​“Moses didn’t send a fax to Pharaoh. Moses didn’t send an email. He nev­er texted Pharaoh. Moses went to Pharaoh. We are about to go see Pharaoh and he resides in that big office up at Peabody,” exclaimed Cecil Roberts, pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed Mine Work­ers of Amer­i­ca (UMWA), at a Jan­u­ary 29 ral­ly in St. Louis. Roberts, who honed his ora­to­ry skills as a self-pro­claimed ​“back­woods Bap­tist preach­er” in his home­town of Cab­in Creek, W. Va., was there to fire up a crowd of about 1,000 min­ers, most dressed for bat­tle in the UMWA’s trade­mark camouflage.

'Millionaires and billionaires, when they die, die with great dignity because they've got healthcare. I've got a message: Our pensioners and our widows are just as good if not a whole of hell of a lot not better than these millionaires and these billionaires.'

Tech­ni­cal­ly, the min­ers were up against two Pharaohs: min­ing giant Peabody and its spin­off com­pa­ny, Patri­ot Coal, which is in bank­rupt­cy pro­ceed­ings at the St. Louis court across the street from the ral­ly. The min­ers are furi­ous over Patriot’s attempts in court to be relieved of its pen­sion and health­care oblig­a­tions to more than 10,000 active and retired min­ers and anoth­er 10,000 beneficiaries.

But in the UMWA’s eyes, Peabody is the real vil­lain. Accord­ing to union esti­mates, 90 per­cent of Patri­ot’s retirees are for­mer Peabody min­ers who ​“nev­er worked a day in their life” for Patri­ot. The UMWA charges that Peabody cre­at­ed Patri­ot as a vehi­cle to shed its retiree oblig­a­tions. As evi­dence, the union cites the fact that when Peabody spun off Patri­ot Coal in 2007, it hand­ed Patri­ot three times as many retirees as active work­ers and $557 mil­lion in retiree health­care oblig­a­tions. With­in five years, Patri­ot had filed for bankruptcy.

If Patri­ot is suc­cess­ful in shed­ding some or all of its retiree oblig­a­tions in bank­rupt­cy court, the rul­ing could have a rip­ple effect in the indus­try. Should oth­er coal com­pa­nies be inspired to try the same tac­tic, tens of thou­sands of retired min­ers, their bod­ies bat­tered from decades in the mines, could be left to make tough choic­es between med­ical care and pover­ty in their old age. Thus the bat­tle against the Patri­ot Coal bank­rupt­cy is lit­er­al­ly a life-or-death fight for many.

That’s the case for Kevin Luthy, a UMWA Local 5958 mem­ber who spoke at the ral­ly and has worked for 31 years in a Chapel Hill, W. Va. mine — first for Peabody, then for Patriot.

​“I have a stage three and stage four can­cers in my lymph nodes. Right now it’s in remis­sion, but there is a high risk of it com­ing back,” Luthy told the crowd. ​“If I don’t have health­care when I retire, I have no choice but to keep working.”

​“I’m 55,” Luthy con­tin­ued. ​“I have been promised for 31 years that when I was 55 I could retire with full ben­e­fits, and that’s not going to happen.”

​“We sim­ply shouldn’t allow com­pa­nies to shift their oblig­a­tions to oth­ers and avoid all future respon­si­bil­i­ty. That’s a ter­ri­ble prece­dent,” says Sen. Jay Rock­e­feller (D‑W. Va.), who has intro­duced fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion to pro­tect the pen­sions of Patri­ot Coal retirees. ​“Those com­pa­nies have a moral oblig­a­tion to the work­ers who gave so much of them­selves — and I intend to make sure they are held accountable.”

God, guns and guts

To many UMWA mem­bers, the Patri­ot Coal bank­rupt­cy fight is also about hon­or­ing those who came before them.

​“When my father was dying, God bless his soul, he had 50 some years in the Unit­ed Mine Work­ers union,” Roberts told the assem­bled min­ers. ​“He signed his first card up in the woods so nobody would know he was join­ing the union! … Peo­ple like my father built this, and I am not gonna stand idly by while some­body takes away what my dad­dy built.”

At the ral­ly, many of the min­ers’ cam­ou­flaged hats read, ​“God, Guns, & Guts built the U.M.W.A.”

The hats allude to the Bat­tle of Blair Moun­tain in 1921, when 10,000 UMWA min­ers took up guns after being attacked by local law enforce­ment and coal oper­a­tors dur­ing a labor dis­pute over the right to form a union. More than 100 min­ers would die in the largest armed rebel­lion since the Civ­il War, which esta­bil­shed UMWA’s rep­u­ta­tion as a union that fights back.

Men like Roberts’ father, who were forced to join the union in secret, risked their lives to fight for the union ben­e­fits. And the min­ers today are angry to see those same ben­e­fits threat­ened by Patri­ot Coal.

​“When my father was dying he had the best health­care in the world. The doc­tors were all over him try­ing to help him. The nurs­es were giv­ing him dai­ly the best med­i­cine avail­able. He died in great dig­ni­ty,” said Roberts at the ral­ly. ​“Mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires, when they die, die with great dig­ni­ty because they’ve got health­care. I’ve got a mes­sage: Our pen­sion­ers and our wid­ows are just as good if not a whole of hell of a lot not bet­ter than these mil­lion­aires and these billionaires.”

