Word: coaling
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...strike would have been the first legal job action by South Africa's black miners since their union, the National Union of Mineworkers, was formed in 1982. The walkout at gold and coal mines was called off at the last minute, however, when management agreed to raise the workers' holiday pay. But word of the compromise evidently did not reach all the mines, and throughout the gold-rich Transvaal and Orange Free State some 40,000 blacks refused to go underground for their usual shifts. When they did not disperse, police riot squads moved in, and the angry...
Barely two hours later, Richard Trumka, president of the United Mine Workers, emerged from a suite at the Sheraton Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., to announce tentative agreement on a new 40-month contract with the Bituminous Coal Operators' Association. Trumka called the deal "a giant step forward in this industry." If miners approve the contract, it will be the first time since 1964 that the U.M.W. has reached a new wage agreement without a strike...
Furthermore, many rightly question the call to keep the waning pits open on economic grounds. British coal is already the most heavily subsidized in the Common Market, with the government pumping in the equivalent $2.5 million a day and the industry is grossly uncompetitive. By maintaining uneconomic pits, the Coal Board would have to raise the price on all British produced coal and thus jeopardize an already shrunken market. It would be far wiser to save what is profitable in the industry than to allow the few to drag down the many. Nor can the miners expect, as Scargill...
...LIKELY that, in the short run, the British coal strike will have no direct effect on labor relations here. With the threat of Japanese imports and the demise of many traditional industries (not to mention Washington's decidedly anti-union policies), American workers appear sufficiently concerned with job security so as to be more conciliatory than their British counterparts. Furthermore, American unions are beginning to recognize their erosion of their political clout. In addition to dwindling membership, union leaders can no longer be certain that they can deliver the rank and file vote...
...neither is the British coal strike so far removed from American labor-management relations-a fact to which the General Motors workers bear testimony. America may soon face a union militancy comparable to that of the British coal miners if workers feel that they are being left in the wake of economic progress. As in Britain, politicians in the U.S. have done little to help those vast areas where the decline of old industries threatens hundreds of communities...