The 1989-90 Pittston Strike
During the coal boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s (brought on by the Arab oil embargo), Pittston employed as many as 12,000 rank-and-file miners working in West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. The company owned hundreds of thousands of acres of mineral reserves and surface land in the coalfields.
By the late 1980s, Pittston’s non-salaried workforce had dwindled to around 2000, due in part to a downturn in the world coal market and the use of new machines and strip mining, including Mountain Top Removal, to dig more coal with fewer workers.
In 1987, Pittston withdrew from the main association of coal mining firms, the Bituminous Coal Operators Association, as Massey Coal had done in the early 1980s. The BCOA and the UMWA had developed a negotiating relationship decades before in which final contracts were formed covering all workers and their BCOA employers. By withdrawing from the BCOA, Pittston signaled to its workers and to the UMWA that it would confront the union, and proceeded to do so by refusing to sign a contract with the same provisions as the UMWA-BCOA contract signed in 1988.
In an unprecedented act, Pittston terminated the medical benefits of 1,600 pensioners, widows, and disabled miners -- a lifetime benefit the coal industry promised in 1947 after a nationwide strike. This violation of a long-standing social contract ignited a sense of outrage throughout coalfield communities and among union people around the country.
The main issues of contention in the new negotiations between Pittston and the UMWA were job security and health benefits: specifically, subcontracting, the introduction of irregular work schedules and Sunday shifts, and the drastic limitation of health and pension benefits for retired and disabled miners and their dependents and beneficiaries. Pittston miners worked without a contract for months while the company and union negotiated.
In April 1989, UMWA President Richard Trumka called a selective strike against Pittston operations to protest the company's systematic violation of federal labor laws. About 1,700 miners went on strike in southwestern Virginia, southern West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.
Pittston aggressively fought to break the strike, especially in Virginia, home to many of its operations and a “right-to–work” state. Hundreds of state troopers were brought to the area to escort "replacement workers" through picket lines. Union members, their families and allies responded with mass civil disobedience resulting in over 4,000 arrests. State and federal judges reacted with injunctions and fined the UMWA more than $64 million. These actions sparked a six-week wildcat strike by as many as 46,000 miners in 10 states during the summer of 1989. In February 1990, after an 11-month strike, UMWA members ratified a contract with Pittston.
The strike and its outcome is well documented in Appalshop’s Justice in the Coalfields.
In his book A Strike Like No Other Strike, Richard Brisbin cites the Pittston strike as one of the most important strikes in the history of American labor and "one of the longest and largest incidents of civil disorder and civil disobedience in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century."
The UMWA heralded the contract with Pittston as a victory because of its protection of health benefits. The strike did pave the way for major reforms in health care and pension benefits for miners and retirees. Then-Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole was pressured to form a special panel whose recommendations eventually led to passage of the 1992 Coal Act -- federal legislation that ensured there would be no disruption to the health-care benefits of those who retired before October 1994.
Author Brisbin believes that, in the end, both sides lost: although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the union in regard to its strike-related fines, most of the strikers faced elimination of their jobs and an ongoing struggle for pensions and health benefits.
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