Word: coaling
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Unemployment has cut a painful gash through coal mining and automobile production. One consequence is that union membership in those basic American industries has eroded, turning leaders of both the United Mine Workers and the United Auto Workers into generals of shrinking armies. But competition to head the unions is still sharp. That showed up last week as the miners elected a new president and the U.A.W. nominated a successor to Douglas A. Fraser, who retires next year...
...unexpectedly large 2-to-1 sweep in a heavy turnout, unionized coal miners elected Richard L. (Rich) Trumka, 33, a lawyer and third-generation miner, to head the 220,000-member U.M.W. (peak membership in 1942: 595,000). That will make Trumka the youngest leader of a major labor union in the U.S. when he takes office next month. He defeated Incumbent Sam M. Church Jr., 46, who was appointed to the job in 1979, when Arnold Miller resigned because of his health...
Church also campaigned on his record: a 37.5% pay increase over 40 months won in 1981, when other unions were making concessions. That raise, though, came only after a 72-day strike and what Trumka called "giveaways" in other areas, such as allowing the coal companies to pay less for the health care of miners. Trumka pounded away at the health issue with personal feeling: his father and the father of his bride-to-be, Barbara Vidovich, 35, suffer from black-lung disease...
Trumka argued that Church had not been effective at organizing coal miners in Western states. The U.M.W, said Trumka, spent some $10 million to bring in a grand total of just 542 new members from the West, which is only 17% unionized. The U.M.W. members see nonunion coal as a major threat to their jobs, one reason that U.M.W. joblessness stands...
...buried financially in a similar fashion. Last week the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed its estimates of record U.S. and world grain production in 1982. In Minnesota and the Dakotas, farmers are stuffing unsold wheat into their sheds, leaving tractors and combines out in the cold. An abandoned coal mine near Quincy, Ill., and an ammunition depot in Hastings, Neb., were recently readied for the storage of surplus grain. A few Iowa farmers are even planning to burn corn instead of oil in their furnaces this winter, and government officials in Nebraska are promoting the use of popcorn...