Militant, weekly journal of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States.
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. - When their three-year contract expired at the end of September, 80,000 bituminous coal miners, organized in the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), shut down coal production by walking off the job. A few weeks later this correspondent came to Morgantown to talk to miners here.
Morgantown's over 4,000 shaft miners work for four companies and are divided accordingly into four locals which are part of UMW District 31, covering northern West Virginia.
William Fox, 44, began working In the mines when he was 18. Elected president of UMW Local 4043 in 1969, he has been unable to work for the past 16 months due to an on-the-job back injury. He has had two operations and has been in the hospital seven times for treatment He was recently certifled as having the first stage of black lung, which is not sufficient for compensation. One must be judged totally unable to work.
Two years ago, Fox was managing Tony Boyle's election campaign in Morgantown. However, "At this point I'm pretty well fed up with Boyle He made promise after promise. When Boyle was here before the last election, I asked him about autonomy. He sald autonomy was all right with him If the districts wanted It But now there's a big fight over it so some body isn't telling the truth."
About 500 miners came to WashIngton last spring to demand action on a government suit filed seven years ago to force Boyle to give up his stranglehold over 19 of the UMW's 25 districts which are beid in trustee ship by the international This bars nearly 170,000 UMW members from voting for their district leaders and blocks them from participating in district affairs.
*1 think we were used in that electon," Fox told me *I used to be very friendly with Distriet 31. A lot of us feel now that we should fire everybody, kick them out of these offices, and start all over again. It's taken me 26 years to see through some of this stuff."
William Fox's son Keith, 24, has been working in the mines for five years He described what happened when the union contract expired at the end of September. *We walked out one second after midnight with the young miners leading the way. The district officials tried to keep us working an extra day by saying that our contract expired at the end of Oct 1 Instead of at the beginning. Our contract plainly says Oct 1 and that's when we went out.* Miners have a tradition of "No contract, no work," and they ignored pleas by the coal operators to renew the contract, on a day-to-day basis. The operatots argued that they might as well stay on the job since there would be no raise during the wage freeze. "Another shuffle deal that came out of the district," Keith Fox went on, *was that we've been faced with our own UMW scabs" following the walkout These "shop men," he explained, were brought in to maintain mine equipment during the strike. They were recently organized into the UMW and were told they could receive a pension although they contribute nothing to the Welfare and Retirement they could work during the strike be cause they were under some sort of special contract with an expiration date different from that of the miners.
*Five of us went down to the mine and asked the men to stop working." Keith Fox said. *The distriet leaders came down and gave us a lot of double-talk. They remind you of those fast-talking carnival men. They said we were on private property and could be sued. I got so mad I almost hit him. The next day, 30 of us showed up and pulled the men out The young men aren't afraid of anybody. They Just do it They called us nameshippies and everything else -but we made sure they shut it down." Under intense pressure from the district, however, the shop men returned to the mines.
William Fox quoted what a district official told a local miner: "The trouble with you miners who want to reform this union is that you're too fat A good long strike will bring you back in line and make you appreciate Tony [Boyle]."
Coal miners in Pennsylvania carrying out body after one of frequent mine disasters.
Fox said angrily, "It's easy for these officials to say we're too fat while they're sitting around on a full salary drinking beer all day while our men are walking the streets and not getting a dime." He was referring to the fact that the miners have received no strike benefits because Boyle has used a technicality in the union constitution as an excuse to delay any payments until at least four weeks after he officially declared a strike on Oct 11, almost two weeks after the walkout Busloads of miners recently went to Washington to stage protests at the union headquarters and the union-owned National Bank of Washington.
"Hearsay has it that we have $70million in that strike fund," said Fox. "We sent registered letters to Washington asking for application forms for strike benefits. We'll have to wait and see whether we get anything or not."
This is the first strike the UMW has officially sanctioned, although be latedly, since 1950. Contrast this with the intense struggles of the late 1930g and 1940s, which saw more than 10 national UMW strikes and walkouts. 1943, defying a wage freeze and a no-strike pledge, defeated all attempts of the government and the union bureaucrats to make the miners sacrifice for the war, and set the stage for the powerful labor upsurge in the months Immediately following the war.
