MOUNT MORRIS, Pa. -- The conversation in the conference room at the New Warwick Mine Co. turns to rock. Veteran coal miner Dave Sweeder is perturbed. The men, their hands as calloused and coal-smeared as his own, are cutting too much slate with the coal, he says.
"Until management takes a step in this and takes a little harder line [on the amount of rock cut] . . .," Mr. Sweeder says to two dozen men at a rectangle of conference tables.
The mine's superintendent, Jon E. Pavlovich, flicks the ash from his cigar. The miners know where the coal is, he says. But in the dark corridors, with the coal dust swirling and the water spray misting, distinguishing a layer of slate from a layer of coal is difficult.
He suggests outfitting the coal-cutting machines with an antenna to gauge how high to cut. "Do we have a consensus?" asks Mr. Pavlovich, one of the company officials in the room.
A chorus of gravel-voiced yeahs rises up -- Dave Sweeder's among them. At 49, Mr. Sweeder has worked in the mine in the tawny hills of southwestern Pennsylvania for nearly half his life. Like his brothers before him, he followed his father into the coal fields.
But this meeting of miners and managers is unlike any Mr. Sweeder's father or his brothers attended. In an industry known for labor strife, the men at New Warwick, whether they carry a union card or a manager's clipboard, are making decisions together. Union workers are helping to transform a culture of mistrust that runs as deep as the coal seams they mine and spans the 104-year history of the United Mine Workers of America. Their bosses are giving up the paternalistic "we know best" attitude and sharing power once exclusively theirs.
The two sides are in an industrywide experiment, promoted by the UMWA as the best way to secure America's coal-producing future -- and the jobs of its members. At New Warwick, site of an acrimonious two-year strike just a few years ago, the improved relations have strengthened hopes that the best times may still be ahead.
"Our members have a tremendous amount to contribute," said Richard L. Trumka, the 46-year-old president of the UMWA, who grew up near the New Warwick mine. "We can resolve problems in a way that increases job security, increases the efficiency of a mine, makes the place more pleasant to work because you are not being dictated to; you're part of a solution."
Since the summer of 1993, union workers at the New Warwick Mine Company have been part of the solution. They and company officials have been working in a program called Relationship by Objective. A panel of company officials, miners and foremen meets monthly to discuss critical issues: equipment purchases, health benefits, a new air shaft, death benefits for miners' families, the Christmas party.
It's changed the way New Warwick does business so it can stay in business. With help from its mechanics, the mine revamped its system of repairing and maintaining equipment. Less down time means more coal produced. Employees helped designed a new ramp at the mine's coal preparation plant and saved the company more than $30,000 in its construction.
"I'm a staunch supporter of the RBO, and everybody knows it," says Mr. Sweeder, the barrel-chested chairman of the union's mine safety committee. "For us to survive as a union and a coal company, we have to have it. The object of the game is to keep working and have a paycheck. And harmony."
The concept, developed nearly 20 years ago for use in a union workplace, has been implemented in the auto and steel industries, by school systems and corporate giants like IBM and Johnson & Johnson, with similar success. John J. Popular II, the former federal mediator who designed the program, believes the UMWA embraced the concept "to show that a union mine can be as competitive as a nonunion mine."
At New Warwick, where the 182 employees spent two years on a picket line before returning to work in 1990, the program has yielded tangible results. Production has doubled. Morale is up. Grievances, which two years ago exceeded those at any other union local in the UMWA district, are resolved more quickly. Safety violations are down.
"It's no longer management in this corner, the union in that corner," said William "Bud" Vanata, a mine mechanic and a member of the RBO panel. "Now, everybody has some input."
The New Warwick mine hasn't always operated that way.
Bitter legacy
In the spring of 1990, members of UMWA Local 6310 returned to the mine after a bitter two-year strike. For many of the men, the mine, nestled in a farming valley within an easy drive of the West Virginia border, had been their only employer. Opened in 1965, it provided coal for the Pennsylvania utility that owned it. At its busiest, the mine employed about 400 workers who routinely worked six days a week. When the mine reopened, Duquesne Light Co. told the workers that it had leased the mine operations to a company near Pittsburgh.
That company, Aloe Mining Corp., chose as its manager a man who had worked for the UMWA's nemesis, the CONSOL Coal Group of Pittsburgh, the largest exporter of coal in the country.
The union and management battled for three years. The mine manager's "my way or no way" style alienated miner and supervisor alike. In 1992, the union local filed 97 grievances, exceeding the number lodged by any of the 17 other locals in the district. Along the way, the mine racked up dozens of safety violations. And federal labor officials fined the company $10,000 for violating child labor laws.
