WASHINGTON D.C. -- Tourists roaming around the National Mall on Thursday had some questions. What was this large crowd of gray-haired people in camouflage t-shirts? Why were they shouting? And what were they doing with that coffin?
The main speaker – an older guy pushing 70 who didn’t want to wear a hat out here in the boiling swamp of Washington D.C. but whose friends / brothers / followers made him wear one anyway – shouted like a televangelist.
“Fired up! Fired up! Fed up! Fed up! U-M-W-A! U-M-W-A!”
United Mindreaders of Western Alabama? University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin-Albania?
“In case you’re confused,” the televangelist / UMWA President Cecil Roberts shouted, “that stands for United! Mine! Workers! Of! America!”
The crowd? Well, they were fired / fed up. According to a UMWA spokesman Phil Smith, about 10,000 hit the National Mall for the Keep the Promise Rally.
Some of them, like 81-year-old Bob Royalty, with his “froze-up back,” push their cancer-stricken wives in wheelchairs just so they can stand up straight. Then there’s Steve Beard, whose brother-in-law died in an accident in Lynnville after the highwall caved in on him. Jimmy Handley, whose son Jeremy came with him to thank his father for a lifetime of hard work. Others, like 95-year-old Clarence Addington, helped build the Squaw Creek mine in Boonville and yet he still walked around Washington with a lot more prowess than a sunburned 30-year-old columnist subsisting solely on Cliff Bars, free water and dreams of the $9 Bud Light he would chug at the Charlotte airport late Thursday night.
And then there’s the coffin, brought brought from Madisonville, Kentucky by District 12 vice president Steve Earle. And the men and women in orange hats and green bracelets who volunteered to carry it into the street and get arrested.
They all wore Day-Glo orange hats and green bracelets. John and Rhonda Leach, of Beaver Dam, Kentucky, were among them. They have two adult children in wheelchairs – Elizabeth and Christopher John. The children wore the hats and the bracelets too. John holds his son’s hand as a musician sings a union folk song. Christopher John and Elizabeth clutched white crosses – symbolizing the 100,000 union miners the televangelist said have died of black lung.
And they’re here, confused tourists, because they’re trying to preserve their healthcare and pensions. Ask any of the 10,000 people here, from 160 buses out of 14 states, and they’ll tell you about Harry Truman, John L. Lewis and 1946.
In Washington on Thursday, 1946 got mentioned more than it did in 1946. Strikes sparked all across the country in the wake of World War II. After taking a softball bat to the knees of the railroad union, Truman geared up to do the same to the mine workers as labor strikes sparked around the nation. With 400,000 coal workers from 26 states going on strike and arbitration failing, Truman fined the union $3.5 million.
It looked bad. But then: a deal. Pension and healthcare coverage from “the cradle to the grave.”
Protestors on Thursday hope two bills currently loitering in Congress, the Miners Protection Act in the Senate and the Coal Healthcare and Pensions Protection Act in the House, will keep that deal alive. If not, thousands of retirees risk losing coverage.
“We have given all we have to give to this country, to these United States,” Roberts said. “And it is time brothers and sisters, for this government to stand up for the people who work for a living!”
For us / against us
But for politicians, the cynical question remains: why stand up?
Deals such as the one struck in ’46 would never happen today. Then, union membership stood at 14.5 million people, according to Economic Populist. For 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics listed membership at 17.7 million. That looks like a nice increase until you realize the U.S. population in the days of the Truman / Lewis deal was only 141 million – well less than half of the 318 million currently crammed into the U.S. of A.
To put it mathly, in 1946 almost 10 percent of the U.S. population belonged to a labor union. Today: one-half of 1 percent.
Private sector membership has plummeted from 17 percent in 1983 to 7 percent now. And any cursory look around the mall on Thursday would tell you that the strikers are getting older. And as time and people pass, younger folks – unlikely enjoying the protection of the unions themselves – forget. Once you’re forgotten, you’re no longer powerful.
Plus, the country isn’t as dependent on coal mining as it used to be. Coal generated only 33 percent of U.S. electricity as of last year. With companies such as Peabody Energy and Patriot Coal shouting bankruptcy and shuttering plants, that number is bound to shrink.
