenses, food and motel...
...When Yablonski was killed and his followers were stunned by the tragedy, Rauh and Yablonski's two sons helped restore the movement's morale by legal actions that led finally to the court order for a governmentsupervised election in December 1972...
...In the rows of cars parked in the open fields, there was not one rusty jalopy...
...We are proud of our name: Miners for Democracy," one delegate said at Wheeling in 1972...
...When that future arrives, the whole thing usually is forgotten...
...Many hold him responsible for the degradation of their union, because, in destroying their rights, he turned it over to a self-serving officialdom that has betrayed them...
...If these miners succeed in reforming their union, it may induce laborites, liberals, and civil libertarians to notice those who strive for democracy in the labor movement...
...I've got to do it even though I will probably be killed...
...When you watched him, you knew these men could produce the talent necessary to run this union...
...they applauded enthusiastically...
...The Joy loader, which scoops out coal in smaller seams, costs somewhat less...
...The cost of a continuous mining machine, which gouges out the mine face with huge revolving conveyor cutters, is some $200,000...
...The MFD legal team forced the U.S...
...When the fanfare faded, payments dropped quickly to $50...
...He wore no jacket on that hot Saturday, May 27...
...later they chipped in $300 to help those who had come a long way...
...Today these pensioners are down to $30—and of that, $1.25 comes off for union dues...
...We are a mighty army, and we're going to win...
...He reminded me of my neighbor, a stocky 45-year-old East Side cabdriver, but he was a West Virginia coal miner...
...they halted other internal disciplinary trials against dissenters...
...His skin just split open...
...Arnold Miller, the MFD candidate for president, has been burned with battery acid...
...They all were insurgents, critics, rebels, which means that one instantly imagines people standing on chairs, demanding rights, in a raucous scramble for the floor...
...He kept his eye on the road...
...They acted with such dignity and self-possession that the whole affair might have seemed dull to anyone not aware of the deadly tension behind that decorum...
...MFD lawyers would not remain at the mercy of government officials who had repeatedly torpedoed miners' rights...
...Each district had been apportioned a voting quota determined by weighting the number of votes cast in the last UMW election modified by the number of votes probably stolen in that district...
...But in all the negotiations and deals among union officials, government officials, and judges, the complainant was the forgotten man...
...for honest administration of pension funds...
...No union opposition can mount an effective campaign against a ruthless officialdom with out using federal law to protect its internal rights...
...MFD lawyers, by contrast, brought suit against two trusteeships in other districts...
...The MFD chose Arnold Miller, Mike Trbovitch, and Harry Patrick to run for the three highest positions...
...Several candidates vied for the top spots, and the voting system was complicated...
...None of them has held national office before...
...Many had been down in the pits the day before...
...That scorn for democracy finally rendered the ranks incapable of guarding against death in the mines...
...The coal miners have been good to me," Yablonski then had said, "and I owe them something...
...The AFL—CIO West Virginia Federation of Labor also backed Kee, but with less enthusiasm...
...He could never know what was being cooked up behind his back...
...They are not UMW members and cannot run for union office...
...When he died, he was a member of the UMW International Executive Board, having served under Lewis and then Boyle, always part of the team...
...they are effective where other union reformers have failed...
...The rest of him was left behind with $400,000 worth of wrecked equipment, sprayed over with rock dust, and forgotten when they closed off that section...
...The Labor Department suit, under pressure, was concluded two weeks later, ending the seven trusteeships...
...They have moved men like Hechler and Rauh and others...
...Harry Patrick, run ning for Secretary-Treasurer, had one brother killed in a mine accident...
...A miner became a delegate to this convention just by coming and expressing solidarity with the MFD, so that a system of weighting ballots was essential to avoid an accidental unrepresentative majority in balloting...
...Something about the miners brings out the best in people...
...and that is virtually impossible with out expert legal aid...
