Coal Miners Pensions Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Lawmakers Warn Of Economic Fallout From Failing Pensions

United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts fired up a crowd of thousands of union workers in Columbus, Ohio, with a simple chant: “Fix it!”

The rally last week came on the eve of a congressional field hearing on problems plaguing multi-employer pension programs like the one retired miners depend upon.

“When the people get to marching, the politicians get to listening,” Roberts roared.

Union workers rally for pension protection in Ohio.

The UMWA warns that its pension plan could face insolvency if no action is taken, and it isn’t the only plan in trouble. Teamsters, iron workers, carpenters and others fear their pensions are shaky. As lawmakers on the Joint Select Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans explored the issue they heard warnings of dire effects if major pension plans fail — not just for employees in those industries but for the larger economy.

‘Economic Contagion’

Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican on the joint committee, warned that if even one of the larger plans becomes insolvent that could put the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation at risk as well.

“That wave of bankruptcy has the potential to create an economic contagion effect,” Portman said. “In other words, it would spread around our economy.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, center, addresses witnesses at the field hearing in Columbus.

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, echoed the concern that if multiemployer pension plans are allowed to become insolvent it could hit the whole U.S. economy hard.

“This one could take us down, quicker, faster and harder than anything that’s faced the United States since the Great Depression,” Manchin said. “I truly believe that. And I see this train wreck coming. I see the light in the tunnel and it is sure as hell not the daylight on the other side.”

Miner Discord

Mine workers had hoped that a bipartisan bill would address problems with both their pensions and health benefits. But as it made its way through Congress the bill was split and only health care benefits were secured.

Manchin later introduced another bipartisan bill to shore up the pension plan for more than 43,000 coal miners in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia, but the bill has not gained much traction on Capitol Hill.

Larry Ward is a retired miner and former president of his local union. He told the committee that a wave of coal company bankruptcies left more of the pension obligation on fewer employers. Existing companies are responsible for contributing to pension plans for people that worked for the now-orphaned companies.

“I think it’s well known, 80 percent of our retirees and widows are from orphaned companies and failure on the part of this committee to act now, our pension fund will go insolvent.”

Ward says one more downturn in the coal market could push the UMW plan into insolvency.

Business Perspective

Employers in other industries are looking at similar problems. David Gardner is the CEO of Alfred Nickles Bakery in Ohio. His employees are part of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers union.

“Why should our company have to fund the pensions of people who never worked for Nickles Bakery?” Gardner asked.

Nickles Bakery CEO David Gardner (left) talks to Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA 3rd).

Gardner said his company was turned down for loans because of the unfunded pension liability. He says business owners are stuck if they can’t negotiate pension increases.

“Is it fair for multiemployer funds to put companies out of business due to rehabilitation plans that require huge contribution increases per employee per week?” Gardner asked.

Striking a Balance

Sen. Portman said one of the questions the committee has to answer is how to strike the right balance, not only on the bipartisan panel but also with the American people. He said the committee has to figure out how much money should come from taxpayers who have no stake in the pensions.

“Let’s be honest with each other today. About 99 percent of the taxpayers who are going to be asked to contribute to something through the government … are not in these affected plans,” Portman said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said there are more than 60,000 active workers and retirees in his state who could lose their pensions if nothing is done. Brown said workers now paying into pensions might not see a penny of that money if Congress doesn’t act.

“It threatens our economy, it affects every American, every state in this country. It affects union workers, it affects non-union workers,” Brown said.

Brown has introduced a bill to establish a system in the Treasury Department for pension plans to borrow enough to remain solvent.

ReSource reporter Aaron Payne contributed to this story.

Miners’ Pensions A Major Part Of Spending Debate

Retired union coal miners are joining teamsters, iron workers and other union retirees in an effort to shore up their ailing pension plans, and they hope the ticking clock on a government spending bill will help.

Some Democrats want to see protections for retirement benefits included in the omnibus spending bill, which Congress must pass in order to prevent a government shutdown. That could set up a year-end showdown over the spending bill, with major implications for retirees in the Ohio Valley region.

Some 43,000 retired miners in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia depend on a pension plan that the union argues could be at risk without Congressional action. A trio of leading lawmakers from the region will play key roles in the debate in the coming week.

Pensions In Peril

Last year retired union miners fought to protect their health benefits and pensions which were both at risk due to the coal industry’s decline and a wave of bankruptcies. They won protection for health benefits but not pensions, after the issues were split off in a compromise measure to fund health benefits.

A bill championed by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to extend protection to the miner’s pension plans attracted some bipartisan support but not enough traction to win passage.

Now Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has attracted support of Democratic leadership to make a broader push for pensions for a number of other teetering pension plans.

At a Capitol Hill rally Brown said Congress found time to pass major tax cuts for corporations and now it’s time to shore up pensions.

