"I'm Awful Thankful"

"I have had around 45 years in the mines. I now have a wife and nine children all under age. I had a mine accident in 1942 . . . got my back and both legs broke. I am unable to do any work . . . Part of my children had to finish school without any shoes and part of the time they didn't have money for lunch. I have three babies that ought to have milk to drink and I can't buy it for them . . . I have no other income only what I get from the welfare fund--and that's $170 and I'm awful thankful for that."

Before the Senate Banking and Currency committee last week, a trim, grey-haired woman slowly read this West Virginia coal miner's account of his fight with life.

His plight, explained Miss Josephine Roche, onetime coal operator (president of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co.), is just a sample of the cases in the files of the United Mine Workers' multimillion-dollar Welfare and Retirement Fund. With the 20-c- paid to the union fund for every ton of coal mined, John L. Lewis and his U.M.W. were fighting a kind of poverty and despair unknown to most of the prosperous U.S. So far, said Fund Director Roche, the money has been barely enough to attack the "backlog of human misery [that] has been rolled up through decades" in the mining country. In the past twelve months, she said, the fund took in $90,891,905, but had to spend $14 million more than it took in.

Because of his hazardous work, a miner cannot afford the cost of sky-high life insurance. The U.M.W. fund, reported Miss Roche, paid out $5,500,000 since mid-1948 to nearly 32,000 survivors of miners who died or were killed (an average of $174 per beneficiary). Another $64 million went into disability and assistance grants, $30 million for the miners' $100-a-month pension program, and $5,000,000 for health and medical services.

But the miners, it seemed, were not the only beneficiaries. Of the fund's three trustees, Miss Roche disclosed casually, two are drawing a lush $35,000 a year each (the equivalent of 35 miners' death benefits) for their services. The third trustee, U.M.W. Chief John L. Lewis, accepts no fee but gets a union salary of $50,000 plus an unlimited annual expense account.

The Senators received the news with some astonishment--one of the recipients of this rich stipend was their senatorial colleague, New Hampshire Republican Styles Bridges (the other: Ezra Van Horn, representing the mine operators).

Said Trustee Bridges, who as U.S. Senator gets $12,500 plus a tax-free $2,500 expense allowance: "I am not going to be forced out ... by a lot of scurrilous criticism. And I wouldn't stay 30 seconds if I were not paid sufficiently to hire real counsel and advice."

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