And of course there’s “the war on coal.” Rep. David McKinley, R-W.Va., uttered that infamous phrase during his speech at Thursday’s rally. So did Kentucky Republican Andy Barr, who blamed the “war” for putting 10,000 Kentucky coal miners out of work.
Who’s waging it? The Internet will tell you OBAMA. The same guy who wants to translate your Bible into Arabic and fire your sister from Applebee’s.
But according to a lengthy Politico report last year, the main entity fueling (pun) the “war on coal” is the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. Beyond Coal has reportedly taken credit for the closing of 189 coal plants.
As far as healthcare and pensions go, that’s all politician-whipped noise. Mitch McConnell strips himself to the waist and howls “war on coal” each night into the mocking face of the full moon, and according to the dozens of retired miners I talked to over two days, there’s no politician more hated by the UWMA than our old boy Mitch.
Wendy Bredhold, an Ohio Valley representative for Beyond Coal, says that while the Sierra Club works to reduce pollution vomited forth by coal plants, it stands with the union.
“Sierra Club completely supports the coal miners and the passage of the Miners Protection Act,” she said. “Promises were made to them about their healthcare and their pensions and those promises should be kept. … They made a lot of sacrifices to power this country.
“… Sierra Club is a union employer and I’m a member of a union for the first time in my life.”
She said local Sierra Club representatives will soon head to Washington themselves to lobby for the RECLAIM Act: legislation that would provide funding for unemployed miners looking to transition into other fields of work and helped rebuild towns eviscerated by strip mining.
Environmentalist group = friend. Kentucky legislator with a slew of coal-miner retiree constituents = enemy.
Confusing times for retired miners. As far as the presidential race, Royalty said you’ve got an “idiot and then two or three others who don’t know what the h***” they’re talking about. He said Trump sticks his foot in his mouth so much “he’s going to wind up being a one-legged man.”
The bigger problem, he said, is coal companies.
“Them politicians, I’m paying them in this hand when I elect them to represent the public,” he said. “But this coal company … they fill (the other) hand a whole lot fuller than what we’re paying them. So when this bill comes up, they don’t hear us.”
Beth Sutton, a spokeswoman from Peabody Energy, said Patriot Coal has lived up to its end of a deal struck in 2013. It extended the deal earlier this year to fund healthcare obligations through October, and will continue paying some healthcare expenses under the Coal Act. That provided little solace at the rally.
The promise
The 160 buses choking the streets of Washington, the $11 million in union dues spent on recent rallies, the worry about health bills, livelihood -- it all comes down to that moment in 1946.
Truman and his ilk had to know then that nothing can be guaranteed from “cradle to the grave.” The flow of American politics and enterprise is too crooked for such a straightforward promise. Give them everything now, I guess he thought, and let somebody else fight about it after I’m dead.
Fight they have. I heard stories about strikes in 1978, 1989, 1993, 1999.
“Everytime we turned around we were out there on strike,” Royalty said.
Even in retirement, they’re at it again. Hundreds of union baseball caps bouncing through the mountains of West Virginia on an air-conditioned-less bus, sweaty heads nodding off onto the shoulders of seatmates. And after 15 hours in that metal sausage casing you get to your hotel and, oh lucky you, the air conditioner in your room is busted. And then it’s on to the rally. With setup, the rally and a long wait for the bus afterward, it’s about eight hours in the kiln sun. Aging bodies wobbling in the heat. Sunburns crawling up your legs like blood across the kitchen floor.
Everyone stands with you in the mall, from fellow retirees with busted knees to their wives with lung cancer to their children with incurable diseases. They all care because this is their life. But what about everyone else? Union members age and die. How much longer can you draw senators to your podium? How long until the union dues can’t produce fleets of buses and comped meals at Golden Corral? And sure other unions stand with you. Autoworkers from Georgia. Stagehands from Washington D.C. The National Association of Letter Carriers. Many more.
But what about everyone else? Those young people toiling in today’s harsh American landscape who work 60 hours a week with no pension promised at the end of their road. Why should they care about you?
All you have is, well, it’s our life.
“If we lose our insurance,” Earle said, motioning toward the coffin. “People are gonna end up in a casket.”