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The union organizing campaign currently underway at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama could prove to be the most important labor fight in the South since the failure of Operation Dixie, the movement’s last large-scale push to organize the South in the late 1940s. The story of that historic effort holds lessons for the struggle today.

 

Nearly six thousand Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are currently voting on whether to unionize. The mail-in ballot process began on February 8, and ballots must be returned by March 29. The votes will be tallied the following day. It’s one of the most important union campaigns in the United States. A win in Bessemer would be a shot in the arm for organized labor: should these workers unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), they will be the first unionized Amazon workers in the United States. Given that the company is the second-largest private employer in the country, this could open the floodgates for organizing campaigns, as well as force the labor movement to reconsider what is possible. Akin to the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) early successes in the auto industry of the 1930s? It might be.Michael Goldfield is professor emeritus of political science at Wayne State University and the author of The Southern Key, a new book on efforts to organize the South in the 1930s and ’40s. In the book, Goldfield details the efforts made in the region’s key industries — coal mining, woodworking, textiles, and steel — using archival research to understand the roots of campaigns’ successes and, more often, failures.

The heart of the effort was the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) Operation Dixie, the labor movement’s most ambitious attempt to organize the South, a region that had been particularly resistant to unions. But Operation Dixie did not succeed: employers wielded red-baiting, racism, and repression to keep the region largely union-free. Goldfield examines what went wrong.

That history created the context in which Bessemer’s Amazon workers operate today: Bessemer is located in what was once a highly unionized region of Alabama, a hotbed of radicalism and, also, repression. Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Goldfield about this history, and what lessons the present-day labor movement can take from it.

 

Let’s start with the Amazon union election that’s taking place in Bessemer, Alabama. What’s the significance of this campaign?

First of all, Amazon is very resistant to unionization. During the pandemic, a lot of workers haven’t had a lot of leverage because business has declined. But Amazon is just the opposite. Jeff Bezos made $90 billion within months in 2020. So business has grown. And because they had to hire so many people, they gave employees COVID-19 bonuses. But once the benefits ran out from the first relief bill and people were more desperate, they got rid of the bonuses. It’s a situation where people who work for Amazon and other of these delivery services know how crucial they are, and they’re much more in danger. Of course, the reports we’ve had at Amazon are that the speedup and the accidents are pretty incredible.

 

You said it’s a big spark rather than a gradual or incremental shift that can lead to a new wave of unionizing. Can you talk about your research on that?

I wrote a book on the decline of organized labor in the United States, and I’ve kept up that line of research pretty much to the present, looking at unionization and union growth and decline over more than a century. What happens is, in normal periods, not much takes place.

During the 1870s, there was a huge growth of unionization — the big railroad strikes for example. During World War I, there was a huge growth of unionization: unions went up in membership from a little over two million people to over five million by 1920. A lot of that had to do with the increase in war production; even though we didn’t get into the war until 1917, European countries needed more goods produced starting in 1914. That created labor shortages, meaning much more leverage for unions. Unions grew all across the South during that time. So textile mills — really, virtually every industry you could think of across the South — unionized during that period from 1914 to 1920.

After that, unions declined quite a bit. The low point was in 1933, when union membership was down to about 2.7 million members from having been at five million in 1920. But then there are sparks that took place: in the book, I discuss in detail the coal miners, who were very important, especially in Alabama and West Virginia. (I consider West Virginia mostly Southern.)

The coal miners organized before any legislation was passed. I write a lot about the myth of Section 7a, which was a symbolic part of the National Industrial Recovery Act that said that unions are okay. Most historians have said that legislation, passed in 1933, stimulated union organizing, but I show that the coal miners, who are sort of the vanguard of organizing, organized before it passed. Once the coal miners organized, all sorts of other workers organized. There were six hundred thousand coal miners and they pretty much organized within a six-week period; it was a massive upsurge. And the conditions that they had in Alabama and West Virginia were very brutal: union people were murdered, it was very oppressive.

But once they organized — and this was particularly true in Alabama — the coal miners were very solidaristic. They organized everybody else too. They helped organize steel workers — steel and iron are very big in the Birmingham area also. So, Bessemer is a site where there’s not only coal miners around there but there are big iron ore mines in Bessemer, and there’s steel. This is the hook to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ’60s: the iron ore miners are about ten to twenty thousand. And they’re organized by the Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, which became a Communist-led union, but their history goes back to the Western Federation of Miners, which was led by Big Bill Haywood.

