Word: mined
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...part or all of December. Oil companies grappled with new uncertainties about their future as the House Ways and Means Committee approved a tax bill that fairly soon is likely to wipe out the celebrated depletion allowance. Prospects for a quick end to the nationwide coal strike darkened as mine-union leaders raised new objections to a proposed contract that provides well over a 50% raise in wages and benefits over three years. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones average worried its way back down toward the 600 level, as signs of deepening recession mounted every...
...idle miners in Appalachia and elsewhere picked over the tentative coal settlement last week, formal deliberations ran into deep trouble in Washington. The bargaining council of the United Mine Workers voted by 38 to 1 to send the pact back to negotiators for more-much more. Already the settlement calls for wage-and-benefit increases exceeding 50% over three years. But council members sought a bigger pay raise next year than the negotiated 9%, as well as the right to strike over local issues. They also wanted a reinstatement of the traditional two-week vacation period, which had been split...
...contingent upon (or confused by) questions of finding new fuel sources. Most experts agree that America sits upon coal seams extensive enough to meet its needs for 80 to 100 years. It has a definite point of origin--November 12, the Tuesday when 120,000 coal-mining members of the United Mine Workers didn't go to work because their old contract had expired without a duly-negotiated successor. And it has a discernible terminus--the day, ten days or so after the UMW's 38-member bargaining council approves a new contract, and a majority of members vote...
When Miller returned home, his old employer claimed that he had no jobs. Miller protested, invoking his status as a veteran-and found himself mining coal while standing in ten inches of water. He quit to enroll in an auto mechanics' apprenticeship program but returned to mining in 1951. This time Miller was placed in a mine so dusty that he soon had trouble breathing, but "the companies told you that coal dust didn't hurt you." Ultimately, suffering from black-lung disease, he switched to another mine-one so wet that it brought on his arthritis...
That physical impairment helped pave Miller's road to power. In 1969, while working at the wet mine, he helped organize strikes in West Virginia to force passage of a state law declaring black-lung disease a work-incurred ailment worthy of compensation pay. His unauthorized activities enraged U.M.W. panjandrums, and Miller became a leader of the insurgents who ultimately brought down Tony Boyle, U.M.W. president for a decade...