ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150126
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: PROFILE
SOURCE: PETER M. SLAVIN SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
IF Cecil Roberts, the new president of the United Mine Workers, had his way, labor unions would call the country's first general strike and vast numbers of workers across the country would walk off the job simultaneously.
"If a million Afro-American men can march on Washington to draw attention to those issues that are important to them, there's absolutely no reason why 5 to 10 million Americans couldn't do something similar to that with a one-day strike," Roberts says. Such an event, he says, "would send shock waves to Congress and those in power." Roberts has been called America's most militant union leader and some UMWA members hailed him as the second coming of the fiery John L. Lewis, the union's greatest leader. Yet Roberts has championed nonviolence and civil disobedience, leading the the monumental and successful 10-month UMWA strike against Pittston coal company in 1989-90 with such tactics.
He has also been called the conscience of the American labor movement. At the AFL-CIO convention last fall, Roberts, speaking in cadences reminiscent of a Baptist minister, brought delegates to their feet with an impassioned call to labor's past and future. Few can match him in oratorical power.
Deep labor roots
In Roberts, UMWA members have a leader whose roots in coal mining run six generations deep. He was raised in Cabin Creek, W.Va., site of the epic 1912 strike. Striking miners evicted from their company-owned homes were invited by his great-grandmother to pitch tents on her property and the celebrated labor radical Mother Jones stayed in her home. His great-uncle Bill Blizzard became a legend during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, and both his grandfathers were killed in mine accidents.
Roberts says when he was a young man he would visit his ailing grandmother and hear about those days. "I would sit down on her bed and she would talk about the union and organizing days. A very good education for me. My grandmother ... taught me many lessons about what it meant to be union."
Roberts "doesn't just think trade unionism or feel trade unionism. He is trade unionism," says labor expert Tom Juravich of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who has worked with the UMWA over the past 10 years. "It comes from so deep in his heart and his spirit. There's an emotionality to Cecil and his belief in unions that you don't see in a lot of trade unionists these days."
There's "an almost spiritual" sense to him, says West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who has known Roberts for three decades. "Whatever his relationship is to Bill Blizzard, it's a very close one."
Roberts, 49 and graying, is short and bespectacled but has a wrestler's brawn. Earnest, down to earth, and courteous, he speaks carefully, fashioning his sentences as he goes.
Roberts succeeded Richard Trumka as UMWA president last December, emerging from the shadow of a man he served for 12 years as vice president. Trumka left after he was elected to the number two post at the AFL-CIO.
The two men came up together through Miners for Democracy, a grass-roots movement that sought to give control of the autocratic UMWA back to ordinary members.
Both were ambitious for office. But "they decided to be a team and that they weren't going to run against each other," says UMWA education director John Duray. Once they gained the UMWA's highest offices in 1982, Duray adds, they worked closely together.
Rebuilding UMWA
Trumka left Roberts with the daunting task of rebuilding the UMWA. No union has a prouder and fiercer history, but its membership in the mines, which numbered over half a million in the 1940s, has shrunk to fewer than 40,000.
Roberts took over just as the UMWA was launching its most aggressive organizing drive since the 1930s, aiming not only at nonunion coal mines but other workplaces. Under the motto, "Every Member an Organizer," the union plans each year to set aside $1 million to pay for 15,000 person-days of organizing by the rank and file after training - the equivalent of 50 people organizing full time for a year.
"We had 200,000 members at one time that were not coal miners," Roberts says. "We're going back to to those days." In the first stage of the drive, a team from UMWA headquarters is visiting five communities to train officials from about 100 locals in organizing. Roberts is part of the team.
Roberts, who is reputed to have a talent for administration, also has consolidated the 16 UMWA districts to 10, in part so that organizing resources are not spread thin.
Organizing results since last winter show how much work the UMWA has cut out for it. The UMWA has attempted only one election among mine workers since December and it narrowly lost that one in a small mine in Montcoal, W.Va. It has managed to help organize more than 500 blue collar and local government workers in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and West Virginia.
As vice president, Roberts negotiated dozens of UMWA contracts with independent coal producers. Few of those who have been across the bargaining table will speak about Roberts, but Jerry Eyster, vice president of Massey Coal Co., an industry giant, did. He calls Roberts someone willing to listen to the other side and a pragmatist.
"He's worked hard to keep miners employed and cut deals that some of his fellow officers in the union think were a major concession in the interest of keeping people employed," Eyster says.
Roberts realizes coal companies must be profitable if miners are to have jobs, says Eyster, but for making concessions "he's taken a lot of heat." Still, Eyster says, Roberts is no pushover. "He can be old shoe or tough as nails," he remarks.
Strike tactics
Roberts says if the circumstances are right, he could see himself as president both leading a strike on the ground and negotiating with the company, as he did at Pittston. He also expects to employ nonviolent resistance again.
Violence has long marked coal strikes. but at Pittston Trumka and Roberts took the UMWA down a new road. The union had just ended a bitter but unsuccessful four-year strike against Massey. Roberts, who was running the strike, had to go to Mingo County, W.Va., and tell striking miners he was calling it off. They wanted the strike to continue, and the meeting lasted three hours. Roberts says it was the toughest decision he's made as a UMWA official, one he second-guessed himself on for years.
"Shakespeare said, 'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,'" he recalls. "I continually reflect on that day in Mingo County, looking at the faces of all those workers and telling them that the end had come."
Regarding violence as self-defeating, he and Trumka were looking for a new strategy at Pittston. They decided the civil rights movement offered useful lessons. UMWA members sat in the roads and at plant gates, leading to thousands being arrested. Drivers sympathetic to the strike clogged the roads, creating gridlock and preventing trucks from hauling coal. Miners sat in at a key Pittston plant. They held rallies every Wednesday night. In the end the company succumbed and signed a contract.
Nonviolence, Roberts learned, leads those inclined to be sympathetic to labor's cause to offer support - family and community members, other labor leaders and religious figures. "People are drawn to your cause when you use nonviolence," he says. It is, he adds, is "a powerful tool."
LENGTH: Long : 137 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Cecil Roberts, shown here (right) speaking with miners atby CNBCyprus Amax Emerald Mine in March, succeeded Richard Trumka as UMWA
president last December, emerging from the shadow of a man he served
for 12 years as vice president. color.< E. DOTLER