Submerged Strike

The miners' demand for a 55-peso ($2.20) daily minimum wage had been rejected; the company's counter offer of a 15% pay rise (16-c-) had been turned down. A month's patient mediating by the Government had ended in failure. Last week, the coal miners of Lota stayed in their grubby little dirt-floor huts on the edge of the Pacific and the strike was on.

The Life. Government files contain reports on the miseries of Lota--its mine galleries reaching out under the sea, its underhoused town, its undernourished children. One of the reports says that no Chilean family can subsist on less than 65 pesos ($2.60) daily. But 33-year-old Juan Soto, a typical miner, who has dug Lota's coal for 16 years, gets 30 pesos for an eight-hour day's work. Neither he nor his wife and three small children remember having ever bought cheese or fruit, but they do get some milk.

The Sotos live in two candlelit rooms in a row of two-story barracks. Four times a day (for 30-minute periods), their tap runs water, but the house has no bath or toilet. Occasionally, the family uses one of six collective baths that the Government has constructed.

It takes Juan four hours a day to get to & from his work, which is sometimes as much as five miles out under the ocean. The tunnels are hot and humid. In the big Lota mine, there have been 8,151 accidents and 38 deaths in the past 20 months.

The Need. Like the majority in Lota, Juan is a Communist. His union is Communist too. In the past it has staged some violent strikes, lost every time. Last week, the union's tone was strangely moderate. Its leaders seemed to take seriously the claims of the Chilean and British owners that costs were high,* and bound to remain so as long as machinery ordered in the U.S. failed to arrive.

Because hard-pressed Chile needed Lota's coal to keep railroads and power plants going, President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla sent troops to Lota, used his emergency powers (TIME, Sept. 1) to order strikers back to the mines, offered a 40% wage increase. At week's end, the miners still stood fast.

* Though Lota and Schwager, the two biggest companies, cleared 10% and 20% profit respectively last year.

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