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Can a coal company get away with breaking promises to workers?
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112449/coal-companys-broken-pension-promises#
Eddie Bullock spent 27 years in the southern Illinois coal mines working for Peabody Energy, the largest coal-mining company in the world (infamously memorialized by John Prine.) He retired in 1998, when his mine shut down. Hes now 72 years old and suffers from black lung disease; his wife has emphysema, and both have oxygen tanks at their side at all times. But theyre fortunate in one regard: Bullock has a good pension and solid health benefits that were negotiated for him at Peabody by the United Mine Workers of America.
Or he did, at least. In 2007, Peabody created a new entity called Patriot Coal, and transferred to it 13 percent of its coal reserves. It also transferred to it about 40 percent of its health care liabilitiesthe obligations for 8,400 former Peabody employees. A year later, Patriot Coal was loaded up with even more liabilities when it acquired Magnum Coal, an offshoot of the countrys second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by last year, total liabilities of $1.37 billion. Patriot Coal is now seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy, through which it will seek to limit or discharge its pension and health obligations to 22,000 retired miners and their spouses, 90 percent of whom never worked for Patriot Coalamong them Eddie Bullock, who, oxygen tank and all, joined the UMWAs outspoken president, Cecil Roberts, and a handful of other former Peabody miners in getting arrested at the first of two recent rallies at Peabodys St. Louis headquarters.
Theyre gonna take our insurance away from us, Bullock said to me over the phone. Peabody promised us our insurance and everything and formed another company and put all our stuff in that, and let it go bankrupt. I never worked for Patriot in my life. I worked for Peabody.
There was much talk during the 2012 campaign about corporations breaking faith with workers, courtesy of Team Obamas highly effective attacks on Mitt Romneys record at Bain Capital. President Obamas subsequent victory over Romney was taken by some as a repudiation of the vulture-capitalist vision for America. But the Patriot Coal case now playing out in bankruptcy court in St. Louis and in Charleston, W.V., where the UMWA has brought suit against Peabody and Arch, is a blunt reminder that the election in fact settled nothing: questions of basic fairness in American economic life remain as contested as ever. If anything, the matter of Patriot Coal suggests the stakes have gotten only larger. Veteran observers of employer-labor relations say that Peabodys Patriot Coal gambitcarving out an entirely new company that seemed designed to fail in order to offload retiree obligationsis as brazen as anything theyve ever seen.
FULL story at link.
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Can a coal company get away with breaking promises to workers? (Original Post)
Omaha Steve
Feb 2013
OP
Mopar151
(9,983 posts)1. "Clean Coal Technology"
Ruin the land, sicken the people, bust out on the debt.
A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)2. I didn't think
I didn't think it was possible for me to hate coal companies more than I already did. I was wrong.
Mopar151
(9,983 posts)3. The John Prine story
As told by Jim & Jessie (breathtaking harmonies)
The story of the song
A nice slideshow, with the John Prine version