So, this has always been sort of a radical, militant union. They’re broken during the McCarthy period by the [United] Steelworkers who run this absolutely racist campaign: the iron ore miners are half black and half white, and the steel workers have the support mostly of white workers. But even after the union is broken, these black workers get very involved in the NAACP. They’re very active in the Civil Rights Movement.

There’s a civil rights tradition. I don’t know how much to make of this in terms of the present, because that was a long time ago. West Virginia is the state that voted for Donald Trump by the largest margin in 2016, but when the state’s school teachers went on strike, a lot of the signs and slogans they had harkened back to things that their grandparents had done through the United Mine Workers’ union.

They seemed to display even more solidarity and militancy than other teachers strikes — all of which had their positive aspects to them and solidaristic components. So, I don’t know how much to make of that tradition because it was a long time ago. But during the 1930s, Alabama was the most unionized state in the South. They elected a fairly liberal, populist, antiracist governor in 1946 and 1954 — “Big Jim” Folsom. The key thing is that the level of unionization in Alabama was higher than exists in any state in the United States today. We’re talking about fairly militant unions, as a really important social and political force in a Deep South state.

People are more open after the results of the election in Georgia to saying that some of the Southern states are changing slightly politically. But this [in the 1930s] was a massive change: we’re not just talking about 1 or 2 percent higher black vote and some suburban whites who are disgusted with Trump. We’re talking about people who had more radical visions about transforming society. It was on the basis of this support, or partly on this support, that this liberal populist governor was able to get elected.

The argument is that unionization in general has the potential to transform politics. One case in particular, for example. There’s this conservative district in Texas, where Martin Dies — who was the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] and a real right-wing racist — was the Congressional representative. The Oil Workers Union in Port Arthur, Texas, where there were ten thousand oil workers at the time, organized in 1941 and 1942.

After the Port Authur workers negotiated their contract, they said their first goal was to get rid of Martin Dies. They mobilized so many people that he didn’t even run the next time and they elected a somewhat liberal, pro-union, antiracist Congressperson. The oil workers were not a particularly radical union. This potential existed in the 1930s and ’40s in Alabama. The union fell apart for a variety of reasons. There were a lot of conflicts between the industrial unions and the mine workers. Plus, they were not able to combat the white backlash.

After unionization declined, Alabama transformed into something that we’ve known since: Deep South, George Wallace, etc. But the potential existed, including in the South. Unionization in all parts of the country is progressive: it’s pretty commonplace to say that the decline in unions plays a major role in terms of growing inequality. But the unionization and transformation of the South is key to transforming the country. This is the part of the country that historically has held everything back, from the early colonial times to the founding of the republic.

There’s been lots of research on how backward the region was even in terms of the New Deal era. Richard Rothstein’s book, The Color of Law, argues that what happens during the New Deal is that the control of benefits — whether it be unemployment, conservation, even the entire GI Bill — is run by Southern white supremacists, so blacks get frozen out of the housing market.

Suburbanization takes place with easy credit for white veterans, so whites are moving into the suburbs with virtually no money available for black homeowners. So in Detroit, where I am, even whites couldn’t get money to fix up houses in the city but they could easily get money for suburban mortgages, while blacks couldn’t get any money to move into all-white areas of the city or outside of it. These things are the heritage of New Deal policy.

We see that Franklin Delano Roosevelt [FDR] wouldn’t come out against lynching because his Southern supporters in the Senate and the House were opposed to such legislation. Some of them were openly in favor of lynching, like the politicians from Mississippi for example. So, those constraints on anything very progressive happening were put on by the southern elites. That’s why the unionization and transformation of the South really provides the key to opening all sorts of things up.

 

A big part of this story is Operation Dixie — the CIO trying to build an expanded base in the South and then failing to do that.

Operation Dixie is something that I, along with most everyone else, saw as a critical turning point, its result being the failure to organize the South after World War II. But what I came to find in my research is that Operation Dixie was not as serious an organizing effort as I and other people originally thought. Changes in approaches to organizing took place in the late 1930s, and even within the CIO there were very conservative people. They wanted to rely on the federal government. They thought they could sweet talk the employers and have cooperative relations with them. They relied on Democrats who controlled many of the institutions, including the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] and during the war, the National War Labor Board, to help them, rather than trying to mobilize workers to struggle and building broad support for those struggles.

