WAR IN TUG RIVER VALLEY: A LONG AND BITTER MINERS' STRIKE
Mills, Nicolaus
Drive down Route 49 as it takes you through the coalfields of southern West Virginia and into Kentucky, and what catches your eye before anything else is the beauty of the land. Even in the late...
...As the spring began, Massey, which had at one point hired the Charleston public relations firm of Charles Ryan Associates, began to prove surprisingly vulnerable...
...Drive by a Massey coal mine during the day, and you see miles of chain-link fences and cement observation posts manned by uniformed guards with cameras...
...By March it seemed that the strike, now in its sixth month, might at last be resolved...
...I just hope the mine workers continue what is really a precedent-setting response...
...But this strike has brought with it special pressures, and a number of women have begun to meet in small groups to talk about the strike...
...They cared...
...Provided the NLRB upholds its preliminary determination, Massey's decentralization strategy will turn out to be an illegal labor practice...
...Fluor is responsible for providing technical training to more than 20,000 nonwhite workers in South Africa and for building one of that nation's most modern synthetic fuels plants...
...That agreement, the first in 20 years without a strike, brought 40 months of peace to much of the industry and gave the UMW added protection against nonunion workers...
...In its corporate campaign against Massey, the UMW has, however, started to make its greatest gains...
...Massey has made no secret about what it expects to gain by canceling panel rights...
...At the struck Massey mines personal relations between UMW workers and management had in the past been good, and at mines such as Tall Timbers, which in 1983 set production records, the relationship had been even better, with the company lavishing year-end bonuses on its workers...
...On April 24 the UMW scored its first legal victory...
...Even in the late summer the trees are darkgreen, and after a rain the mist rising out of the mountains hovers between the clouds and the tree line like smoke wrapped around long invisible strings...
...On the contrary, despite the hardship this strike has caused, the UMW's mood is one of confidence...
...Then, last June, Massey committed an even bigger publicity gaffe when Fluor Corporation, the international engineering firm that is one of Massey's parent companies, asked engineers from mothballed Massey mines in West Virginia to help design a coal-mining complex for mainland China...
...You could hear people talking back and forth, see others reach out to touch a hand...
...THE STRIKE STEMS from a decision made in late September 1984 by the Richmond-based Massey Coal Company not to sign the labor agreement the UMW reached with the Bituminous Coal Operators Association...
...On this second day of hauling coal, between 300 and 500 pickets were waiting for the coal trucks and the security-guard escort, and when the dust cleared, the company backed down again...
...Standing firm in its selective strike against Massey Coal is thus crucial for the UMW, which now has 45,000, of its total of 155,000 active members, idled by unemployment...
...The mismanagement that prompted Wheeling-Pittsburgh to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in its battle with the United Steelworkers does not exist here...
...They are talking about a time when "the coal companies treated the miners any way they wanted to...
...A victory, on the other hand, would demonstrate the viability of a selective strike strategy as opposed to an industry-wide strike, particularly when backed by a $70 million strike fund...
...At night the same mine sites, illuminated by flood lights, dominate the hills around them, while guards with CB radios note every car that stops...
...But the idea of asking their husbands to back down is never voiced...
...Americans are Free, Scabs Go Home...
...But from Massey the BCOA agreement elicited a declaration of war...
...Massey must for the present negotiate as a single employer...
...But there was something more to it as well, and it was driven home to me each time a car passed and we all ducked behind the sandbags that now protect the Samoyard pickets...
...But you cannot spend any time in the Tug River Valley without realizing that for the UMW strikers and their families, the battle with Massey has become a mission...
...nor did it hide its willingness to do everything it legally could to persuade the two utilities to purchase its coal elsewhere...
...I SPENT AN EVENING WITH PICKETS Outside the Samoyard mines in Kentucky...
...52...
...With its own security force in place and aided by the most sweeping injunction yet against the UMW—an order issued April 15, 1984, by U.S...
...Finally there is the determination of the UMW's strikers in West Virginia and Kentucky...
...Seeing the caravan come through the mountains, watching the cars with their headlights on stretch back along Route 49 as far as the eye could see was terribly moving...
...Not until the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, where an estimated 10,000 armed miners—the largest insurrection since the Civil War—surrendered to U.S...
...The opening stage began in October 1984 when, following Massey's refusal to accept overall corporate responsibility for its subsidiaries with UMW contracts, the union went out on selective strike...
...On Saturday March 16, in response to a request from the National Labor Relations Board, Federal District Court Judge Robert Staker issued a temporary restraining order banning mass picketing at Sprouse Creek and Rocky Hollow, and the following week Massey hauled more coal than ever during the strike...
