"Minimum Comfort"

In one day New York City's Department of Health got 1,526 complaints about heatless apartments. In many another locality, especially along the Eastern seaboard, shivering householders eyed their dwindling coal bins and thought unkind thoughts about John L. Lewis. Patriots who had converted from oil to coal had an extra curse for Harold L. Ickes.

The year's strikes had cost the nation about 40,000,000 tons of lost coal production. Production has been speeded since, to an estimated 586,000,000 bituminous tons for the year, against peacetime's normal 400,000,000 tons. But consumption, including shipments to Europe, has risen too, to more than 600,000,000 tons. The deficit has come off the national stockpile--now down to about 65,000,000 tons, providing a safety margin of only 37 or 38 days' supply. But the prime cause of last week's domestic shortages was that what coal the nation had was in the wrong places; the strikes had dislocated normal distribution. Labor trouble was another obstacle to righting distribution: while New Yorkers shivered last week, a longshoremen's wage dispute slowed unloading of 300 carloads of New York-bound coal at a Jersey City pier (see cut).

The Bituminous Coal Institute airily asserted that there will be little to worry about as soon as the distribution problem is licked--which, considering transportation troubles, was something like saying that peace will come when the war is over. But Solid Fuels Administrator Ickes was gloomy: he predicted that manpower and machinery shortages will make the mines fall well short of next year's 620,000,000-ton goal. Said OWI last week: "While Britain has become accustomed to 'no coal for comfort,' the U.S. enters 1944 on a basis of 'minimum comfort.' "

Meantime the threat of still another coal strike diminished last week, when John L. Lewis and about two-thirds of the nation's bituminous coal operators (with the other third likely to follow) signed a contingent two-year, no-strike contract--conceding Leader Lewis' wage demands. Contingencies: i) the War La" bor Board must approve the contract; 2) somebody, either OPA or Congress, must let the operators charge more for their coal.

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