In Operation Dixie — which starts after the war, in 1946 — there was actually less money and fewer organizers than had been put into two earlier, industry-specific campaigns. The organization of steel — which was funded by the CIO and in particular the [United] Mine Workers — had two and a half times as much money as Operation Dixie, as did the Textile Workers Organizing Committee. In steel, they had alliances with the Communists, who had more roots in steel than anybody else. They used unemployed organizations, ethnic organizations, and civil rights organizations to build broad support for their campaign. In Operation Dixie, and also with the textile workers, they didn’t want any outside help.

This is one of the lessons that I would draw from the campaign in Bessemer: people have some leverage, but if they’re only one part of a huge company, outside support, publicity, bodies, and everything else is really important to help them win. The more support we can give them, the better. That’s why I think it’s actually significant that the National Football League Players’ Association came out in support of them, among other unions; I think more unions should be giving them support, and even sending people down there to help them.

But one of the lessons of what worked and didn’t work in the South is that you have to mobilize people, and you can’t rely on the government or on more favorable laws or thinking that you’re going to have cooperative relationships with the company, as if that will get you very far.

That’s one of the problems posed by some unions today, including the UAW, of which I was a member of for a long time. The UAW have lost a number of key fights in the South. They lost in Chattanooga. They lost in Mississippi recently. They want to cooperate with the company rather than mobilizing people. In taking that approach, it’s hard to convince many workers that the union is worth taking risks for.

Unionization in all these places, but particularly in the South, means people have to take risks: workers get fired for organizing. The penalties against the company are pretty weak so there’s nothing to hold the company back. So there has to be some bigger vision and goal involved if people in large numbers are going to take those risks.

 

I want to get back to the Operation Dixie era because your research offers some lessons. You look at the role of racism, and how a union’s willingness to take on racism mattered for success in the South — an unwillingness could portend a failing campaign. Where did the CIO fall on this spectrum?

My findings are a reversal of what I used to think about this era. The CIO was very reluctant on race, to say the least. People in the CIO considered themselves liberal. When academics doing oral history interviewed them in the 1970s, they’d all say they were pro–civil rights because after the 1960s, every liberal said they were in favor of civil rights. But when you go back and read the organizers’ reports, you’re aghast.

Some of these people were explicitly racist, but most of them were just obtusely racist. They don’t want to talk to black workers because they think white workers have to be organized first. Even though in most places, black workers in coal and steel and other industries are among the most militant and pro-union. They’re so bad that in some of these places, they alienate all the black workers. They want white leadership. They don’t want any of the blacks, even those with organizing roles, to hold leadership. They don’t appoint any blacks to the staff. And in the textile industry, which has a significant percentage of female workers, they don’t even have any female organizers.

I’ve gone through all the organizing and union reports, and looked at pictures of these people too. Of course, when you see a picture of fifty organizers, you can’t absolutely tell who is black and who is white, but so much of the time, it scans as 90 percent white, where the one or two black organizers don’t make a difference. And in the organizers’ reports, there are no female names — some names may be ambiguous, but if it’s Bob or Tom or George, it’s pretty clear.

They’re just very bad on these issues. They believed they could keep themselves from being red-baited if they hired white, male veterans. But those guys are inexperienced, and many of them are incompetent. You can read this from the organizers’ reports, where the union officials are saying, “Who are these idiots?” It’s not just leftists criticizing them. It’s union staff saying, “These people won’t even work on weekends, they don’t know how to organize, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

These are the people who are ideologically the CIO’s right wing — they’re liberals of a sort — complaining about the organizers who they picked. The irony is that even when they hire all white, male veterans, they still get red-baited. It’s like what happens today: the Right says Joe Biden is a socialist. You’re thinking, “What happens when you meet some of us who are real socialists?” This is what happens during Operation Dixie. They might as well have hired all these very competent Communist organizers because it wouldn’t have made any difference in how they were attacked.

 

There is an understanding of the CIO, generally the more left-wing of the two labor federations, as having been more aggressive on the issue of racism. But the story is not nearly so clear-cut.

They freeze out not only anyone who was a Communist, but anyone who had any connection with a left-wing union, even ones that were pretty mainstream. You don’t get any of this in the oral history taken twenty or thirty years later because people reinvent themselves — it’s not that they’re dishonest, but memory changes.

