Solidarity in Virginia

...The result has been layoffs for 4,000 UMW miners...

...What the UMW got in the contract its rank and file ratified by a 63 percent margin this February is, however, a package that not only provides needed health protection but a pay raise and safeguards preventing Pittston from turning its union mines into nonunion operations...

...As she put it, "My husband is forty-two years old...

...But his arrest also sent a clear message to Pittston and to anyone watching events from Washington...

...We are an unarmed group...

...The subject of "Let Me In" is a child whose striking father has been put in jail...

...When Gentry, as one of the men most affected by Pittston's cutoff of health benefits, was arrested, it said much about his personal courage...

...Now there is new building everywhere, even a bunk house for visitors...

...Health benefits will be paid at 100 percent...

...Pittston's withdrawal from the BCOA allowed it to stop payments in early 1988 into a multi-employer health and pension fund begun in 1950 by John L. Lewis in an agreement allowing the BCOA to modernize (it would eventually cost the UMW 300,000 jobs...

...It can't just be the middleclassing of American journalism...

...Wages: No givebacks...

...The ICTU's usual focus is on labor disputes in countries like South Africa and Chile, but when in response to the UMW's request for support it sent a delegation to America that included a representative from Poland's Solidarity, the Bush administration found itself in a difficult position...

...Her best known song, "Let Me In," is called the "Camo Song" by those who have heard it...

...On the domestic front the UMW, nonetheless, moved quickly to make sure its own rank and file was not economically bled to death...

...Profit sharing: During the first year of the contract, union and company officials will meet to see if such a plan can be agreed upon...

...Job security: Laid-off UMW members must be hired for the first four out of five job openings at Pittston's nonunion mines...

...When Douglas took over Pittston, President Reagan's breaking of the 1981 air traffic controllers union was still a vivid memory, and when Pittston finally forced a strike on the UMW, there was every reason to believe it would have the support of the Bush administraSPRING • 1990 • 239 Solidarity in Virginia tion...

...Notebook I: The countryside...

...to 4:00 P.M...

...At the entrance to Moss 3, the men are staying in a wafer-board shack and keep warm with a wood-burning stove...

...The September sit-in at Moss 3 was the most dramatic sign of UMW resurgence, but there were other signs as well...

...But nothing like that followed...

...Just as the miners occupying Moss 3 had dressed alike, so the wives occupying Pittston's headquarters refused to use their real names...

...To themselves and to the police, they were all Mother Jones...

...When the company or state police use camera surveillance, at a distance every striker looks alike...

...By Friday the 13th Dole was in Virginia, checking on the Pittston strike first-hand...

...It could buy extra coking coal from rivals, but it had put itself in a very unstable position as a Japanese supplier...

...Notebook II: Hidden blessings...

...But most everything else I read is white bread...

...In November a write-in campaign by Jackie Stump, the President of UMW District 28, won him election to the Virginia House of Delegates in an upset victory over the father of an anti-union judge...

...The result was that the UMW leadership could wage a war of attrition against Pittston without having to worry about internal problems...

...Usery, Jr...

...I drive to Camp Solidarity, where they are having a dinner honoring the ninety-nine men who occupied Moss 3. Before the strike began, 238 • DISSENT Solidarity in Virginia Strikers in camouflage face state troopers in a nonviolent action...

...It's made of two nails twisted together and welded at their center...

...Anything more is overkill, a sign that you haven't persuaded anybody...

...Pittston's decision to take on the UMW is consistent with the way it has been run since 1984, when Paul Douglas, son of the late Illinois Senator Paul H. Douglas, a longtime friend of labor, became its chairman and CEO...

...In turn mine workers will have access to a four-day, ten-hour schedule, which will provide them with fifty-two fewer working days per year...

...Then all it would take to keep production at near-normal levels were some replacement workers...

...Without backup, the Vance guards, so easily recognizable in their blue jumpsuits, were in no mood for a fight...

...Who's going to hire him for another job...

...With a strike fund of over $100 million, the union was able to pay strikers $225 weekly and by the year's end come through with a Christmas bonus of $1,000...

...Every working miner and pensioner under age sixty-five will be sent a $500 benefit check every six months...

...Theirs expired," Pittston spokesman William Byrne told reporters...

...Paul, himself a striking miner, had no trouble getting the town to let the UMW use its football field for a Labor Day rally...

...There is a practical side to the camouflage as well...

...What has not surprised her, however, is the music itself...

...By nightfall there was a crowd of over 2,000 acting as a human shield for the men inside...

...At the same time, while Pittston was losing 240 • DISSENT Solidarity in Virginia momentum, the UMW, after a series of early setbacks, was gaining it...

