Miners in Largest Soviet Coal Field Reject Offer to Settle Walkout
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MOSCOW — Miners in the Soviet Union’s biggest coal field Saturday rejected a government offer to end their weeklong strike, and reports indicated that half the coal industry’s 1 million workers remained off the job.
“All mines have stopped,” the official Tass news agency reported from the Donets coal basin in the Ukraine.
Miners in one major coal center, Karaganda in the republic of Kazakhstan, began returning to work after negotiators worked out a settlement package, Tass said. But other strikes were depriving vital factories of fuel and threatening industry nationwide.
The Donets basin has 121 pits with an annual production of 210 million metric tons.
About 5,000 miners gathered outside government offices in the city of Donets and rejected the pact, which would have increased vacation time and paid workers for time spent descending into pits.
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