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Workers Describe Fear of Losing Pensions as Lawmakers Tackle Multi-Employer Plan Problems

Source: Workday Minnesota 

April 10, 2019

ILLINOIS

For 33 years on Chicago’s South Side, Blue Island resident James Morgan helped bake Wonder Bread.

“When you’re in an industrial bakery, the work is difficult and demanding,” he says. And he did every job there was in that Wonder Bread plant, from slicing and wrapping to shoveling 50 pounds of dough at a time into the ovens.

It gave him a good middle-class life…but now he wonders if it’s going to be gone.

That’s because several years ago, Wonder Bread’s new owners, a group of private financiers, announced they were suspending the company’s contributions to the multi-employer pension fund which Morgan and his fellow members of Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 1 had faithfully paid into.

They couldn’t afford it, the owners said. They promised to resume in a few months. They never did. Instead, they declared bankruptcy and closed the plant. And, with bankruptcy court permission, the financiers walked away from millions of dollars in pension obligations, while paying themselves nice fat checks, also with the court’s OK.

That left Morgan, a former Local 1 shop steward, and his co-workers and friends out in the financial cold. Don’t worry, he thought. He had his pension, plus a part-time job in a school. Or so it seemed.

But now that multi-employer pension fund Wonder Bread used to contribute to is in or headed for the “red zone” of such funds. It’s bleeding cash as the number of companies in it – especially after the 2008 Great Recession hit – crashed and the number of active workers did, too, victims of the joblessness that slump caused. The number of pension fund clients soared.

If that fund collapses, Morgan is left with zero. “I stand to lose being independent and taking care of my family,” he told lawmakers on March 7. “I’m 67. Not too many people would hire a 60-some-year-old these days. I need my pension for food and medicine.”

That BCTGM fund is one of approximately 100 multiemployer pension plans projected to run out of money in the next 20 years, lawmakers learned at the hearing, the first of several on the problems plaguing those pension plans. They cover an estimated 1 million-1.5 million workers nationwide.

They’re union members, because companies and unions jointly run those multi-employer pension plans. They’re Teamsters, BCTGM members, United Food and Commercial Workers members at groceries and warehouses, Steelworkers, Electrical Workers, Seafarers, Mine Workers, Machinists and others. Especially Mine Workers.

And their multi-employer plans all suffer from the same financial ills: Too few workers and too few firms putting money in, and more and more retirees to care for.

The workers supposedly have a backstop: The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), set up to take over pensions for workers when companies walk away, buy their way out of contributions or avoid their obligations and dump their workers by declaring bankruptcy, as Wonder Bread did.

There are two problems with that scenario, though, other witnesses told the House Education and Labor subcommittee that deals with pension problems. One is PBGC’s average yearly payout per worker is $12,365. The average pension promised to each covered worker in a multi-employer plan: $27,300. “These aren’t golden parachutes,” one witness said.

And the other is the PBGC trust fund that handles the multi-employer plans suffers from the same financial ills its clients do: Fewer firms contributing, more bankruptcies and company walkaways, more aging workers, widows and dependents to cover. It’s $54 billion in the hole. It could run out of savings – leaving only company contributions – by 2025.

In short, unless Congress does something and quickly, Morgan says, one day he could wake up with a pension of zero. So could more than a million other workers, witnesses said.

That brought Morgan, along with members of the other unions facing multi-employer pension plan problems, to Congress to urge lawmakers to fix this mess, fast. It’s particularly acute for the Mine Workers, whose delegation of several dozen from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia spent three days in D.C. lobbying legislators.

The UMWA pension funds are in particular peril and they have a particular claim on the federal government: It set them up just over 70 years ago, funded by a per-ton tax on coal.

But there are now so few coal companies and so many “orphan” ex-miners and their widows to take care of – miners whose firms went broke, leaving remaining companies to pick up the tab – that the UMWA funds could go broke within months. And in interviews before the hearing started, they’re even more worried than Morgan is. Though they didn’t say so, the prior GOP-run Congress ducked the issue.

