New Vigor in the Pits

Unions have lost much of their vibrancy and clout in recent years. The big reason, many critics of the labor movement say, is that union leadership has become calcified in its complacent enjoyment of power and increasingly remote from the workers in the factories and mines. No union was more open to that accusation than the United Mine Workers under the autocratic tenures of John L. Lewis and W.A. ("Tony") Boyle. Now, a rank-and-file coal miner named Arnold Miller is giving this thesis a major challenge by providing the U.M.W. with the kind of leadership that labor's critics have found wanting.

Last December, Miller beat out Boyle by about 14,000 votes in a federally supervised special election to become U.M.W. president. Almost immediately, he began cleaning house. He fired nearly all Boyle's field appointees, including the former president's highly paid brother and sister; knocked down official salaries (Miller reduced his own from $50,000 to $35,000 a year), abolished special executive pensions and auctioned off three of the union's Cadillac limousines.

In a move guaranteed to make John L. Lewis spin in his grave, Miller announced that henceforth all U.M.W. local districts would elect their own officers instead of accepting bosses hand-picked by Washington headquarters. He set about spending two days a week touring the coal fields, listening to miners' comments and complaints. Last week he visited the hamlet of Lake, W. Va., to call on Willie Ray Blankenship, a feeble 72-year-old former mine worker. Blankenship had applied for a union pension four years ago when he retired, but the Boyle regime denied it on a technicality. Miller handed Blankenship a check for $2,400, bringing the old miner up to date on his pension, and told Blankenship that he can now collect $150 a month.

Miller has yet to be tested in a direct confrontation with the coal companies. But he has already served notice that when union contracts expire next year, fat wage increases will not be enough to satisfy him. He will push even harder for generous fringe benefits and, above all, tough safety rules. Coal mining is a hazardous occupation, and Miller himself suffers from black-lung disease, contracted because of a lifetime of working in the pits. It has left him with a pasty skin and anemic look that, combined with steel-gray hair, makes him appear at least ten years older than his actual age of 49.

He was drawn full-force into the union reform movement in 1969 when he helped to lead a series of wildcat strikes that forced the West Virginia legislature to vote compensation for black-lung victims. Boyle opposed the effort. Says Miller's press aide Bernard Aronson of the atmosphere they encountered at U.M.W. headquarters: "It was like the Wizard of Oz. There was this screen and a lot of smoke and noise and light coming from up above. When we took the screen away we discovered the real secret: nothing was going on up there at all, just a bunch of guys drawing huge salaries."

Miller also promises that the union will become "more political." He already has assailed President Nixon for dismembering the Office of Economic Opportunity, which coordinated anti-poverty programs, and attacked a director of the Bureau of Mines' health and safety section as an incompetent. Such moves have led some mine operators to call Miller a radical, but he is not always opposed to the companies. Last week he called a press conference to denounce President Nixon's energy message for not paying enough attention to King Coal.

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