...After meeting with UMW officials on Wednesday, October 11, the ICTU delegation met with Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole on Thursday...

...With 57 percent of its coal exports going to Japanese steel companies, Pittston was extremely vulnerable to any loss in production...

...Then on Saturday calls went out for car caravans from three states to leave in staggered intervals for a Sunday rendezvous in Virginia just a few miles away from Moss 3. The ninety-nine invaders-94 striking miners, four UMW staffers, and a Methodist minister—had come prepared for the worst...

...During the next three days, Pittston representatives and state police were allowed into the plant to check that nothing was being damaged...

...Then in October UMW Secretary-Treasurer John Banovic traveled to Japan to meet with Japanese union officials and get their support as well...

...A group of wives has brought dessert—apple pies, chocolate cakes, brownies...

...All that distinguished them was what number Mother Jones—one through 39—they took after beginning their occupation...

...Four years ago when I covered the UMW's Massey strike, everyone did picket duty from behind sandbagged bunkers...

...Governor Douglas Wilder went to work for one of the law firms hired by Pittston, would spend $1 million a month to provide Pittston with state trooper protection...

...By late fall Pittston production was one-third its normal rate, with its profits dropping, according to Business Week, by nearly $12 million for the first half of 1989...

...Most important of all, a ten-acre parcel of land, rented to the union for $1, quickly turned into Camp Solidarity, a 24-hour-a-day gathering place that for UMW members and their families became a home away from home...

...Pittston's belief that it could do to the UMW what it had done to the Teamsters at Brink's and Burlington was bolstered by the political atmosphere in which its union busting began...

...Unlike Gail Gentry, Edna Sauls has never worked in the mines...

...Tensions were running high...

...As soon as Moss 3 was occupied, UMW supporters quickly gathered at the plant entrance...

...The words come faster than I can write them down," she says...

...We're clearly prepared to go on indefinitely," a confident Paul Douglas declared as the strike finished its fifth month...

...Burke's words were meant to prevent Pittston's Vance security guards from panicking...

...For the UMW, the Pittston strike has been more than a needed victory...

...If Pittston coal production is subcontracted to another operator, nineteen out of twenty job openings at that operation must go to laid-off UMW Pittston miners...

...The key ingredient was winning support from the International Confederation of Trade Unions (ICTU), which represents eighty-eight million workers in ninetyseven countries...

...Gentry lives in a house near Moss 3 that in every way seems like what the house of a man who has made a decent living in the mines should be...

...The message they send is clear: for the UMW, this is a war of survival, not just a strike...

...Once he succeeded in doing both, Pittston Coal became his next target, despite the fact that since 1984 union productivity has gone up 67 percent from 12 to 20 tons a day per miner...

...One of the new heroes is Gail Gentry, the 2,000th person arrested after the strike began...

...The result was a wholly different administration scenario than with Eastern Airlines...

...Gentry's legs are paralyzed as a result of a 1978 mining accident, and the platform allows him to come and go (he drives a specially outfitted car) without assistance...

...The last thing the security guards at the Pittston Coal Company's Moss 3 preparation plant were expecting was the sight that greeted them: ninety-nine men in camouflage T-shirts and pants, wearing bright orange vests...

...Since April there had been more than 3,700 arrests of UMW members and their supporters, and in June 44,000 miners in nine states had walked off their jobs in a series of wildcat sympathy strikes...

...In guerrilla war as in labor war, I think the only military rule is that whichever side limits itself to small, cheap weapons wins...

...Nobody sits-in in the lobby of Pittston's Virginia headquarters these days, and the block letter sign, "UMW FOREVER," that appeared on the side of Moss 3 when the mine workers retook the plant is also gone...

...The mood of the UMW pickets in front of Moss 3 is upbeat...

...On the way to Moss 3, I drive past a golf course and a handlettered sign that says, "Let scab cancer spread, and the union is dead...

...What has not changed in four years are the camouflage shirts and pants...

...Top union scale goes to $17.52 per hour...

...I get a sense of what a quilting bee or a house raising must have felt like a century ago...

...In 1986 Pittston set up Pyxis Resources Company, a nonunion corporation to which it began selling and subcontracting its union operations...

...Like Gail Gentry's arrest, it seems part of a world she shares, not part of a world she invented...

...Before the summer was up, it got a commitment from John Maitland, general president of the Miners' Federation of Australia, that Australian coal, on which Japan also depends, would not be used to make up any Pittston shortfalls...

...It's a comfortable place...

...Now it found American labor policy under attack from an international delegation that included Solidarity...

...There were "chuckers" with gas masks and heavy gloves in case Pittston decided to retaliate with tear gas...

...It is the distancing of day-to-day life that suddenly feels unnatural...