...Then, just after the Sprouse Creek Processing Plant, the signs begin to hit you...
...But the union also believed that the strike fund it had been accumulating since 1983 would enable it to support its 1,100 Massey workers for as long as necessary...
...Trucks carrying mattresses and a portable food-service unit made it through the gates at Big Bear, but the bus turned back...
...They had seen what is easy to miss if you think this is an ordinary strike or you are a company manager who believes the remoteness of these coalfields works in your favor...
...For the rest of the month, the union kept up the demonstrations that had changed the tenor of the strike and brought favorable publicity...
...What has changed the landscape of the Tug River Valley is a strike by the United Mine Workers against A. T. Massey, the nation's sixth largest coal producer, which has been going on since October 1984...
...The poster outside the barbershop of UMW wife Cookie Smith— "God, America, the UMWA—Without These There Can Never Be Freedom"—sums up the way patriotism and the winning of this strike have merged for the mine workers...
...By the very intensity of their response they had become the givers...
...Months ago, when tension ran particularly high, the Chicago-based firm of Gardner Stern, Jr., a company that specializes in "scab catering," helicoptered in hot meals for the Massey guards...
...But with the UMW and Massey at the bargaining table and Governor Arch Moore working to settle the strike, the judge chose to delay ruling on Massey's requests...
...A golf course close by a train yard...
...FOR A UNION THAT IN THE PAST has relied on short industrywide strikes, this is not an easy position to be in, and it is made all the more difficult by the knowledge that coal still would not be moving in Mingo and Pike counties if Massey were not able to rely on court injunctions and state troopers protecting scabs...
...They are convinced that their lives have been put in jeopardy by Massey Coal...
...Massey continued making sporadic attempts to haul coal, but each time it was thwarted...
...Last June informational leaflets passed out at Shell gas stations in Wheeling had an immediate impact on its customers, who did not hesitate to take their business elsewhere, and for the coming months the UMW is preparing to link its campaign against Fluor and Shell to South African protests throughout the nation...
...The union could no longer count on the presence of UMW pickets to stop nonunion workers from going down into the mines...
...But in the end, it did not matter where any of the Auto Workers had been raised...
...At this point, however, the UMW could not afford to remain inactive...
...Shell owns 50 percent of the Rietspruit mine in South Africa, which employs more than 1,000 workers and produces over 5 million tons of coal for export each year...
...Later, when I spoke with a group of Auto Workers at a picnic given on their behalf by the UMW, they were still talking about the impact their arrival had had on them...
...On Thursday a convoy of coal trucks plowed into 14 UMW vehicles parked along the road leading to Sprouse Creek, and on Friday the violence continued when a coal truck smashed into a car carrying four UMW strikers...
...The striking mine workers are the guerrilla enemy to be overcome...
...Victory would make it clear that the UMW was not going to let itself fall victim to "a corporate shell game" in which coal producer after coal producer denies responsibility for its subsidiaries...
...Welcome to Poland...
...Among the UMW's rank and file there is also a prevailing belief that, as Bill Davis, president of Local 1440, observed, "Right here the battle for the future of organized labor is being fought for everyone else...
...Just how vulnerable Massey's utility customers are was made clear last August at the United Auto Workers' "Motown to Coaltown" rally...
...Earlier in the year one of them, Judy Mullins, had been wounded in the hand by shots fired from a passing van, and the men on picket duty that night pointed out the bullet holes in the doorway where she was standing...
...For them that life was humiliating, and when they say they are determined to take no steps backward in this strike, they are not just talking about a contract...
...Two lines of strikers, one coming from the east and the other from the west, converged on Sprouse Creek and stopped all coal deliveries...
...It is a war like the mine wars that occurred here over 60 years ago when the UMW was struggling for recognition in southern West Virginia...
...District Judge Dennis Knapp forbidding mass picketing at all Massey facilities—Massey felt free to begin hiring nonunion miners to replace UMW miners...
...On March 4 UMW strikers stopped trains from leaving the Sprouse Creek plant by walking along the rails, and the following week, when Massey tried to haul coal by truck, the UMW unveiled a new tactic—the "serpentine...
...It is a view that the UMW's supporters in the labor movement, particularly the United Auto Workers (which last August staged a "Motown to Coaltown" rally in which a 217-car caravan brought more than $50,000 in food and clothing to West Virginia), have begun to express with increasing frequency...
