Vol. 75/No. 26      July 18, 2011

“Are they going to shut that mine down?” a coal hauler asked as he pulled his loaded truck to the side of the road to buy a Militant near the Willow Lake Mine north of Equality. “These companies are all the same,” he said, recounting press reports that the Peabody-owned mine could be shut down for safety violations.

A Willow Lake supervisor was killed in an underground haulage incident last year. The mine is among 15 across the country that were cited June 28 for serious safety violations by the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

The 444 miners at Willow Lake voted by a narrow margin in May to organize into the United Mine Workers of America in their fight to establish a contract with a pension plan and safety provisions, including a union safety committee. Peabody is appealing the union vote.

“The company has told us they will give us a $5 raise to $28 an hour, as soon as we get the union out,” a miner told the Militant. “They say they already have the money for us. The only thing standing in their way is the union.”

Some of the miners at Willow Lake work for third-party contractors, a common practice today designed to sow divisions and thereby undermine workers’ capacity to fight around safety and other questions. “The contracting company I work for gets $55 an hour to provide cheap labor for Peabody, but we only get $12 an hour,” explained a miner in his 20s. “Even if the union wins, it won’t affect those of us working for contractors.”

Working people in Johnson City, already hard hit by the economic crisis and the devastating effects of recent flooding, were angry about this week’s announcement by Mayor Jim Mitchell that all but a “skeleton crew” of city workers will no longer have their jobs.

A woman whose husband works in a nearby mine told us that they already pay for private garbage collection, and high taxes “for everything, including the repaired porch you are standing on.”

“My father was a union miner,” she said, as she bought a copy of the paper. “To this day he still won’t cross a picket line. But the mines opening now aren’t union.”

A retired worker who invited us into his home to talk said that his son had been a miner, but “now he does those inspections. He doesn’t like it, though, because it seems that all they do is write up safety violations and nothing is done about them.”

A construction worker who said he was “glad to see that the Willow Lake miners voted the UMWA in” was among those who subscribed to the paper in the town of Harrisburg. After looking at El Militante, the Spanish-language section of the paper, his friend tried to talk him out of subscribing. “It’s for them!” she exclaimed. “It’s for us—working people,” he responded as he filled out the subscription card.
 
 
Related articles:
Canadian miners’ union to investigate workers’ deaths
China: 3 die, dozens trapped in coal mines
Coal, oil field workers discuss safety and boom-and-bust cycle  
 
 
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