The UMW's Last Chance

...One was the lack of autonomy in the districts where Boyle ruled with an iron hand through the trusteeships...

...Boyle had said the wrong thing, and the storm clouds began to gather...

...Boyle's daughter draws $40,000 a year as a union attorney in a moribund Montana district...

...Hechler and Nader, working with the protesters, called for Boyle's resignation...

...Some of the largest loans went to districts where Yablonski figured his strength was greatest...

...And in any case, he said, investigators determined it was done spontaneously by an emotion-wrought union man reacting to Yablonski's talk...

...And a cloud of suspicion still hangs over the UMW as a result of the murder of Joseph A. (Jock) Yablonski, the insurgent candidate who tried unsuccessfully to defeat Boyle in the 1969 union election...

...There is a bright side to union membership: wages are moderately high (top scale is $37 a day), and a medical and retirement program financed by royalties on union-mined coal provides a thread of security for those lucky enough to qualify...

...it pays more than $11,000 a year to house Owens in a fancy hotel...

...The wonder is not that Boyle is being challenged and buffeted by forces with which he can barely cope...

...of Washington, depicts as a sovereign nation with its own treasury, its own propaganda machine, its own law, its own enforcers, and a populace held in servitude by a greedy and despotic leadership...

...But finally the break came...

...Labor investigators found millions of dollars in "organizing" loans to the districts simply unaccounted for...

...Among the contributions allegedly made was $30,000 to the 1968 Presidential campaign of Hubert H. Humphrey...

...Its assets today are roughly $100 million (this sum is independent of the union's welfare fund...

...He is charged with embezzlement, conspiracy, and illegal use of union money for political purposes...

...At least $10 million of UMW money is unaccounted for, according to Labor Department reckoning...

...For tough-talking Tony Boyle, all of this could not come at a worse time...

...Boyle went to the scene and made some remarks that had a shock effect...

...He had some success in the courts, but while judges expressed dismay at what they heard, they said the broader matters of union affairs were under Labor Department jurisdiction...

...Testimony in those cases has shed a new light on the union's financial linkage with coal companies, a sweetheart relationship that dates back to the era of John L. Lewis...

...There are about 145,000 working coal miners in the United States today, about 90,000 of them UMW members...

...And lately it has paid the fees of the law firm of Edward Bennett Williams, whom Boyle enlisted to defend himself from the legal sallies of UMW dissidents...

...They back him strongly...

...The marchers jeered as they passed union headquarters...

...As long as we mine coal, there is always this inherent danger," he said...

...Boyle was furious...

...Another Labor Department suit, pending since 1964 but stymied by union delays and Government indifference, seeks to put an end to the UMW's historic and illegal practice of keeping its regional districts in "trusteeship"—a device which gives Boyle virtually total control...

...After Yablonski, his wife, and his daughter were found murdered in their home, the Department decided to investigate the election...

...Yet in relation to the power they potentially wield, coal miners are largely orphans of the Affluent Society...

...Boyle hews closely to the Lewis example—even to the point of employing much of the same rococo language...

...Nepotism among union officials is rampant...

...Moreover, Consol was "one of the best companies to work with as far as cooperation and safety are concerned," he added...

...The U.S...

...Witnesses told of vote-buying by the Boyle team—or attempts to buy votes...

...As demands grew for reform of the Federal mine safety law, West Virginia coal miners—most of them UMW men—were in open revolt, pressuring for a state black-lung compensation law...

...The most outspoken and almost only Congressional critic of Boyle's dictatorship is West Virginia Representative Ken Hechler, a Democrat, whose district includes some 4,500 coal miners, most of whom are unionized...

...The Senator concluded that Boyle's increase of pensions was "politically motivated...

...Pensioners—old men fearful of losing their security— know that Boyle can take away what he provides...

...But this wave of union-sanctioned automation, with its emphasis on large scale mining operations, has left in its wake perpetual depression in scores of impoverished Appalachian counties...

...He already has talked himself into a sticky corner—he has promised $50-a-day wages and a hefty increase in the per-ton royalty that operators must pay to finance the union's welfare and retirement fund...

...Much of this union activity might have gone unnoticed had it not been for a 1968 disaster that killed seventy-eight UMW members in a West Virginia mine run by Consolidation Coal Company, the country's largest producer...

...He lost badly in them...