The CIO was more worried about Communists than racists, so they appointed many people who were actually racist. It was very bureaucratic. I would contrast what happened there with what happened in steel, in which radicals were very involved but were not the people at the top — the main person being [CIO founding president] John Lewis. But Lewis, because he was with the coal miners, understood that mobilizing people and striking was the key to bringing the employers to heel. That wasn’t the case for many of the unions.

The other thing which has a racial component is that the two biggest industries in the South were textile and woodworking. Woodworking involves both lumberjacks — people cutting down trees and transporting them — and people working in sawmills. There are six hundred thousand woodworkers in the country — about as many as there were coal miners — and the majority of them are in the South. In the South, they’re half black and half white. So when they mobilize, they have interracial unity. These workers are very militant, and the CIO mostly avoids them and goes for these almost entirely white textile workers. They somehow think that race won’t be a factor if they focus on textile workers. But the lesson of Alabama is that the interracial unions — steel, iron ore, coal — are critical to organizing the whole state.

The coal miners nationally, but especially in Alabama, did a number of things beyond organizing themselves. They organized groups of white and black workers to go together to register to vote. They often paid the poll taxes for black and white workers. They said if you’re in the Ku Klux Klan, that’s incompatible with being a union member and you get expelled. So if you were in Birmingham, or in Bessemer, and you’re connected with the Klan, you were out. Given the times, this is pretty impressive stuff. By the time Operation Dixie comes around, the CIO wants to avoid all these issues.

 

When people think about the campaign in Bessemer, and about organizing in the Deep South in general, is there anything your research bears out that should be kept in mind?

One interesting thing is the degree to which other workers, particularly coal miners, went about organizing other workers around the state. Today, that part of Alabama has a lot of food processing workers. That these workers, who are unionized, are playing a role in organizing and supporting the Amazon workers, is an impressive, good thing.

In the book, I talk about two types of power. First is structural power, which is when people have a lot of leverage. If all the Amazon workers organized, they’d have a lot of leverage on the company. But where the first warehouse to organize doesn’t have a lot of that leverage, what they need is what I call associative power. This is support from other unions and organizations that give them more leverage. And that’s exactly what the CIO refused to do during Operation Dixie. They denounced even liberal organizations that wanted to help–ones they had no political disagreement with, including the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which even Eleanor Roosevelt supported. They said, “we’re doing this on our own, it’s a union campaign.” That failure to mobilize the broadest support was fatal for a lot of their organizing.

Source: Williamson Daily News

 

 

Source: Estevan Mercury

February 16, 2021

SaskPower has announced it is currently exporting 175 megawatts (MW) of electricity south to provide relief as extreme cold conditions strain electrical systems and leave millions without power in parts of the United States.

“In Saskatchewan we know first-hand the challenges posed by extreme winter weather, and being part of an integrated grid means that when called upon, we help each other out,” said Kory Hayko, SaskPower vice-president of transmission and industrial services, and president and CEO of NorthPoint Energy Solutions.

“We have been able to help our neighbours in their time of need, while maintaining the stability of our grid and delivering reliable power to our customers.”

SaskPower began moving 150 MW of electricity on Sunday morning, and has since temporarily increased the amount to 175 MW.

The company will continue to offer all the support it can for as long as possible.

SaskPower has successfully managed higher-than-normal peak loads during the past 10 days as Saskatchewan experienced extreme cold conditions associated with a polar vortex.

The exported power is being fed through an intertie into the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), which is currently under emergency operating conditions.

SPP co-ordinates the flow of electricity across approximately 60,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines spanning 14 states.

 

Source: WTOV 9 Fox

February 17, 2021

 

Click here to watch video.

 

The United Mineworkers made a donation to the Hopedale Fire Department in the name of former Hopedale Mayor and UMW District 6 President Larry Ward.

“We’re trying to make people aware how critical the EMS units are in this area to protect the lives and safety of all constituents in the area,” said Rick Altman, Vice President, UMWA District 31.

It’s our way, it’s not a lot of money, it’s our way of saying, really, to everybody, how much we truly appreciate how they take care of all our people.”

“When we were going for the ambulance district, we were going for support, we went to Larry, he said, ‘absolutely.’