...Above all, the platform demands a return of the union to membership control and restoration of autonomy in the districts...
...Not that they were a bunch of saints...
...they are miners...
...The point is that in a contest over choosing candidates, a hot fight over this system could have split the convention wide open...
...Without Rauh, the 1969 Yablonski cam paign would probably have foundered...
...for active miners' safety committees backed by the International...
...Hechler's main organizational support came from the Miners for Democracy...
...Perhaps the coal miners can teach us that labor power can be a force for social justice even when directed by rank-and-file workers against errant union officials...
...The driver was right...
...With him on your side in court, you may not always win...
...When he stepped down from the platform and passed the press table, this reporter shook his hand and said, "I'd like to express my admiration...
...for protection of the land against pollution and for the reclamation of areas devastated by uncontrolled strip mining...
...The vote assigned to each district was then divided equally among all delegates from that district...
...The remaining question is, how high did the murder conspiracy reach into the union officialdom...
...public law firm that handles miners' cases, with the help of two other dedicated lawyers, Clarice Feldman and Dan Edelman...
...Win or lose, Miners for Democ racy will undoubtedly achieve an important base in the union...
...When he first talked to me," said Rauh in Wheeling, "I was sure he was exaggerating...
...by May 10, 1972, they had won their case...
...Kee was actively supported by the UMW, which savagely attacked Hechler as antilabor...
...There were no miners' caps...
...He rejected that view...
...One district, heavily represented because it was close to the convention city, protested that it had not been assigned enough votes and demanded more...
...Leonard Woodcock is said to have expressed sympathy for their effort...
...Did he denounce the slick relationship between the coal operators and those charged with enforcing the safety laws —the Bureau of Mines...
...By this time, after convictions and confessions, it was legally established that the murderers had been hired with the aim of destroying the opposition in the United Mine Workers...
...In such accounts, the aspirations of the miners are not evidence of ambitions that may be stirring the nation, but nostalgic reMINERS FOR DEMOCRACY minders of the yearnings of men bypassed by history...
...They knew that thousands of other miners, and a broader public, were watching, wondering if these delegates could be trusted to select new men to run this once-great union...
...In the U.S...
...When you hear union men applaud passionately for demands that should be commonplace in any decent union, you wonder: what happened to this union, once the most progressive in the American labor movement, that a man must die to rededicate it to such basic needs...
...Coal miners are part of a new kind of alliance among unionists, public officials, and liberals, although they still lack outspoken support from within the labor movement...
...A federal court had ordered an election under government control...
...These miners seem ready to forget Lewis, at least for now...
...If James Morrissey had enjoyed rights in the National Maritime Union like those won in the UMW, he might be NMU National Secretary today...
...they blocked the use of union funds for the factional purposes of union officials...
...How do we know they really want democracy, these miners...
...I know of only one other...
...The answer is simply that democracy was destroyed...
...he seemed doomed in a one-sided fight...
...His car was a four-door sedan, only 3,800 miles on it, tastefully upholstered, no ashes or wrappers on the floor...
...And with the restoration of district autonomy, they will surely win some key district posts...
...For the first time, oppositionists were in court when the conditions of a supervised election were determined...
...They could complain to the Labor Department, which might (but usually did not) process their complaints or, in exceptional cases, might even sue in federal court to upset an election...
...It is comfortable for those who identify the labor movement exclusively with its officials to think of miners as a curiously unrepresentative breed of mavericks...
...Not many congressmen would dare to support union insurgents...
...Banjotwanging song and story tell of old-fashioned customs in a bygone day...
...but he turned out to be a retired anthracite miner, Charles Ned, almost 80...
...Coal miners, from this angle of vision, have yet to learn that union officials possess one virtue that transcends many (or all) defects: power...
...You sympathize, somewhat condescendingly, as you sympathize with the plight of the bald eagle...
...In the back seat, the coal miner sitting next to me said something about miners' caps...
