Black lung

Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the world, decided a few years back that it was inconvenient to pay its retiree health care obligations. So it spun off a new company, Patriot Coal, giving Patriot Coal 13 percent of Peabody's coal and 40 percent of its health care costs, in the form of thousands of retired coal miners with the black lung and other costly conditions they got working for Peabody. Then, as if that wasn't enough, Patriot went ahead and acquired another spin-off company with serious health care liabilities. Then it decided to declare bankruptcy, because after all, it had a lot of debt and not much in the way of assets.

And now a judge has said Patriot Coal can just dump its retiree health benefit obligations, because screw it, those miners didn't deserve such good benefits anyway and what else is Patriot going to do? It's not like there's a guarantee anyone can make Peabody pay up for its obvious ploy to save itself those retiree health care costs, whereas union contracts are, to bankruptcy Judge Kathy Surratt-States, so much toilet paper. The health benefits being jettisoned were going to people like Alana Green:



"You take a car and go underground, like a trolley," said Green. "The mines are very damp and cold and wet, with a low ceiling. The only lamp you have is on your head, and if you turn that out, you can't even see the hand in front of your face. In the wintertime, you go down in the dark and come back in dark." Green, a grandmother of six, will be 59 years old next month. She suffers from Lyme disease, and her time in the coal mines has left her with black lung and chronic back problems, she told HuffPost.

The Patriot case is about retiree health benefits, but maneuvers like this are also a way pensions have become so rare—companies have devised a staggering array of ways to get out of their pension obligations, with spinning off a company designed to fail being one of those ways. This is why pensions have become so rare. Companies have methodically shed them, and in many cases, workers didn't have unions to fight for them and draw attention to what was happening. Then by the time the companies came for the strongest contracts, people who'd lost their pensions years before were willing to sit by, going, "I don't have a pension, so why should?"

Yes, I'm a little pissed today. Continue reading below the fold for more of the war on workers.