...For the UMW, which had so carefully put in place its nonviolent campaign, Judge Staker's restraining order, following the assault on its own men, was a double blow...
...The most vulnerable of the new Massey employees, the coal haulers, do not dare drive at night nor in 45 trucks unprotected by bullet-proof plastic across their windshields...
...At a March 22 news conference West Virginia Governor Arch Moore said that "all of the issues" involving West Virginia "are coneluded," and a month later UMW President Richard Trumka was just as optimistic...
...Cross over to the Kentucky side of the Tug River, and the signs become small billboards...
...since being taken over in 1980 by Fluor Corporation and Royal Dutch/Shell, the company has acquired cash reserves of $680 million...
...At the time the UMW was convinced, as its president Richard Trumka, a 36-year-old lawyer and former miner, told a strike rally in early October '84, "It's not going to be a first-round 46 knockout...
...Without such a transfer system—or paneling system, as it is known in the industry—a miner would, when the coal seam he was working on gave out, go back to the status he had on first entering the mines, and a company could acquire workers for whom it had no pension obligations and to whom it could pay starting rates no matter what their real experience...
...The white mansions and rolling lawns of coal executives not far from the trailer homes of coal workers...
...Nine days later photos taken at Massey's Sprouse Creek complex revealed the presence of an armored personnel carrier, an M-113 APC, its turret covered by a tarpaulin...
...Like the American army in Vietnam, Massey has been able to alter the countryside, to put in place its own version of a strategic-hamlets program...
...AGAIN THE UMW COUNTERED WITH BLOCKADES, but this time the nonviolent tactics were not enough...
...Stage two was over...
...On Wednesday Massey announced there would be no work for nonunion employees at Sprouse Creek, Rocky Hollow, or Rawl Sales...
...With a group of UMW miners and their families, I watched the caravan of UAW cars snake through the West Virginia mountains and cross the Matewan Bridge into Kentucky...
...As the fall began, events moved ahead smoothly from the UMW's point of view...
...On Wednesday, with only 150 pickets on the scene, Massey made a token attempt to run coal, but this time a union sitdown made delivery impossible, and on Thursday, the UMW once again showed up in force...
...In the future, Massey declared, its unionized subsidiaries would negotiate separately with the UMW Massey knew the UMW could not accept such a demand...
...There's no place else to work...
...but with the spotlight now turned on Mingo County and additional police on the scene, Massey made a second try at breaking the strike...
...It is not just a strike the mine workers are engaged in...
...stage three had started...
...Throughout the fall strikers posted at the Massey mines kept up friendly relations with the salaried Massey employees who continued working...
...Rather there was an instant awareness of what their coming meant...
...Defeat would accelerate decentralization in the coal industry and signal other producers that Massey's strategy is the way out of pension obligations and union troubles...
...The most frightened, they are also the most dangerous of the Massey strikebreakers, the ones you most often see brandishing weapons...
...But behind them, stretching a quartermile down the road, were more than 800 other UMW strikers, singing, "We Shall Not Be Moved...
...Given the clashes that had stopped coal delivery the week before, this announcement could only be expected to heighten tension...
...Don't Sell Out Like a Fool," one says, and next to the inscription is a cartoon scab dressed in a green Santa Claus suit...
...In his left hand, dollar bills...
...It's part of their strategy to incite, hoping to win public opinion and gain a legal foothold," Nelson told reporters...
...Ayatollah Massey...
...In an era when unemployment is high and unions represent only 19 percent of the labor force, it is fashionable to talk about workers who do not trust their own leaders and for whom solidarity is as remote as the 1930s...
...On the company grounds trailers have been set up to provide housing for security guards afraid to live in the prounion towns and hollows surrounding the Massey mines...
...This is a landscape of incongruities...
...Instead of expressing concern over the impact of disinvestment in West Virginia, where the 16 percent unemployment rate is double that of the rest of the country, E. Morgan Massey, president of Massey coal, used the China venture to point up what Massey could do if it did not get its way in West Virginia...
...For a union whose members still wear baseball hats that say, "God, Guns, and Guts Built the UMWA," it was an unprecedented strategy, and on Tuesday, when another massive turnout, this one joined by UMW wives, showed up, there was again no activity at Sprouse Creek...
...From the perspective of the mine workers, what mattered was that they had come...
...As one miner put it, "Our families are here, our homes, our jobs...
...Not only have Massey's coal-production capacities risen from 16 million tons per year in 1978 to a current level of 23 million tons...
...What I was really being shown was what the bullets hadn't touched: how, if they had created fears, they hadn't created doubts about the strike...
