Nation: Carter Acts–Just inTime

Jimmy Carter made an appointment with national network television at 9 p.m. last Friday. He let it be known that he planned to announce “drastic steps” to end the 81-day coal strike. Two hours earlier, however, the President had just joined in a party honoring early campaign supporters in the Blue Room of the White House. Suddenly he got a message. Striding down the corridor to take his place before cameras in the West Wing, he briskly announced that the long ordeal was probably over. A “voluntary settlement” had been reached between the 165,000 striking United Mine Workers and the 130-member Bituminous Coal Operators Association. Said the President to the workers who must now ratify the pact: “This agreement serves the national interest as well as your own. If it is not approved without delay, time will have run out for all of us.” After dealing with B.C.O.A. negotiators through the afternoon, U.M.W. President Arnold Miller was walking down the street on his way to dinner when the President’s sudden announcement came. The union leader was accosted by an aide who yelled: “Come back right away!” Miller hustled down the block to U.M.W. headquarters, conferred with other officials for ten minutes, then announced that he was “delighted.” He said he was urging the union rank and file to ratify the contract “so they can get back to work as soon as possible.”

If they do ratify it, probably within ten days, it will finally end a struggle that brought power shortages, curtailed business hours, and threatened mass layoffs in eight Eastern-Central states. It will also end the sporadic violence that has pitted angry strikers against armed truckers trying to bring nonunion coal to utility companies (see box). Even after ratification, however, it could take the mines three weeks more to resume full production.

After nine days of intense negotiations, maneuvers and threats, the B.C.O.A. surrendered more or less completely. What the United Mine Workers wanted, they got: a $2.40-an-hour wage increase over three years, company-guaranteed health care, and the right to honor wildcat pickets without retributions. For the mineowners, there was only the minor sop of a presidential commission to examine improved health, safety and productivity. The agreement “will be ratified overwhelmingly,” predicted one confident U.M.W. official.

In Kentucky, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, some suspicious rank-and-file miners were not so sure. Said Ralph Adams of U.M.W. District 30 in eastern Kentucky: “Before anybody can say anything, I’d say they’d have to wait and see what kind of settlement it is.” It will not be until the end of this week that the miners’ feelings are really known.

The President had decided by late Thursday afternoon that he would act on Friday night if the miners and operators had not reached a solution. He had instructed Domestic Affairs Adviser Stuart Eizenstat to prepare a plan of action. Eizenstat recommended that Carter invoke the Taft-Hartley Act, imposing an 80-day back-to-work injunction on the miners, and request congressional authorization to seize the coal mines.

Carter asked the coal industry’s leading spokesmen to come to the White House Friday morning. There, in the Roosevelt Room, the guests met a formidable array of brass. It included Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger and Special Trade Representative Robert Strauss. In the hour-long session, Carter set a 6 p.m. deadline for settlement, without revealing his threatened countermeasures.

Those measures, as Carter well knew, could have made matters worse. By using the Taft-Hartley Act, he could obtain an 80-day back-to-work injunction against the miners, but they might well choose to ignore the ruling. Seizure of the coal mines, on the other hand, would put pressure on mineowners, but it might have taken a month to get the necessary legislation through Congress.

Confronted by such unpleasant options, Carter had been looking in another direction: a compromise settlement worked out earlier last week by the union and ‘the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Co., a small subsidiary of Gulf Oil, which is not a member of the 130-company B.C.O.A.

There was little time to spare. Coal stockpiles in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Michigan had dwindled dangerously. Normally, the utilities in those states use 3 million tons of coal a week during the winter. Lately they have been receiving a weekly average of 300,000 tons from unstruck mines.

In Ohio, the state’s largest utility, Ohio Edison, has been staying just above a 30-day coal supply. At that cutoff point, a mandatory 50% power cutback would be required, affecting General Motors and Chrysler plants and perhaps thousands of jobs. Last week officials were importing up to 35% of their power from Minnesota, New Jersey and other states.

In Indiana three state power companies declared cutbacks in consumption that averaged 22%; some 3,600 people were laid off. In Kokomo, a General Motors electronics plant announced a four-day week for 6,000 workers.