...Ken works out of Charleston, West Virginia...
...some UMW districts had been under trusteeship for 30 years...
...There are many prolabor congressmen but few who have ever supported union reformers...
...It is customary, under these conditions, for the Labor Department to trade off the complainants' rights for a promise by union officials to be good boys in the future...
...With Rauh's help, Yablonski did remark ably well...
...they look just like men from Michigan auto plants or Pennsylvania steel mills...
...for medical aid to disabled miners and their families...
...9 mine exploded, and 78 men were killed...
...That combination of Rauh, the two Yablonski boys, and the Washington Project makes a formidable legal staff that has already won outstanding victories in federal court, bolstering the democratic rights not of miners alone but of all union members...
...Jock Yablonski showed the greatest kind of courage I have seen...
...but they will know you were there...
...The delegates had come to pick candidates for top office...
...Rauh keeps a composite photograph mounted on the wall of his room: underneath Jock's portrait is a picture of three graves of the man, his wife, and daughter, all murdered...
...The delegates were all working miners...
...A lot of critics charge that a member of Congress has no right to stick his nose into the internal affairs of a labor union...
...The fight was reaching its climax...
...His son Ken told the convention that after the 1969 election count his father had said, "I never lost an election in the UMW, and I didn't lose this one...
...But no one has ever questioned his talents as a lawyer...
...Did he stand up and demand an end to slaughter at the coal mines...
...they stopped an internal trial for "dual unionism...
...Before it adjourned the next day, Sunday, there were about 450...
...they are insurgents who were never part of the ruling machine...
...There were suit jackets despite the heat, white shirts and ties, and crazy-colored sport shirts...
...It was stolen...
...The miners have a right to hear 'their chief counsel," he said, "but I have nothing to do with picking candidates...
...CHIP) AND KENNETH YABLON sKI are both lawyers...
...Supreme Court on January 17, MFD attorneys won a landmark decision on union elections...
...The hall was quiet while the old man spoke...
...Two of those Duty miners saw a buddy smashed to death while pulling timbers with a Joy loader when the mine roof started working, and he didn't get out fast enough...
...All three speak in soft conversationaltones, without high-blown oratory, about death in the mines and de mocracy...
...When Dow Wilson and Lloyd Green were murdered for their reform fight in the Painters' Union, there was but a minor ripple of protest from the liberal-labor community...
...That image of miners as a race apart seems to fit almost everyone's political, ideological, or practical necessities...
...Joseph (Jock) Yablonski was 60 when he was murdered...
...Chip runs the Washington Project, a D.C...
...For the first time in more than 40 years, an opportunity loomed to restore union democracy for the coal miners...
...In these modem industrial underground factories you can get killed or permanently disabled...
...Yet, for every miner coughing out his black lung and facing rock falls, there is a hardhat building trades worker facing cancer from asbestos, liver and kidney failure from new chemicals in paints and coatings, and death from scaffold falls...
...there was not one paid official among them...
...But when the votes were tallied on May 9, Hechler won by a landslide, defeating Kee better than 2 to 1, or 50,000 to 24,500...
...For one thing, they say so...
...At UMW conventions over the decades, John L. Lewis would befuddle the delegates with oratory on the puzzling intricacies of democracy, heaping literarious scorn upon critics who wanted to elect district officials...
...That's one reason Rauh could accuse the Department of contributing to the murder by its "icy indifference...
...The Village Voice is particularly good at this sort of thing...
...I will work like hell for whoever you choose...
...Hechler, however, identified himself with the miners' opposition from the very beginning, when it was still only a tiny band around Yablonski...
...Mike Trbovitch, their man for vice-president, saw a close friend killed in a mine accident in May...
...When his congressional district was merged with another, taking in most of the state's coal-mining counties, Hechler faced an uphill primary battle against James Kee, MINERS FOR DEMOCRACY 637 638 whose family had held the fourth district seat since 1932 and who was backed by a strong Democratic machine...