...They go to the feeling the UMW strikers have of being treated not as Americans but as a Third-World population...
...Unlike Great Britain's National Union of Mineworkers, it has not gotten itself into a no-win confrontation with the government, nor has it allowed a split to develop in its ranks between striking and nonstriking miners...
...For the UMW the result is a strike that has already been through three distinct stages, and is now in stage four...
...You can't discipline union miners, and you can't discharge them, so you have to be able to purge your work force of unproductive elements in some way," Don Blankenship, Massey's highestranking officer in West Virginia and Kentucky, told reporters last June...
...Pickets and supervisors began informal discussions about resuming operations...
...Army troops was the UMW stopped in its effort to unionize southern West Virginia...
...They're trying to take everything away from us...
...But beyond that, it reflected what at this stage in the strike the UMW sees as Massey's Achilles heel—the image of both its parent companies, Fluor and Royal Dutch/Shell, and that of the giant utilities that buy Massey coal...
...Multinational corporations do not have a great deal of national loyalty and even less loyalty to southern West Virginia," Massey told reporters...
...Parking cars and vans in a serpentine pattern along the road leading to Sprouse Creek, the UMW strikers made coal delivery impossible...
...On Wednesday March 13, with more than 100 Kentucky police providing convoy protection and Massey security guards and helicopters on the scene, the company hauled coal in quantity for the first time since the strike began...
...Public sympathy for the UMW continued...
...The union and Massey had, he was convinced, "negotiated an agreement in principle...
...Tuesday's confrontation had, however, set off shock waves throughout the state...
...That feeling was reflected in the tears you saw some of the mine workers fighting back, in the cheers, so deeply personal that you heard them 51 as individual voices...
...For the UAW workers, who had been on the road since 8:00 Friday evening and would have to start back for Detroit by early Sunday, it was a moment they had every right to bask in...
...The Massey strike thus provides a clear test of a union's ability to withstand a company's calculated effort to destroy it, to sacrifice job security for higher investment returns...
...They had come face to face with the fact that in this strike whole families—parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents— still talk about life in the Tug River Valley before they had a union...
...It was the kind of evidence you would expect a sympathetic reporter to be shown...
...I found the same determination among the strikers' wives...
...But the worst was yet to come...
...There was nothing for the haulers Massey had hired to do except remain locked inside their trucks as demonstrators milled around them...
...What appeared to be the end of the strike was the start of what has become its fourth stage...
...In this one-industry area, there are few two-paycheck families, so out of both necessity and tradition the strikers' wives are deeply involved in what is happening to their husbands...
...Surprised Massey officials continued to maintain that nothing had changed in their bargaining position, but on February 25, a week after the UMW's civil-rights-style protests, the company was at the bargaining table seriously negotiating...
...James Slater, president of the Sprouse Creek Processing Company, ran ads in the local paper announcing that on February 18 Massey would begin hiring new workers to replace any UMW employees who did not report for work at Sprouse Creek by 7:30 that morning...
...Both Governor Moore and UMW President Trumka, it turned out, had been too hopeful...
...In mid-April the owner of one of the security firms working for Massey was arrested for importing a pistol with the numbers chiseled off and soliciting an undercover federal agent to break the arms and legs of a UMW organizer...
...It is no coincidence that for so many miners army camouflage T-shirts and fatigue pants have become the uniform of the day...
...In West Virginia the media discovered a major story, and Governor Arch Moore announced that more state police would be sent to Mingo County...
...Worse still, it could not physically confront Massey in the coalfields without risking fines that would endanger its $70 million strike fund...
...The only hints of trouble were the armed guards Massey began hiring in mid-December and the company's request, granted January 2 by Mingo County Judge Elliott Maynard, for an injunction limiting the number of UMW pickets at a series of mines...
...The irony was that meanwhile negotiations were going so well that for once public events seemed secondary...
...The UMW wives know it is necessary to try to shield their children from the frustrations their husbands are feeling, and especially on holidays and birthdays they feel the pain of not having a regular paycheck...
...The rest travel in convoys, on the Kentucky side counting on state troopers to ride shotgun for them, on the West Virginia side relying on luck and Massey security guards...
...In a state already worried about an international situation that allows foreign coal to be exported for as much as $8 less per ton than American coal, Massey's declaration seemed designed to rub salt into deep wounds...
...Courtesy Marat Moore, UMW Journal 49 The next UMW battles with Massey would be in the courtroom and in the union's corporate campaign, designed to bring public pressure on the company...
...Some UAW men had roots in West Virginia and Kentucky...
