On December 19th, Arnold Miller defeated Tony Boyle for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America in an election which was ordered by the Courts and policed by the Labour Department of the federal US government. Miller was the candidate of a movement called Miners for Democracy, formed in 1970.
Miller is the successor to Jock Yablonski, who ran against Boyle in the 1969 election and was defeated. Soon afterwards, Yablonski threatened miners were living on pensions of $150 a to use the Landrum-Griffin Act (passed in the 50's ostensibly against corruption in the unions) against Boyle, whom he charged with having rigged the election. Boyle was subsequently found to have paid out large sums of money to various individuals in the union during his campaign and to have denied Yablonski access to union facilities. Jock Yablonski, his wife and daughter, were murdered one month later. Investigations have since shown that the assassins were hired by officials of the UMW close to Boyle. Miners for Democracy was successful in getting the courts to declare the 1969 elections null and void, and in obtaining a re-run of the election, this time putting up Miller as candidate. Miller won by 14,000 votes.
DISCREDITED The deposing of Boyle is altogether a good thing. For many of the younger and more militant miners, Boyle had become widely discredited. In the first strike officially sanctioned by the UMW since 1950, many miners had gone without strike pay, despite the $ 70 million in the union's strike fund (The Red Mole, 29 November 1971). Boyle's gangsterism at union conventions was becoming widely known. Local officials were appointed rather than elected. If indeed Boyle did have Yablonski killed then he made a serious miscalculation of this changing mood.
But most important of all - and this was an issue Yablonski took up in 1969 - has been the question of safety and health in the mines. One of the most dramatic examples of this was the Farmington mine disaster in 1968, in which Boyle had said that the mine, owned one of the best companies to work with as far as co-operation and safety are concerned". Since 1966, 12,000 miners have been killed and 60,000 injured in cave-ins and gas explosions in US coal. At about the same time. Miller, then leader of a Local, was helping to organise the Virginia Black Lung Association which began to campaign for a state health and safety bill, and for increases in the compensation paid to disabled miners.
The basic cause of Boyle's cynicism lay in the fact that the union had built up investments in coal companies over a period of years. The National Bank of Washington, for example, controlled by the UMW, was bailing out coal owners and helping them to modernise, while month, and those forced to retire through pneumoconiosis were paid compensation from a fund contributed to by employers on the bass of output. This indifference of the union to health and safety in the mines stems back to the Fifties when the UMW not only gave the coal owners a free hand to modernise and rationalise the pits, resulting in the loss of over 300,000 jobs during the coal slump, but also gave them loans to do this. Boyle came to power during this period.
SUSPICION Nonetheless, Miller's election was not overwhelming, despite all the exposures of Boyle which have taken place since 1968, and the 1970 killings in particular. There is a good deal of suspicion of Miners for Democracy among the miners. This is understandable, because MFD has carried out an essentially legalistic campaign. MFD has nailed Boyle by using the Labour courts, and particularly the LandrumGriffin Act, and it has been associated with lawyers and others, such as Ralph Nader the consumer-advocate.
Of course Boyle's men have tried to discredit Miller's integrity by pointing this out, and this does play on a genuine fear. Nixon is hoping to extend legislation against the unions in the coming year and it is teared that the intervention of the Labour courts has created legal precedents which might make Nixon's job easier. Cases of corruption and murder and mafia-type practices are always good propaganda. Whether this is true or not, this suspicion is justified. It indicates the political limitations of MFD. They have not carried out any political explanation which could offset the dangers inherent in inviting the state machine into the affairs of the union - union democracy can only be built if the unions are independent from the state.
In fact, the leadership of MFD have been riding on a wave created by a series of state interventions in the UMW. Boyle suffered a defeat toil is HK $10 (70p). To survive every member of in 1969 at the hands or tne government, wen it introduced (partly, at least, for its own reasons) the Coal Mine Health & Safety Act, following the Farmington disaster. This incorporated some of the proposals of the Black Lung Association which had been campaigning for such a bill. Yablonski was a former proBoyle bureaucrat who had been persuaded by Nader to campaign against Boyle, but Yablonski had not built up a mass base in the reform movement and his decision to use the Landrum-Griffin Act shows his political limitations. Miller was not in the bureaucracy like Yablonski, and has been able to gain mass support by making the health and safety issue a central feature of his campaign, but he too has relied heavily in an apolitical sense on the labour courts.
NOT UNSYMPATHETIC This makes the liberal ruling class not unsympathetic to Miller's candidacy. Firstly, the growth in wildcat strikes in the coal fields has clearly frightened the bourgeoisie, who recognised that Boyle was rapidly losing control over the men at local level. The ruling class remember that in the Thirties the UMW was in the leadership of the working class movement and played a major role in building the CIO, and they have also noticed in the British miners' strike the solidarity mining communities can dısplay. Boyle is therefore a potentially dangerous anachronism they can affordto dispense with Another, broader question which forms a backcloth to all these developments, is the trends of development within the coal industry itself. One motive for the 1969 Act was to speed up the process of concentration of capital in the coal fields by making it difficult fot smaller firms to meet the conditions of the Act. The Act even gave the UMW the right to close pits they considered unsafe. Hundreds of small concerns have closed down over the last couple of years. Of course the coal owners will blame anything and everything on to the safety measures, but it is critical for US capital none.theless to speed up rationalisation in the mining areas because the demand for coal in the US is rising sharply (the nuclear fuel policy has failed and imports of oil are causing balance of payments difficulties). If rationalisation does not take place rapidly then demand will exceed efficient supply and thus force up prices. Naturally the ruling class want the burden to fall on the miners either way: miners working in disastrously unsafe conditions (with Boyle bailing out the companies) on the one Amold Miller, new president of the UMN The following statement was issued by the Revolutionary Marxist Group (Irish sympathisers of the Fourth International) in reply to the smear campaign recently mounted by various bourgeois papers in Britain and Ireland.
We regard with alarm the recent smear campaign, directed against the Fourth International, which is being waged by certain sections of the bourgeois press, both in Ireland and abroad. While we are in favour of the freedom of the press, we feel that this does not mean freedom to distort facts, which is an abuse of journalistic acence.
These libels have centred on the alleged involve. ment of the Fourth International in the military campaign against Imperialism in the Six Counties. In accusing the Fourth International of masterminding a projected conspitacy to manip ulate the Republican movemept, certain newspapers (e.g. News of the World, Dec. 10 1972) have libelled our comrades Ernest Mandel, Peter Graham, and Mairin Keegan, and portrayed them as "international terrorists" rather then Marxist revolutionaries. As for Liam Dalton, we cannot answer for his politics as he was never a member of our group but we must defend him as one sympathetic to the cause of Proletarian Revolution.
While we support the Anti-Imperialist struggle for national unification, which we regard as a necesmry part of the fight for Socialism, as marxist revolutionaries we recognise the primacy of the latter objective. This can be achieved
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Revolutionary Marxist Group rejects press slanders