Violence in the Coalfields

The union struck last fall because Massey refused to sign the contract agreed to in September between the U.M.W. and the industry's Bituminous Coal Operators' Association. Still, on both sides the contract is only one of the issues at stake. For the U.M.W. its membership dwindling (down 31%, to about 110,000 working miners, since 1978) along with the industry's work force and its once formidable power diluted, the dispute is providing the first test of a new selective strike strategy. For Massey, a company with 25 mines, seven processing plants and some 100 subsidiaries around the U.S., the goal is to allow each of its subordinate operations to negotiate a separate contract. Massey contends that the wellbeing of his company (owned by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and the Fluor Corp.) relies on such decentralization. But Trumka insists that Massey's purpose is only to bust the unions.

To the affected workers, the root issue is economic survival. Jim Vance and his wife Barbara, who moved their 13-year-old daughter away from the Tug Fork Valley after the family trailer was fired upon one night, voice both the fear and the anger of the strikers. They find the sounds of nonunion coal trucks, as Barbara puts it, "gut sickening" because they "take the jobs." She makes sandwiches at the B&G Mart in McCarr to supplement the $200 that her husband, like all the other strikers, gets each week from the U.M.W. To bolster the morale of the worn strikers, the United Auto Workers this month sent a 200-vehicle convoy (plus gifts of clothes, food and $55,000 cash) from Detroit to Belfry, Ky., for a "Motown to Coaltown" solidarity rally attended by some 2,000 supporters.

Enough workers have crossed the lines to keep the Massey company operating--at 60% of prestrike production levels in one operation. Strike breakers include some ex-union members. At the Sprouse Creek Processing Co., Buddy McCoy was a union man who crossed the picket line to become a foreman. "I had a family to care for," says McCoy, who received a three-stitch gash in the head from marauding strikers after his defection.

The danger to the communities involved is not entirely physical. Friendships and even families have been torn apart. Viet Nam Veteran Fred Deerfield, 44, of Matewan quit the mines as a union man and recently opened Fred's Place, a bar. He supports the strike, but some of his friends and relatives do not. "Now we don't speak." he says. "Christmas has been a family thing, but last year I didn't go." --By Frank Trippett. Reported by Elizabeth Taylor/Matewan