“Wall Street squandered your pension money,” he said. “Now this body, the House and Senate, have a responsibility to keep the promise to protect the pension that you earned and to do it before it’s too late.”

Brown said Congress has a responsibility to keep the promise of pensions to the millions of workers who depend on them. He’s introduced the Butch Lewis Act, named after a Teamsters union member who died two years ago while working on the issue.

Ohio Teamsters member Mike Walden explains the Butch Lewis Act as Lewis’ widow, Rita (left), listens on.”

The bill would establish a new office called the Pension Rehabilitation Administration. Pension plans would be able to borrow what they need to remain solvent through this new arm of the Treasury Department.

Ominous Omnibus

Mike Walden is a member of the Teamsters union in Ohio. He said shoring up pensions should not be a partisan issue.

“This war on the elderly and unions here in the United States of America is only about party lines and aisles not saving lives, not the economy, not letting someone keep what they earned but wanting to take it away for personal gain or power,” he said.

Walden wants to see work across the aisles in Congress. That would depend on a trio of lawmakers from the Ohio Valley finding common ground in a partisan atmosphere.

Democrats Brown and Manchin have picked up some bipartisan support for pension protection. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, has said that he prefers to address troubled pension plans as part of a broader pension reform effort.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

UMW spokesperson Phil Smith said the situation is urgent, and that the union’s pension plan could become insolvent in less than five years if there’s a further downturn in the coal market.

“Any more bankruptcies in the coal industry would have significant effect on our plan,” he said. “It would essentially lead to all of the remaining employers who are making contributions to the plan to being let out of that obligation by a bankruptcy court.

With a deadline looming, some Democrats are threatening a government shutdown if a pension fix is not included in the end-of-the-year spending bill.

Bipartisan Bill Would Prop Up Coal Miners’ Pensions

A bipartisan Congressional group from the Ohio Valley and beyond introduced a new bill to save pensions for retired union coal miners throughout the region.

The American Miners Pension Act, or AMP, would secure pensions for about 43,000 miners in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia whose retirement benefits have been undermined by the decline of the coal industry.

West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin said Congress acted to protect miners’ health benefits last year but pensions got kicked down the road.

“And every day that it goes without settling our pension problems it’s another day this will cost more,” Manchin said.

Without Congressional action, the United Mine Workers pension plan could become insolvent in about five years. The UMW blames the pension fund’s decline on a downturn in coal markets and coal company bankruptcies. The AMP Act would transfer excess funds from the federal Abandoned Mine Land program to the UMW pension plan.

Manchin said bankruptcy laws are also at the root of the problem.

“This will repeat itself time and time again. We’re not going to change it unless we change our bankruptcy laws,” Manchin said.

Manchin said the bill seeks a loan, not a bailout. The AMP Act would require the pension fund to certify each year that it is solvent and able to pay back the principal and interest. UMW representatives warn that if their pension plan collapses the beneficiaries and their dependents will be moved into the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which could also put that important source of pension protection at risk.

Robert Bailey was a coal miner for 36 years and retired from Patriot Coal, a company Peabody Coal created. Patriot carried many pension and health benefit costs from Peabody and has twice declared bankruptcy. Bailey said he worries he will lose his main source of income if the UMW’s pension plan becomes insolvent.

“It would definitely be devastating to the majority of coal miners that depend on this,” Bailey said.

Bailey said he has developed black lung and is unable to work. His wife left work to stay home and care for him as well. He said the federal government promised long ago to guarantee lifelong benefits for miners — a pledge he said the AMP Act would keep.

“If they have any morals within themselves, to me, they would have to pass it,” Bailey said.

Coal retirees have been fighting to secure their benefits for nearly five years. The average monthly pension payment in the Ohio Valley is about $500 to $600.

WVPB’s Glynis Board, Roxy Todd, and Jessica Lilly contributed to this report.

Fighting For Breath: Black Lung's Deadliest Form Increases

At the age of 38, a coal miner named Mackie Branham Jr. was diagnosed with progressive massive fibrosis, a debilitating and terminal form of an illness that was supposed to be a disease of the past — black lung. But Branham is among many the miners afflicted by a resurgence in the disease, and officials are just beginning to realize the scope of the problem. A review of health clinic records shows roughly a thousand such cases, many times more than federal officials had thought existed.

Mackie Branham, Jr., was diagnosed with the complex form of black lung at age 38.

"The more I talk, the more I get out of breath." – Mackie Branham

Driving into Pike County, Kentucky, the welcome sign tells you that you’ve entered “America’s Energy Capital.” Sheer rock walls line the highway, evidence of a community that’s extremely skilled at cutting through mountains.