The period of near chaos in the coal dispute began on Feb. 12. That was when the 39-member U.M.W. bargaining council—with rowdy support from rank and file miners, who barged into U.M.W. headquarters—rejected President Miller’s initial agreement with the B.C.O.A. The agreement called for a three-year wage increase, from $8.11 an hour to $10.46. But the pact also allowed mine owners to penalize workers who joined in a wildcat strike by requiring offenders to pay $20 a day to the U.M.W. health fund. The owners were adamant on the wildcat provision because 2.5 million man-days were lost that way in the coal mines last year, ten times the average for all industries. The miners, on the other hand, regard such strikes as their only way of settling grievances against local mine operators. The miners were nearly as outraged by a provision compelling them to contribute up to $650 a year for family medical expenses, which have hitherto been paid by the companies.

Those aggravations do not appear in the contract between the U.M.W. and the Pittsburg & Midway Coal Mining Co., which employs some 700 miners. While offering roughly the same wage increase ($1 an hour in the first year, 700 in each of the next two years), the company agreed to guarantee the health fund and restrict antiwildcat penalties to strike leaders and actual picketers.

This small settlement buoyed the union—and also cheered up Labor Secretary Ray Marshall. Communications between the union and the B.C.O.A. had broken down over the previous weekend. Here, thought Marshall and his mediators, was another path to try—using the P. & M. agreement as a pattern for a national contract with the U.M.W. Marshall’s aides began meeting separately with the two sides at Labor Department headquarters on Monday afternoon.

Jimmy Carter took no part in those negotiations, except to consult regularly with Marshall. On Tuesday the President breakfasted with Democratic and Republican leaders from the House and Senate to keep them up to date and also to test their views. All sides favored stronger presidential action, but Carter aides were wary of congressional delays on a step as controversial as seizure of the coal mines.

Later that day the coal operators turned down the Pittsburg & Midway settlement as a pattern setter. Said one B.C.O.A. leader, in snide reference to P. & M.’s ownership by Big Oil: “No filling-station operation is going to influence these negotiations.”

The B.C.O.A., however, was badly divided. Many of its member corporations, subsidiaries of Big Steel or Big Oil, or completely independent, respond to widely differing business impulses. Their executives split between hard-and soft-line bargainers. Squabbling between those factions impaired the B.C.O.A.’s flexibility and judgment. Still, the coal operators tried a counterplay late Tuesday night. They issued a call for binding arbitration of the dispute. The union said no.

By Wednesday, Mediators Wayne Horovitz and William Hobgood had persuaded the U.M.W. bargaining council to accept the P. & M. settlement as its own pattern setter. The pressure was now seriously coming to bear on the B.C.O.A. The mine owners, who had only reluctantly answered President Carter’s initial plea for new negotiations after their deal with Miller collapsed, had feared such a shift all along. They sensed the U.M.W.’s perverse strength: since the rank and file would not necessarily follow their leader, logic dictated that the Government try to make the more organized opposing party bend toward settlement.

Try it did. White House officials began calling coal companies, suggesting that the bargaining might be declared to be at an “impasse”—a technical term that would serve to dissolve the national contract talks and pit individual companies against union locals. The Administration also began to encourage executives in other industries to call their coal-company peers, urging settlement. Finally the Governors of afflicted states joined the cam paign, and mine owners complained that none-too-subtle threats were coming from state regulatory officials. Among them: that holdouts might face sudden delays in obtaining permits for strip mining and other operations.

One result of the pressure was that the B.C.O.A. changed its chief negotiator. The association replaced J. Bruce Johnston, 47, a hard-lining U.S. Steel vice president, with Nicholas Camicia, 61, chairman of the Connecticut-based Pittston Co. and a former coal miner himself. Camicia was chairman of the B.C.O.A. in 1974, when a settlement was reached after a three-week strike.

Carter asked congressional leaders to come to the White House for a second meeting on Thursday morning. He briefed them on the state of negotiations, then asked for and got renewed pledges of bipartisan support. The same day, crusty A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany denounced the President for failing to show “strong leadership” in the strike. Said Meany: “I think he’s fallen short.” But at around the same time, the U.M.W. reached tentative agreement with two more coal companies outside the B.C.O.A. The stage was set for Friday’s climactic showdown.

As Carter said on television that night, the agreement was a “significant achievement”—not least of all for himself. The President displayed strong nerves, sound tactical skills and a shrewd sense of timing in pushing the mine operators over the brink into settlement.