Last week, 10,000 retired coal miners and their families came to Washington, D.C., to ask Congress to pass legislation that would secure health care for 22,000 and pensions for 120,000 retirees. As the coal industry struggles, some coal companies have been relieved by bankruptcy courts of their obligations to pay health care and pension contributions for retirees. But allowing these benefits to lapse would be not only devastating to the families of the coal miners who worked so hard to keep America out of the dark, it would be the abandonment of a promise made to coal miners in 1947.
As Becca Schimmel explains at Ohio Valley Resource:
[Kenneth] Vincent, [Joe] Holland and the other retirees want the cradle-to-grave health and retirement benefits promised to them when Congress intervened in 1947 to settle a national coal strike. Negotiations to establish a health and welfare fund for miners started in 1946. Miners and operators rejected proposals until President Harry Truman issued an executive order taking over all bituminous coal mines in the U.S. A week later lawmakers struck a deal, known as the Krug-Lewis agreement, and the strike ended. The agreement used royalties on coal production to create a retirement fund for miners and their dependents in cases of sickness, disability, death and retirement.
The Mine Workers (UMWA) union suppports the legislation. President Cecil Roberts said: "These miners put in decades of back-breaking work in America’s coal mines to energize our nation."
Mervn Click, a retired coal miner from Hueytown, Alabama, is afraid of what the future will bring if the legislation doesn't pass: "I don't know what I will do if it runs out."
Contact your member of Congress and tell them to support the legislation.
Watch video of the rally in Washington.