Mr. BALDWIN. You mentioned you have doubled productivity per man in the last 10 years. Mr. WIDMAN. That is right, sir. Mr. BALDWIN. Could you tell us roughly what the total productivity of the mining industry today is compared to 10 years ago? Is it up or down? Are we producing more coal today than we were 10 years. ago? Mr. WIDMAN. No, we are down some. I am not sure of the exact tonnage. Our highest year, I believe, was 1947 when we had something over 600 million tons. Mr. BALDWIN. So the situation is that the total production of coal today is less than it was 10 years ago and the productivity per man is twice as much compared to 10 years ago? Mr. WIDMAN. That is right. I hesitate in telling you what might have happened, as I see it from my official position and from my position as a research and marketing director, what might have happened had we not encouraged as a union the mechanization of our industry. Mr. BALDWIN. As a practical matter, in view of this increase in productivity, it appears fairly evident that there is little likelihood of that great pool of men who were in mines 10 years ago going back to work permanently in mining unless there is a tremendous increase in the overall demand for coal in this country and in whatever foreign markets might be available to us. Would that not be true? Mr. WIDMAN. I think your judgment is very good on that, with this addition. While these men who are unemployed, we have an industry capacity now far in excess of the 400 million tons we produced last year, our big problem has been a competitive one in the fuel market. We are not crying about that. We are trying to meet our competition. That is why we mechanized. We are not crying about it in our own Nation. We are raising cain when it comes to foreign importation of residual oils into our natural markets. You will hear a lot from us about that from time to time. We are not complaining otherwise. This is one of the things in progress. A miner is not as mobile as most of the labor force is known to be in the United States. A coal miner moves in, and in the old days, 25 or 30 or 40 years ago, the company, in order to get manpower, would build a little village around the mine tipple. The company would rent the houses to the miners and charge them so much per room for rent. Their pay would be scrip that they took to the company store. All these things brought the people into the area. They raised their families. The old practice was when the oldest boy got to be 16, he went to work with dad in the coal mines. This has changed. It has gone through a complete cycle of change. I do not believe, however, that we are going to see any great burst of employment in the mining industry, with added markets, but I do believe it will give those who are working more worktime, it will employ the second and third shifts who now in most cases are laid off awaiting further need for coal. We find ourselves in a peculiar position in the coal industry. We have just gone wild on the productive end of it and we have more or less stagnated over here in the utilization. I am a member of the Advisory Committee in the new Office of Coal Research. I am mighty proud of what the Government is trying to do there. They are trying to get our industry, who heretofore had not been too interested in research-you might say why? That is easily understood because of the variance in the thickness of the seams they work, because of the quality of the coals that they are mining, and its market reaches wherever it fits best. These are the things that are variables, all adding to a difficult situation. So these miners, however, as long as there is a ray of hope-this is not true of their youngsters that they cannot take into the mine with them now because of the mechanized nature of the industry-but if there is a ray of hope that they will get back to work in that mine, they will not go out to seek temporary employment. Mr. BALDWIN. I understand the point you make, but I tend to agree with the point Mr. Burke made a moment ago, that in the mining industry, because of the great transition in productivity, that this means we are actually going to have to approach this from this manpower retraining standpoint because, although public works could be made. available in those areas, unless those folks that have now reached the point of permanent unemployment get into some new occupation where they can look forward to permanent employment, not just a series of temporary public works programs, we will never really make a basic attack upon this problem, if I understand it correctly. Mr. WIDMAN. Just yesterday, I read a report from Kentucky. We get the fatal accident reports from the various States. We are a hazardous industry, the most hazardous, I believe. Here I read of a man who is 57 years of age. I do not know the man except reading between the lines. They are reporting on his fatal accident. The man is 57 years of age. He had a family. He had worked in the mining industry for over 30 years. But at this little wagon mine he had been there 3 months. He meets with a fatal accident. He has probably hand-loaded most of his life. Then he went into the semiskilled jobs in the mines. Then the seam owned by this company had been worked out. Here he is back here hoping to get employment. He has probably waited for a long time and found a chance to go