"Great Defeat"

After seven sweltering days of conference in Indianapolis, the Policy Committee of the United Mine Workers of America last week voted to accept what was called "Labor's greatest defeat in years." The question was, and had been for some time, whether to relinquish to district vote the authority long exercised by the United Mine Workers' national officers over wage-agreements in the bituminous coal fields.

The wage-agreement upon which the district leaders, especially those from Illinois, who called the Policy Committee's meeting, wanted local autonomy, was the bitterly disputed scale established four years ago at Jacksonville, Fla.--$7.50 per day or $1.08 per ton (for tonnage workers).

Long before the time-limit of the Jacksonville agreement was reached, operators began "welshing," to meet non-union competition. On April 1, 1927, when the agreement expired, began the general bituminous strike, a strike that is not settled yet. Through successive months of hope, doggedness, anger, misery, squalor, International President John L. Lewis exhorted the United Mine Workers to take "no backward step" from their demands for continuance of Jacksonville rates. Many an operator went bankrupt. Many a head was broken in fights between union pickets and company "scabs" or police. The strong companies remanned their mines with non-union men.

It was to save the local unions in the one State where they had not suffered inroads that the Illinois men agitated for local option on the Jacksonville agreement, and got it. WThether or not the action came too late to help locals in other States, whether International President Lewis had carried his doggedness irretrievably far, remained to be seen. The first overture for local readjustment, by Ohio's union miners to Ohio's operators, was flatly rebuffed last week. President S. H. Robbins of the Ohio Coal Operators Association said: ". . . not interested . . . will have no further dealings with the United Mine Workers of America."

In Pittsburgh, potent operators commented :

"We are through with the United Mine Workers of America and will not deal with any other coal miners' union that may come into being. . . ."