“Our pension will be nothing because in 2007, the stock market hurt us real bad,” followed by coal company bankruptcies, says John Sismondi of United Mine Workers Local 2300 in Waynesburg, Pa. If the UMWA multi-employer plan went belly-up, “We’d have nothing. My wife is working now, but she has medical problems,” he adds.

“And try to find a job after you’re 65 years old,” adds retiree Norman Sams of Local 762 in Uniontown, Pa. He’s worried not so much for himself, but for his widowed mother, Donnie, aged 87, surviving on her miner husband’s pension – which is a little over $400 monthly. If the UMWA plan tanks, and the feds take over, that could be cut by $100 monthly or more.

So while the lawmakers took testimony and subcommittee Democrats, led chair Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., promised to move quickly, the workers wait, worry and lobby. This was the second UMWA delegation to walk congressional halls in three weeks.

Morgan and his allies got a positive reception for their problems from committee Democrats and all but one Republican. Indeed, Wilson and the top GOPer on the panel, Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., together drafted legislation, HR397, to try to solve the problems.

“This is a promise for a secure retirement” that prompted workers “to put on hold” wage increases so more money could go to pensions, said Rep. David Norcross, D-N.J., a building trades leader in his state who is very familiar with multi-employer plans. “If we do nothing, the system crashes and takes everyone down with it.”

The lone dissenter was former committee chair Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who once questioned the need for unions at all. She called HR397 “a bailout.”

“The fundamental point about pensions is that they’re not charity,” responded Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a former AFL-CIO deputy organizing director. “They (workers) put the money aside themselves and shame on us if we don’t provide it.”

“I was on the union bargaining committee” with Wonder Bread “and we’d negotiate wage increases of 35 cents or 40 cents an hour, and we’d take 12 or 13 cents of that and put it into the pensions,” Morgan said. Unless Congress acts, that money they earned is gone.

As a result, other witnesses noted, the pensioners, deprived of their income, would have to turn to public programs – food stamps, housing aid and the like – to stay alive.

To try to solve the problems, the bipartisan bill, the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act, would provide low-cost long-term repayable federal loans to funds in financial trouble, financed by 30-year government bonds. Estimates of the long-term costs of the bonds range from $34 billion-$100 billion. Estimates of the costs to government to aid the bereft pensioners are at least double that.

The funds could use the loans to both shore up their finances by making responsible investments while not cutting benefits for current retirees, a committee fact sheet says.

That would solve one big problem from the last time, several years ago, when Congress’ GOP majority tackled the multi-employer pension fund issue. Its law, passed in a rush at the end of the session, let financially troubled plans cut current benefits – in some cases by 40 percent or more – to try to guarantee future solvency, subject to a federal OK. Several unions and pro-union senators strongly opposed it. Now they wouldn’t have to do that.

Labor appears to be united behind HR397. Backers include BCTGM, the Steelworkers, the Machinists, the Teamsters, the Food and Commercial Workers, the Electrical Workers and the Boilermakers, and the American Association of Retired Persons. HR397 will move, but not immediately, Morgan said afterwards.

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Source: Union Plus

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Roberts promises miners they will win the pension fight in Congress

Source: WV Metro News

April 03, 2019

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The fight is continuing for active and retired coal miners in West Virginia and across the country for their pensions.

Cecil Roberts, United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President, was in Charleston Wednesday updating hundreds of members of UMWA District 17 on the battle in Congress that he says will end on their side.

“We are going to win this,” Roberts told MetroNews. “The only question is when. If you don’t quit, you’re going to win at some point. I feel like we have plenty of support to get this done.”

The conference centered around miners in the 1974 Pension Plan who might lose their benefits by 2023 if Congress does not act. Roberts said during the conference that over 83,000 miners get pensions from the 1974 plan.

According to UMWA, more than 106,000 active miners and their widows’ pensions may become insolvent in the coming years.

Roberts said the miners have received support on both sides of the aisle as this is not a partisan issue, but a moral issue in keeping promises.

