Eddie Bullock spent 27 years in the southern Illinois coal mines working for Peabody Energy, the largest coal-mining company in the world (infamously memorialized by John Prine.) He retired in 1998, when his mine shut down. He’s now 72 years old and suffers from black lung disease; his wife has emphysema, and both have oxygen tanks at their side at all times. But they’re fortunate in one regard: Bullock has a good pension and solid health benefits that were negotiated for him at Peabody by the United Mine Workers of America.

Or he did, at least. In 2007, Peabody created a new entity called Patriot Coal, and transferred to it 13 percent of its coal reserves. It also transferred to it about 40 percent of its health care liabilities—the obligations for 8,400 former Peabody employees. A year later, Patriot Coal was loaded up with even more liabilities when it acquired Magnum Coal, an offshoot of the country’s second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by last year, total liabilities of $1.37 billion. Patriot Coal is now seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy, through which it will seek to limit or discharge its pension and health obligations to 22,000 retired miners and their spouses, 90 percent of whom never worked for Patriot Coal—among them Eddie Bullock, who, oxygen tank and all, joined the UMWA’s outspoken president, Cecil Roberts, and a handful of other former Peabody miners in getting arrested at the first of two recent rallies at Peabody’s St. Louis headquarters.

“They’re gonna take our insurance away from us,” Bullock said to me over the phone. Peabody “promised us our insurance and everything and formed another company and put all our stuff in that, and let it go bankrupt. I never worked for Patriot in my life. I worked for Peabody.”

There was much talk during the 2012 campaign about corporations breaking faith with workers, courtesy of Team Obama’s highly effective attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital. President Obama’s subsequent victory over Romney was taken by some as a repudiation of the vulture-capitalist vision for America. But the Patriot Coal case now playing out in bankruptcy court in St. Louis and in Charleston, W.V., where the UMWA has brought suit against Peabody and Arch, is a blunt reminder that the election in fact settled nothing: questions of basic fairness in American economic life remain as contested as ever. If anything, the matter of Patriot Coal suggests the stakes have gotten only larger. Veteran observers of employer-labor relations say that Peabody’s Patriot Coal gambit—carving out an entirely new company that seemed designed to fail in order to offload retiree obligations—is as brazen as anything they’ve ever seen.

“It’s rather extraordinary,” said Robert Bruno, director of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Employer-Labor Relations. “It’s just a more elaborate attempt to detach the employer from any kind of legacy obligations for their employees, a further abdication, or departure, from the post-war era’s contract in which employers bore some responsibility…Now that model of providing some level of social insurance has been torn asunder, and the burdens have been handed to the individual worker.”