...Missing from almost everything I read is a sense of what it means to be threatened with never working again, how you feel when men and women you've never met before bring you food, money, Christmas presents...

...In a strike that the UMW has kept as nonviolent as possible, jackrocks have, nonetheless, been used from time to time to puncture the tires of nonunion trucks hauling coal...

...on Sunday...

...I repeat, we are unarmed...

...Such bargaining might be fine within the corporate world but not in a union where history still mattered...

...This was not going to be a strike, the message said, in which one generation forgot another generation in order to cut a deal...

...Sauls was one of the . thirty-nine Daughters of Mother Jones who occupied Pittston headquarters in April, but what has brought her to the forefront in the Pittston strike is her music...

...The UMW's other foreign front was Europe, and here, even more than in Asia, history favored the union...

...Operation Flintstone," named in honor of the Auto Workers' Flint, Michigan, sitdown strike of 1936-37, had gone off without a hitch...

...I have now read virtually everything written on the Pittston strike over the last year...

...Not only did UMW workers stay out, the replacement workers Pittston brought in proved inept...

...The mayor of nearby St...

...When Pittston cut off health benefits to retirees, it struck a bad note to begin with in a country in which concern for the elderly is ingrained...

...In the rolling Virginia hills, the near treeless golf course seems out of place...

...The neighbor who was a familiar face, the man one saw only at union meetings now seem real flesh and blood...

...In early January, when I visited him, there were Christmas stockings still hanging from the mantle...

...Health benefits: Pittston will provide a lump-sum payment of $10 million into the UMW's 1950 benefit fund for miners who retired before 1976, and it will make the same contribution as other unionized companies into the UMW's multi-employer 1974 benefit fund, designed to protect beneficiaries whose companies have gone out of business...

...In the 1980s being a labor reporter for a daily newspaper in New York or Washington seems to to be as outmoded as being a radio repairman...

...The new agreement, which Wall Street coal analyst Joel Price of Donaldson, Lufkin & Genrette calls a "smashing defeat for Pittston," was one Douglas insisted the company "just couldn't be happier" with...

...If their medical expenses are under $500, they will, as a compensation bonus, be allowed to keep the balance of the $500...

...By the weekend, Dole had persuaded W.J...

...What is different about the Gentry house is the long wooden ramp leading up to the front door...

...When it lands, it does so like a child's jack, with at least one of its ends pointing up...

...To Sauls, who never composed music before the strike, the attention she has gotten has been a surprise...

...Next to them a complete set of Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia and next to the Encyclopedia, a gun rack filled with hunting rifles...

...Pittston can introduce a seven-day work week, however, by putting miners on a twenty-eight-day rotating schedule...

...At Christmas alone, the gifts earmarked for the Pittston miners came to $500,000— enough to provide $250 per family plus a special allowance for each child...

...It was a move Pittston had been attempting to bring about for fourteen months, and when it came, the company was ready...

...Hoping to gain new influence in Eastern Europe, it had championed Solidarity...

...Everyone curious about the details of the settlement, but what everyone talks about is the closeness the strike generated...

...A UMW diversion had drawn most of the Virginia State troopers in the area away from Moss 3. Within minutes the fifth-floor control room of Moss 3 was in union hands...

...UMW did not, however, let matters rest here...

...If the UMW had accepted what in June 1989 Pittston called its "last best offer," it would have meant not only the loss of jobs but the end of health plans on which its members rely...

...Then on Wednesday evening after a federal judge issued an order for the takeover to end, the ninety-nine Moss 3 occupiers left quietly, slipping into the crowd—by now 5,000—still gathered at the plant entrance...

...Whatever the reason, the price is high...

...The September sit-in was not the first time the UMW and its supporters had surprised Pittston officials by using tactics borrowed from the labor movement of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s...

...By contrast Pittston's negligence fines for a 1983 accident that cost seven miners their lives totaled $47,500...

...Pittston was still not through with its anti-union offensive, however...

...What changed Douglas, who if forced out at Pittston will, along with senior executives in his management team, share in a $4.1 million severance package...

...In this latter expectation Pittston had not miscalculated...

...On February 1, 1988, it canceled health benefits to 1,500 disabled miners and retirees covered by a company insurance plan...

...Small and inconspicuous by comparison with the weaponry of the Virginia state troopers (shotguns) or Vance security, it's a modern David's stone for fighting Goliath...

...The reaction of UMW rank and file to Pittston's attacks was outrage, but not until April 1989, after all mediation attempts had failed, did the UMW officially go on strike...

...But on New Year's day, as Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole announced an agreement had been reached between Pittston and the UMW, it was a very different Douglas who met with reporters...

