Word: millers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cause of this latest rumble is the U.M.W.'s presidential election, which is scheduled for June. In a three-way campaign that is already getting heated, Miller is running for re-election against Union Secretary-Treasurer Harry Patrick and U.M.W. International Board Member Lee Roy Patterson. Patrick, 46, a voluble, fiery fourth-generation miner from Monongah, W. Va., ran with Miller on the reform ticket in 1972 and represents the progressive wing of the union. Though he came to office without bookkeeping experience or a high school education, he is credited with putting the U.M.W.'s ledgers...
Despite their ideological differences, Patrick and Patterson share one sentiment: contempt for the way Miller has run the 250,000-member union. Miller is the issue in the election...
Office Door. "The man is incapable of administering the affairs of the U.M.W.," says Patterson. Patrick calls his former ally "a disaster as president." For evidence, they point to his inability to control disorderly meetings of the U.M.W.'s 21-member international board, Miller's habit of spending long weekends in Charleston, W. Va., near his home, and his failure to check the rash of wildcat coal strikes that have plagued the industry during his tenure, including last summer's prolonged walkout that idled more than 90,000 miners...
Patrick also accuses Miller of a more unpardonable sin. "Arnold has betrayed the movement for democracy in the union," says Patrick. "He's behaving like a dictator." Miller has recently shown a draconian side, abruptly dismissing several top aides, beefing up security at the union's Washington headquarters and insisting that everyone, including Patrick, clear all travel with him. When one of Miller's secretaries was suspected of political plotting with Patrick, the door to her office was removed. (It has since been restored...
...Miller offers a spirited defense. "Julius Caesar had his Brutus," he says, "but I've got about a hundred Brutuses. The problems I have are not with the membership, it's with the elected officials and the staff." Miller explains, with some justice, that almost from the day he was elected, opponents have tried to undermine his administration. First, he says, it was the obstructionist international board, then the opposition of U.M.W. Vice President Mike Trbovich, who has been forced out of the fray by his own overheated charges about Communists in the Miller administration. Miller...