Archives: Press Release

For Immediate Release March 14, 2018

Blue Collar Swing Voters Are the New (Old) Soccer Moms, Workers and Retirees Anxious about Pension Crisis Looking for Congressional Action

Uniontown, Pennsylvania – As political observers across the nation try to parse the results of last night’s special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District for clues to upcoming midterm contests, one issue that clearly stands out is solving the multi-employer pension crisis. PA-18 demonstrates that voters who fear for retirement security will blur partisan lines to support candidates they believe have their backs.

News accounts have documented a sharp division between the winner in the PA-18 contest, Conor Lamb, and his opponent, Rep. Rick Saccone, on addressing the pension crisis. Saccone ducked the issue when asked to address it by reporters, preferring to eat ice cream rather than answer whether he supported the American Miners’ Protection Act. Lamb and his surrogates, including United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President Cecil Roberts, by contrast, have made solving the pension crisis a central issue.

“You elect this man to Congress, and you won’t have to lobby him one minute,” said Roberts at a recent campaign rally for Lamb. “He’s for your pensions, he’s for your union, he’s for your health care. This is a ‘yes’ vote.”

In the wake of Lamb’s victory last night, Roberts noted that, “a lot of our members who didn’t vote in the last election or voted for President Trump came out and voted for the one candidate who was clear about standing up for their pensions and their retirement security. They may still agree with the President about a lot of things, but they know that if they lose their pension they will be scrambling just to survive. All the other things any politician is doing or saying fall by the wayside when a person is in survival mode.”

The looming pension crisis is not just a Pennsylvania or a coal miner issue. More than 1.5 million workers and retirees concentrated in key swing states – including Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia and Wisconsin – now face the possibility of losing their long-promised pensions due to pending insolvency of multiemployer pension funds. Millions more workers across the country may also lose their pensions without a long-term funding solution.

As part of a budget agreement reached last month, the U.S. House and Senate tasked a bipartisan 16-member select committee with crafting a solution to the funding crisis for stressed multiemployer pensions covering retirees and workers employed in mining, trucking, warehousing, commercial baking and other industries.

“There are tens of thousands of Teamsters and Mine Workers and Bakery and Confectionery workers and Carpenters that will see huge cuts in their pensions, and they start pretty soon,” Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Politico last December. “It’s not just fixing it and getting it done because the economics and the math get worse and worse. It’s because of what it does to families.”

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) in an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in February summed it up this way, “Over the past several years, I’ve consistently made clear to my colleagues that there is a looming multiemployer pension crisis in America, and responsible reforms are needed to protect retiree benefits, ensure the solvency of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and allow participating employers to remain competitive…we must put politics aside and find a workable solution.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MARCH 6, 2018

[TRIANGLE, VA.] United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement today:

“I congratulate the teachers, school support personnel and other state employees who emerged victorious in their struggle for dignity and respect from West Virginia’s state government today. Their solidarity and unity of purpose has inspired working families throughout our state and across America. Their victory demonstrates once again that when workers stand united, they can never be defeated.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Joint pension committee now must act to preserve pensions

[TRIANGLE, VA]  United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement today:

“Now that the members of the Joint Select Committee on Multi-Employer Pensions have been named, it’s time for them to get to work to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of retirees who are in jeopardy do not lose the pensions they spent a lifetime to earn.

“The charge of this Committee is clearly spelled out in the enabling legislation. It is to ‘improve the solvency of multi-employer pension plans and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.’ The American people, and especially the retirees whose pensions are at risk through no fault of their own, have every reason to expect that the Committee will do just that.

“I am encouraged to see that some of the people on both sides of the aisle who have been working on this issue the longest and have the most knowledge of what needs to be done to address this problem have been appointed to this Committee.

“The UMWA stands ready to provide whatever information and assistance the Committee may need as it develops a plan that preserves the pensions our retirees literally put their lives on the line every day to earn.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

UMWA statement regarding Congress’ failure to solve pension crisis

[TRIANGLE, VA.]  United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement today:

“I had hoped that Congressional leadership could come together and take immediate action to put an end to the pension crisis confronting millions of American retirees, including more than 107,000 current and future UMWA retirees, but they did not. Today’s failure to act makes tomorrow’s solution more expensive.

“However, I am encouraged that Congress has established a joint special committee that is charged with coming up with a workable legislative solution to this crisis by the end of November. If they can agree on a path forward, there will be an expedited vote on that solution.

“But that committee cannot properly understand the full scope of this problem sitting in a room on Capitol Hill. I strongly encourage them to hold hearings across America to hear directly from the people whose lives are at stake. Their voices must be part of the committee’s considerations.

“As for the UMWA, we will continue our fight to ensure that the pensions our members earned doing the hard, dangerous work to provide the fuel that has energized America will be paid in full. Their retirement security was promised by the federal government in 1946. Every Congress from that day to this one has kept that moral commitment. I hope and pray that this Congress will not be the first to fail to keep the government’s word.”

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[TRIANGLE, VA.] United Mine Workers of America International President Cecil E. Roberts issued the following statement today:

“As Congress works to develop legislation to fully fund the government for the rest of the year, it is critical that a solution to the looming multi-employer pension crisis be included in that bill. There are several pension funds in crisis that need to be addressed to prevent an economic disaster across the nation. However, the UMWA 1974 Pension Plan is on the cusp of insolvency, and is one more coal company bankruptcy away from going under.

