Before marching to the bankruptcy court, miners and supporters gathered at the Rupp basketball arena in downtown Lexington for a rally. “This is not the end, this is the beginning of this fight,” UMWA president Cecil Roberts told the rally. After marching to the court building, Roberts and 16 other union leaders sat down in front of the building doors where Lexington police arrested them.

Later at the bankruptcy hearing, Judge Howard approved the results of an August auction of Horizon’s assets. The new owners are Massey Energy, and Newcoal and Oldcoal. Wall Street financier Wilbur Ross owns the latter two companies.

Busloads of miners and retirees came from Horizon-owned mines in Illinois, Eastern Kentucky, and West Virginia. Miners took union “memorial” days to attend.

“It ain’t right that they’re taking health-care coverage away from miners,” Dennis Dixon, a disabled miner from West Virginia who worked at the Ziegler mine in Illinois, told the Militant. “We were promised this. We wouldn’t be protesting if we had the same hospitalization as the judge does.”

Miners at Horizon’s Starfire mine in Eastern Kentucky, the one union operation in that half of the state, have been told that the buyer of their mine, Massey Energy, is planning to lay them off. Ronnie Sullivan from Pike City, a miner at Starfire, told the Militant that when “contract time comes up, there is going to be a bad long strike.”

In addition to Horizon miners and retirees, three busloads of miners and others from Virginia came. Roberts welcomed them as veterans of the union’s 1989-90 fight with Pittston Coal Co. at the center of which was defending health-care benefits. About 1,900 UMWA members struck Pittston Coal for 11 months at the time. During the strike, another 40,000 union coal miners across the country walked out for up to six weeks to back the Pittston miners. More than 50,000 supporters of the UMWA struggle visited the strike center, Camp Solidarity, in southwest Virginia. Thousands of miners were arrested during that strike.

“The judge ruled against retired miners,” said UMWA retiree Bobby Kiser from Castlewood, Virginia. Describing past experiences with the courts, Kiser said that during the Pittston strike “judges put us in jail right quick.”

Black-lung activists were among those who took part in the protest. Two older women in the march said their husbands had gotten black lung, and one died from it eight years ago. “It’s because of this that we’re here today and why these protests are so important,” one of the women said.  
 
 
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