Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 25, 1991 TAG: 9102250098
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CLINCHCO LENGTH: Long
"I'm working non-union now."
In Virginia's mountainous coalfields, where jobs are as hard to find as flat land, Rasnick is doing what he has to to support his wife and three children.
"I'm a 100 percent union man," he says, "but after you fight to preserve the union, you have to preserve yourself and your family. I can say I'm union, but that don't feed my family."
Just a year ago, Rasnick was among 1,700 union miners who celebrated the end of a bitter 11-month strike against the Pittston Coal Group, the state's largest coal producer.
The end of the strike was viewed by Rasnick and industry analysts as a major and badly needed victory for the United Mine Workers of America and for unions in general.
Miners believed Pittston was out to break the union. Instead, it was forced to accept a contract, generally seen as yielding to most of the union's demands.
A year later, Rasnick and many other miners say the victory isn't so sweet.
"It didn't pan out," he says.
To make matters worse, Rasnick thinks his beloved union abandoned some miners who are still on strike against private companies leasing Pittston land.
Once the union leaders got a Pittston contract, he says, they did little to pressure contracts from the lease operators. The union miners striking the lease companies were "sorta hung out to dry," says Rasnick, 46.
He says union leaders led strikers to believe the contract would boost union employment with Pittston and prompt union jobs at other companies.
That may yet occur, but economic reality doesn't offer much hope, at least for Virginia miners.
The reality is that coal has come out of Virginia's mountains in record amounts in recent years - with steadily fewer miners. And Pittston, after losing $27 million during the strike, earned $61.1 million in 1990, its highest earnings in 10 years.
Mike Odom, Pittston's president, says the company's profits since the strike show that the contract gave both sides what they needed - job security for miners and improved efficiency and production for Pittston.
But Rasnick and other miners are afraid the union traded future jobs for the sake of a contract. They say Pittston is closing union mines and opening new ones without union workers.
The company has closed some union mines that ran out of coal and slowed production at others, including Lamberts Fork, where major confrontations occurred during the strike.
Mechanization at Pittston and other companies also has taken a toll on employment. Nearly 15,000 miners worked Virginia's coal mines in the late 1970s. The number now is down to about 10,000. The number of union miners has declined even more, falling from 10,000 in the '70s to just 3,700 working miners today.
The trend is the same nationally, where the once all-powerful UMW is down to just 85,000 miners from a post-World War II high of 400,000.
There's still talk that Pittston will reopen some old mines that will give jobs to union members. Pittston says it may do so within a year, possibly at Camp Branch, a closed mine in Russell County.
Pittston's total employment, including its mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, is more than 1,500, down only a little since the strike. But in Virginia, union officials say, Pittston now employs 800 union miners, 300 fewer than the pre-strike level.
Rasnick is one of those 300.
When the strike ended, he went back to work as an electrician at Pittston's Triple C mine in Dickenson County, but he and all but a handful of the 40 miners there were laid off by September.
"I spent two months looking for a job. I tried all union places, but couldn't find one."
In November he took a job at Minuteman, a non-union mine near Coeburn. That job is nearly an hour's drive from his home on a 3,000-foot-high ridge overlooking the old mining camp town of Clinchco. It's not the drive that bothers him: it's the ghostly echoes from the mining camps like Clinchco where generations of miners fought for the union, job security, better pay and mine safety.
"I'm a union man," he says, taking a long drag from a cigarette, a generic brand he got hooked on while cutting costs during the strike. "You gotta do what you gotta do."
He and his family fought for the union for nearly 11 months to win a contract. They spent all of their savings and lived off the land from hunting and farming.
Now, he says, slowly shaking his head from side to side, "the only job I can find is non-union."
He's happy to have a good-paying job in a part of the state where unemployment reaches Third World levels. But he makes less than when he was working union - $110 a day instead of $134 - and has no job security. "I could go to work today and they could tell me I'm laid off."
It could be worse, Rasnick's wife, Shenia, says. "They're good to him" even if there is no security. If it weren't for the strike, she says, "they wouldn't have anything. Companies might be paying just $50 a day."
