Word: coal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jimmy Carter made an appointment with national network television at 9 p.m. last Friday. He let it be known that he planned to announce "drastic steps" to end the 81-day coal strike. Two hours earlier, however, the President had just joined in a party honoring early campaign supporters in the Blue Room of the White House. Suddenly he got a message. Striding down the corridor to take his place before cameras in the West Wing, he briskly announced that the long ordeal was probably over. A "voluntary settlement" had been reached between the 165,000 striking United Mine Workers...
...they do ratify it, probably within ten days, it will finally end a struggle that brought power shortages, curtailed business hours, and threatened mass layoffs in eight Eastern-Central states. It will also end the sporadic violence that has pitted angry strikers against armed truckers trying to bring nonunion coal to utility companies (see box). Even after ratification, however, it could take the mines three weeks more to resume full production...
...miners and operators had not reached a solution. He had instructed Domestic Affairs Adviser Stuart Eizenstat to prepare a plan of action. Eizenstat recommended that Carter invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, imposing an 80-day back-to-work injunction on the miners, and request congressional authorization to seize the coal mines...
Carter asked the coal industry's leading spokesmen to come to the White House Friday morning. There, in the Roosevelt Room, the guests met a formidable array of brass. It included Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Special Trade Representative Robert Strauss. In the hour-long session, Carter set a 6 p.m. deadline for settlement, without revealing his threatened countermeasures...
...drinking alone in the office one night when this dame wanders in. Real sweet, she was, with coal dust in her long blonde hair and a crumpled bus ticket in her fist. "Scranton," she sighed by way of explanation, in a voice that trailed off like the Doppler effect of a passing 18-wheeler on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I poured her a stiff one, and she poured me her story: "I have this terrific manuscript, but please don't ask how I got it, and I just have to get into the newspapers before they do." "They?" "The syndicate...