National miners' strike

Before I turn to other matters, I feel I ought to add something to what I said last week about the Middle East and America's commitment there – or rather, America's interest.

I believe I said that whatever the outcome of the Cairo meeting, Israel is not likely to give up the lands it conquered in the 1967 war in exchange for a promise of protection from Egypt alone. She must have some solid guarantee from one of the two superpowers and Russia, surely, is out of the question. And I stressed that what embarrasses Washington in this whole problem is the fact that the United States and neither its Congress nor its people, however sympathetic they may be towards Israel, are going to sign a treaty promising to come to the defence of Israel if she's attacked. 

Well, put like that, as a proposition coming out of the blue, many people will say, 'Well, of course not!' Many more Americans, I'm afraid would say, 'What? But we have a treaty commitment to do it!' Well, the United States does not and I pointed out that, for 30 years, American policy under seven presidents has been given to the strongest moral commitment to the security and nationhood of Israel, but there is no legal commitment and, after Vietnam, I think there's no doubt, that the American people are overwhelmingly against giving such a promise to anyone, except to the nations of Western Europe under NATO. 

Now, once this is understood, it's not hard to see why the Americans have seemed to take a back seat in all the frantic politicking in the Middle East and why, from that back seat, they've been doing some pretty energetic politicking of their own. 

The United States has a crucial interest in the Middle East, but while it may parallel Israel's interest, it's not the same. It is primarily a concern to see that the Soviet Union does not come to straddle the Mediterranean and become the dominating power in the whole region. I mentioned, I think two or three years ago, the peril from not merely the American, but the Western point of view, the peril of seeing the Soviets in a position to commandeer the oil fields or at least to deny their product to the industrial West. 

Russia, herself, is not only self-sufficient in oil, she provides most of the so-called Third World. Her problem is not producing the stuff but supplying it. She has a problem inside her borders of transportation lines to the ports. Therefore, however sincerely President Carter may yearn for the security of Israel, and I believe it is, with him, a genuine, even fervent, feeling, however much we may applaud the courage of President Sadat, what Secretary of State Vance has to reminded himself every day is that neither the United States nor her Western allies can possibly afford to alienate the Arab world and he's been a specially busy man in the past week because the outcome of President Sadat's approaches to Israel has been a split in the Arab world and a revival of the Russian urge to make it wider and deeper. That, at least, is how it looks from here. 

And Washington is, accordingly, looking on with mixed emotions at the prospect of a separate Israeli-Egyptian treaty. Maybe President Sadat has thrown in so many cards that he has nothing to lose from such an agreement, but if Syria and Jordan and the PLO and the rest stood firm and were given aid and comfort by the Soviet Union, a Geneva conference might be worse than no conference at all. It might seal the break and the American fear is it might realign America, Israel and Egypt against the Soviets and the rest of the Arab world, and that would be a bad, possibly a catastrophic, end to the bravery of President Sadat, proving once again that in diplomacy, idealism alone is an inflammable element. 

Well, Egypt, Israel and the Middle East remain the chief topic in the news here but obviously there are other things on people's minds, apart from Christmas presents and the blizzards sweeping across the American mainland, and such an item, which no doubt, we'll take up another time, as a national opinion survey which shows among young people an almost dramatic conservative turn. 

Most American students today, for instance, are in college with the intention of studying. They also believe that their teachers know better than they do what they ought to be taught. They also, by a majority, believe in the family as it is and an astonishing majority doesn't approve of pre-marital sex. What is happening here? This is a shocking switch from the permissive freewheeling, free-talking, radical Sixties and certainly it will have to be gone into. 

But just now, there's a national strike that started in an ironic coincidence. The Secretary of Energy was making a public speech and saying that unless America in the next ten years can move over from oil to coal as its main source of energy, we should face the worst economic crisis since the Crash of 1929. And he said that the night that a national coal strike began. And by the second day, non-union miners began to join the 160,000 striking members of the United Mineworkers. So, I suppose many listeners, perhaps most, hearing the phrase 'coal strike' will assume that the miners want more wages. Not at all. Or rather, yes. There is a wage issue but it could probably have been resolved without a strike. 