I know many people saw the video that he made for the ambulance district levy, which was just a small showing of what he would do for the community when asked,” said Chief Mark Marchetta of the Hopedale Fire Department.

 

Ward died in January at the age of 77.

 

Written by: Paul Giannamore

Source: WCHS Eyewitness News

MATEWAN, W.Va. (WCHS) — At the start of its statehood coming out of the Civil War, West Virginia experienced a coal boom like no other. With that, came a high demand for men willing to go underground.

Companies recruited across the country and even into Europe but specifically targeted African Americans in the Jim Crow South. By 1909, according to the National Park Service, African American miners made up more than a quarter of West Virginia’s mining workforce.

Their often unrecognized contributions and sacrifices played a key role in the fight to unionize while also fighting for their own civil rights.

In Mingo County, the historic coal town of Matewan has been a centerpiece of the state’s labor history, and on the side of the town’s Mine Wars Museum is a banner of a black and white photo of black miners, European immigrant miners and white miners standing together before a shift.

Michael Ray Johnson, a third generation coal miner from Matewan, says it is one of his favorite pictures.

“My dad was a coal miner. He was originally from Alabama. He came here after the service to mine coal. It was a lot better for him here. In the ’40s and ’50s down there, he said the discrimination was pretty bad, so after he came back from the war, that’s when he decided if he couldn’t find work, he would venture out and go somewhere else, and so he ended up here,” Johnson said.

His family’s story of migrating to West Virginia from the south is the story of thousands of African American families spanning back to the late 1800s.

In those days, Southern West Virginia’s population quadrupled almost entirely because of the coal industry as people poured in to mine coal in places like McDowell County, Mercer County, Logan County and Mingo. Coal companies promised of a better life, but conditions were far from ideal.

At the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, their displays in abandoned coal camps like Nuttalburg in Fayette County tell the story of segregated housing, segregated schools and unequal working conditions. This meant longer hours for black miners on the most grueling, dangerous and deadly jobs. This was a strategy by the coal companies to keep the miners from unifying.

Johnson says by segregating the miners in Mingo County and treating each group differently, it would cause chaos among them.

“They helped keep them separated and keep them mad at each other. Instead of trying to keep the peace, they wanted to stoke it,” Johnson said.

However, the influx of African Americans also created new opportunities for some even outside of the coal industry. The great-great aunt of Matewan native Francine Jones started the state’s very first minority-owned dry cleaning business in Matewan with her husband, John Brown. Both Mary Brown and her husband came to Mingo County from Virginia. With her skills as a seamstress and his as a fluent speaker of Italian, they were able to open the Matewan Dry Cleaners in 1911.

“They had so many friends in not just Matewan but Mingo County, and they were able to employ people, and when some people came from Virginia, they didn’t have a place to stay, but they always made sure they had a place to stay,” Jones said.

Jones would hear stories growing up about her great-great aunt and how she created an environment where all were welcome including the miners, their families and of course their laundry, and that business model served them for 52 years as the business lived through the town’s most turbulent time.

In the years leading up to the 1920 Matewan Massacre and the Coal Wars across Southern West Virginia, this was a turning point in the fight to unionize as coal companies began evicting miners who started to strike as their unions grew stronger. Families in Matewan began living in what they called Tent City.

“When the coal companies got the thugs to throw the miners out, they didn’t have anywhere to live because of the coal company houses they had to live in these army tents,” Johnson said.

In Tent City, segregation was impossible as they had no choice but to all live together.

“Families were living in an actual tent and you know, I thought about those children freezing. you had black and white families live together but they also worked together. They made sure the kids were fed, and Tent City just means so much to me.”

In May of 1920, black miners, white miners and immigrant miners from Europe banded together to stand up to the coal company as it ended in a deadly exchange of gunfire known as the Matewan Massacre killing seven detectives from the coal company, the town’s mayor and two miners.

“I think they thought, ‘If they do that to you, then they’ll do the same thing to me.’ So if we don’t stand up and fight as one, it will eventually get to all of us and they can do to us whatever they want to do,” Johnson said.

Despite this display of unity in Matewan and in the battles following, it would be another long uphill battle for integration throughout the state. It would be another 36 years before Mingo County became one of the last counties in West Virginia to integrate their schools following a lawsuit from the NAACP.

When Johnson and Jones came up through school in the ’60s, ’70s and’ 80s, they both attended integrated schools.

