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   Vol.64/No.23            June 12, 2000 
 
 
'You take on one of us, you take on all of us'
P&M coal strike spreads to Wyoming
{lead article}
 
BY JEFF POWERS  
KEMMERER, Wyoming--One hundred fifty striking miners and their supporters from United Mine Workers Local 1307 lined the road going into the Pittsburg and Midway coal mine here May 30. They greeted the few company supervisory personnel that went to work that morning with handmade signs that declared, "You take on one of us, you take on all of us," "We're not flex-a-ble," and "On strike against P&M--unfair labor practice."

Picketing alongside Local 1307 miners were several workers from a nearby coke plant who are also members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The coke workers went through a 47-day strike two years ago.

The 230 miners who work at the Kemmerer mine struck Pittsburg and Midway (P&M) on May 28 a minute past midnight. They joined the more than 300 UMWA miners who have been on strike against P&M since May 15 at the McKinley mine near Gallup, New Mexico.

Kemmerer is the second largest of the four P&M mines, with close to 4 million tons produced last year. McKinley ranks first, with nearly 7 million tons of coal mined.

"The two main issues are the company's demand to go to a 12-hour day and their not wanting to give us a raise for six years," said striker Robert Wayman. "They say they are for the families, but how can you have any kind of life at all if you are working 12 hours a day?

"I have worked at the mine for 28 years," Wayman continued. "You have to have close to 20 years to be working here. Every time a miner retires they replace him or her with a bigger shovel."

"Everything in the company's proposal was a loss," Dallas Wolf, a unit coordinator for the UMWA, told the Militant, describing P&M's "final" offer.

"P&M hired an independent consultant named Dave Smith to negotiate both the Kemmerer and McKinley contracts for them," Wolf said. "Everywhere he goes there are strikes. He was the chief company negotiator at A.T. Massey and at Pittston and we had bitter, long strikes at both those mines," he noted, referring to the strike battles in 1984-85 against A.T. Massey Coal and in 1989-90 against Pittston.

The central takeaway the company wants is a change in the work schedule.

"They want to go to 12-hour shifts seven days per week," Wolf explained. "They want no overtime unless 40 hours are worked during a week, and they want to eliminate the shift differential of 35 cents per hour for second shift and 40 cents per hour for third shift."

"Right now we're scheduled to work three shifts, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday, with overtime on Saturday--and we work a lot of Saturdays," Wolf reported.

"The company is offering a 30-cent raise if we agree to their proposal, but that doesn't even make up for the shift differential we lose, much less for the overtime," he pointed out. "They're promising no layoffs, but with this schedule layoffs are inevitable."

"The union was willing to work with the company to come up with a new schedule to make the mine more productive," Wolf said. "We have agreed to different work schedules at a number of other mines, but P&M would not seriously negotiate with us."

Another takeaway demand is that the miners pay for at least a portion of their health-care benefits. Right now Kemmerer miners are covered at 100 percent of all health-care costs.

"At one point P&M said they wanted us to make a 20 percent co-pay on all medical expenses, but they took that off the table," Wolf reported. "The main thing they are after is the 12-hour day."

On May 27 the UMWA held two meetings to go over the contract. One was for the 200 UMWA members who work at Kemmerer and the other was for the 20 miners who are not in the union.

"Wyoming is a 'right-to-work' state and not everybody is in the union," Wolf said. "Once we went through the company's proposal point by point, everyone--even those who are not union members--were convinced that we had no choice but to strike.

"Several of the folks who are not in the UMWA asked if they could join the picket line," Wolf said. " Of course, we told them yes."

Expressing the sentiment of many of the workers on the picket line, Robert Wayman said, "We are not just fighting for ourselves, We are fighting for the future generations."  
 
 
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