“Retired coal miners earned their pensions, putting their lives and limbs on the line every day they went to work to provide the fuel that energized America. The average pension is just $586 per month. Many of those receiving checks are widows, who depend on that pension and a small Social Security check to live. Now, through no fault of their own, their pension plan is in trouble. The 2008-09 recession and a series of bankruptcies in the coal industry over the last six years have decimated what was a strong pension fund just a decade ago.

“Some say the government should do nothing to help them, instead forcing them to choose between buying groceries or paying for out-of-pocket medical costs. But since 1946, the United States government – Republican and Democrat alike – has lived up to this promise it made to retired miners: ‘If you will bring out the coal that provides the foundation for the American economy, then the government will make sure you have a secure retirement.’

“It’s time for our government to once again demonstrate that it will meet that moral commitment it made 71 years ago. Preserve these pensions, so that tens of thousands of our senior citizens can live out their days with some measure of comfort and security. They earned it.”

[TRIANGLE, VA] The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on November 28 dismissed an appeal by CONSOL Energy that sought to overturn a federal judge’s decision requiring CONSOL to continue paying for health care benefits to some 3,400 retired miners – members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) – their dependents and widows.

Judge David A. Faber of the Federal Court for Southern West Virginia in Bluefield issued a decision on March 17, 2017 that found CONSOL was attempting to violate a collective bargaining agreement requirement to pay for lifetime health care benefits for retirees. CONSOL had unilaterally sought to stop paying the contractually-required benefits and instead replace them with a plan to fund health savings accounts for five years with no promise of lifetime benefits.

Judge Faber issued a preliminary injunction order prohibiting CONSOL from implementing its plan until the legal process played out. CONSOL appealed the injunction and on November 28, the Fourth Circuit threw out CONSOL’s appeal.

“This is another step forward in this case, but it is far from over,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said. “CONSOL could do the right thing, decide to keep its promises to these retirees, withdraw its litigation and fulfill its obligation to provide full health care benefits. But unfortunately, they are instead focused on grasping every dollar at the expense of thousands of senior citizens – the very people who created the wealth that allowed CONSOL to make billions of dollars for decades.”

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OCTOBER 10, 2017

The Clean Power Plan was destined to fail. America must take a different path to address greenhouse gas emissions.

[TRIANGLE, VA.] The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) supports today’s withdrawal of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) by the Trump administration, while at the same time encouraging the administration to move quickly to propose a more reasonable replacement rule and step up support of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and its commercial application.

            “We said from the very beginning of this rule that is was unworkable and far exceeded EPA’s authority under Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said today. “That’s why we filed suit against the CPP on the day it became final, that’s why we joined the successful motion to stay the rule at the Supreme Court, and that’s why we rallied our members again and again against this rule. We are not sad to see it go.

            “Our view at the time this rule came out was that our government was placing the burden of solving global climate change squarely on the backs of American coal miners, their families and their communities. And it was doing this while countries like China and India were continuing to build coal-fired plants. That is even more true today.”

            Roberts cited a recent report from Urgewald, a German environmental organization, which said there will be 1,600 new coal-fired power plants built in the next decade world-wide, nearly half of which will be built by Chinese interests. While many of those plants will be built in China, many more will be built in countries that currently have little or no coal-fired power.

            “There are so many in the United States who want to put hundreds of thousands of American coal miners, utility workers, electrical workers, boilermakers, railway workers, seafarers, and construction workers out of work – as well as destroying the jobs of all the people who support those workers,” Roberts said. “Yet at the same time China is rapidly developing and implementing a plan to keep their workers employed and spread coal-fired electrical generation throughout the world.

            “The Sierra Club likes to brag about how many coal-fired power plants they’ve shut down in the United States,” Roberts said. “I’m not sure why they’re proud of that, given the very real pain and suffering those shutdowns have caused millions of people who live in the states where those plants existed, and the communities where the coal was mined that powered those plants.

            “Greenhouse gas emissions pay no attention to national borders,” Roberts said. “So if the Sierra Club’s claim that it has shut down 259 coal plants since 2010 is true, and there are 1,600 slated to be built worldwide in the next decade, even my coal miner’s math says worldwide emissions will go up – and by a lot.

            “That would still be true if you shut down every coal-fired plant in the United States, which was the ultimate goal of the Clean Power Plan,” Roberts said. “It was never going to reduce global emissions.”

            Roberts said that the better way for the United States to pursue true, lasting emissions reductions now and into the future is for the EPA to take a measured, inside the fence approach that reduces emissions at the source. One key component of this has to be New Source Review reform, which will allow utilities to replace older components like turbines and boilers with new units that will operate much more efficiently and therefore use less fuel, reducing emissions on a megawatt-per-hour basis.

            “It is especially important that our government also take every opportunity to increase incentives and provide material support to develop commercially available carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology,” Roberts said. “I would venture to guess that not one of those 1,600 new coal-fired plants coming globally in the next decade will have CCS technology attached to it.

            “The truth is that without the application of CCS technology here in the United States and especially worldwide, humanity will never be able to stop the rise of greenhouse gas emissions from the global power sector,” Roberts said. “We ought to be about the business of aggressively developing this technology and taking the lead in supplying it across the world. Let’s take the technological initiative away from China and put Americans back to work building something again.”

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