Word: coal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...presidential nominee able and popular enough to match the opposition Social Democrats' popular and widely known candidate, Bundestag Vice President Carlo Schmid. It also appeased Ruhr industrialists, who, because industrial production tumbled 8% in January-the sharpest drop in seven years-and because 14 million tons of unsold coal are piled up around Rhineland pits, long for protectionism and cartels, and cry for the removal of the man to whom they owe so much. They are now tired of Erhard, the apostle of free trade and competition. (At a recent Bad Godesberg business dinner, an old friend...
...Barricades. Last week the Borinage, hardly changed since the days of Author Zola and Painter Van Gogh, erupted again. Its grimy miners, many of them leather-jacketed foreigners-Sicilian and Spanish peasants, Greek sponge fishermen attracted by the wages-barricaded the streets with overturned coal cars. They ripped up rails, destroyed signal equipment, scattered broken glass at crossroads, where their wives shrilly ordered cars and trucks to turn back. At Quaregnon, 20,000 strikers and sympathizers jammed the city square under banners crying: "Death to the Coal and Steel Community!" "Work, not Charity...
Just as in Zola's day, it was jobs and bread that the miners wanted. The spontaneous strike was called to protest the decision of the Belgian National Coal Board to close down eight of 13 Borinage mines and to limit production in the remaining five to 8,000 tons daily. Yet the decision has long been inevitable and was postponed only because successive governments feared to make...
...Borinage mines are small, obsolete and uneconomic. As in the U.S.'s depressed Harlan County, Ky. (TIME, Feb. 23), coal seams are ever deeper and narrower, and the extraction cost is far above that of the big, modernized mines in the German Ruhr. Last year's recession created a glut in European coal-the surplus now stands at 26 million tons, with 7,000,000 in Belgium alone. The formation of the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community-creating a common market in these products in France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg-finally forced...
...companies and new investment by creating this revolution?" A government minister promised "replacement jobs" for the miners but was hooted down when unable to give any details. Premier Gaston Eyskens refused to consider nationalizing the mines, argued that the liabilities as well as the benefits of the six-nation Coal and Steel Community must be accepted: "Belgium can no longer decide on its own coal policy or even its own economic policy. We have to adapt ourselves...