...Around his feet, a ball and chain...
...But even now it was welcome news for the union, which has contended that in the recent past the NLRB had been far more concerned with "addressing employer complaints than the underlying causes of the strike itself...
...For the rest of the labor movement the implications of the Massey strike are no less serious...
...When the women express anger, it is at the company for the suffering it is causing and for the hate they see rising up in their children, whose frustration often takes the form of "rocking" the trucks of nonunion coal haulers...
...How deep these feelings are came through again on August 10, the Saturday before I left, when more than 400 United Auto Workers arrived with food and clothing...
...For Massey there was, however, no pulling Courtesy Murat Moore, UMW Journal 48 back...
...This was, however, the last week the UMW would be able to control the strike by using nonviolent protest...
...For the remainder of that week in February '85, no coal moved at any of the struck Massey mines...
...On March 27 Judge Elliott Maynard announced that for violating his January injunction limiting to 10 the number of pickets allowed at Sprouse Creek and Rocky Hollow, the UMW would be fined $200,000 for the demonstrations it had staged between February 18 and 28...
...Even more crucial is the UMW corporate campaign against Fluor and Royal Dutch/Shell...
...Without intending to, the UMW miners and their families had for the moment reversed things...
...The UMW, through its corporate campaign, has pointed up what it means to do business with Massey...
...The UAW, which sees the Massey strike as part of a much broader antiunion drive, made no secret of its anger about the fact that Detroit Edison and Consolidated Power of Michigan are Massey customers...
...On February 28 the company's lawyers were back in court, this time asking Judge Maynard for a stricter injunction against UMW picketing and for a contempt ruling on the basis of damage UMW strikers had allegedly caused...
...In his right hand, a skull and bones...
...State Senator Robert Nelson, mindful of the negotiations going on, condemned Massey's effort to run coal...
...This time the war the UMW is caught up in is best described in terms of Vietnam rather than World War I. With its $200,000 per month "security" budget, Massey Coal has bought the kinds of equipment—helicopters, an armored personnel carrier—that one associates with a military operation...
...The UAW workers did not have to be bringing anything...
...The 50 UMW is not, however, a union out of touch with political reality...
...The few truckers willing to drive alone barrel across backroads at tremendous speed...
...But as they drew abreast of the Matewan Bridge and saw the response, there was no basking in the role of givers...
...Now with injunctions and fines limiting UMW pickets, Stern's catering is gone, but traffic still moves in and out of the mines like a military operation...
...As ordered, the 48 UMW workers at Sprouse Creek showed up at the company gates...
...THE FIRST INDICATION that the calm of stage one of the strike was over came on January 24, when a bus bringing in what UMW pickets judged to be nonunion miners and Massey claimed was beefed-up security, was stopped by 200 strikers at the entrance to Big Bear Mines...
...Had it come earlier in the strike, this might have been of more use to the UMW...
...In order to maintain their reemployment and pension rights, miners work on a system that allows them, when a company closes a mine, to move on to another company mine on the basis of their seniority...
...The signs along the backroads that compare Massey to the Ayatollah Khomeini and suggest that the coalfields of the Tug River Valley have become like Poland and Iran are not just hyperbole...
...Then, 18 days later, Massey announced that a trucking firm had been hired to haul stockpiles of coal to its processing plant at Sprouse Creek, and on February 12, one day after the hauling began, the strike exploded into a confrontation that would characterize its second stage...
...The union's answer was a page from the 1960s—a massive civil-rights-style protest that made business as usual at Sprouse Creek impossible...
...The National Labor Relations Board made a preliminary determination upholding the UMW's contention that Massey was in fact the common employer for all the mine operations it owned...
...UMW members were not about to cross their own picket lines and until January '85 Massey made no attempt to bring in strikebreakers...
...The UMW was now in its most vulnerable position since the strike began...
...For Massey, on the other hand, it was a time to salvage what it 47 could...
...At that time Mingo County acquired the name "Bloody Mingo," and the mine workers of West Virginia fought gun battles with the Baldwin-Felts detective agency as well as with the West Virginia state police...
...Jerry Renfro, who had driven the lead car, had been born in Mingo County and remembered realizing as a child one year, "If it hadn't been for the union, there wouldn't have been Christmas...
...The car caravan, which had been moving slowly through the mountains, now came to an almost complete standstill...
...With its enormous strike fund—its rank and file paid for it with a 2.5 percent assessment of their wages—the UMW has the reserves for a long battle, and with its corporate campaign it can make life hard for Massey's parent companies...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