...He offered a platform of bold reform for the union, saying the basic issue was union democracy...

...UMW conventions are stacked...

...Such rhetoric is not uncommon to labor elections, but coming from Yablonski it carried a special ring of truth...

...Then they urged a Congressional investigation of the welfare fund, claiming that its questionable investment policies and its no-interest deposits were bilking the miners out of millions in benefits...

...The Landrum-Griffin Act puts an eighteen-month limit on trusteeships, but some UMW districts were created in trusteeship and never have had autonomy...

...Secretary of Labor George Shultz later told the Williams subcommittee that the punch was not a karate chop, but a straight blow to the chin...

...both gave him important assignments...

...His job is among the most dangerous in all of American industry...

...The miner lives—and often dies —with the constant threat of being gassed, crushed, burned, or electrocuted as he plies his trade in the menacing bowels of the earth...

...Boyle carefully patterned his image after the master...

...The welfare fund has kept as much as $80 million (half its assets) in non-interest bearing checking accounts, depriving fund beneficiaries of millions of dollars in interest income...

...It has lagged far behind its membership in battling black-lung disease and inadequate safety conditions in the mines...

...Lewis and Boyle never doubted his fealty...

...Most of Boyle's lieutenants were schooled at Lewis' knee as well...

...Federal agents believe the killers' payoff came from union funds and they continue to pursue leads along with the special grand jury in Washington...

...Strategically placed as they are, the miners are one of the most powerful segments of the labor force...

...Bureau of Mines fumbled enforcement of the new coal mine health and safety law...

...To say that Tony Boyle and his aides have responded with indifference to the plight of the mine worker is to be charitable...

...Even if he escapes those perils, he may wind up a wheezing wreck, victimized by the coal dust that ossifies his blackened lungs...

...Months before Yablonski emerged, Hechler and Ralph Nader were publicly deriding the UMW leaders, urging the miners to clean up their union...

...A U.S...

...What Shultz failed to tell the subcommittee —if he knew about it—was that five men among the dozen or so at the meeting were on Boyle's payroll and one had helped set up the affair...

...And when Lewis told him to "be anonymous"—when he called him to Washington as his special assistant in 1948—Boyle took it as gospel and still does...

...He was indicted with Boyle in March...

...Today, Hechler is even more critical...

...Case closed...

...Yablonski, who was shot dead three weeks after he lost a bitterly fought election to Boyle, called the UMW the most dictatorial union in the country...

...Then on May 29, 1969, he called a press conference and announced his surprise candidacy for the UMW presidency...

...The UMW is involved in several court cases charging it with conspiracy with large coal companies to drive small non-union operators out of business...

...The other force was the "bogus local"—an institution that bloomed after the welfare fund came into being and retired miners who once were discards went onto the union pension rolls...

...He is inaccessible to the press and rarely ventures out of Washington to meet with UMW members...

...That staggering assertion surely raised eyebrows at the FBI and the Justice Department, whose probing had led to the indictment of a UMW local president in connection with the killings...

...and that the welfare fund seems to be a classic case of mismanagement...

...Some men have been on the board since the Twenties and Thirties, all there as Lewis loyalists...

...To the contrary, Consol's safety record at the Farming-ton mine had been far from "best...

...As large as it may loom to Boyle's freedom and his future, the indictment is just the tip of the iceberg...

...But in a tortured interpretation of the Lan-drum-Griffin Act, the Department refused to heed Yablonski's repeated calls for Federal monitoring of the election...

...The treasury is an interlocking empire consisting of the union's income from dues and investments, its three-fourths ownership of the National Bank of Washington, and the theoretically independent, but in practice closely related, UMW welfare and retirement fund...

...Labor Secretary Shultz refused to consider the bogus locals as an issue...

...Union payrolls were beefed up with make-work assignments...

...Some 100,000 miners have been killed since 1900, and in the past forty years coal mining has resulted in more than 1.5 million disabling injuries...

...Threat, intimidation, and violence within the union are commonplace...

...it pays for portraits by Bachrach and it permits outrageous expense-account living (one official collected expenses while in a hospital...

...It reads like a bad dream: Jock Yablonski, the only high echelon official bold enough to shed his close ties with Boyle to try to clean up the union, was murdered...

...The policy-making UMW international executive board, with a member from each of the twenty-five districts in the United States and Canada, is a geriatrics showcase...

