Heath Coleman
Fola Coal Co.
Indore, W.Va.
Mine Workers
'Companies Are Stomping All Over These Rights'
"I've had to put my family's well-being at stake just to exercise my rights as an American," says Heath Coleman. "People shouldn't have to live the way we've had to live for the last year." The same thing has been happening to his co-workers, and it's all because they are trying to improve their lives by forming a union.
Coleman, who lives in Indore, W.Va., is a heavy-equipment operator on a reclamation crew at Fola Coal Co. After coal is removed from a mountaintop mine, his crew's job is to "restore the area to what it originally was," he explains. "We put in wildlife habitats, refuge areas, duck ponds, wetland areas. We prepare the land for reforestation."
Coleman and other Fola employees take pride in their work, but when Consol Energy took control of Fola in 2007, things started going downhill. The workers’ health care benefits were slashed and management told them they were covered by a pension plan, but "they wouldn't provide us with any information on it whatsoever," according to Coleman. "They wouldn't give us any documents about it. We have no proof it even exists."
It's no wonder that, as Coleman describes it, "employees felt we needed a little united say-so in things. There was talk around the job that what the company needed was a good dose of the union." But after Coleman and others started organizing in 2007 to join the Mine Workers (UMWA), management struck back. He recalls, "They started telling us in meetings that they heard some ‘union pushers and radicals’ had been coming to people's houses, and we should tell them, 'No, thank you, we're not interested.'"
Management certainly didn't stop there. "The company told us that if it went union, they'd shut down because they couldn't afford to work union," Coleman says, and when employees started signing cards saying they wanted union representation, "management would direct employees to get those cards back from the union. At one of the field locations, they gave documents to the workers for them to fill out and sign and mail to the union to ask for their authorization cards back. That's unbelievable pressure." He adds, "The company pushed so hard to get people to get those cards back that we had some who never signed the cards, yet they mailed in letters to the union to ask for cards back. That's how hard management was pressing us."
Once management learned that Coleman is one of the most active union supporters and a member of the in-house committee of workers committed to organizing, he says that they seemed to make him a special target. "One of the things they did was that they came out and took my company radio from me," he notes. "That could have put me in some danger. I'm a reclamation worker, so I'm out by myself a lot and away from the equipment where there's a CB radio. They issued radios to us as a safety precaution. I asked the foreman why he was taking away my radio, and he said, 'They don't feel you represent the company anymore; you represent the union.'"
As one incident piled on top of another, the union filed unfair labor practices charges against the company with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In May last year, Fola signed a settlement with the NLRB. Although management got by without admitting that it had violated the law, it agreed to post a notice on company property with a long list of promises to workers, including that it would return Coleman's radio, it wouldn't threaten workers with discharge for supporting the union and it wouldn't tell workers there would be layoffs if they chose the union.
Still, the pressure from management on Coleman and other workers who seek a union remains intense. "I can't speak to my friends at work because they're afraid someone will see them talking to me," he notes. "My family, my friends and anyone who associates with me have become victims and it's because I tried to express the right to have a union."
Coleman is hardly alone. "All the guys on the in-house committee are making sacrifices in different ways," he observes. "All of us believe the reward of having a union would be worth the risk we're taking, but this situation is crazy. It's like a disease. If we don't find the cure, it's going to get worse."
After this experience, Coleman has become an enthusiastic supporter of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would clearly guarantee that workers could have a union when a majority of workers sign statements saying they want it. "I think we've got to have the Employee Free Choice Act," he says. "Our forefathers fought and bled and died to give us the rights we're supposed to have today, but the companies are stomping all over these rights. The Employee Free Choice Act would help put a stop to this."
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