Word: miners
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...rank and file, however, remained skeptical. They assembled at their locals to hear the pact explained and to ask questions. Each miner was handed a copy of the contract in a 36-page booklet. No literary scholar is better at reading between the lines than a miner, who treats a contract as reverently as the Bible and even takes it underground in case there is a grievance. The more the miners read, the angrier many of them became...
...typical meeting in Vestaburg (pop. 950), Pa., the room was so thick with smoke that the people in back could hardly see the district president up front. As the debate wore on, miners from time to time slipped out into the raw morning air to spit out tobacco juice-a habit they acquire to get rid of the coal dust they inhale in the mines. The gesture may also have expressed their feelings about the contract. "If Carter says this contract's a fair shake," said one miner, "they can take that peanut farmer back to Georgia and bury...
...produce as much as 500 tons of coal a day remained open primarily by turning themselves into armed fortresses. At the Crooks strip mine, one of only two mines in southern Indiana that stayed constantly open during the strike, the trouble started in December when 300 striking miners showed up and asked Mineowner Ed Crooks to stop operations. Instead, he spent $6,000 on guns and ammunition to arm his 24 workers and hired half a dozen guards to keep watch. On the wall in the trailer that serves as the mine's office and command post, he kept...
...lengthening of the strike increased the chances of violence. Miners have already stopped some coal headed for utilities from non-union mines. Dozens of coal trucks have been forced at gunpoint to dump their loads. Towboats hauling coal barges up Pennsylvania's Monongahela River had to abandon operations when they were fired on by miners. "I don't like to see anyone suffer," says Jim Elias, 50, a miner in Greene County, Pa. "But we've got to get a decent contract somehow. I'm not the kind to fire a shot or throw a rock...
...members of District 17. Many of them live in the vicinity of Cabin Creek Hollow, a group of small frame houses and mobile homes along a narrow, twisting road in the hills of southern West Virginia. On the eve of the strike last December, a Cabin Creek miner defiantly told TIME Correspondent Robert Wurmstedt that he and his neighbors were prepared to stay out of the pits until "she freezes over." Last week Wurmstedt revisited the hollow and found that 2½ months without paychecks has caused hardship for the miner shut made them even more obstinate. His report...