As the Coal Goes, So Goes Neutrality

Only a year ago, students climbed into cars, stepped aboard silver birds and otherwise stole out of Harvard environs with a half-credulous awareness that this trip home might be their last before Arabs, oil conglomerates and energy crises shut down America. Headlines and eyewitness news, everywhere one turned, a sinister image was forming of olive-skinned men in hoods, pink-cheeked men in gray suits and straight-faced Stephen S.J. Hall, vice president for administration, and his computer, all working together to shut down the planes and gas stations and steam heat in Harvard Houses. The 1973-74 energy crunch didn't leave Harvard's children stranded or shivering, of course. But it gave them a scare.

This Thanksgiving, though, few are aware at all that this year--perhaps before students leave again for Christmas holidays--the lights could go out.

The energy crisis in the winter of 1974-75--this time, an impending shortage of coal-produced electricity instead of Arab-imported oil--poses most of the same threats to a sluggish economy its predecessor did, but fewer inscrutable mysteries. It is not foreign in origin. It is not contingent upon (or confused by) questions of finding new fuel sources. Most experts agree that America sits upon coal seams extensive enough to meet its needs for 80 to 100 years. It has a definite point of origin--November 12, the Tuesday when 120,000 coal-mining members of the United Mine Workers didn't go to work because their old contract had expired without a duly-negotiated successor. And it has a discernible terminus--the day, ten days or so after the UMW's 38-member bargaining council approves a new contract, and a majority of members vote "yes" on the provisions President Arnold B. Miller and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association hammer out--provisions that will govern their working lives for the next three years.

Until then, the crisis will go on. As the strike continues, the nation's industrial stockpiles of coal will continue petering out, unemployment statistics will keep climbing and both the internal and external pressures on Miller's democratic union regime will start intensifying.

The day the strike began, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country's largest supplier of electricity, announced that its stockpiles would last only 42 days. Two weeks later, despite its warnings to governors in its seven-state area to take emergency measures to reduce electrical use, the TVA is standing by its predictions that it can't last until Christmas. Ditto that for most other utility heavy weights.

The ripple-effect, as well as the brownout, also hangs heavily over the negotiations at Washington's Hay-Adams Hotel--a place Miller aides and coal operators will see more of after yesterday's failure by the 38 regional representatives to put their imprimatur to a second, fattened industry offer. The strike has already idled more than 23,000 workers in the steel industry and coal-hauling railroads, had a hand in last week's laying-off of 130,000 auto workers and, by Government estimates, could add as many as 400,000 workers to the country's six-per-cent-plus unemployment figure if the miners' walkout lasts another two weeks.

The federal government's role in the action has also thickened with the plot. Despite Secretary of Labor Peter J. Brennan's threat at the strike's onset that President Ford would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to order the miners back to work if they rejected a tentative settlement, despite the continual release of memos from Secretary of the Interior Rogers C.B. Morton decrying the growing number of lay-offs resulting from the "miners' strike"--indicating, apparently, that no one has lost his job due to the coal operators' recalcitrance--the initial response from Washington officials was, as The New York Times editorialist A.H. Raskin put it, "benign neglect." Members of the Executive Branch, including labor economist John T. Dunlop, coordinator of Ford's advisory commission on labor and management, stayed clear of the fracas.

But, predictably, as the strike outlasted its projected half-life of a week to ten days, the Government's activity increased. Treasury Secretary William E. Simon Sunday gave his blessing to the industry's second offer--which restored the consecutive two-week summer vacation lost in the first offer and increased its daily pay hike of $7.00 by 98 cents, leaving average daily wages at approximately $53. William J. Usery Jr., director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, reportedly started pleading early this week with bargaining-council members for acceptance of the contract, banking on his reputation as White House opponent of presidential intervention.

Such gentle prodding could easily turn into tougher tugging if the ratification process continues to stumble slowly along. Certainly, a rank-and-file rejection of the contract--the first such grass-roots referendum ever in an autocratic union that has had the likes of John L. Lewis and W.A. (Tony) Boyle as its advocates--might prod Ford to choose his option of an 80-day, back-to-work, cooling-off period under Taft-Hartley instead of beginning the complex negotiation and ratification cycle again. Whether the miners--a group of workers who, by virtue of the very interdependent nature of their dangerous job, have always exhibited solidarity to a man--would obey an injunction is another question. They never have before.

Miller has played the role of the democratic leader to the hilt, and perhaps to his own detriment. His aides have won the costliest contract (for the operators) in the union's history, provisions guaranteeing miners the right to withdraw from mines they feel are unsafe, pensions of $600 a month, and pay raises of 18 per cent that are a start in alleviating the lapses of the last 40 years, when coal miners fell behind other skilled union members in pay, benefits and everything else.

But it is doubtful Miller can survive the one-two punch of the old Boyle machine--which will oppose anything that emanates from the Hay-Adams Hotel--and a Ford injunction. The neutrals will soon disappear in Washington, just as in Harlan County.