Word: miners
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Trapped by circumstances they only dimly understand, the miners take a very simple view of their situation One grizzled old miner put it this way at a meeting of strikers: "I'll tell you something boys, and I'm gonna tell you the truth now. There will be blood coming from the mines--not coal--unless we get a union contract. And if you try to get by my picket line you're gonna smell copper and lead, copper and lead...
...Howell sees it, his only chance of combating this despondency and supporting a strike is inducing the Teamsters to organize the county. Practically every miner in McDowell watched Dave Brinkley's report on Jimmy Hoffa and his union, and to them Hoffa looks like the messiah. "Jimmy could do it," was the general opinion. "He's tough--if we get him in here that will fix things up in short order." Tough men themselves, these miners are convinced Hoffa will understand them and their problem. But a Teamster representative recently studied the situation and reported that it was almost hopeless...
...around $18-20 a day; Reed would quickly accept $15. And Reed is willing to pay the royalities even though he thinks them "oppressive." While he doesn't think the hospitals need be so elaborate ("This is not Miami Beach"), he recognizes how essential they are to the miner. Unfortunately, neither of them knows each other's thoughts. They rely on rumors for information about each other and therefore grow increasingly alienated...
Berman Gibson, the leader of the pickets, smiles at these charges. His grin is a confident one, the smile of a man who is sure of victory. A big swarthy man who is gentle with his family but a powerful demagogic speaker with great charisma at miner's meetings, Gibson is actively preparing for a show-down battle this spring. He "knows these operators can pay the money," and several observers agree with him, as many of the mines in Perry country are mechanized...
Lower Rates. Automation has increased coal's efficiency vastly, more than doubling the miner's daily output, to 15 tons. Cheaper residual oil has hurt coal but failed to take away all its markets. Atomic energy, coal's glamorous bugaboo, has turned out to be more expensive than expected, and seems no serious threat for the immediate future. And with the use of electricity in the U.S. rising about 7% a year, electric utilities last year used a record 192 million tons of coal's 420-million-ton production. But nothing has helped coal so much...