It’s industrial warfare in Kentucky

Press, 4 August 1977, Page 17

It’s industrial warfare in Kentucky

Industrial stoppages in New Zealand and strikes in .Kentucky are as alike as chalk to cheese—or pickets’ placards to highpowered shotguns. The “Sunday Times,” London, reports direct from the battlefront . . .

The 2800 inhabitants of the tiny mining town of Steams, on the edge of the Kentucky coalfield, are awakened on each of these sweaty rummer nights by the sound of gunfire. It comes from the thickly wooded hills surrounding the town where the Blue Diamond Mining Company operates the small isolated, strike-bound Justus coal mine.

The firing, exchanged from sandbagged bunkers across a quarter of a mile of no-mans land between the miners on the picket line and Blue Diamond guards, may last only a few minutes or it may go on for hours.

Each morning William “Doc” Coffey, the Justus mine superintendent, drives across the picket line escorted by a police car and checks the night’s damage with the guards — a motley gang of meanlooking war veterans. He counts the new bullet holes, now in the hundreds, in the prefabricated mine buildings and replaces shot-out floodlights. A pile of empty shells in the company bunker by the main gate tells him the company guards did their share of shooting, too.

The shooting war has been going on for four months after the breakdown of round-table talks. There has been four wounded to date. No-one will ever prove who shot first the miners say it was the guards and the guards say it was the miners. Both sides, however, agree that the only foreseeable outcome of the 12-month bargaining deadlock is what is known locally as the “Brookside solution” - 3 reference to the death of a miner in a bitter. 13-month strike at the nearby Brookside mine in Harlan County in 1974. The miners won a long battle only after a young

picket was shot dead by a security guard. Judging by t>'“ random nature of the shooting at Justus, and the fact that I saw high-velocity, largebore weapons, it is remarkable that no-one has been killed yet. The casualty list so far is four wounded — two miners and two guards.

The central issue is one which has plagued the Kentucky coalfields since the 1930 s — the coal companies’ stubborn resistance to attempts by the Unted Mine-workers of America (U.M.W.) to organise the miners.

The U.M.W. got its opportunity at the beginning of last year when the Blue Diamond outfit bought Justus from the local Steams Coal and Lumber Company. Within months of the takeover there was a gas explosion in another Blue Diamond mine in Kentucky in which 26 men died. That mine was also non-union.

Feelings against Blue Diamond were running high, and Justus miners voted 126 to 57 to join the U.M.W. Immediately, the

company filed an objection on the grounds that not enough of the miners were members when the vote was taken. But a month later the National Labour Relations Board certificated the men’s decision.

Last January, negotiations on a new contract broke down over a U.M.W. demand that the union's national safety committee be allowed regular inspections of the mine and be empowered to close it down if it found the owners had failed to meet its safety standards — until federal safety experts could inspect the mine.

The U.M.W. insists that this clause is written into every contract for its 150,000 members: a refusal by Blue Diamond is, as

Lee Potter, the strikers’ organiser, says, an effort to keep the U.M.W. out. The company insists that allowing the U.M.W. safety committee into the mine takes the mine’s control of it out of its hands. It says the power to close down the mine would be used by the miners for demands unrelated to safety, such as increased wages and benefits.

The miners told me, however, that safety regulations at Justus are already being disregarded. They say that the mine is very gassy, yet methane monitors on heavy equipment at the coalface are often “crossed over” or bridged out of the circuit.

So the fighting continues. It started in a relatively mild manner with road blocks and the ston-

ing of company officials’ cars. When Blue Diamond obtained a court order restraining the miners from being on or near the mine site, the 150 strikers, who get $lOO a week strike pay, each put $35 into a kitty and bought a fiveacre plot a quarter of a mile from the mine gates to set up a picket. A sign by the picket says: “Warning. The Stearns miners have determined that scabbing is dangerous to your health.” Next to the sign are two bunkers dug into the sandstone and topped with sandbags. No miner can be seen carrying a gun — the judge ruled that was illegal — but you don’t have to look very far to find spent 22 and .3 calibre cartridges.

It is apparent that even

more potent weapons are being used. There are clean bullet holes in the 3/8 in-thick steel plating which surrounds the Blue Diamond’s bunker at the pithead.

“We can call up guns when we need them,” said one miner. “We have to defend ourselves.” The firing does not start usually until dark, and after the handful of employees who maintain the machinery have left. But an NBC TV crew filming at the picket were pinned to the ground by gunfire for 15 mintues. “They staged that for the publicity; it must have looked good on film,* Coffey says.

Recently, Roy Hamlyn, a miner, was hit by a buckshot-pellet in the left leg while manning the picket line. One of the security guards has been charged with' shooting him. Coffey says it happened at about 10 o’clock at night after a dynamite bomb had been thrown over the mine perimeter fence and exploded near the bunker. One of the

guards fired into the woods and hit Hamlin.

Coffey says the guards use only shotguns, but I saw several carrying AR15’s, the civilian version of the Ml 6 rifle in use with the United States infantry. A small wooden hut near the miners’ picket line is riddled with byllet holes which indicate that the guards have been using weapons other than shotguns. But the most sinister incidents have occurred away from the site. In one, a striking miner was dragged from his car on a public road and shot with a .38 automatic pistol through his arm. In another, two security guards, who had come to pick up colleagues, were shot in their car, one of them seriously in the stomach. The guards are now flown into the beleaguered mine site by helicopter. They are not local men and refused to give their names. One, who called himself Dan, appeared to be in charge of the 12man contingent; he said that he was a veteran of the Second World War and Vietnam. Besides shotguns, many of them carry pistols strapped to their waists.

Although Coffey is given a police escort in and out of the mine, he says he has received many anonymous phone calls at home, threatening to harm his wife and two children and bum down his house. A week ago he was beaten up in a bar in neighbouring Tennessee by miners from Kentucky he recognised. Warrants are out for their arrests if they ever stray back across the state line.

Meanwhile, neither the company nor the union offer any suggestions for breaking the deadlock — except, that is, for the “Brookside solution.”