"They were running the mine into the ground," said Joe Volansky, the secretary-treasurer of the union district office that handled many of the grievances. A one-time coal laborer, Mr. Volansky had read about the successes of the RBO program in UMWA mines in Monongahela, Pa., and Canada -- improved job security and job satisfaction. He asked the mine manager to consider it. He refused. The miners were jittery. In the past two years, two other area mines had shut down.
Was New Warwick next?
Dan Miller, the burly, soft-spoken president of UMWA Local 6310, was sure he could convince the Aloe family that their trust in the mine manager had been misplaced. A 49-year-old mechanic who began working there in 1968, Mr. Miller invited David T. Aloe, the chairman of the family's mining and quarry operation, to tour the mine.
"I locked my tool box up, put my hard hat on, got my lamp and together we went in the mine for 11 hours," Mr. Miller recalls. "I let him talk to anybody he wanted. I showed him what I thought needed to be done. Two o'clock in the morning, we came back outside. And from there, the ball just kept rolling and rolling."
Mr. Aloe fired the manager. He agreed to try the RBO program.
"RBO isn't hard to sell to people who believe in people," said Mr. Aloe, a quiet man with smiling eyes who prefers blue jeans and a sweater to a business suit. "RBO is a hard sell to people who believe in numbers. If you take care of one, the other follows."
To implement the program and oversee mine operations, he brought in a vice president from Pittsburgh, Grant P. MacSwain. At Ford Motor Co., Mr. MacSwain had seen how an "employee involvement" program could work effectively. He told the mine's mid-level managers to accept the program or head for the door.
In July 1993, after a retreat attended by the founder of the RBO concept, a panel of union workers, supervisors and company officials convened its first monthly meeting. They drafted a list of 12 goals. They chose as their symbol a phoenix.
Carrying it out
Four hundred and fifty feet underground, in the mine's dusty darkness, Randy Ferland and a five-member crew have taken their places along the "longwall," a hulking piece of machinery that revolutionized mining, cutting slabs of coal like a cheese slicer. It produces in 27 minutes what miners using conventional equipment would cut in an 8-hour shift.
"OK, fellas," the 39-year-old miner yells into a phone, his voice traveling down the line to his union brethren. "Give me some coal."
With a whistle, the longwall starts churning and banging, a tympani of gears and wheels reverberating through the hallway as coal tumbles onto a conveyor belt. In the past year, Mr. MacSwain has seen the mine's tonnage increase from 550,000 to 1.1 million.
"That's with having two months down because of roof falls," he says. "The employee-involvement program did that."
A jolly fellow who acknowledges that he has little mining experience, Mr. MacSwain acts as a buffer between miners and managers as the two sides work through the new power-sharing arrangement. "This is a hard way to manage," he concedes. "Instead of telling someone what to do and he telling somebody else what to do . . . you have to work out your problems."
"It's a relationship with management that is unparalleled," adds Paul Wells, a longwall foreman who sits on the RBO committee. "Instead of working against each other, they are working with each other for the longevity of the mine."
The examples are many. Union workers have helped select $1 million worth of new coal equipment, recommended ways to cut costs and advised the company on the replacement of the 5-mile-long coal conveyor belt. The RBO committee has developed programs on accident prevention, chronic absenteeism and light duty for injured workers. The company agreed to hire union-only subcontractors, to relax restrictions on vacation days and to end mandatory overtime.
The union president attends company board meetings and receives quarterly financial reports -- documents never before provided to the workers. For their part, union leaders persuaded members and retirees to keep a drug-prescription program that saved the mine $250,000. They persuaded workers to accept back pay in installments rather than a lump sum, which eased the company's financial burden.
But this is the first quarter in which the company has made money each month. And not everyone is enamored of the program. At New Warwick's coal-preparation plant, someone has scrawled an obscenity about RBO on a podium.
Some workers have complained that the panel hasn't followed through on some of its original objectives. Others say RBO decisions don't reach them fast enough -- an issue that committee members have acknowledged they need to work on.
And there are some problems beyond the control of the RBO panel: Water from another underground mine is seeping into New Warwick; the relationship between the Aloe company and Duquesne Light is shaky; the persistent roof falls eventually may prove too costly to fix.
But miners and managers agree they must push on.
"I started here when I was 18 years old," says Eugene Latuesky, an RBO panel member who works at the mine's coal-loading plant. "It's all I've ever done. . . . We're all feeling the responsibility of doing anything we can to keep this place going."