Peabody Miners Fighting for a Union

by James Parks, May 31, 2006

Tired of being forced to work overtime every week and getting precious little in return, nonunion coal miners who work for Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, have joined together with the AFL-CIO, the Mine Workers, community religious leaders and miners in Australia to say, “Enough! We want a union.”

Peabody has systematically closed its union mines and replaced production with nonunion mines over the past 15 years, says Bob Gaydos, UMWA’s assistant organizing director. Today, only 40 percent of Peabody’s miners worldwide are union members, he says, down from about 70 percent in the 1990s.

For the past couple of years, the UMWA has responded to the requests of hundreds of nonunion miners at Peabody’s facilities across the country for assistance in organizing unions. In December 2005, the workers launched the Justice at Peabody campaign. Peabody, which provides 10 percent of the nation’s electricity and 3 percent of the world’s power, employs some 8,300 miners at 33 mines in nine states.

Peabody says its employees are free to join unions through elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). However, union leaders counter that the NLRB process is long and cumbersome. Employers often use the process to delay votes, harass and intimidate workers and erode union support. Gaydos says the NLRB process is “unfair for workers.”

Under the NLRB process, management has almost unlimited access to employees, while employees have almost no access to the union’s message. This is the equivalent, in a congressional election, of one candidate owning all the local print and broadcast outlets and denying opponents any access to them; it would be the equivalent of one candidate being able to fire voters who don’t care to listen to his or her campaign speeches. (Check out Jordan Barab’s excellent post about what’s wrong with the NLRB process at Firedoglake.)

To level the playing field for workers trying to form unions, AFL-CIO unions including the UMWA are supporting the Employee Free Choice Act. The legislation, which has 259 co-sponsors in the House and Senate, would strengthen workers’ freedom to choose union representation through a majority sign-up process. It also would provide for binding arbitration of first-contract disputes and authorize stronger penalties for violations of labor law when workers seek to form a union.

With the aid of the AFL-CIO, which is providing staff, resources and expertise, the UMWA has put 30 organizers to work helping the Peabody miners. The workers began forming in-house committees in April 2005, and more than 500 workers have signed petitions demanding the right to organize.

The workers’ main concerns are pensions, health insurance costs, work hours and time off, says Bob Kendrick, UMWA’s lead organizer at Peabody. Some of the miners are forced to work overtime, averaging 10- to 12-hour days with no lunch breaks. They have only two sick days per year and little vacation time. They also are paid less than union miners, Kendrick says.

The long days with little time off leads to fatigue that many of the workers worry could lead to accidents or worse, Kendrick says. That’s a particular concern this year when nearly three dozen coal miners have been killed.

In the past five months, 33 miners have died on the job, including five in Harlan County, Ky., and 12 who were killed Jan. 2 in the Sago Mine explosion in West Virginia. More miners have died on the job this year than in any full year since 2001, when 42 were killed. More than 90 percent of the miners killed this year worked in nonunion mines.

Coal miners, their families, the UMWA, the AFL-CIO and a growing number of state and federal legislators are demanding new and tougher coal mine safety laws. Even the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration—rightfully criticized for lax enforcement, ties to the coal industry and an unwillingness to develop new safety rules—issued some emergency measures in March as the 2006 death toll climbed.

Union miners elect their own safety committeemen and have the right to withdraw from unsafe work.

Peabody, along with several other mining companies, is opposing tough federal mine safety rules through the industry lobbying group, the National Mining Association.  The opposition to the rules is another example of the company’s disregard for workers’ rights, Gaydos says.

The same disregard is clear in the way the company is fighting tooth and nail to stop the union, Gaydos and Kendrick say. “It will probably get worse,” Kendrick says, as the workers’ effort to form a union grows.

Even though some 57 million workers say they would join a union, according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, employers routinely mount vicious anti-union campaigns and use the federal union elections process to coerce workers to vote against the union.

Last year, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development reported that when faced with organizing drives, 30 percent of employers fire pro-union workers, 49 percent threaten to close a worksite if the union prevails and 51 percent coerce workers into opposing unions with bribery or favoritism. (See more about the employer war on workers trying to form unions.)

The Peabody miners have gained immeasurable help from the community and from fellow Peabody workers in other countries. Several coalfield town councils have passed resolutions supporting the miners’ organizing effort.

Members of the Religious Leaders for Coalfield Justice met April 28 in St. Louis with senior Peabody officials and presented a petition signed by 500 clergy members from across the country urging the company to remain neutral in workers’ efforts to form a union and to agree to a majority sign-up process.

“We support the efforts of miners who work in Peabody Energy’s nonunion mines to gain dignity, respect, fairness and safety on the job by forming a union with the United Mine Workers of America,” the religious leaders said in their statement.  “Coal mining is dangerous and demanding work. The workers in this industry endure peril daily to help provide for our nation’s energy needs.”

The UMWA was successful in convincing Peabody to add internationally accepted workers’ rights guarantees to its corporate code of ethics in late April. On paper, at least, Peabody has agreed to recognize workers’ freedom to choose a union and bargain collectively, to refrain from using forced or prison labor and to provide a safe and healthy workplace.

Australian miners who work at four Peabody facilities “down under” have joined with the U.S. miners to let the company know they support the workers’ decision to join a union. The Australians, members of the powerful Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, have pledged to work with the UMWA to develop international strategies to push Peabody to recognize the union.

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