Talk:Pittston Coal strike

Slight name change
Because the object of the strike was the Pittston Coal Company, should not the article be titled "Pittston Coal strike" (with "Coal" capitalized)? Plazak (talk) 13:44, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

stuff to do
Good work so far. There are some things left to do, probably before you seek a peer review. This is it for now. I like what you've done here, and it is much improved over the first article. Nice. Auntieruth55 (talk) 22:03, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Citations
 * 1) Insure proper citation format. Enclosing your web address in < > is not the format.  I've done the first one for you.  They should all be like that.
 * 2) The bibliography should also list the citation web source the same way, in [http://www etc (space) "Article Name"] . The newspaper goes in Italics.
 * 3) Insure proper citation page numbers.  You have some articles with several pages, but the pages are not cited. They need to be.
 * 4) Redundant citations.  You don't need to cite the whole citation a second time.  Just use the last name, and the page number.  If you have two sources with the same last name, use an additional distinguishing feature.
 * Prose
 * 1) Please check your prose again.  Strike should be spelled properly, at least, not Stike.  I've corrected a lot of them, but I may not have found them all. Refer to people by first and last name the first time, then by last name subsequently. You only need to link them the first time. Mother Jones is always called Mother Jones, but you would include her full name the first time.
 * 2) Please pay attention to text informality. Don't.  Can't.  etc.  They got to do something.
 * Comprehensiveness
 * 1) do you know where / what the primary mine was? the other mines?  Perhaps a list or a table of the key sites would be in order.
 * 2) Were there casualties?
 * 3) Do we have total cost figures?
 * Pictures
 * 1) If you can, you might locate the mines on a map, to show the locations.
 * 2) Other pictures?
 * Be sure to spell "strike" correctly in your citations. At least one time it is spelled "stike".  :)  Auntieruth55 (talk) 20:51, 6 April 2010 (UTC)
 * you might also check this source. for info about miners versus Coal company. And this is a direct result, isn't it? Auntieruth55 (talk) 21:23, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Comments
Megzie, you might continue working on this using the comments you have. GA reviews sometimes take a while. Auntieruth55 (talk) 01:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Peer Review
I read through your article after you mentioned it in class last week. You have put a great deal of work into this...good job! I think this is a very interesting topic and I feel as though you explain it fairly well. I did find some things that you could fix to make the article even better.

UMW vs. UMWA - You use these seemingly interchangeably throughout your article. If there is no distinction between the two it might be best to just choose one and stick with it. It is slightly confusing.

Citations in the Intro - It seems as though you are conveying information in the intro that you got from sources but there are no citations. It might not be necessary to include references in the intro paragraph but you might want to look into that to see if you need to.

Try to not use the phrase "a lot" as much as it is currently used in the article.

In "The Pittston Strike of 1989" section in the beginning of the paragraph you need to change "in" before February 1 to "on" and about midway through the paragraph you need to fix the sentence that begins "The UMWA declared strike..."

In the beginning of the next section i would suggest saying "alternative types of fuel" as opposed to "alternate".

There are other typos and grammatical errors throughout the article that you should read through and find as well.

The last sentence in the "Strike Tactics" section needs to be fixed...its confusing. Do the same for the second sentence in the next section after that.

In the last paragraph of the article the phrase "The strike lasted until a settlement was finally agreed upon in February 1990" is used 3 times. It looks like it might be a glitch in Wikipedia that caused this or a copy paste error. There are other sections of the paper where this is used too often as well. I would say that you do not need to write that more than three times in the whole article.

Like I said before this is a good article and your hard work is evident. I just know that it is helpful to get honest suggestions from someone else so i hope this helps.

Ragfin (talk) 18:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)


 * If I may suggest, the section "The Pittston Strike of 1989" does not appear to be needed in the article; the article itself does a pretty good job of walking through the specifics of the strike from top to bottom, and there fore the article itself is doing what this section tries to do. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:16, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Quick Comment
I read through your article and I enjoyed it! It was obvious you put a lot of time into this and you brought everything together very nicely. I fixed some minor typo errors that I saw, but the facts seemed to check out and you stayed to the point. Good article! Nock526 (talk) 03:46, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Events leading up to the strike
In the first paragraph in the "Events leading up to the strike" section, there is this statement about the Pittston Coal Co.:
 * "...due to the drop in the value of the American dollar overseas, it began to enter into debt."

This does not appear to make sense. A drop in the value of the dollar would make exports (including coal) more competitive in foreign markets, and make coal sold on the international market more valuable in dollar terms. Thus, a drop in the value of the dollar would increae the profits of coal exporters such as Pittston. Can anyone explain this to me? Thanks. Plazak (talk) 21:07, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

The lead paragraph of this section still appears to contain misinformation. I will document this later, but: 1) US demand for coal was not falling in the 1980s; instead, it was rising (according to the US Energy Information Administration). 2) There was a recession in the early 1980s, but by 1987 we were well out of it (judging by unemployment rates from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics). The difficulties of Pittston may have derived from the price of bituminous coal, which although roughly flat through the 1980s in nominal dollars, was declining in terms of constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars (per the US EIA). Plazak (talk) 19:17, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Aftermath of the strike.
There is a sentence in this section that reads: "Since the strike, many of Pittston's coal plants have been sold to Alpha Natural Resources, which is now in the nation’s top three coal companies,[4] in order to pay for the health care for the miners"

Absent solid supporting financial documentation, the highlighted assertion of causality could be seen as an interpretation with political bias related to contemporary policy debates and should not be stated as unequivocal fact. In order to lay causality for the plant sales entirely on responsibility for miner's benefits, it would be necessary to eliminate other possible factors contributing to the decision to liquidate assets. In addition to questions about possible declining profitability, it should be verified that there was no significant shareholder profit, decision makers did not achieve bonuses resulting from the transactions, no common-ownership ties among decision makers and no other clear tangible benefits to decision makers that could influence a choice to sell corporate assets.

If the phrase is to be kept, the assertion needs to be sourced. Further, if the only sourcing available are PR statements from the corporation itself or a representative association, the phrase should be restated from being a declaration of fact to clarify that the source of such assertions is an actor with clear interest in public perception of the events and their aftermath. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.183.151.74 (talk) 21:58, 20 July 2012 (UTC)