Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 23, 1993 TAG: 9312220002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES SESSIONS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Right now, the poor state of labor-management relations - specifically, the weakening or utter lack of a check on the limits to management behavior - is devastating to whole communities and counties.
In fact, what we have been experiencing is not so much deteriorating labor-management relations, but an increasingly distant management that is thoughtless and uncaring of labor relations and their effect on families and communities.
Even though the absentee land and mineral corporations and foreign conglomerates that own the mines often pay little or no local taxes in these counties, the coal companies now have the same kind of power they had 50 years ago - the power to decide if a community lives or dies. Unfortunately, more often than not, these distant owners simply don't care about the people and communities whose destiny they control.
This disproportionate level of control exists because the tiny tax base in most coal communities cannot support even minimal standards for social services, education, public health and safety. Such taxing patterns result in an impoverished public life and all the afflictions that accompany it - job insecurity, poor health care, lack of social responsibility, loss of hope.
We experience it at ground level. It has tragic results. One-industry counties become no-industry counties with job loss, fear of job loss, no alternative employment, and many caught far from retirement age. Children are forced to leave home to find jobs and opportunity. Families are torn apart and scattered. The bottom line on a distant computer kills, maims and impoverishes people we love where we live.
There is precious little to protect working people from the ravages of this hostile relationship. Failed labor laws, the increasing success of lawyers' strategies to delay, demoralize and defeat local democratic union elections, and shell games played by coal companies are resulting in despair and cynicism in the coalfields.
Present trends are working to undermine and subvert successful working relations between labor and management in America in general and the coalfields in particular. They are steadily leading toward a world where workers are denied the right to meet their employers as an organized and collective group, but are left as isolated individuals, subject to whatever an increasingly disengaged management decides to offer, impose or take away.
Such trends, if allowed by our elected representatives to continue, will go on to undermine the basic fabric of justice in an area of the country sorely in need of justice, will go on to undermine the participation of people in making decisions which affect their lives in a region of the country sorely in need of every citizen's hand on the plow.
The practices we see being played out the in the coalfields today in this latest chapter in a long story are not democratic, nor civic, nor, I believe faithful to Christian responsibility or to basic, widely shared ideals of morality and basic human decency.
\ James Sessions, a clergyman, is executive director of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia.
by CNB