...It was the sixth month of the UMW's strike against the Pittston Company, the leading coal producer in Virginia and the second largest exporter of coal in America...

...With an enormous security budget (company expenses would reach $20 million before the strike was over) Pittston was prepared to start running coal with replacement workers...

...UMW members will receive a $1.20 raise per hour over the life of their new contract, which extends until 1994...

...But as with the Vance guards, the precautions proved unnecessary...

...They had not been told the date of the sit-in or where it would occur...

...And the courts would act in similar fashion...

...Pittston's anti-union offensive began in 1987, when it announced it was withdrawing from the Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA), with which the UMW bargains collectively and which accounts for 35 percent of the nation's coal production...

...Usery to act as a "supermediator," and two months later, when Usery finally brought about a strike settlement, it was Dole herself, standing between UMW President Rich Trumka and Pittston's Paul Douglas, who made the announcement, promising a special commission would study the health and retirement problems facing the entire coal industry...

...The final key to the UMW's victory was, however, the two-front war it waged in Asia and Europe...

...Nobody here wanted this strike...

...242 • DISSENT...

...All they knew was that it was expected to last for days...

...It has also been a strike that, as the union begins its hundredth year, has brought about a new set of heroes...

...Notebook IV: Press clips...

...Wonderful pieces in the Village Voice by Denise Giardina, who grew up on a West Virginia coal camp, and in In These Times by David Moberg, the best SPRING • 1990 241 Solidarity in Virginia labor reporter I know of...

...It has been two days since a tentative strike agreement was announced in Washington...

...Going into the strike Pittston believed it could get as many as 40 percent of its workers to cross union lines...

...Employment: No UMW member can be required to do production from 8:00 A.M...

...Every striker seems to be wearing them...

...Each year 40 cents will be added to their hourly pay...

...The most obvious are the ninety-nine men who took over Moss 3. But just as significant and as well known in the coalfields, are the men and women who showed how the current UMW, down to an estimated 70,000 working miners, remains as much a movement as a union...

...In 1986 alone Pittston's union operations sold off 52 million tons of coal reserves while its nonunion operations added 44 million tons...

...For two weeks prior to September 17th, the men who would occupy Moss 3 had met secretly in small groups...

...When asked about the ethics of such a tactic, Pittston went out of its way to make clear it was playing hardball...

...As the new President would make clear by vetoing Congress's proposal for a bipartisan fact-finding committee to look into the machinists' strike against Eastern Airlines, his was not an administration about to do anything to settle a strike workers seemed to be losing...

...But now there is a feeling of having been tested and passing with flying colors...

...With China in no position to ship more coal to Japan because of its student uprisings and with South Africa as a producer from which Japan could not import more coal because of political reasons, Pittston was trapped...

...From the Steelworkers, the Auto Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Building and Construction Trades Council, among others, came generous donations...

...At Brink's and Burlington Air Express, the Greenwich-based Pittston's two other major companies, Douglas's first move was to go after union control and slash jobs...

...In April thirty-nine miner's wives calling themselves the Daughters of Mother Jones occupied Pittston's Lebanon, Virginia, headquarters with a sit-in that lasted two days...

...Only on the Friday before the takeover were they told to stand by and wait for the code words, "Kiss the wife and kids...

...There, too, the occupation was nonviolent, and there, too, the SPRING • 1990 • 237 Solidarity in Virginia emphasis was on an anonymous solidarity...

...Governor Gerald Baliles, who after his defeat at the hands of Lt...

...But the consequences of the UMW's ten-month strike are visible where they matter most: in the agreement the company and the union hammered out in sixty-two days of negotiations presided over by former Secretary of Labor W.J...

...It was also counting on help from Virginia, a right-to-work state...

...Part of the answer lies in Pittston's hubris...

...The child asks to be jailed as well, and after each verse Sauls comes back to a chorus that her union audiences sing along with her, "Let me in/Let me in/ The man in camouflage is Dad...

...There were even men with ammonia bottles to ward off attack dogs...

...The first of the three payments begins in 1990...

...He's worked in the mines for twenty-four years...

...The wife of Doug Sauls, one of the miners who took over Moss 3, Sauls quickly became convinced, however, that the Pittston strike was a do-or-die battle for her family...

...No person or property will be harmed," United Mine Workers (UMW) Regional Director Eddie Burke shouted through his bullhorn...

...The song was inspired by a child Sauls taught in Sunday school whom she found in tears one morning because his grandfather had been put in jail...

...Photo by Joe Corcoran/UMW nothing here had been in use for years...

...It's like a credit card...

...Notebook III: The jackrock...

...Before the strike was over, the UMW would be subject to over $64 million in fines and post $5 million in appeal bonds...