Word: soft-coal
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...weeks ago John Lewis' threat was a gambit in the war of nerves of his soft-coal strike. Now it was something more: a weapon by which he might win unusual gains. The master of strike strategy had made his moves slowly and cleverly. He had been careful not to arouse an apathetic Government and an even more apathetic public against himself-until he could exert the maximum leverage of all that his threat implied...
...cigar-fogged suite in Washington's Shoreham Hotel, negotiators for the nation's soft-coal operators drooped dejectedly. For a weary month they had failed to lure labor's one-man theater into writ-fag a new contract for his United Mine Workers. Now the nation was living on stored coal. And now, because his only specific demand (for a miners' health & welfare fund) had been turned down, Lewis was about to halt even the pretense of negotiation. Balefully he intoned...
After six weeks of tedious negotiations and a scattering of strikes (19,000 miners out in 235 mines), the soft-coal miners and operators signed a new contract. On its face it was a give & take proposition. Actually it was a fair victory for the miners and their shaggy, barrel-shaped boss, John L. Lewis, who had asked for a lot and wound up by getting quite a little...
While big John Lewis and the soft-coal operators jousted in a cloud of cigar smoke, the nation's soft-coal miners went to the polls. They voted, under the Smith-Connally Act, on what John Lewis disdainfully called a trick question: "Do you wish to permit an interruption of war production in wartime as a result of this dispute?" Their answer: yes, 208,797; no, 25,158. John Lewis could now legally shut down the mines...
...hurried scribbling they announced that Lewis' demands would cost up to $400,000,000 a year, add up to 65? a ton to the cost of coal. A union spokesman cried "80% wrong," and the soft-coal battle was on. (The anthracite battle will come a little later-the hard-coal contract expires on April 30, a month after expiration of the soft-coal miners' contract...