in. I am almost sure you will find this is some relative of his who either works there and is a relative or it is the men who operate the little mine. It showed they got careless. The small mines are not covered unless they have over 15 employees. That is something that has always alarmed me about Congress, thinking that a man's life, if he is employed by an employer of less than 15 men, is less important than one who employs more. That kind of reasoning does not go good with me. My arithmetic does not come out that way. These are the problems we have. a real rough row in mechanization. industry, but they are all getting it. pening. The coal miner, of course, has had I look upon the public works we are talking about in this legislation as being of a type that will be an injection, a transfusion as I call it, to our economy, to take over this time, not continue any longer than we have to. Mr. BALDWIN. The one point I was making is that the basic objective of the standby public works bill is to turn public works on during the period when nationwide unemployment has gone in excess of a certain figure and then turn off the standby public works when it falls. This problem in the coal mining industry is a permanent problem as a result of this complete transition from the standpoint of productivity and total demand for coal. No standby public works program which is just going to turn on when nationwide unemployment reaches a certain point and then turns back off is going to solve this basic permanent problem in the mining industry. That is why I voted for the manpower retraining bill. It seems something like that is the only permanent hope for the industry. Mr. WIDMAN. In some areas that are critical I agree. In other areas they are not that critical but, nevertheless, they are in need of public works. I have done considerable traveling for our organization in various areas. I encourage every community to have a standing committee, call it the committee for public good, they have a half dozen names. This committee is trying to work toward the end of improving the community. We talk about paint-up programs, clean-up programs, better schools, things of that kind to encourage industry to come in. Never do we tell these people to rely solely upon the Government. We tell them--I have made this speech from Utah all across the country-you are only going to get out of what the Government passes in the way of legislation the help that you yourself are able to provide to make them interested in giving you some help and do something on your own. I think that has a psychological effect upon the people in these distressed areas. It is unfortunate, we have these boom and bust periods, but we have always had them in the history of our country as far as I know. Some are a little worse than others. Let us say they have given them a little higher class titles than in the old days when I worked in the mines but, nevertheless, the problem is still the same. I do believe it is a matter that should certainly concern every citizen of the country. As long as we have these people all unemployed, it may make a fine labor market for an employer to find employees, but it does not help our national growth. Mr. McFALL. Mr. Chairman. Mr. BLATNIK. Mr. McFall. Mr. McFALL. With reference to the type of project that might be best for these areas, suppose we consider projects that would be a supplement to the area redevelopment kind of project and, in a sense, a supplement to the Manpower Training Act. Are there projects in these areas which would assist the area in redeveloping itself so that it would have an opportunity to attract more industry, but are not eligible under the area redevelopment program? Mr. WIDMAN. Yes, there are. I would say in the areas that have been considered critical areas from the point of view of unemploy ment for a longer period of time, they have not been able to pay their taxes, the company has sold these little houses to these people, but that is shelter, that is about all. They are living on surplus foods that they pick up. The projects I visualize in most of those places would be sanitary sewerage systems, which is of a permanent nature, it would help them. I am thinking of a school program if they do not already have one. The taxpayers have to build these schools, of course, if they are in a depressed area for any period of time. Then there are sidewalks, adequate water supply, any number of projects I can think of that would be permanent. I do not want these WPA programs of cutting weeds along the side of the road and things of that kind. Mr. McFALL. My colleague, Mr. Burke, points out to me that in these areas where coal mining was originally the only industry and which has now disappeared, these areas, in order to attract more industry, must control the rivers, and more roads must be constructed. What would be your comment on that? Mr. WIDMAN. I think that is right. You run into the water problem I am talking about. If you do not have adequate water you are just stuck. I think that is going to be a very serious problem in our whole Nation as we go along here because I do not think we are showing enough interest in moving on it. When he says that the coal mines have disappeared, that is not the question. We must understand in mining-I worked in a mine 250 feet underground in Illinois. I worked