“We all went to school together. We all treated each other like we were cousins to this day. To this day, my classmates who are still living, we have that bond,” Jones said.

When Johnson finished school and went into the mines, he also joined the United Mine Workers of America where he felt a sense of unity and bond.

“Because you have to when you’re working in a job that’s dangerous like that. I can’t say I don’t like you and both of us have to go up there and move something, and so you have to put that out of your mind,” he said.

The United Mine Workers of America played a key role in unifying diverse groups of miners as they implemented anti-racist policies early. Charles “Hawkeye” Dixon is the financial secretary for the UMWA 1440 chapter in Matewan.

“That’s not to say there weren’t individuals that were racist, but our union didn’t tolerate it,” Dixon said. “Our members were African American and we loved them and protected them. Couldn’t belong to Ku Klux Klan or anything like that. Wouldn’t condone it. We don’t to this day.”

Following the Great Depression and beyond, African American families started to move away from West Virginia. They were more likely to be laid off from their jobs in the mines because their jobs typically involved more manual labor. When machines began to take their spots, they were the first to go.

“We don’t have too many black families left anymore,” Jones said.

But Jones and Johnson stuck around to fight for a better Matewan as Jones has a vision to see the town thrive again.

“This is home. This is home,” she said.

Today, when you walk into the local union hall in Matewan, you will find retired miners of all different backgrounds and races sitting around, laughing, talking and reminiscing, and when you ask about the secret to their ability to come together, some will say it was the miners before them. Some directly point to the their fight for labor justice, and others, like Dixon, simply point to the guy next to them and say, “If there’s any fighting that starts, don’t you forget who’s side I’m on. I’ll be here fighting with you. He just laughed, but I meant it, you know.”

Johnson looks at the painting on the wall of Tent City, a reminder of what the men and their families before them went through. The painting portrays black men, white men and their families all together.

“A lot of times adversity like this brings people together, I think. And that right there’s a neat picture,” he said.

Written by: ANNA SAUNDERS

 

Source: WTRF

February 10, 2021

CHARLESTON, WV — Just this year, the U.S. Department of Labor recorded three mining deaths.

While none of them are related to COVID-19, supporters of the COVID-19 Mine Workers Protection Act say it’s one more threat miners face below the ground.

The bill was recently re-introduced in congress and is led by West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.
It would require coal operators to issue an emergency temporary standard and provide the necessary PPE.

The United Mine Workers of America is backing the bill, writing: “Without an industry-wide, enforceable standard, miners are left to the whims of coal operators regarding protective measures that are employed at the mine to limit exposure to the virus.”

But not everyone in the coal industry thinks this bill is necessary.

“Mine operators all across our state have done everything humanly possible to prevent the spread of covid; everything from staggering shifts from the time they enter the mine, they’ve been spacing all of the miners, steam cleaning all of the pieces of equipment in between shifts,” said West Virginia Coal Association president Chris Hamilton.

Hamilton says last year the Mountain State had its lowest number of mining deaths at two, and they’re not aware of any COVID-19 cases contracted in West Virginia mines.

“The average miner, when you see them coming out of the mine or the working place, he almost looks like he’s wearing a space outfit — I mean very little skin is exposed,” he said.

But the UMWA says more than 500 miners have contracted the virus in the past 11 months, and the extent of infection at non-union mines is not known because the DOL does not keep track.

Written by: Larisa Casillas

Source: Star Tribune

February 5, 2021

 

APowder River Basin coal mine has closed down for the first time in modern history. At the end of January, mining ceased at the Decker coal mine in Montana after the owner of the mine filed for bankruptcy late last year.

Home to some of the world’s largest mines, the Powder River Basin is the epicenter for coal production in the country. But a dramatic decline in thermal coal demand has left many companies in trouble.

Coal firm Lighthouse Resources owns the Decker mine in Montana’s Big Horn County, just north of Wyoming’s border. A majority of the mine’s workers live in Wyoming. The parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December, citing dismal market conditions for coal. Continuing to operate the surface coal mine was no longer economically feasible, it stated in court filings.

But before the doors of the Decker coal mine officially shutter for good, the company needs to send out the last shipments of coal, clean up the mining site and settle outstanding obligations to its workers. A battle over the details is now playing out in federal bankruptcy court.