But Ronnie Rasnick is no longer certain the strike was a major victory.
"Am I better off now than before the strike?" he asks. "That's a rough question."
For the union miners who still have jobs at Pittston, it was a great deal, he says. "But there's just a whole lot in that contract that didn't work out right. . . . We didn't get more jobs."
He's hesitant to blame the UMW. "I'm 100 percent union." But he wonders if union leaders were too quick to jump at a contract and promote it to the members as a great deal.
Union leaders say they are carefully watching Pittston to make sure it abides by the agreement. But Rasnick and other miners believe Pittston is using new work rules to give a few miners more in overtime and weekend pay while laying off others.
They also accuse Pittston of shifting work to its highly successful non-union Paramont Coal subsidiary.
And they say Pittston is not enforcing contract provisions that give union miners preference for jobs Pittston farms out to contractors.
Rasnick may be hesitant to blame union leaders, but James Christian isn't.
Christian is one of about 120 union miners who go out to picket lines every day instead of jobs. They've been on strike for nearly two years against a dozen independent companies that lease mines from Pittston.
"He'd better not come down here," Christian says of UMW President Richard Trumka. "I'd say the union leaders let us down."
Christian and other miners at a picket post in the coal-rich Jewell Ridge section of Buchanan County say they feel helpless, betrayed and abandoned.
"When we went out they told us we go out together and we go back together," says David Perry, the group's strike leader. But a year after the rest went back to work, he says, "we're still here."
Perry and some of the others still wear the camouflage clothing that the union adopted during the strike as a show of solidarity.
They still jeer at state troopers sent to keep coal moving.
They still shake their fists and curse truckers who drive coal trucks through picket lines.
But the fists aren't clenched as tight; the curses are drowned by the roaring trucks; and the strikers admit that the only thing that keeps them on the picket lines is the lack of other jobs in the coalfields.
"I'd leave tomorrow if you'd give me a job," says Robert Smith, a miner from the tiny town of Jolo in nearby West Virginia.
"We need a little help down here," Michael Goss says. But, he says, about the only help he's gotten lately from the union was a toy trumpet at Christmas for his 3-year-old son, Travis. "It was a real nice trumpet," he says.
The union does provide more than toy trumpets. Goss and the other strikers continue to get some medical protection and $225 a week in strike benefits, which is more than they could get if they went to work at McDonald's.
If there were a McDonald's.
Donnie Lowe, president of UMW District 28, which covers Virginia, says the union still is working hard to get contracts from the Pittston lease operations. It's difficult, he says, because the union is required to negotiate separately with each company if that's what the companies demand. The union also is pressing unfair labor claims against some of the lease mines.
There are more than a dozen such lease operations, and Lowe says, "We're not giving up on none of it."
Lowe admits that the hoped-for bonanza of jobs has not materialized. He blames part of that on the economic slowdown. The economy of the coalfields still is victimized by coal's boom-and-bust cycles. Like generations of miners before, Lowe is banking on a return of union jobs.
"We're still hoping this year will be better than '90."
Steve Bourne, a business professor at Bluefield State College in Bluefield, W.Va., says unemployed union miners obviously are disappointed with the Pittston contract. But, he says, a lot of union miners are back working at union mines. By almost any measure, the strike has to be viewed as a union success, he says. "It showed that the UMWA continues to have solidarity."
Cecil Roberts, the union vice president who personally led the Pittston strike, agrees that the strike was and still is a big union victory.
Many of the employment problems union miners have with Pittston are due to the national economy, not the contract, he says.
"I understand the frustration. I'm frustrated, too. We can't find enough jobs. . . . Coal miners, auto workers, all the good-paying jobs have somewhat disappeared."
But, Roberts says, the union's victory at Pittston not only saved union jobs, it elevated the UMW's prestige at a time when unions were failing around the country.
"It puts us in a better bargaining position with everybody" from coal companies to Congress.
by CNB