“It was a promise made in 1946,” Roberts said. “It was confirmed in ’90, confirmed in ’92, confirmed in 2006 and confirmed again in 2017. It’s not a question of it being a promise but it should be a movement by now.”

 

If the miners’ pension plans collapse in the coming years, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation would collapse as well, said Roberts. As a result of that, he said if the miners’ plans become insolvent, almost every state in the union will be touched.

UMWA and Congressional allies are seeking a solution through S. 27, the Americans Miners Act of 2019, and H.R. 935, the Miners Pension Protection Act.

He said the plan can be fixed for $3 billion but the money seems to go to the wrong people.

“We’ve watched this Wall Street bailout after the great recession, which caused this problem,” Roberts said. “It bailed out everybody that caused the problem but everyone that was adversely affected by it, who worked for a living.”

Miners from multiple states were in the crowd on Wednesday, including West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia.

All were told by Roberts to continue to keep an eye out on Congress and remember to vote for politicians who vote for the miners.

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Source: Union Plus

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APNewsBreak: Federal black lung fund in danger of drying up

Source: AP News

March 19, 2019

COEBURN, Va. (AP) — Former coal miner John Robinson’s bills for black lung treatments run $4,000 a month, but the federal fund he depends on to help cover them is being drained of money because of inaction by Congress and the Trump administration.

Amid the turmoil of the government shutdown this winter, a tax on coal that helps pay for the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund was cut sharply Jan. 1 and never restored, potentially saving coal operators hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

With cash trickling into the fund at less than half its usual rate, budget officials estimate that by the middle of 2020 there won’t be enough money to fully cover the fund’s benefit payments.

As a surge of black lung disease scars miners’ lungs at younger ages than ever, Robinson worries not only about cuts to his benefits, but that younger miners won’t get any coverage.

“Coal miners sort of been put on the back burner, thrown to the side,” Robinson said recently, sitting at his kitchen table in the small Virginia town of Coeburn, near the Kentucky border. “They just ain’t being done right.”

President Donald Trump, who vowed to save the coal industry during the 2016 campaign, has repeatedly praised miners. At an August rally in West Virginia filled with miners in hard hats, he called them “great people. Brave people. I don’t know how the hell you do that. You guys have a lot of courage.”

Trump made no mention of restoring the 2018 tax rate in his proposed budget released in mid-March.

The White House said in a statement Tuesday that “President Trump and this administration have always supported the mining industry by prioritizing deregulation and less Washington interference.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose home state of Kentucky is third in the nation in coal production, told reporters in October the tax rate would “be taken care of before we get into an expiration situation.”

That didn’t happen. McConnell spokesman Robert Steurer didn’t repeat that pledge this week; rather, he wrote in an email, “benefits provided through the Black Lung Disability Fund continue to be provided at regular levels” and that McConnell “continues to prioritize maintaining and protecting the benefits.”

Trump and McConnell have reaped large contributions from the coal industry, according to the political money website Open Secrets.

Trump received more than $276,000 during the 2016 presidential election from political action committees and individuals affiliated with coal companies. His inaugural committee received $1 million from Joe Craft, CEO of Alliance Resource Partners in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and $300,000 from the Murray Energy Corporation, the nation’s largest privately-owned coal-mining company.

McConnell received more than $297,000 in coal industry donations since 2014, when he was last up for election.

Congress established the trust fund in 1978. Until the rate expired, money came from an excise tax of $1.10 per ton on underground coal and 55 cents on surface-mined coal that brought in $450 million last year. Rates fell to about 50 cents and 25 cents when lawmakers failed to act on its Dec. 31 expiration date.

The fund provides health benefits and payments to about 25,000 retired miners. Most worked for companies that are now bankrupt. Many, including Robinson, struggle to breathe as their lungs are slowly stifled by tiny dust and particles trapped there.

Robinson was 47 when he was diagnosed, part of a wave of younger miners that doctors and experts say have been swept up in a new black lung epidemic in Appalachia. Robinson, now 53, and others who depend on the fund are disappointed in McConnell and other leaders who typically enjoy miners’ support.

