Miners' Maverick

A crusading fortnightly journal last month exposed the derelictions of John Ashcraft, director of the West Virginia department of mines. Ashcraft, the magazine alleged, gentled mammoth coal companies with only token fines for safety violations, while at the same tune violating the law himself by failing to meet the required minimum qualifications for a mine safety inspector. As a result, a committee of the West Virginia state senate will decide this week whether to recommend Ashcraft's impeachment. The aggressive publication that dug out these facts is hardly a national name, though among the miners of Appalachia and labor experts across the country it is well known. It is the United Mine Workers Journal (circ. 230,000), possibly the brightest union publication around today.

Just a few years ago, the U.M.W. Journal was more useful for kindling than news. It lavished all of its reporting on the U.M.W.'s corrupt president, now convicted Murderer W.A. ("Tony") Boyle. In one memorable issue in May 1969, the Journal got so carried away with its neo-Stalinist sycophancy that it ran 32 separate pictures of Boyle in the magazine's 24 pages, including one photograph of Boyle standing in front of a picture of himself.

Present Shock. That all ended, however, after Reformer Arnold Miller, running on a platform of union democracy, beat Boyle in 1972 and appointed his press secretary, Don Stillman, 29, a Columbia University School of Journalism graduate, to the Journal's editorship. A stocky, plain-spoken journalist with a passion for fair reporting, Stillman rushed the Journal through present shock. He improved the layout, introduced four-color covers, hired a staff photographer whose job included investigative work, and stopped running the magazine as a presidential patsy. "But the No. 1 change," explained Stillman, "is that we place our emphasis on what is going on in the coal fields. Most unions report the news from the top. We start at the bottom. We go to the men's homes, to the bathhouses. We go out to them to see what is bothering them, and what needs to be aired."

The results of Stillman's philosophy --shared by President Miller despite grumbling by some miners that the Journal has turned "radical"--is a labor publication that behaves like an independent magazine. Stillman and his three-man staff spend half of their time outside Washington interviewing miners and investigating working and safety conditions. The Journal has run stories on how to press a Social Security black-lung claim; it has also uncovered and documented conflicts of interest by the general counsel of a rival organization, the Southern Labor Union. Last year it defied a taboo and printed the complete list of the U.M.W.'s contract demands for the membership before the union began its bargaining sessions with the coal operators. Most significantly, however, the Journal has taken to printing dissenting opinion in a "Rank & File Speaks" feature and the letters column. Says Joseph Rauh Jr., Miller's lawyer during the election: "One of the happiest days of my life was when I saw a letter in the Journal in praise of Boyle. Not that I feel any sympathy for the guy. Far from that, but because it's such an expression by the union of belief in free speech and freedom of the press."

Stillman's Journal has practically no equal in the union field. Most labor publications follow their union's policies faithfully, larding their pages with head shots of members on a dais, pictures of the organization's president receiving another award, and inventories of the latest union benefits. Dissent is not banned, just unthought of. As Burt Beck, editor of the Advance, put out by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, sums it up: "The paper has to reflect the policy of the union or it would have no real reason to exist."

Stillman would agree, up to a point: "I don't see the Journal as a bulletin board to drive nails into Arnold Miller's hide. On the other hand, the way it was run before was like a personal propaganda office for Tony Boyle, and we're not like that either." Whatever it is, the maverick U.M.W. Journal is different and refreshing.

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