act now > peabody energy report

Peabody Energy: Rights Denied
and Promises Broken

Report of Fact Finding Mission by
Religious Leaders for Coalfield Justice
and Interfaith Worker Justice

On July 16-17, 2006, Religious Leaders for Coalfield Justice and Interfaith Worker Justice convened a fact-finding delegation of religious leaders to visit the mid-west coalfields and learn more about the situation of miners employed by Peabody Energy. The delegation heard testimony from miners, clergy, elected officials and labor organizers. Notably absent were representatives from Peabody Energy, who were invited but declined to testify.

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The delegation found that Peabody Energy is systematically deunionizing its mines, reducing miner health protections, and eliminating job security and retirement benefits, all conditions painstakingly achieved through decades of struggle and collective bargaining. Miners are being denied their hard-won voice in life and death workplace decisions.

“Peabody treats their workers like a piece of equipment; if it breaks down they discard it and replace it. Once you’re hurt, you can expect to be fired.”
Richard Riggle, Peabody miner

Miners testified about a number of disturbing practices that they say prevail at Peabody’s nonunion mines. These reports include miners losing their jobs because they get hurt in the mines, miners receiving no flexibility from the company even in emergency situations, and the company intimidating workers who seek to address workplace grievances by organizing with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Together, these reports point to a pervasive pattern of disloyalty and disrespect on the part of Peabody’s management towards its workers and violations of workers' legally guaranteed and internationally recognized right to organize.

Peabody’s practices are undermining a long history of progress that workers have made in solving a variety of workplace problems by organizing unions. A set of labor laws passed in the 1930s under Franklin D. Roosevelt established the legal right of workers to form unions. As a result, workers organized to win decent working conditions, employer-provided health care, and living wages, which created the American middle class.

In the coal industry, the United Mine Workers of America won a set of agreements that provided for good wages for coal miners, full health coverage for miners and retirees, retirement with dignity, and safety stewards elected by the workers who accompany federal inspectors and can shut down the mines if there are safety problems. Today, the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds support over 100,000 retired miners and surviving spouses annually through payments of nearly $50 million a month and provide over $60 million a month to cover medical expenses for payments to coal field doctors, clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals. The resources from these funds are crucial to the economic health of coal-producing regions. Peabody’s drive to deunionize threatens these funds and, along with them, the survival of coalfield communities.

Unfortunately, labor law enforcement has eroded substantially since the 1930s. Today, workers who try to organize unions face huge obstacles, including, among others:

• 30% of all employers fire pro-union workers. In fact, more than 20,000 workers are fired or discriminated against every year for attempting to organize unions.
• 49% of companies threaten to close their facility if the workers try to join a union.
• 91% of employers force employees to attend mandatory, closed-door, one-on-one, anti-union meetings with supervisors against the union.

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As a result, the middle class that was created by the union movement is fighting for survival. At the height of union membership in 1955, 31.8 percent of workers belonged to unions. But today, the percentage of union members has dropped to 12.5 overall. In the coal industry, while unions represented 60 percent of workers in 1984, today that figure has fallen to below 30 percent. As a result, America’s workforce generally is working longer hours for less income. Between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, a time of increasing corporate wealth and declining union density, the poorest 40 percent of Americans on average lost income while the richest five percent increased their annual earning by an average of 55 percent. Middle class family incomes remained essentially stagnant, even as most families depended on two-wage earners, while the richest 20 percent realized a 33 percent increase in earnings.

As the largest coal producer in the U.S., Peabody Energy has been a key player in this deunionization process in the coal industry. In 2005, Peabody CEO Greg Boyce bragged that the company had “moved the vast majority of our production and developed our operations to where we have reduced the intensity of our unionization, and we would continue on that path.” In addition to the intimidation tactics described in miners’ testimony, Peabody has held “captive audience” and one-on-one meetings at several mines where supervisors speak against the union and hint that the mine might close if workers organize. Because of these employer pressure tactics, the UMWA is calling on Peabody Energy to remain neutral while workers are organizing and to recognize the workers’ union when a majority has signed cards.

Under conditions like the ones facing workers at Peabody, people of faith are called to act. Human dignity in the face of human oppression is a central theme of Biblical literature, and the religious community has a long history of supporting justice for workers. As a result of the testimony given in Madisonville, Religious Leaders for Coalfield Justice and Interfaith Worker Justice recommend the following steps to promote justice for Peabody coal miners:

• We urge Peabody Energy to agree upon a fair process for workers to choose whether to organize with the UMWA without company harassment and intimidation. Peabody should recognize a union if a majority of employees at a given mine sign union authorization cards, and Peabody should remain neutral so that employees can decide for themselves whether to join a union.
• We urge Peabody Energy to agree to contracts with miners that guarantee safe working conditions; and high-quality, affordable health insurance to both active and retired miners; and a voice for miners on the job.
  

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For more information about what you can do to support coal miners, please contact Will Tanzman here at IWJ, (773) 728-8400 x16.