Cecil Roberts, International president of the UMWA, was the featured speaker. Also speaking briefly were UMWA officials from District 12 and several Democratic Party politicians from Illinois, including some who are UMWA members.

The meeting highlighted the ongoing crisis in the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act (Coal Act), which was supposed to shore up depleted funds needed to cover coal miners' lifetime health care. The Coal Act, also known as the Rockefeller bill, was signed into law by former President George Bush in 1992.

The Coal Act requires all companies that have ever signed a UMWA contract--reaching back 30 years--to pay lifetime health benefits to their retirees. Since passage of the 1992 legislation, there have been more than 60 challenges to it in court by the coal companies.

In a case brought by Eastern Associated (now a subsidiary of Peabody Co.) "the U.S. Supreme Court voted against the union and for the coal companies and the billionaires," declared Roberts.

The UMWA maintains the Combined Benefit Fund (CBF), which was established under the Coal Act and provides benefits for about 70,000 retired miners and their families. It is the largest of five pension and benefit funds run by the union. About 23,000 people in West Virginia and 15,500 in Pennsylvania rely on the CBF, and smaller numbers in 18 other states.

The CBF is funded by some 300 coal operatives, both current and former coal bosses, and pays out an estimated $31 million a month. It faces huge deficits in the coming years.

In the days leading up to the meeting, the U.S. Congress adopted an emergency $94.5 million appropriations bill, initiated by Sen. Robert Byrd from West Virginia, to fund health care for miners. President Clinton signed it October 11, two days before the meeting. The funds are "only enough to last for a year," Roberts warned.

The gathering here was one of a number held in the coalfields that Roberts addressed over the past several days. These included a meeting of 250 that morning in Madisonville, Kentucky, as well as others in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. At the meeting here, Roberts reminded the audience that when coal miners went on strike in 1946 President Harry Truman took over all the coal mines in the country. To settle the strike Truman guaranteed miners pensions and health care benefits for life. Coal miners, who had a higher rate of death and dismemberment than soldiers fighting in World War II, had neither health benefits nor federal mine safety regulations at the time.

Roberts said that this "wasn't a promise for two years, for three years, or five years. It wasn't something that could be changed with a contract. It was for life." Nearly half the audience raised their hands when Roberts asked how many had been actively mining in the 1940s.

The next day in Herrin, Illinois, some 350 people attended the dedication of a memorial to mine workers. Behind a bronze statue of a miner returning home from work, a wall bears the names of hundreds of southern Illinois coal miners, many of whom died working in the mines. Several speakers eulogized the 119 miners killed in a 1951 mine blast in nearby West Frankfort. Among those attending the event were a number of active miners and their relatives. That evening several hundred people gathered in Springfield, the state capital, to honor the memory of Mother Jones, a mine workers organizer and union fighter, and to discuss some of the lessons of the fights she led on behalf of coal miners.

J. Rose is a meat packer in St. Louis and a former coal miner in southern Illinois.