...Yablonski had promised that the fight to restore the UMW to its once proud and respected status as the flagship of the American labor movement would go on—and that is his legacy...

...The payroll is dotted with the children of other union officials...

...His brother, R. J. Boyle, is a $27,000-a-year district president, appointed by Tony...

...It has also made those American miners who are still working the world's most productive...

...The wonder is that it took so long, which may be due to the fact that the once-proud UMW of John L. Lewis has become a fetid backwater of the American labor movement...

...But there is another side to the UMW story...

...In nineteen of the UMW's twenty-three regional districts in the United States, all the officers are appointed through these trusteeships...

...Labor Secretary George P. Schultz insisted to a Senate subcommittee that there was no connection between the union election and the murders...

...Lewis left for these men one of the great labor treasuries...

...Miners have little say about how their leaders are picked, and no say at all about the contracts negotiated for them...

...Another Boyle supporter, Silous Huddleston, a retired miner who is president of a pensioner local in east Tennessee, has been indicted as the "director" of the murder of the Yablonskis...

...When Senator Williams' subcommittee went into some of the deails of the fund's relationship with the bank and the union, Senator Claiborne Pell, Rhode I^and Democrat, described himself as "astonished" at the revelations, particularly the disclosure that Boyle's pension increase for retired miners would bankrupt the pay-as-you-go fund in five years...

...The bogus locals figured prominently in Boyle's reelection, particularly after the handsome pension increase he engineered for retirees...

...He rebelled against what his lawyer and confidant, Joseph L. Rauh Jr...

...All through 1970, the UMW was a complacent bystander as, time and again, the U.S...

...Office expenses mushroomed during the campaign...

...Secretary-treasurer John Owens, who mined coal as a ten-year-old child, disguises his eighty years with a silvery-blue hairpiece...

...Why the Government allows this practice to continue I could not find out...

...WARD SINCLAIR is a member of the Washington staff of the Louisville Courier-Journal and The Louisville Times...

...It has gone right down the line in encouraging the automation that put thousands of its own union members out of work...

...A day after he had himself named to the fund's trustee board, Boyle raised pensions from $115 up to $150 a month for 70,000 UMW retirees—-just as his campaign against Yablonski was heating up...

...that Yablonski and his backers were the targets of violence and intimidation during the campaign...

...He talked it over with Nader, but still accompanied Boyle around the coalfields, praising him to the skies...

...Tony Boyle, a coal miner's son from Montana, stood at the top as Lewis' hand-picked, $50,000-a-year successor, a fact he lets no one forget...

...The Department of Labor is suing to set aside Boyle's election victory over Yablonski, claiming widespread vote fraud and irregularities...

...Senate labor subcommittee headed by Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr., New Jersey Democrat, is moving into its second year of a special investigation of UMW affairs...

...A special pension fund, kept secret until Ralph Nader exposed it, will allow Boyle, Titler, and Owens to retire at full salary for life, with more than $1.5 million of miners' money as a nestegg...

...The UMW is an organization of vast wealth which often aligns itself with the coal industry...

...The UMW last year collected about $1.5 million in dividends made possible by the welfare fund's subsidization of the bank...

...Nothing short of Tony Boyle's removal seems likely to restore peace in the sagging palace that John L. Lewis built...

...Yablonski was frustrated in his attempts to place observers at those locals on election day...

...Even in the best of circumstances, the lot of the coal miner is capricious and hazardous...

...The policies and procedures ordained by Lewis have been carried on by his successors...

...Yablonski and his doctor said it was a karate chop on the neck...

...Since the murders of Yablonski, his wife, and his daughter, the lonely crusade that began with one man who took a stand has gained scores of new adherents who now see the hope for a new day for their union...

...The UMW's financial records show that the treasury pays for their Cadillacs...

...These are the men who carry out Boyle policy...

...the candidate blamed Boyle's "goons...

...Nor are the bosses' families overlooked...

...That feat helped him win nearly ninety per cent of the pensioners' vote, enough to reelect him with ease...

...Now, in a slowly building chain, the UMW leadership is under unprecedented assault for its sins, both from within and without the union: • The late Jock Yablonski's followers, calling themselves Miners for Democracy, are pushing the reform drive despite Boyle's threats to purge them for "dual unionism...

...The self-righteousness, the roll of the tongue, the combative rejection of outsiders, the thundering responses to criticism all are pages from the Lewis book...