...In other cases, MFD attorneys goaded the Labor Department into suing against a District 5 election...
...Nevertheless, the Labor Department delayed for five years before instituting suit against seven district trusteeships in 1964, only to permit its suit to meander through the courts without resolution for the next seven years...
...He recalled that it was exactly three years ago that he went to work for the miners' opposition after meeting Yablonski on May 27, 1969, when Jock spoke of his decision to run against Tony Boyle for president...
...He mentioned that his father and grandfather had both been coal miners...
...The objection was put to the delegates, calmly discussed, and withdrawn without rancor...
...They take home around $10,000 a year, maybe more...
...But he couldn't do that...
...In almost 40 years as an official, he had learned many secrets, which is undoubtedly why he had to die after breaking with the machine...
...Two delegates told me that in one of the largest coal mines in the world, 750 miners work full-time for the Clinchfield Coal Company in Duty, Virginia, in seams with enough coal to last, they estimate, 50 years...
...The fight in the miners' union and the death of his friend Jock was a bitter education for Joe Rauh in problems of union democracy...
...I have lived to learn that it was all an understatement...
...They are highly skilled machine operators and mechanics...
...the sleeves of his white shirt were neatly folded...
...Now they want officers who will return control to the rank and file...
...Here for the first time," said Hechler, I saw where Tony Boyle placed his priorities...
...Tony Boyle got up before the television cameras and, before a nationwide audience, used the occasion to apologize for the Consolidation Coal Co...
...Did he insist that Congress pass tough legislation on mine health and safety...
...It takes skilled operators to run them, and machinists, welders, electricians, and carpenters to keep the operations going...
...How green he was, he recalled, when he first went to Congress and turned over complaints from miners to UMW officials, ex pecting them to provide effective union service...
...In two days at the Wheeling convention there was not one laudatory reference to John L. No one felt compelled to intone that everything would be fine if only the great leader were still here...
...But it wasn't that way at all...
...It contains no wages plank but deals literally with life and death, calling for effective protection against cave-ins and gas explosions, black lung and other industrial diseases...
...636 Labor Department to pursue its case for autonomy in the UMW districts...
...When the Labor Department, under the pressure of a national scandal, finally agreed to sue against the 1969 miners' election, the MFD sought to intervene as an interested party so that H. W. BENSON the insurgents' case could be presented with vigor by their own representatives rather than by lackadaisical Labor Department attorneys who usually sought to conciliate the offending officials...
...After their dad's death, they helped the Miners for Yablonski to reorganize as the Miners for Democracy and continue the reform crusade...
...IN THESE DAYS of ethnic lore, coal miners often appear as the surviving remnants of some misplaced mountain clan, hillbillies, tobacco juice spitters, faces like worn leather, cracker-barrel philosophers...
...Rauh is a former chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action (currently vicechairman), an eminent liberal Democrat considered too "radical" by some liberals and too "liberal" by many radicals...
...In this view, coal miners are simple folk, not yet drawn out of the woods into the realism of modern power, like moonshiners quixotically resisting revenooers...
...He looked like a business agent from one of the construction H. W. BENSON trades...
...In the most moving of all the convention addresses, he told how Lewis, to wide acclaim, once boasted of "winning" pensions of $100 a month for the hard-coal men...
...That's what they kept saying at this convention...
...One delegate had come 1,500 miles from Nova Scotia...
...American miners are modern industrial workers...
...FOR THE FIRST TIME since the 1930s, a movement of rank-and-file workers has won effective public support in a fight to reform their union...
...I had the obligation to protect their interests...
...Still, remembering the great battles he did lead for the CIO and the miners, they will not denounce in public his legacy of authoritarianism...
...He weighed 225 pounds and all we could scrape out for burial in a plastic bag was about 40 pounds...
...In the interim, Yablonski was murdered...