Regarding the miners' share in the wealth they produce, Keith Fox re marked, "The district and big union officials are screwing us all the way. Last time, back in 68, we got $7 a day more over three years and three cakes of soap at pay day." That wage increase has since been completely wiped out by inflation.
He predicted a settlement including $50 a day over three years (now a maximum of $37), a 5-day sick leave (miners get no paid sick leave at present), and a couple more days vacaton (now two weeks a year). "And even this will be chopped up by the district and the management by the fine print in the contract If we all stick together, though, we could win."
Keith Fox said bitterly, "Whenever Photo by Metro/LNS we get a raise, everything goes up in the stores around here The same thing will happen again, freeze or no freeze Why not freeze food instead of wages? It seems to me that we've got a kind of dictatorship from Nixon on down."
The Morgantown miners were generally displeased with the coverage, or rather lack of it, which the strike Is getting from the media. "We've got a monopoly in this town," said John Pringle, a shop steward in Local 4043. "There's a Republican paper and a Democrat paper and both are put out by the same people, the Griers, who own limestone mines, steel mills and almost everything else around here. There's been almost a total blackout on news about the strike in the papers, the radio and the TV."
Asked what the local miners were going to do during the strike, William Fox replied, " We're organizing a mass meeting of the four locals here to try and thrash out some of this stuff we've been talking about We invited the district officials to attend. I've been told that if I step on any toes, I'm going to get my toes chopped off. And I've only just started."
First lessons of a big struggle Work has started again at SEAT in Barcelona. 'Order' reigns once more, an 'order' which began to think that it would last forever, after it had, in the image of the Francoist dictatorship, stifled all movement of struggle for ten years. This order can only survive by killing: Antonio Ruiz Villalba, involved in the fighting on 18th October died several weeks ago.
The workers have gone back, without having obtained anything. But they have not been beaten; the true meaning of their victory is somewhere else, in the magnificent solidarity struggles which shook Barcelona for a fortnight, involving some 100,000 workers at the time of the General Strike on Friday 29th; and in the awareness of the strength which unity in struggle gives, and did give for the first time in action in SEAT. The workers have gone back-not in surrender but in a retreat to prepare better the next offensive.
From the construction workers' strike in September when Pedro Patino was murdered to the IMENASA strike at Pamplona when the workers built barricades in the street when charged by the police and the SEAT struggle, a large workers' vanguard is adopting the radical forms of struggle advocated by the revolutionaries.
The break with its reformist policy and its criminal legalist education shows itself even in the ranks of the PCE: in Sabadell as in Rubi, two workers' suburbs of Barcelona, our comrades of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria have organized a solidarity campaign on a United Front basis on the basis of a leaflet of which 30,000 copies were distributed which called for the formation of self defence pickets and fighting brigades.
Paradoxically it's Bandera Roja which says that it is police provocation alongside the C.P. bureaucrats and, denounces this "call to armed insurreetion" in the name of the unity of the workers' movement!
Its our comrades who have built this unity by their resolute and implacable intervention. The audience that they have acquired can be measured by the denunciations of the Franco Press, calling down thunderbolts of repression on them. Contrary to their allegations our comrades have not been the diabolical instigators of the SEAT struggle. But their intervention has ahd an important weight in the struggle.
In Madrid, the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria brought 300 militants out on a solidarity demon stration; in Barcelona in a fortnight our comrade distributed 200,000 leaflets in all; their militants in SEAT produced three editions of SEAT Proletario. In the Universities and workers' districts solidarity committees were formed on their initiative. Several factories struck on October 20th at their instigation.
While they are working on a pamphlet which will make a balance sheet of the struggle, they are continuing their solidarity work in support of the metal workers and miners of Asturias who are entering their second month of strike. This work on solidarity is the much more necessary since for the second time, the Asturian miners are being basely betrayed by the Polish bureaucracy, which has not hesitated to increase its coal sales to the Franco regime. Red Mole T-shirts Black on red, red on white: £1.05 each including postage from:
The Red Mole, 182 Pentonville Road, London N.1 The Red Mole 29th November 1971 Page 9
-Polemic