A Dime for the U. M. W.

The wind was warm enough last week to melt the snow around the tipples of most of the nation's coal mines; there was a faint hint of spring in the air. Like a grey old bear ending his winter's hibernation, John Llewellyn Lewis lumbered from his den to negotiate with the nation's bituminous operators.

The U.S. watched apprehensively. Many guessed that John Lewis would try to wreck the Little Steel formula in one massive plunge for higher wages. But the miners' boss had something vastly more revolutionary in mind; he lost no time telling the country what it was. Borrowing from Jimmy Petrillo's book, he told the operators he wanted them to pay his union a royalty of 10-c- for every ton of soft coal mined in the U.S.

Bearlike John Lewis announced his appearance by rolling a rock down the mountain. Three days before the negotiations began, he filed formal notice of a labor dispute under the Smith-Connally Act--to which he referred as "that grotesque slave statute." Thus he paved the way for a legal strike vote within 30 days, and in so doing turned the act--passed by Congress in anger at the 1943 coal walkouts--into a weapon for his own use.

Cried the Philadelphia Record, "John Lewis is brandishing a coal shovel over the heads of the American people again." But when he faced the operators and U.M.W. representatives in the ballroom of Washington's Shoreham Hotel last week, John Lewis spoke softly. With just the right note of threat and regret, he said he hoped that "the public and Government will not be inconvenienced through stoppage or loss of tonnage vital to ... our war program."

The 1945 Deal. As the operators sat uncomfortably on spindly, gilded chairs, Miner Lewis enumerated 18 financial and nonfinancial "adjustments" that he proposed to get this spring for his men--premium pay for late shifts, free explosives, fuses, rubber boots and other materials, better sanitary facilities. Then he emphasized what his unhappy listeners had already gathered: he was going to do everything possible to avoid engaging the Government on a second front--even though he enjoys fighting the Government.

None of these proposals, he intoned righteously, constitute a violation of the Little Steel formula "contrary ... to our literary pundits and Government people who look into a whiskey glass and tell what the United Mine Workers are going to do."

He discussed the royalty proposal with ironic innocence, as though he expected applause any minute from his squirming listeners. The royalty fund would enable the union to provide modern medical service, hospitalization, insurance, rehabilitation and--economic protection. Did not his listeners hope for the betterment, the protection, the comfort of their fellow men? He was certain that there could be no objection to this wholly charitable and worthy request.

The operators shuddered, went back to hotel rooms to plan a defense. After hurried scribbling they announced that Lewis' demands would cost up to $400,000,000 a year, add up to 65-c- a ton to the cost of coal. A union spokesman cried "80% wrong," and the soft-coal battle was on. (The anthracite battle will come a little later--the hard-coal contract expires on April 30, a month after expiration of the soft-coal miners' contract.)

What Now? Hundreds of other U.S. employers watched all this uneasily. Most of them had shrugged off Jimmy Petrillo's royalty on phonograph records (TIME, Nov. 20) as a lamentable freak. But if the coal industry began paying royalties into the treasury of the United Mine Workers, labor royalties would be a freak no longer. Other unions would soon be asking for royalties on automobiles, furniture, shoes and a thousand other manufactured products.

At week's end only one thing was certain--John Lewis had the coal operators where he wanted them. The U.S. could not afford to lose one ton of desperately needed coal.

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