Word: mined
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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First Vote. The U.M.W.'s policy of allowing every member to cast a secret ballot on industry-wide contracts at last brings the miners into the mainstream of progressive unionism. Until now, the final decision on major mine contracts was made at the top. Under the plan, the first vote is cast by the Bargaining Council. The schedule then calls for the agreement to be explained to 800 delegates from the local unions at a meeting in Pittsburgh late this week. The delegates will then take the 58-page agreement back to their local headquarters, where it will...
...present nine and a new $75-a-year allowance for work clothes. The U.M.W. also scored well on improving safety measures. Every miner will get the right to leave any area that he considers un safe, and the companies agreed to bear the cost of four comprehensive mine inspections each year by the union's Miner Safety Committee...
Still, among major industries, mining is the most dangerous work in the U.S., running far ahead of construction, which is the second most hazardous. So far this year 122 miners have been killed on the job and thousands more injured. Part of the problem, Miller asserts, is that the federal mine-safety inspectors have not been strict enough with the companies...
Eerie Digs. The dangers that miners face routinely each day would be considered harrowing by most American workers. At the Shoemaker Mine near Benwood, W. Va., for example, a miner's day begins at the bathhouse, a big stark room with showers. Miners' work pants, boots, jackets and gloves are in buckets hung from the high ceiling on ropes that look like stalactites. After changing, the men hang their numbered brass tags on a board at the mine entrance; a tag that is still there after the shift ends alerts the rest of the crew that a miner...
Next the miners descend in an elevator to the mine, far below the surface. There they file into a tiny rail car for the ride to the mine face, the wall of solid coal at the end of the tunnel where the coal is actually extracted. During the four-mile journey, the beams from the lamps on the miners' hats bore through the darkness, picking up eerie, abandoned passageways, diggings of another day. The foreman carries a small naphtha lamp; if the lamp's flame flares up, it indicates the presence of flammable methane gas and the threat...