“I just feel that Mitch McConnell has let the citizens of Kentucky down, especially the miners,” said Patty Amburgey, whose husband, Crawford, died of black lung disease at age 62 in 2007. She draws a monthly widow’s payment through his black lung disability benefits. “And now there’s an epidemic of black lung.”

Dr. Brandon Crum has watched that epidemic unfold at his Pikeville, Kentucky, radiology clinic. In less than four years, Crum has seen 200 miners diagnosed with a severe form of black lung disease, called pulmonary massive fibrosis. The nation had 31 such diagnoses in the 1990s, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

“We’re looking at men in their 30s and 40s on oxygen, being evaluated for lung transplants,” Crum said. “Those are usually middle-age individuals with younger families, so it affects their wives, a lot.”

His findings were published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a December 2016 report that showed a shockingly high level of severe black lung cases at his clinic.

Amburgey, of Letcher County, Kentucky, said there will be fewer benefits for the growing number of younger miners with black lung if the fund is depleted. Robinson said he’s now worried the trust fund’s “pot of money will dry up.”

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and other coal-state Democratic senators are pushing a bill to shore up the fund by restoring the larger tax for 10 years. Manchin said in a statement that lawmakers “cannot continue to allow these solutions to be put off again and again.” That bill is in a Senate finance committee.

The mining industry supported the increased tax rate’s expiration, calling the effort to maintain it an unnecessary tax increase. The National Mining Association, which speaks for the industry, says the lower rate “will be sufficient to cover monthly benefit costs for the fund.” The group argued extending the rate would lead to job losses.

The May 2018 GAO report contradicts that claim, saying the fund’s beneficiaries could multiply “due to the increased occurrence of black lung disease and its most severe form, progressive massive fibrosis, particularly among Appalachian coal miners.”

The increase in younger black lung sufferers will put more pressure on the fund, as the industry continues to shrink.

“I think people always thought they would get (black lung) if they worked long enough in the mines, but I think it’s a disease they thought would affect them at the end of their life, in their 70s or 80s,” Crum said .

Amburgey says Trump reneged on his pledge to support miners.

“Mr. Trump promised that he would bring the mines back and take care of the miners, and that is not happening,” she said. “He promised us a snowball in July.”

 

Written by: Dylan Lovan

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2019 Workers Memorial Day

Source: AFL-CIO

 

NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act, promising every worker the right to a safe job. Unions and our allies have fought hard to make that promise a reality- winning protections that have made jobs safer and saved lives. But our work is not done. Each year, thousands of workers are killed and millions more suffer injury or illness because of their jobs.

After years of struggle, we won new rules to protect workers from deadly silica dust and beryllium, a stronger coal dust standard for miners and stronger anti-retaliation protections for workers who report job injuries.

These hard-won gains are being threatened. The Trump administration has carried out an all-out assault on regulations, targeting job safety rules on beryllium, mine examinations, injury reporting and child labor protections. The labor movement and allies have fought back and blocked some of these attacks. However, this assault has taken a toll-key protections have been repealed or rolled back, and agency budgets and staff have been cut. The number of OSHA inspectors has never been lower. There has been no action on critical safety and health problems like workplace violence, silica in mining and exposure to toxic chemicals.

On April 28, the unions of the AFL-CIO observe Workers Memorial Day to remember those who have suffered and died on the job, and to renew the fight for safe jobs. This year we will come together to call for action on hazards that cause unnecessary injury, illness and death. We will stand united against the ongoing attacks on workers’ rights and protections, and demand that elected officials put workers’ well-being above corporate interests. We will fight for the right of every worker to a safe job until that promise is fulfilled.