for United States Steel. I am giving you this as an example. This mine ran in tunnels over the full acreage of the land, or coal owned by the company. Many of those mines are completed, or what we call had depleted their reserves. They are no longer there, but the houses are still around that place. Where I was born and raised, the houses are still there. Some of the people are living in them, but in most of them, I wouldn't say many would be likely to be lived in. Machinery has not displaced the men and done all of this to the coal miner. Some of it has been because of depletion of the seams of coal. We have vast reserves, gentlemen, but it takes a great deal of money to go into the coal business today and encounter the market fight we have been having. We are far from dead as an industry. I want to make that clear. We think we have got a very vital interest here. We think it is one of much importance to our future well-being in our Nation. Coal as a fuel is important. In research we may find it important for some other needs. I think we will if we work at the job. Coal has a future if for no other reason than the old rule of supply and demand. We have got the supply. I do not know where the demand will come from altogether yet, but we have the supply. Mr. McFALL. This question is not material to this subject matter perhaps but one of the real uses for your coal now is in electrical power development. Mr. WIDMAN. That is right, sir. Mr. McFALL. We might set up a program for building powerplants where this coal is not being used. Then we could distribute power throughout the area. Would you comment on that? Mr. WIDMAN. I would say that there are presently a number of mines on what we call mine mouth electric plants. Here is a problem. We are trying a pipeline. We are having an awful time to get a pipeline. It has been demonstrated to be practical. It has been demonstrated that transportation will be cheaper that way than any other. There is a pipeline from Georgetown, Ohio, to Cleveland, Ohio. It has done far above what was expected of it. This pipeline takes coal up to Cleveland in a water slurry. About 3 or 4 months ago we had a demonstration of water slurries 70 percent coal and 30 percent water in the pipeline going into a cyclon furnace at South Amboy, N.J. 83015 062- 41 They demonstrated that to all of the engineers that they could get to come to see it. I am not an engineer, but I did get an invitation. I went up. You would expect with 30 percent water, 70 percent coal dust, mixed in the slurry that looks like what we used to call black strap or No. 6 oil-it looks like real old crude oil when it is in this mixture. They blow it into the furnace. They only lose about 2 percent efficiency. You would expect steam to come out of the high stack at the electric plant. That is not so because of the high temperatures they are using. We are helping: 182 million tons out of 400 million tons went to make electricity last year. That is going to grow tremendously. We are trying to help it grow. We have the only marketing and research department in existence in the labor movement. We go further. Most of them have research departments but they do not go into the marketing end of it. We have a program. Coal by wire is what we call electricity. Mr. McFALL. If you had Government assistance for a powerplant at the coal mine could you distribute energy easier than sending it by water? Mr. WIDMAN. I had a meeting yesterday with some very interesting people on this very subject for the State of Washington, at Glenellen (?). I believe the name of the town is in Washington. There they are trying to do that very thing and supplement that power with the other power in the community and they claim that the cost will be competitive from the standpoint that at the Bonneville Dam you have got a feast-or-famine situation. Probably you know more about that than I do. This inner-tie on the west coast may well be a good project. I am not really prepared to say yet because I do know that the engineers in the electric utility industry who talked to me about it say that the losses under the present system of taking electricity to the point of use is too great so we are going to have to go into high voltage transmission where the loss is less. Coal, I think, is going to fulfill the market for the utilities for years and years to come, barring, of course, a competition with our Government. If our Government keeps building atomic energy plants right in the heart of the coalfield and subsidizes, which they have had to do because they cannot produce it as cheap, but do not misunderstand me, I do not want our Government to be second to anybody in the atomic energy field, that is not my purpose, but for heaven's sake, let's put it where it will have a chance to be on a competitive range rather than put it in the heart of the coalfield, which has been done in quite a few cases. The fellow says I am filled with these things. I appreciate your courtesy, Mr. Chairman. Mr. BLATNIK. Thank you very much, Mr. Widman. Thank you for your presentation. Mr. WIDMAN. I hope I helped the members of the committee understand what we are thinking about. Mr. BLATNIK. It is a serious problem. You have been most helpful. Mr. WIDMAN. Thank you, sir. Mr. BLATNIK. Our next witness is the distinguished and well-known economist, Mr. Leon Keyserling. |