Word: coal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...morning shift truck jolts on its rails spewing dusty miners and rattling the next shift down While the earth shoves out belly fulls of coal as black as the death of an uncle...
...Coal Crisis...
...contract offers and untold expenditures of rancor, obstinacy and personal discomfort, rank-and-file members of the United Mine Workers voted late last week to end their strike. With union leaders promising that the 165,000 miners would return to their jobs on Monday and mine owners predicting that coal shipments would be back to normal within the week, the energy crisis that had been threatening-but never quite materializing-in a dozen Eastern Central states seemed to have passed...
...miners began voting on the contract in the hollows and flatlands of coal country on Good Friday morning, few involved in the negotiations-coal operators, union officials and federal mediators-held out more than a fifty-fifty chance of approval. Indeed, as the first returns were announced by militant locals in western Pennsylvania and southern Illinois, it looked as if the miners were about to deal a thumping rejection to the pact, as they had done to a previous contract proposal three weeks earlier. But when most of the ballots were tallied, they showed that the rank and file...
...fact was that time had just about run out for the miners, and they knew it. If they had voted no, national bargaining between the U.M.W. and the 130-member Bituminous Coal Operators' Association might have broken down completely. The coal companies and union locals would have begun negotiating on their own. Disillusioned miners thought that further negotiations at any level would not gain them a better contract, at least not one worth continuing the strike for. "It's kind of like playing poker at this point," said Cecil Roberts, 31, a vice president...