 

DECADES OF STRUGGLE by working people and their unions have improved working conditions and made jobs safer. We must fight back and continue to push forward. We must:

  • win new protections on workplace violence, silica exposure in mining, exposure to toxic chemicals and other hazards;
  • defend hard-won safety and health protections and workers’ rights from attacks;
  • resist any attempts to cut job safety budgets or weaken enforcement;
  • increase efforts to protect the safety and health of Latino and immigrant workers, who are at much greater risk of death and injury;
  • pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to provide OSHA protection to the millions of workers without it, as we ll as stronger criminal and civil penalties for companies that seriously violate job safety laws along with improved anti-retaliation protections;
  • pass the Robert Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act to strengthen mine safety enforcement and miners’ rights; and
  • ensure workers’ right to have a voice on the job, and to freely choose to form a union without employer interference or intimidation.

AFL-CIO criticizes Green New Deal, calling it ‘not achievable or realistic’

Source: The Washington Post

March 13, 2019

The AFL-CIO, the national arm for U.S. labor unions, offered a critical assessment of the Green New Deal, warning that the ambitious plan to combat climate change could adversely affect U.S. workers.

In a letter last week to Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the lawmakers who introduced a resolution last month detailing the key components of their plan, members of the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee said it could not support a proposal that did not address their concerns.

“We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered,” wrote Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The Green New Deal resolution, as proposed by Markey and Ocasio-Cortez, calls for the federal government to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions with a “fair and just transition” for all communities and workers, including by creating millions of high-wage jobs, health care and housing for all, a sustainable environment and enormous infrastructure investments.

The proposal would make sweeping changes and expand the government’s reach into the economy, and it almost certainly would require tax increases or large-scale deficit spending.

No one is proposing to “eliminate all planes, cows and the military.” No one created “doctored” versions of the deal that included these outlandish proposals. (Joy Yi/The Washington Post)

It entered the national conversation when Ocasio-Cortez adopted it as her calling card. The proposal marries climate change and income inequality as one all-encompassing issue.

Support for the Green New Deal has become a benchmark for Democrats running for president.

But the AFL-CIO throwing water on the plan complicates matters for Democrats who rely on labor support. Without the backing from unions or the business community, it will be a hard sell for Democrats to get it beyond grass-roots support.

In their letter to Markey and Ocasio-Cortez, Roberts and Stephenson called the Green New Deal “not achievable or realistic.” They urged the lawmakers to include labor in conversations related to climate change, but they said such work shouldn’t impinge on other priorities such as infrastructure.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) tweeted the letter and added, “I agree with the AFL-CIO.”

Markey fired back on Twitter: “We will continue to work and partner w/ @AFLCIO, who is right to say that ‘doing nothing is not an option.’ But until Republicans say that climate change is real, caused by humans, and demands action now, the only people they are in agreement with are Big Oil and the Koch brothers.”

In the fall, the top scientific body studying climate change found that the world had to take “unprecedented” steps to reduce carbon levels, with the globe on pace to warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels.

The Trump administration has not proposed a comprehensive agenda for addressing climate change. It has dismantled some initiatives supported by the past administration to check the growth of greenhouse gases.

President Trump has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Just Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted a quote from “Fox and Friends,” where a guest said: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” Trump added: “Wow!”

The Green New Deal has become a favorite foil for Trump and congressional Republicans. Trump mocked the plan in a speech to conservatives last week, pretending to ask his wife to check the wind to determine whether they could watch television.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he wants to bring the proposal to a vote to force Democrats to take a stand on it.

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said Tuesday the Green New Deal risks alienating labor groups, giving Republicans an opportunity with voters who side with conservatives on issues such as gun control and abortion. Exit polling from the 2016 presidential election showed a sharp decline for Democrats in support among union households.

“If Republicans play it smart and stop antagonizing labor, there’s a real opening for us,” King said.

Co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), acknowledged during a news conference Tuesday that labor groups have some concerns with the Green New Deal.

“Anything we move forward on, we have to be recognizing that people could lose jobs,” Pocan said.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters on Capitol Hill last week that labor was not consulted on the Green New Deal before it was released.

“Look, we need to address the environment. We need to do it quickly,” he said. “But we need to do it in a way that doesn’t put these communities behind, and leave segments of the economy behind. So we’ll be working to make sure that we do two things: that by fixing one thing we don’t create a problem somewhere else.”

