No announcement was made.
That no news was the news seemed appropriate for a strike that has had little effect on the outside world, an action by a union whose force is a faint whisper of the time when coal union boss John L. Lewis could literally shut down the national economy.
The "selective" strike, which has been aimed at six of the largest coal companies, has reduced nationwide coal production by less than 5 percent. No electric utilities, which last year consumed 87 percent of the country's coal, have been forced to shut down or scale back.
Nonunion mines, whose growth the striking miners hope to constrain, have picked up the slack. Their business is booming.
"The union just does not have the power to restrict national coal production, and that really is about the only weapon they have," said William Miernyk, a coal economist and professor emeritus at the University of West Virginia.
"I don't think any of the companies are in a position where their backs are to the wall and they're forced to settle," said Ralph W. Barbaro, a partner in Energy Ventures Analysis Inc. in Arlington, Va.
To many observers, the strike marks the transition of a way of life in the coalfields, where every miner was once a union member and the United Mine Workers was a cultural force in the community. But union membership today is half the 120,000 who were members in 1980.
"It was always one of the strongest unions," said Paul Clark, a labor relations expert at Penn State University. "The communities were union towns. There was a real tradition."