There are two main issues. One is to have the owners give the guarantee, in a new contract, that there will always be a safe reserve of medical benefits and pension funds. The financing of these funds has been such that they are, at present, very nearly bankrupt. 

The other issue is a burning one with the miners who work in fields a thousand, two thousand miles apart. They want to establish the right of a local union to strike over a local issue. The miners complain that, under the present system, any local grievance is referred to the executive of the United Mineworkers, the national executive, that it then goes to the owner's national board, that a national arbitrator is brought in and then it goes on to the courts. By which time people are adjudicating the rights and wrongs who have to learn from scratch about the local conditions and so, as with almost anything in America that goes into litigation, the complainants go on complaining and paying the fees of the lawyers who go on arguing. 

Now this may seem a slightly academic point to outsiders, but one of the facts of life that came to make the separate state governments powerful and, in many things autonomous, was the great variety of climate and living conditions and customs across 3,000 miles of a continent settled by very different, national groups. And I can imagine that a miner who lives in West Virginia complaining, say, about the drainage problems of his house on stilts in the narrow valleys of Appalachia could not expect automatic sympathy from a coal owner who presides over a mine in the vast, open field, spaces of Montana. 

Another point which the miners have brought up, which a mere layman finds very hard not to sympathise with, is the wording of their contracts with the owners. Like most American contracts, I dare to say like 'all' American legal contracts, they are very long and enormously verbose. One union leader, and by the way, a strikingly direct and articulate man, said the other evening on television, 'There seems to be no quick way of handling local grievances. When the arbitrator comes in, it turns out he has a law degree and a degree in psychology, how is he to make the contract plain to me with nothing but a high school education? When there is no way that a working miner can understand the contract, the working miner is against the man who's for the contract.' I hate to report to you that that was the most intelligent and articulate sentence spoken all evening in a fairly rational argument between the miners and management. 

Incidentally, the union leaders believe there would be fewer strikes if they had the right to local strikes over local issues and thereby, they implied, were able to quicken the process of settling local grievances. 

And a third point is the miners' dislike of what they call 'management's penalty policy' whereby the owners give rewards to a miner for never being absent over a given stretch of time and withhold health and welfare payments whenever he is. 

The mine owners say that the mines around the nation have been so productive that they have a three months' stockpile and that even the steel companies have at least two months' supply in hand. If this is so, then the prospect is for a long strike. The last one, in 1974, gave out after 42 days and, at the moment, the advantage would seem to be with the owners. Medical benefits were cut off the day after the strike began, the miners have, strangely, no union strike fund and they do not qualify for state unemployment benefits. 'But', said one leader, 'we earn on an average of $370 a week' (that's about £210) 'and, out of that, lots of us have seen this thing coming and we have saved. Anyway,' he said, 'adversity has always had a history of bringing mineworkers together when nothing else would.' We shall see. 

Talking of jargon, which we were in mentioning the miners' complaint about wordy contracts, I must tell you that a new phrase that has come into the language which people are already tossing around who haven't the slightest notion about the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius or Centigrade. 

I've mentioned before, I hope – and I also hope that no nice Americans are listening – that one thing you have to get used to when you live in this country is the national habit of not saying anything in one syllable when you can say it in five. This comes from the American dislike of Anglo-Saxon English, except in moments of tantrum and love of Latinisms and Graecisms. No American ever hurts his shin bone. He says that his tibia has suffered a lesion. Our weather forecasters never say there's a chance of rain. There is – honestly! – the possibility of precipitation activity. 

Well, now, we no longer ask how cold it is. You have to know the chill factor which is an adjustment between the temperature with no wind and the same temperature with a wind at various miles an hour. 

'Better wrap up,' I said to a roommate of mine, 'it's 12 above!' 'Yes,' she said, 'but what's the chill factor?' 'Never mind!' I said, 'Baby, but it's cold outside!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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