...at first you didn't notice the shiny bald spot on the back of his head because he kept his hair so short...
...The miners' leader, Jock Yablonski, had been murdered two years before...
...It is my job to represent thousands of coal miners and their families...
...The miners have known a lifetime of strong-man and strong-arm rule...
...and after 40 years of authoritarianism, the union came to represent its officials at the expense of the members...
...The chairman was Karl Kafton, a blacklisted miner from Moundsville, West Virginia, who handled the sessions with exceptional tact, careful to treat every speaker with the same courtesy...
...It was like hitting a grape with a hammer," said the man who had been working the nearby shuttle car...
...No," said the driver, "we don't want any miners' caps at this convention...
...It is time to end all this Li'l Abner stuff...
...Karl Kafton is run ning for international executive board from the 10,000-member District 6. MINERS FOR DEMOCRACY JOE RAUH flew in from Washington on Saturday morning, addressed the convention, and left promptly...
...This is no time to brood over the past, they seem to be thinking, but to act for the future...
...and defend the safety record of the company...
...To get the UMW to do a proper job, they must restore internal democracy and oust its imperious officials...
...The steel cab that protected him could withstand tons of rock, but it was useless when the whole shelf fell...
...JOSEPH, JR...
...But they are not looking for a new set of bosses...
...The Labor Department resisted the MFD application, but the January 17 Supreme Court ruling established the right of complainants to intervene...
...He had only to sit back a little longer and retire in comfort...
...Up till then, unionists who were the victims of election fraud were denied status in court...
...All this explains why they all handled themselves with such selfrestraint...
...The LandrumGriffin Act, which took effect in 1959, presumes that trusteeships are invalid after 18 months...
...They don't pick and shovel, they don't smear boots in mule manure, they don't bathe in open wash tubs...
...He said nothing for a moment and then replied, "As you get older, you begin to ask yourself what you're doing with your life...
...The two men had hit it off, had become good friends, and spent long hours together during the campaign...
...On that day, Consolidation Coal No...
...It is a big chapter in current labor history...
...634 THE CONVENTION ADOPTED a platform readily because there was nothing much to argue about...
...MFD leaders were worried that their spokesmen would be in danger when they campaigned in isolated mining communities...
...Hazel Dickens, a folk singer from a West Virginia mining family, told the delegates that two brothers had died of black lung...
...Labor power is a force for social justice...
...Shuttle cars, which carry coal from the face, may run up to $100,000 with all their related accessory equipment...
...But something happened on November 20, 1968, that transformed Hechler from a run-of-the-mill liberal, casting proper votes at required moments, into a crusader for peoples' rights...
...When he finished, the men rose for a standing ovation...
...After the candidates had been chosen, there were rumors of election maneuverings, proposed deals—the usual stuff—but none of that created any crisis...
...his father lost a leg...
...he has black lung so bad he can no longer work at mining...
...Press, visitors, and staff brought the audience up to about 600...
...they voided moves by the officials to undercut the rights of oppositionists by constitutional amendments...
...He represents West Virginia in Congress...
...A white-haired old gentleman was intro duced from the platform...
...The wave of insurgency reaches everywhere among miners because they have almost all had personal connection with death and disaster...
...The story of the miners' revolt is not anthropology and folk lore...
...It took the Labor Department 12 years to accomplish what the MFD team finished in 10 months...
...The demeanor of these men was perhaps the most impressive aspect of their unofficial oppositionist convention...
...When we finished the trip from the Pittsburgh airport and arrived at Wheeling College, West Virginia, there were already some 375 miners in session for the founding convention of the Miners for Democracy...
...In contrast, when Benjamin Naumoff, a labor bureaucrats' bureaucrat, supervised the 1969 NMU election for the Labor Department, opposition leader Jim Morrissey first discovered the election rules in a press release from Naumoff's office...
...Ken Hechler shook a fist for emphasis...
Vol. 19 • September 1972 • No. 4
