Sitdown Under

Afraid that they were being eased out of their jobs in a played-out lignite mine near Spoleto, 90 miners went on a sitdown strike 1,300 ft. underground. They got friends to send down bedding. Officials of their Communist-run union organized relays to send down food and wine. The strikers played cards, chatted or took long walks in the eerily echoing galleries.

It was as dank and dark a sitdown strike as even militant or desperate men could survive, and soon about one-third of the strikers, worried about their families or tired of living like moles, got out by emergency exits. Wives and children of the remaining strikers gathered at the pithead to talk by phone to their men below on Mine Level 13. Spoleto's Archbishop Raffaele Mario Radossi, using the same phone, implored the strikers to surface and negotiate. Worried company officials struggled to keep the pumps operating and the ventilating system working so that the men would not fall victim to methane gas. The workers counted on attracting national attention to their little town of

Morgnano, whose second-largest employer, a cotton mill, had just laid off 400 of its 800 employees, most of them women.

With both its menfolks' and its womenfolks' jobs in the balance, Morgnano's Communist mayor appealed to Rome for relief to both mine and mill. The mill was obsolete and the mine uneconomic, but the pressure worked. The mill agreed to reduce the layoffs to 255 and spread these ottt-ever eleven months. The mine (run by a government-owned corporation) promised to avoid any actual firings, transfer men to other jobs as available.

Hearing the news read to them over the mine phone, 68 pale and whiskery strikers consented to be hoisted out. Sniffing his first fresh air and soaking up his first sunshine in eight days, one striker allowed: "It wasn't too bad down there." Another joined in: "But it's better out here."

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