Leaving coal, and redeploying 7,000 miners (1957)

How a promise — finite coal into infinite industry — was actually kept

The heart of this decision lay in a single question: having judged that the founding business had lost its economics, how do you pass the people who work in it on to whatever comes next. Facing an energy revolution that would not reverse, Ube could have kept coal on life support, or shut it quickly and cut the workforce loose. What it chose instead was to spend a decade growing commodity chemicals as a receptacle first, then close the mines while absorbing some 7,000 people through redeployment. For a company that had begun with its region, its investors and its employees very nearly the same set of people, rebuilding the business while holding on to the jobs was economic reasoning and the keeping of a founding promise at the same time.

Redeployment did not, of course, absorb everyone, and the push into the Joban coalfield remains as a failure driven by the inertia of the operating floor. Withdrawal was a question of market conditions, but it was equally a question of internal politics — of how to come to terms with the voices of a shrinking division. Even so, the weight of this decision lies in writing off a dying resource and seeding the next pillar ahead of time: the founding phrase “from finite coal to infinite industry” carried out as painful practical work. Given that the later Ube, buffeted for decades by materials cycles, is once again being forced toward specialty chemistry, the choice to close the founding mines half a century ago still runs into the questions the company faces now.