Last month, a West Virginia woman filed a lawsuit against Murray Energy, the largest privately-held coal-mining company in the country, alleging she was fired from her job as a shift foreman because she had declined CEO Bob Murray’s urgings to make campaign contributions to Republican candidates he favored.

In the brief period she worked for Murray Energy—at the Marion County Mine in West Virginia, which the company bought last year—Jean Cochenour says she received repeated written requests from Bob Murray asking her to give specific amounts to specific candidates. “Not only did Mr. Murray name candidates and specify the amount to be contributed to each candidate, but he also required that the political contributions be returned directly to him in a self-addressed envelope that he enclosed with each of his letters to her,” the lawsuit states. Cochenour did not give anything, and in May, she was ordered to meet with Murray at company headquarters in St. Clairsville, Ohio. She was fired even though, the lawsuit states, she was “satisfactorily performing her duties as a prep plant shift foreman.”

Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, it’s because exactly two years ago, I wrote an in-depth piece for this magazine describing Bob Murray’s years-long efforts to get his salaried employees—engineers, accountants, surveyors and the like—to give to Republican candidates. This approach had helped make Murray, a fiercely outspoken opponent of President Obama, one of the most prolific GOP fundraisers in the country, with Murray employees giving at least $1.4 million to Republican candidates for federal office between 2007 and 2012, plus $720,000 to GOP candidates for state office in Ohio over the past decade. The giving has continued in the current campaign year, in which Murray’s fundraising is again playing an outsized role, particularly in Ohio.

In the piece, I cited internal company documents I obtained showing that Murray and his top deputies were not only urging employees to give to the company political action committee and attend his many personal fundraisers—he held nine different ones in one three-month period during the 2008 campaign—but that company officials were also tracking who gave and who did not. From the piece:

Internal Murray documents show just how upset Murray becomes when employees fail to join the giving. In missives, he cajoles employees to attend fund-raisers and scolds them when they or their subordinates do not. In cases of low participation, reminders from his lieutenants have included tables or spreadsheets showing how each of the eleven Murray subsidiaries was performing. And at least one note came with a list of names of employees who had not yet given. “What is so difficult about asking a well-paid, salaried employee to give us three hours of his/her time every two months?” Murray writes in a March 2012 letter. “We have been insulted by every salaried employee who does not support our efforts.” He concludes: “I do not recall ever seeing the attached list of employees…at one of our fund-raisers.”

I also quoted this foreboding line from a Murray letter to company managers ahead of a 2011 fundraiser for Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and Tennessee Senator Bob Corker: “I am asking you to rally all of your salaried employees and have them make their contribution to our event as soon as possible. Please see that our salaried employees ‘step up,’ for their own sakes and those of their employees.” And this, even more pointed September 2010 letter from Murray lamenting insufficient contributions to the company PAC: “The response to this letter of appeal has been poor. We have only a little over a month left to go in this election fight. If we do not win it, the coal industry will be eliminated and so will your job, if you want to remain in this industry.” And I reported that two Murray employees told me that it was their distinct impression that company bonuses to workers were dependent on how much workers gave in political contributions.