Jack Battuello Memoir #1 - University of Illinois Springfield

Jack Battuello 1.7
we had our sanitation committee, we had all kinds of committees.
never had one injury, not one man was harmed in any way.
We
But we had some interesting episodes that caused a few headaches.
One of them was: we had what we called a check committee that counted
the men every night to see that everybody was present. We had slowed
down the air velocity and we could not get too far away from the
bottom, because we were pumping only enough air to provide us air
at this immediate bottom where we were sitting, One night they took
a count, and we had one man missing. We searched every rock, looked
mder every car and in every conceivable place trying to locate this
man. We were frantic. We didn't want to lose a man, because that
would have blighted our case in the public eye. Herc some of rhe
people had the impression that it was a frfvolous escapade, you know,
and if we'd have lost somebody or somebody had gotten killed or injured,
that would have harmed our cause. And we were, consequently, damn
frantic about the loss of this man, the absence of this man. So we
looked everywhere. Almost four hours passed, and we hadn't located
the man. We didn't even know the name of the man that was missing,
we couldn't come up with his name. About four hours later we were
sitting there, totally disgusted with this man being gone, and not
knowing who he was or what happened to him. Suddenly ee looked down
the entry and saw a faint, glimmering light coming from the area OF
the air shaft, T knew that none of the strikers had wandered off in
that direction, and so I jumped up and rushed down there and it
happened to be a man by the name of Dominic Balestra. He speaks
somewhat: brokenly. When I got down there and saw who it was I was
somewhat angry. I kind of shook him a little roughly and I said,
I I
Goddammit! Whrre have you been? You know we've been worried here
for three or four hours. We were afraid that you got hurt or that
somebody got hurt." And hc said to me in his broken English, he
said, "What kind of goddamn union you got?" He said, "I don't scab,
I support the Union, L sit down in the coal mine." He said, "NOW
'cause I want to go up the air shaft and see my wife for a few minutes
and make a little love," he said, "what the hell? You contr~l my
wife and my monkey business with her, too?"
Q. What was the £ha1 outcome of your sit-down strike? How was it
resolved?
A. We got our demands, the No. One members were allowed to divide
work. It required a couple of weeks to get the thing worked out of
course, and nobody was discharged. We went back to work.
Q. So there was no punitive action taken againsr any strikers?
A. No. There was much recrimination on the part of our officials,
because of our act of sitting down. As a matter of factt there was
times when we thought our enemy was the Progressive Miner officials
rather than the coal company officials.
Jack Battuello Memoir -- Archives, University of Illinois at Springfield