Straight fom the Pharao­h’s mouth

On March 14, Patri­ot Coal filed a motion in fed­er­al bank­rupt­cy court in St. Louis to mod­i­fy its col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments to reduce its pay­ments to retirees. The com­pa­ny, which is cur­rent­ly on the hook for $1.6 bil­lion in retiree oblig­a­tions, has pro­posed instead to cre­ate a trust fund for retiree pen­sion and health­care oblig­a­tions that would start at $15 mil­lion and go up to a max­i­mum of $300 mil­lion. The UMWA con­sid­ers such a fund woe­ful­ly inadequate.

​“We very much regret the neces­si­ty of these changes to our employ­ees’ and retirees’ wages and ben­e­fits,” said Patri­ot Coal CEO Ben­nett K. Hat­field in a state­ment announc­ing the move. ​“How­ev­er, these actions are nec­es­sary for Patri­ot to become viable and con­tin­ue to pro­vide more than 4,000 jobs. We believe the alter­na­tive of liq­ui­dat­ing Patri­ot would do far greater dam­age to the employ­ees and retirees who depend on this company.”

Roberts and the UMWA do not dis­pute Patriot’s claim that it does not have the mon­ey to meet its oblig­a­tions. They place the blame square­ly on Patriot’s par­ent com­pa­nies: Peabody and anoth­er min­ing behe­moth, Arch Min­er­al. (In 2005, Arch spun off four of its mines and many of its retiree oblig­a­tions to a com­pa­ny called Mag­num Coal, which was acquired by Patri­ot in 2008, along with anoth­er $500 mil­lion in retiree oblig­a­tions.) Roberts jokes that Patri­ot Coal should join the UMWA’s ERISA law­suit against Peabody and Arch, on the grounds that it was designed to fail.

Peabody Ener­gy has dis­put­ed that charge, telling the Charleston Gazette in Octo­ber that Patri­ot start­ed out as ​“a com­plete­ly viable com­pa­ny” and was sub­se­quent­ly affect­ed by ​“sub­stan­tial events” includ­ing ​“sharp declines in nat­ur­al gas prices; the soft­en­ing of the glob­al steel mar­kets; and more bur­den­some regulations.”

But a new report by Tem­ple Uni­ver­si­ty Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor for Finance Bruce Rad­er, enti­tled ​“Designed to Fail (The Case of Patri­ot Coal),” calls Peabody’s claims into question:

Even with­out the [recent] drop in nat­ur­al gas prices and the devel­op­ment of frack­ing, it would have been near­ly impos­si­ble for Patri­ot to remain sol­vent. The company’s busi­ness mod­el could only make mon­ey if coal was priced at or above record high. … From a finan­cial point of view this ven­ture seems to have been cre­at­ed to fail in the long-run unless the most opti­mistic out­come for east­ern coal was obtained.

For its part, Arch Min­er­al respond­ed to In These Times’ queries by dis­tanc­ing itself from Patri­ot. A com­pa­ny spokesper­son stressed that Arch had nev­er dealt direct­ly with Patri­ot, but only with Magnum.

A bat­tle in the here and the hereafter

Despite the com­plex expla­na­tions from Peabody and Arch, many of its retirees view the com­pa­nies’ actions in much sim­pler terms. ​“It’s pret­ty low-life,” pro­test­er Lar­ry Knisell, aged 63, told me at the ral­ly. Knis­sell suf­fers from PTSD and Agent Orange poi­son­ing from his time in Viet­nam, as well as black lung from his ser­vice in the mines.

Lat­er in the day, after the min­ers marched from the bank­rupt­cy court to Peabody’s near­by cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, Knisell was arrest­ed, along­side 10 oth­er ner­vous men, sev­er­al of them in their ​’70s and strapped to oxy­gen tanks in order to ward off the effects of black lung. The min­ers hope that civ­il dis­obe­di­ence will draw atten­tion to the immoral­i­ty of Peabody’s actions and help per­suade the bank­rupt­cy judge to take their side.

Since those ini­tial arrests, more than 40 UMWA min­ers and retirees have been arrest­ed on four sep­a­rate occa­sions out­side of Peabody’s head­quar­ters as part of UMWA’s strat­e­gy to keep pub­lic atten­tion on the com­pa­ny. UMWA mem­bers and retirees plan to keep apply­ing heat with more mobi­liza­tions, includ­ing a large ral­ly in Charleston, W. Va., on April 1.

​“I believe that these protests [will] keep grow­ing … because there is a very basic immoral­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with deny­ing health­care to work­ers who sac­ri­ficed their bod­ies to build a bil­lion-dol­lar com­pa­ny,” says Lar­ry Miller, 62, a retired Patri­ot coal min­er from Hart­ford, Ky. ​“But there is also a real hunger by the work­ers in this coun­try for fair­ness. Immoral­i­ty is the spark that [can] trans­form the Patri­ot Coal protest into a true move­ment, with the UMWA as the [first] phalanx.”

Indeed, UMWA’s retirees appear to be inspired by a uni­fy­ing belief that their bat­tle is greater than themselves..

​“Some­body said to me, ​‘You may not get jus­tice over here at the cour­t­house,’ and I said, ​‘Well I know where the ulti­mate jus­tice comes from,’” Roberts told the crowd at the ral­ly. ​”There will be jus­tice, because we will all get judged some­day. We are going to get judged by how we treat the least of these. Peabody and Arch will be judged very poorly”.