Upon filing for bankruptcy on Dec. 3, the company laid off 76 workers at the Decker mine. That left 28 active union employees and nine furloughed union employees. An additional 18 non-union employees held manager or administrative positions.

But by Jan. 22, the company had stopped mining for coal and kept on only four union workers at the facility, according to court documents.

Over the last two months, the company claims it has been negotiating with the United Mine Workers of America over an amended contract agreement.

But as negotiations slogged on, Lighthouse Resources asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware on Jan. 20 for approval to reject the collective bargaining agreement struck with the union in 2012.

That would allow the coal company to shed its remaining pension and medical obligations promised to union employees.

The company maintains that eliminating these remaining worker liabilities is the only way to save enough money to complete reclamation, or cleanup, at the mine site.

The union, in turn, has threatened to strike.

The United Mine Workers of America requested that the court block the coal company’s request to exit its union contract. Union representatives outlined how negotiations with the coal firm over a new agreement had been “hollow” and not carried out in “good faith.”

“Given the current Proposal, the (United Mine Workers of America) Employees may be left with no choice but to exercise their right to strike,” the union said in a Jan. 27 court filings.

“The modification of the (collective bargaining agreement) will create a substantial hardship for the (union) employees and their families who have labored for years at these facilities,” the union added.

As of Friday, the union and attorneys for Lighthouse Resources are still in negotiations over the contract, according to Michael Dalpiaz, vice president of District No. 22 for United Mine Workers of America.

Lighthouse Resources declined to comment for this story. But in court documents, attorneys for the company defended its attempts to work with the union on finding a new deal.

“Debtors (Lighthouse Resources) have and continue to negotiate with (the union),” the company told the court in a Jan. 29 filing. “The Debtors’ proposal is not merely a ‘take-it or leave-it’ rejection of the 2012 CBA (collective bargaining agreement) or a ‘wish list’ of changes. The proposed modifications of the CBA are needed to ensure the viability of the proposed Reclamation Trust.”

In other words, the company needs to divert funds originally dedicated to workers’ benefits to the mine cleanup fund instead.

“It’s just unfortunate that you’re pitting workers against reclamation,” said Shannon Anderson, staff attorney for the Powder River Basin Resource Council. “The company should be able to do both and fund both. They made commitments to do both.”

Meanwhile, exactly how or when the 12,000-acre surface mine will be cleaned up in Montana remains an open question. It’s unclear if the company will hire back former workers to complete reclamation.

The United Mine Workers of America are willing to put up a fight to protect workers, Dalpiaz asserted. He’s intent on keeping the collective bargaining agreement intact when the reclamation ramps up. He anticipates about 30 former workers will be hired back to complete remediation.

“Workers are not going to get screwed like they did in Gillette or Kentucky and every place else when companies file bankruptcies without a union,” he said.

Lighthouse Resources’ proposed bankruptcy plan would establish a reclamation trust to complete remediation at the mine.

When the coal firm filed for bankruptcy, it started looking for a new buyer of its coal export terminal project on the West Coast. But no buyer materialized. The lack of revenue from this venture and others could mean less money for creditors, reclamation and workers at the end of the day.

Montana Department of Environmental Quality confirmed coal mining was no longer taking place at the Decker facility, though some remaining coal would be shipped out in the near future.

“Once the bankruptcy is finalized and funds are released, reclamation activities will begin,” Moria Davin, a public relations specialist with the Montana agency, said in an email to the Star-Tribune. “The mine has reclamation plans and adequate bonding.”

Davin said the agency would also continue to complete inspection of the mine on a monthly basis.

Lighthouse Resources filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of last year with over $256 million in secured debt. According to court filings, Lighthouse Resources owes Big Horn County in Montana over $6.9 million, the Montana Department of Revenue more than $4.4 million and the U.S. Department of Natural Resources Revenue about $3.3 million, in addition to hundreds of creditors.

There’s a history of coal companies breaking away from collective bargaining agreements after filing for bankruptcy in the region. When Westmoreland Coal Company, the owner of the Kemmerer mine in southwest Wyoming, filed for bankruptcy, it received court approval to toss out retiree obligations and the union contract in 2018.

What’s more, a majority of the Powder River Basin coal mines are not unionized, leaving workers with few protections when a company goes bankrupt.

Lighthouse Resources will appear again in bankruptcy court for a hearing on Feb. 17.

 

Written by: Camille Erickson