Struggle in the Kentucky Mines
Orr, Samuel G
A long strike near what once was "Bloody Harlan" is testing the new leadership of the coal miners Struggle in the Kentucky Mines SAMUEL C. ORR Last July, with promises of full support from the...
...There were mass arrests for illegal assembly and for murder...
...and whether outside contractors doing work for the company must come under union jurisdiction...
...The assumption on both sides of the struggle is that the strike represents a key test of the resolve and professionalism of the new, reform UMW leadership under Arnold Miller...
...Some of the more hot-headed miners tell tall tales about generally unreported, late-night shootouts with company "goons...
...Noe's truck was hit by gunfire a few months ago, and other shootings have been reported...
...The changed economics are reflected in two other major differences between the current dispute and the earlier era...
...To visit the scene is to be transported back into the Great Depression...
...A panel of sympathetic observers— including former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz and former Senator Fred Harris—heard two days of testimony from miners and their wives about the living and working conditions which produced the UMW organizing effort last year, an NLRB-supervised election at Brookside last June 26 won by UMW...
...Other shacks line the river between Harlan and Evarts...
...The UMW has presented evidence that F. Byrd Hogg, the local, specially appointed judge sitting for strike-related cases, is a small-time mine owner...
...More recently, in March, a "Citizens Public Inquiry Into the Brookside Strike" was staged by UMW in Evarts in an effort to generate further outside interest in the strike...
...The scene looks less devastated in summer when the steep, tree-covered mountains are green, but residents say the river stinks worse when the water is down and the weather hot...
...the amount of royalty per ton of coal the company will pay into the union welfare fund (fifty or seventy-five cents a ton...
...The students came to Harlan in union-sponsored buses, and one top steelworkers union official from North Carolina said, "You know, I'm really happy to see these kids from Duke and the other universities involved in something like this...
...It is a question of who runs the mines...
...The Cloverfork Valley where BrookSamuel C. Orr is a reporter for the Capitol Hill News Service in Washington...
...It is a classic labor struggle on a battleground that has seen other, almost identical confrontations...
...UMW was back again, organizing successfully during the late 1930s when demand for coal soared, died out in large part during the late 1950s with a slump in the industry, and now is back again as demand for coal increases...
...The shacks have no plumbing, and visitors are advised not to drink water from the communal pumps outside...
...The other significant new element is the looming presence of outside corporate interests...
...Duke officials, including President Carl Horn, Jr., acknowledged that they have relied heavily on Yarborough's experience as a mine operator and a university-trained mining engineer because Brookside and the other Eastover mines are the company's first venture into coal mining and this is their first strike...
...The strike followed within a month...
...UMW has recently started a drive to get people to dump their Duke stock...
...People were killed in gun battles...
...They are still on strike, and their action now carries a weight of importance far beyond the small number of miners involved or the relative unimportance of the Brookside mine to the outside world...
...The Brookside mine alone produced about 561,000 tons of coal in 1972...
...Miners, union officials, and coal operators alike believe that if UMW wins the Brookside contract, virtually every mine in eastern Kentucky will join the union...
...The miners talk about a shootout with company guards at Eastover's Highsplint, Kentucky, mine in February, but no one has yet been killed...
...They are still singing the old organizing song from the 1930s struggles—Which Side Are You On?—but these days some of the singers are students from Duke University and the University of North Carolina organized by a coalition of environmental groups and unions to agitate against Duke Power's seventeen per cent rate increase request...
...The UMW takes pains to point up the parallels...
...A company complaint to the NLRB brought a preliminary NLRB charge on December 20 that UMW was refusing to bargain by sitting on its initial terms, which are more or less identical to the standard 1971 national contract...
...Yarborough himself openly describes the conflict as political...
...A full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and picketing on Wall Street brought the threat of a law suit from Duke...
...Yarborough resists giving UMW the kind of power in his mines represented by the national agreement in effect in other UMW-represented mines, and, more broadly, he resists giving the union a victory that would help it organize all of eastern Kentucky...
...Many of the miners live still in a company-owned "coal camp" just opposite the entrance to Brookside mine...
...Duke Power has left the strike negotiations and company strategy largely in the hands of Eastover's President Yarborough...