There has long been tension between the environmental and labor movements, two major parts of the broader Democratic coalition, over worries that rules meant to curb pollution can lead to job losses in regulated industries with high-quality, good-paying positions.

The crafters of the Green New Deal sought to smooth over those concerns by incorporating into their proposal a “fair and just transition for all communities and workers” as the United States seeks to drive down climate-warming emissions from the electricity, transportation and agriculture sectors.

The resolution called for any economic transition to create “high-quality union jobs” and guarantee “wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition.”

Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell University who advised Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal, argued the apprehension is misplaced because new environmental protections can lead to job growth elsewhere.

“They are probably objecting prematurely,” Hockett said. “It has become customary to think of these as separate problems.”

Yet even before Markey and Ocasio-Cortez released their Green New Deal resolution, some heavy-industry unions were already posturing against it.

Seven unions representing ironworkers, plumbers, electrical workers, boilermakers, sheet metal workers, transportation communication workers and coal miners began late last year sending a white paper to congressional offices expressing “grave concerns about unrealistic solutions such as those advocated in the ‘Green New Deal.’ ”

Instead, the unions said a cap-and-trade proposal such as the one Democrats under President Barack Obama tried and failed to pass in 2009 was a better “starting point” for new legislation.

Markey, then a member of the House, was a lead sponsor of that bill.

John Risch, who worked as a locomotive engineer for 30 years before becoming the national legislative director at the transportation division of one of the unions, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, worried that any promise of a “just transition” for his members hauling coal and oil by train would end up being empty.

“We are not knuckle-draggers,” Risch said. “We’re concerned about climate change. We want to do something positive. But there are a lot of jobs on the lines.”

At least one of the main Green New Deal sponsors is recognizing — and trying to heal — the rift between environmental and labor groups over it.

Last week, staffers working for Markey met with Phil Smith, the head of communications and government affairs for the United Mine Workers of America, after the senator’s office reached out to the nation’s most prominent coal-mining union.

Smith called his meeting “a good first step.”

Still, he called the Green New Deal’s ambitions to meet all of the nation’s electric power needs with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” within a decade a nonstarter, with coal still accounting for more than a quarter of the country’s electricity generation.

Written by: Colby Itkowitz , Dino Grandoni and Jeff Stein

Sen. Warner Meets with Coal Miners

Source: The Coalfield Progress

March 8, 2019

In a meeting with United Mine Workers of America coal miners in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner stressed the need to pass the American Miners Act of 2019, legislation he sponsored that would permanently protect the healthcare and pension benefits for thousands of Virginia’s retired coal miners and their families.

The bill would also protect healthcare coverage for 500 Virginia miners who are at risk of losing their benefits due to the 2018 bankruptcy of Westmoreland Coal Co., which operated in Wise County and had been a leading employer here for decades.

Currently, the 1974 UMWA Pension Plan is on the road to insolvency due to coal company bankruptcies and the 2008 financial crisis. Warner said the American Miners Act would shore up the pension plan to make sure that 87,000 current beneficiaries and an additional 20,000 retirees who have vested won’t lose the pensions they have paid into for decades, Warner’s office said. In Virginia alone, there are approximately 7,000 pensioners who are at risk of losing their benefits if Congress does not act.

In May 2017, Warner worked with several colleagues to pass bipartisan legislation to protect healthcare for retired miners — including more than 10,000 miners and their families in Virginia — who were orphaned by coal bankruptcies. But the recent Westmoreland bankruptcy has endangered health care benefits for additional miners and dependents — including 500 people in Virginia. This legislation will extend the fix to ensure that miners who are at risk due to 2018 coal company bankruptcies will not lose their healthcare.

Lastly, the bill also calls for an extension of the tax that finances medical treatment and basic expenses for miners suffering from black lung. The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund is supported by an excise tax on mined coal that was cut in half at the end of 2018. The American Miners Act of 2019 would restore the tax to previous levels for 10 years.

Locally, the Virginia Coal and Energy Alliance had supported the cut and advocated against an extension.