...The inheritors have no compunction about spending or indulging their tastes...

...Vice president George Titler, a rumpled, barrel-bellied West Virginian in his mid-seventies, is known fondly as "the veteran warrior" in tribute to his fearsome organizing prowess...

...The welfare fund's money is on deposit at the National Bank of Washington, working handsomely for the bank's major stockholder—the UMW —but producing little for needy coal miners and their widows who can not qualify for pensions...

...Abdicate they may not, but defiant W. A. (Tony) Boyle, lord and master of the United Mine Workers, and his aging fellow officers have full-scale trouble on their hands...

...The union makes little effort to organize the non-union men who, for the most part, work in small and marginal operations...

...Retirement fund policies have kept pensions from thousands of miners who fail to meet rigid qualification standards...

...In both the foreground and background of that depressing picture is the UMW...

...A month after his announcement, Yablonski was knocked senseless at a small meeting in Springfield, Illinois...

...he had long been a loyal element of the hierarchy he denounced and exposed...

...In West Virginia and Kentucky, the two leading coal-producing states, not a single district official is chosen by vote of the membership...

...That put Yablonski back where he began...

...President Boyle's most immediate trouble is a thirteen-count indictment, returned in March by a special Federal grand jury that is plowing through the UMW's tangled financial affairs...

...The union stayed aloof, and when the men shut down the mines to march on the state capitol at Charleston to demand passage of the bill, Boyle urged them to return to their jobs...

...It has made loans to the industry from a profitable bank the union owns in the nation's capital...

...The probers now are concentrating on the allegations of misuse of union funds to promote Boyle's reelection...

...It lobbies side by side with the coal industry against legislation deemed harmful to coal company profits, such as air pollution control...

...Without the coal they dig in increasingly prodigious quantities, the country's industrial machine would grind to a halt and about sixty per cent of our electricity, generated by coal, would be switched off...

...He promised emancipation...

...For the last several years he has covered United Mine Workers' activities, including the Yablonski-Boyle fight, and mine safety...

...Court actions ranging from charges of anti-trust violations to misuse of union money are being pressed on other fronts...

...The bosses of the coal miners' union are the most sued, the most controversial, and most investigated in the land...

...Williams has expressed shock at his findings to date—which went considerably beyond the findings of Shultz' Labor Department...

...another 90,000 union members are pensioners or inactive and ineligible for pensions...

...another collected expenses on vacation...

...Coal operators have not yet responded to that notion...

...These events played a part in Yablonski's decision to break with the past...

...Before the explosion Federal inspectors had found dozens of safety violations...

...Boyle shrugged it off, saying he intended to raise the per-ton royalty paid to the UMW...

...comptroller general has concluded that, under policies inspired by Boyle, the multi-million-dollar UMW welfare and retirement fund will go broke by 1975 at the current rate of spending...

...High speed mechanization in the past three decades has eliminated some 300,000 pick-and-shovel jobs in the industry...

...Faced as he was with that continued disinterest of the Labor Department in his campaign difficulties, Yablonski turned to the Federal courts to help clear away the obstacles Boyle put before him...

...Like Boyle, he mined coal as a boy and worked his way up in the union to become a Pennsylvania district president and a member of the international executive board...

...Federal grand juries have indicted several of Boyle's cronies for criminal misuse of union funds and other alleged irregularities during the 1969 election campaign...

...Nearly half of the union's 1,200-plus locals are made up of retired miners, although the union constitution makes it plain that they should be disbanded...

...Late last year, Miners for Democracy scored an impressive upset of a Boyle slate in Yablonski's old district around Pittsburgh, one of the few where officers are elected...

...Boyle denies any knowledge of the murders...

...The Federal Government claims that Boyle and his two top lieutenants are holding office illegally, the result of massive fraud in their 1969 election campaign...

...His power base diluted, his prestige maimed, his control over his members in doubt, this summer Boyle must negotiate a new contract with the soft coal industry...

...Yablonski's courtroom victories deterred the Boyle steamroller, but there were two other major forces inside the union that he could not cope with...

...A decision in one of those cases already has cost the UMW treasury $1.8 million...

...For all its apparent after-the-fact toughness, the Department months later still showed how little it had learned...

...A rebellious membership is on the verge of running out of control, stirred by the pulse of reform...