Tag Archives: bankruptcy hearing

Will There Be Justice?

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Bankruptcy Court hearings begin Monday on Patriot Coal’s plan to effectively eliminate health care for retirees and impose severe cutbacks on pay, working conditions and benefits for active miners. Outside the courthouse in St. Louis, thousands of Mine Workers (UMWA) and their labor and community allies will call for justice.

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They will bear witness to a scam by Peabody Energy and Arch Coal to dump long-term benefit obligations on a company, Patriot, created specifically to absorb those obligations and eventually to fail. That case is being heard in another federal courthouse, in Charleston, W.Va., but it’s an essential underlying factor in this bankruptcy.

Consumer, environmental and civil rights leaders will join labor and religious leaders in demanding justice for those men and women who gave their entire working lives to the success of rich companies like Peabody and Arch, only to be dumped, and for the mining communities that are being abandoned in the process.

Joining UMWA President Cecil Roberts onstage will be Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America; Sally Greenberg, director of the National Consumers League; Van Jones, president of Rebuild the Dream; St. Louis NAACP President Adolthus Pruitt; and UNITE HERE Vice President Bob Proto. And Steve Smyth, president of the Australian mine workers, is coming halfway around the world to pledge support from down under.

Prayers will open and close the gathering, and the congregation comes together again in the evening for a candlelight prayer vigil across from the Federal Building.

It will be the Mine Workers “largest rally yet in St. Louis,” Roberts said, after four previous excursions that drew thousands of miners and supporters. Two weeks ago, the miners planted 1,000 white crosses to signify the number of miners who have died working for the coal companies, or who stand to lose their lives if their health care is taken from them.

The union is running a new 30-second TV spot in the St. Louis metropolitan area that dramatizes the importance of the fight. If the bankruptcy court can allow contractual obligations to miners and their families to be offloaded and then discarded, then no worker’s benefit is safe from corporate thievery.

The Peabody and Arch bigwigs, after listening to the crowd chants during previous demonstrations, got far out of town as the bankruptcy hearings begin, both holding annual meetings in Wyoming. But they can’t get away from the Mine Workers. A delegation was in Wright, Wyo., April 25 to demonstrate at the Arch meeting, and plan to yell even louder outside the Peabody meeting April 29.

“These companies can run, but they can’t hide,” said Jody Hogge, a retiree from Peabody Energy who traveled to Wyoming. She is president of UMWA Local 9819, and retired from Peabody Mine #10 in Pawnee, Ill., with 13 years of service as a miner when the mine closed in 1994. “They moved their meetings more than 1,000 miles from St. Louis because they don’t want people to see what they’re doing to us. They prefer to operate behind closed doors; we’re here to keep those doors open and let everyone see exactly how these corporations behave.”

You can follow the live blog from the rally at http://fairnessatpatriotnow.blogspot.com/. The event also will be live streamed, beginning at 10 a.m. Central Time at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mineworkers. For more information, check out http://www.fairnessatpatriot.org, and show your support by “liking” the Fairness at Patriot on Facebook.

Fairness at Patriot

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Peabody Energy today got a first taste of what promises to be an intense in-your-face confrontation with the United Mine Workers, the first day of hearings in the bankruptcy of Patriot Coal, a company Peabody spun off to offload its union operations – and pension and health care obligations for thousands of retirees and their families.

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Cecil Roberts, third from left, leads miners in singing “Amazing Grace” as they prepare to be arrested in front of Peabody headquarters in St. Louis. (Photo by Mike Elk)

United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts led hundreds of active and retired coal miners in a rally across from the federal building where the court hearing was in session, and then in a march to Peabody headquarters where he and nine others were arrested for sitting in the street and refusing to disperse.

Most of the miners and retirees whose benefits are at risk in the bankruptcy never worked a day at Patriot, but were victims of the double-breasting practices of Peabody and Arch Coal, which also dumped its union operations on Patriot. The UMW charges that Peabody created Patriot specifically to rid itself of the legacy costs, and that Patriot was built to fail.

“What we have here is a company reneging on its promises,” Roberts said of Peabody. “We’re not going to take it. We will fight for our members and their families in the courts, in the coalfields and in the streets of St. Louis. Patriot and Peabody have a moral obligation to those who mined their coal.”

The UMW live-streamed much of the rally and march from St. Louis, and also live-blogged at the event, which had the flavor of old-fashioned mass demonstrations and street theater. Roberts vowed the union would continue to hammer away at the companies in the court of public opinion.

Before marching to Peabody headquarters, Roberts called to the stage the nine other mine workers who he said were committed to go to jail, two of whom had oxygen tanks strapped over their shoulders. One was on oxygen 24 hours a day, several had black lung disease, and one was a Vietnam veteran with Agent Orange poisoning.

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A retired miner with an oxygen tank sits handcuffed in the paddy wagon before being hauled away to jail for civil disobedience. (Photo by Mike Elk)

Roberts, who speaks with the passion and rhythm of an evangelical preacher (“Jesus was an organizer,” he declares), read from the Bible to chasten Peabody and Arch managements, urging them to pray to understand the error of their ways, and to repent. He called for a moment of silence for those in hospice “who will not see the morning come,” others with lung, heart and blood problems, “who without their medicines will not live.”

“I urge the people at Peabody to think about what they are doing to them,” he said. “We march for them, and ask God’s guidance in returning everybody to their homes and the strength to return here again, and again and again and again.”

The union had bused in the miners and retirees from the mining towns throughout southern Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, where most of the Patriot mines have closed down. And it has been hammering its message about corporate greed and community abandonment in two TV ads that have been airing this month in the St. Louis area, as well as billboards in prominent areas.

For more information about the coal companies’ shakedown of miners, check out my previous blogs here, here and here.

And stay tuned. As Roberts said, the miners will be back. And they won’t back down.