...But, in the end, it is not 1931 in Harlan County...
...In the early 1930s the UMW abandoned eastern Kentucky and refused to back up the militancy of the area's miners...
...We've never seen this as an economic issue," he says...
...That national contract will expire in November, and pre-bargaining sessions are already under way preparing a tough UMW position that takes into consideration the relatively recent wholesale acquisition of coal companies by oil and other energy-oriented industries...
...In the early 1930s the mines were dying and the struggles over wages were life and death for miners and owners alike...
...A month before the strike the miners voted 113 to 55 to be represented by UMW rather than the Southern Labor Union, generally recognized as a weak "company union...
...A long strike near what once was "Bloody Harlan" is testing the new leadership of the coal miners Struggle in the Kentucky Mines SAMUEL C. ORR Last July, with promises of full support from the United Mine Workers, 180 coal miners at the Brookside mine near Harlan, Kentucky, walked out on strike...
...A massive, nationwide coal mine shutdown is possible next fall...
...There was a flurry of activity and some optimism at the time of the Citizens Inquiry...
...The ads strike at the company's image by linking a seventeen per cent rate increase request with photographs of poverty in Harlan...
...In 1970 the Duke Power Company of North Carolina began buying mines and other coal reserves through two wholly owned subsidiaries—Eastover Mining Company, which runs the mines, and Eastover Land Company, which now owns about 11,000 acres of coal reserves...
...The basic UMW bargaining position at Brookside is the 1971 National Bituminous Coal Agreement, the standard UMW contract under which about eighty per cent of the nation's coal was mined last year...
...The state troopers have done most of the police work and no one claims they are on the company payroll...
...Miners like Jerry Wynn or Carl Noe or even the boss—Norman Yarborough, president of the East-over Mining Company, which runs Brookside and two other mines—talk sometimes as if those violent days have returned...
...In the "Bloody Harlan" era, hundreds of sheriff's deputies were on the company payroll...
...Several panel members met with Yarborough while they were in Harlan and other panel members met with Duke Power President Horn the next day...
...Duke is the nation's third largest consumer of steam generating coal—after the Tennessee Valley Authority and the American Electric Power Company—and about one third of the fifteen million tons of coal burned in Duke's fires was to have come from the new Kentucky properties this year...
...Raw sewage dumps into the water, and roots and branches along the bank are festooned with shreds of toilet paper...
...There was a guard at Brookside with a record of two arrests and one conviction for murder, and Yarborough acknowledges that some of the guards are "not exactly school teachers...
...The void was filled for a time by the more militant, "red" National Miners Union...
...Newsmen are not met at the county line and escorted out...
...On the other side, UMW Vice President Mike Trbo-vich was in Harlan County this winter pledging full support and saying that the union "is going to organize every non-union mine in eastern Kentucky...
...side mine is located, halfway between Harlan and Evarts, has hardly changed since the 1931-1932 coal field wars that gave the area the name "Bloody Harlan...
...UMW and the company have been unable to agree on a contract...
...There are several specific sticky points in the bargaining, including: safety and the right of the union safety committees to pull men out of the mines...
...Currently, the demand for coal is rising rapidly and wages, prices, and profits are all up...
...The elected county sheriff, Billy Gene Williams, says he supports the strikers...
...The rusting hulks of abandoned automobiles are used to shore up the river bank...
...Trash, bottles, and cans are scattered everywhere, and the smell of coal fires is pervasive...
...While the issues are described by Wirtz as "tough," neither he nor anyone else involved sees the issues as sufficient to explain the long impasse...
...The UMW push has included an advertising campaign in North Carolina designed to push Duke Power into interceding with Yarborough...
...A lot of them are going to be management some day...
...Face-to-face negotiations between union representatives and Yarborough were broken off November 28 amidst charges of bad faith bargaining on both sides...
...Both meetings were described as productive, and informal meetings between Yarborough and UMW officials did follow, but no momentum toward a settlement was generated, according to UMW spokesmen...
...whether or not a "no strike" provision is called for...
...The Brookside strike represents this national stance on a small scale...
...The basic economic conditions were different...
...Certainly the desolation and squalor in those cramped, gray valleys recall powerful images of the Depression...
Vol. 38 • June 1974 • No. 6
