Following the court decision, retirees swamped union offices with concerned phone calls. In a press release, leaders of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) alerted retirees that no union retiree would lose their health-care benefits as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. At the same time, UMWA president Cecil Roberts admitted that the Combined Benefit Fund (CBF) will be "further strained" by the adverse decision.

The CBF was set up in 1992 after the Coal Act was adopted by Congress. The fund provides health care and death benefits to about 66,000 retirees. These retired miners are referred to as "orphans." In 2000, the average age of retirees receiving benefits was 78 years. The vast majority are concentrated in the Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

For the past several years the CBF has faced a serious financial crisis. Stopgap financing has shored up the fund at least three times since 1992. This has come about through concerted mass pressure campaigns led by retired members and their union.

On May 17, 2000, some 8,000 retired miners and active union members, students, and other supporters from across the country converged on Washington and demanded that the government continue to fund cradle-to-grave health care for retired miners and their dependents. A few months after the march, emergency legislation was passed and $96.8 million of federal money transferred into the CBF.

The February 19 Supreme Court decision Barnhart v. Sigmon Coal Co. was hailed in the big-business press as a victory for the coal bosses. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette minced few words with its headline: "High court hands coal firms victory." The same was true of the front-page article in West Virginia's Charleston Gazette, which read: "Court deals blow to UMW health program."

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, the president of the Kentucky Coal Association, Bill Caylor, said the "ruling brought justice to companies like Sigmon, which owns the assets of a defunct firm--Shackleford Coal Co.--that Sigmon's predecessor, Jericol Mining Co., bought in 1973." The ruling will affect 86 retired miners. There are three other significant "successorship" cases that the decision will impact.

In arguing their case, coal boss lawyers found a loophole in the law and drove it home. According to the Coal Act, miners' benefits must be paid by the coal company that employed them, or by "related" companies; a coal company that takes over a "related" company can also be required to pay for benefits. But law does not say that a company that took over a coal operator itself must pay.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, said it was not the court's job to "read into" the law. Thomas wrote that it is not for the court to consider "why Congress would have written a statute that imposes liability on the successors of (related) companies...but not on successors to the signatory operators themselves." In a dissent, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported that Justice John Paul Stevens said that Congress did not intend "to let companies such as Jericol off the hook."

This is not the first time the U.S. Supreme Court has come to the aid of the coal bosses. In 1998, the country's highest court ruled in Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel that companies that were not signatories to the 1974 or later Bituminous Coal Operators of America (BCOA) agreements with the union did not have to pay into the fund. In making this decision, the Supreme Court said the Coal Act violated the Fifth Amendment's ban on "taking" private property for public use without just compensation. Following the decision, 132 coal companies cast aside some 8,000 retirees. For the coal bosses this was viewed as a "tremendous victory."

In response to the Eastern ruling, UMWA lawyer Grant Crandall said, "When the Supreme Court agreed with Eastern that money paid to fund health-care coverage for its former employees constituted a takings, it furthered the belief that property and profit are far more important under the law than the rights of the people who created Eastern's wealth with their sweat and blood."

There is more to the recent court ruling than meets the eye. Sigmon Bros. in 1978 (the year the company changed the name of the mine from Shackleford to Jericol) was at war with the UMWA. Sigmon, based in Harlan County, Kentucky, refused to sign the 1978 BCOA contract. Jericol hired security guards who fired on striking miners. The company's refusal to pay into the UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund was the top issue in the strike; other issues included the bosses' eliminating seniority and job bidding, doing away with union-elected safety committees, and establishing a probationary period.

The health care and retirement benefits of UMWA miners have been under attack since the late 1970s. It was one of the central BCOA contract issues in the 110-day strike in 1977 and 1978. In the 1989 UMWA strike against Pittston Company, a major question in dispute was the company's refusal to pay into the union's health and retirement fund. Through a hard-fought 11-month strike the union won its demand that Pittston contribute to the fund.

In the wake of the Pittston strike, the government established a Coal Commission, which after one year of deliberations found that "the retired miners are entitled to the health-care benefits that were promised and guaranteed them and that such commitments must be honored." The commission recommended that Congress enact federal legislation that according to a union Coal Act fact sheet, "would place a statutory obligation on current and former signatories to the National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement (NBCWA) to pay for the health care of their former employees."

The Coal Act, which grew out of the work of the Coal Commission, was designed to prevent the "dumping" of union retirees. But since its enactment in 1992, just about every major coal operator has challenged the law, and in the same spirit they have ducked their responsibility to pay into the Workers Compensation Fund. As a result, union retirees live on a knife's edge of not knowing where the next challenge to their health benefits will come from.

The multifarious legal challenges to the law are also a huge financial drain on the CBF. According to a Government Accounting Office report, published in 2000, the fund had to pay almost $4 million for "outside counsel."

To a person, retired miners are adamant about the government keeping their "promise" of providing lifetime benefits to retired miners and their families. They often point out that it took a series of work stoppages, confrontations, and strikes against the government and coal bosses beginning in the summer of 1945 and lasting through the summer of 1950 in order for the union to win their right to health and retirement benefits. These union veterans point to that history with a sense of pride and determination.

At this time, the coalfields faced some of the worst social conditions imaginable. "A Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry," a government report, documented appalling levels of ill-health, infant mortality, grinding poverty, and chronic sickness in coal-mining areas. It took a fight by the union just to get the report--which had been suppressed--released to the public.

A part of these conditions was the horrifying safety record in the mines. Between 1935 and 1945 almost 13,000 miners died on the job and 639,000 suffered disabling accidents.

"One of the first tasks of the UMWA Welfare and Retirement Fund," according to Claude Frazier, author of Miners and Medicine, "was to identify and provide medical and rehabilitative care for thousands of disabled miners, some of whom had not received medical care for several decades."
 
 
Related article:
Widows walk to demand federal black lung benefits  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home