Pike County is in the heart of the central Appalachian coalfields, and it’s home to the offices of Dr. James Brandon Crum, a radiologist who often reads the lung X-rays of coal miners. Last July, he reached out the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) because he’d noticed a disturbing trend among his patients.

According to a NIOSH study published this month, Crum found the worst form of black lung disease in 60 patients in a period of 20 months. That’s more cases than the NIOSH black lung surveillance program had identified nationwide since 2010.

One of the study’s co-authors, NIOSH epidemiologist Scott Laney, described the rate of severe black lung at Crum’s clinic as “unprecedented by any historical standard.”

Mackie Branham Jr. is one of the 60. An X-ray of his lungs shows that they’re littered with dark splotches, the scar tissue that’s built up around deposits of coal and rock dust. With his diagnosis, Branham was told he couldn’t go back to working in the coal mines. That meant no more paychecks and the beginning of an extremely difficult period for Branham’s family.

"I can no longer provide for my family." – Mackie Branham

Branham’s work-history lines up with many of the reasons the NIOSH study suggests could be causing the uptick in severe black lung in younger miners. As a self-described “company man,” Branham did whatever the company asked, and that often meant extremely long hours. He often missed birthdays and holidays to pick up extra shifts. He’d sometimes work more than 24 hours straight. Longer hours likely go part of the way to explaining how a 38-year-old can have lungs worse than many retired miners.

The NIOSH report suggests another piece of the puzzle could be the popularity of a technique called slope mining, which involves making a long cut through rock in order to reach a coal seam. In central Appalachia, this usually means cutting through sandstone. Sandstone breaks down into silica dust, which can be much more harmful than coal dust. Branham said he once spent six straight months making this kind of cut, regularly working shifts as long as 16 hours.

The report also suggests that the recent downsizing of the Appalachian coal industry could be playing a major role in this new spike of diagnoses. In today’s coal landscape, laid-off miners have little hope of getting rehired, and that’s created a new incentive for miners to get tested and apply for benefits.

Branham’s black lung is so severe that he wouldn’t be able to work even if there were mines hiring. But he said he’s also affected by the continuing layoffs. As he sees it, laid-off miners have few options besides applying for black lung benefits, and that flood of claims has put him further down the list, forcing him to wait longer before he can hope to receive benefits.

'I make in a week what he made in two days.'     – Amber Branham

Mackie Branham Jr. lives with his wife Amber and their five children. The family has a lawyer, and has been fighting for benefits since March, but they’ve not yet seen a dime. Branham says that his former employer, Alpha Natural Resources, has been fighting him every step of the way.

Coal companies have long been notoriously aggressive in fighting black lung claims. Branham’s condition is pretty clear-cut since he’s disabled and isn’t a smoker. But he still had to get opinions from seven doctors to make it through the process. In the meantime, it’s been hard for his family to get by. He tried to get government benefits, but was turned down for both unemployment and disability. His wife has been working over 60 hours a week as a waitress, and yet Branham said he’d likely be homeless if not for help from his family and a very kind landlord.

"We're having a lot more severe black lung than even our worst nightmares." – Attorney Evan Smith

The NIOSH study found 60 cases of the worst form of black lung diagnosed at Dr. Crum’s clinic since 2015, and characterized that as a “resurgence.” With help from the ReSource, NPR found 392 additional cases in the same period at clinics across the region. Clinics noted over a thousand cases since 2010, which is more than double the number of cases that NIOSH’s black lung surveillance programs have found in the last forty years.

A growing number of miners with the worst form of black lung is likely to create challenges for families, communities, and the region as the whole. Coal companies responsible for paying benefits could face a growing cost in an already difficult market. Taxpayers and the federal government could end up bearing more of the burden.

Mackie Branham views a lung X-ray with Dr. James Brandon Crum, who was among the first physicians to note an uptick in black lung diagnoses

Branham’s former employer, Alpha, recently emerged from bankruptcy, and is still responsible for his benefits. In the recent wave of coal bankruptcies, some companies have shed their liabilities to pay black lung benefits. When that happens, any black lung claims that company would have been responsible for are transferred to the federal black lung benefit fund. That’s what happened when Patriot Coal, once a major employer in the region, shifted about $62 million in liabilities onto the black lung benefits fund.

Benefits in Question

The federal government started paying black lung benefits in 1969 after thousands of striking miners demanded that black lung be recognized as a condition that deserved worker’s compensation.

The system has gone through a lot of changes in the years since, including changes to the requirements to receive benefits and how the costs are spread between taxpayers and coal companies. But since the 1980s, there had been one steady trend from year to year: a decrease in the number of living beneficiaries, and the amount of benefits getting paid out each year. That’s what you’d expect given the number of regulations intended to limit exposure to coal dust.

But in the last few years, the number of black lung claims has been increasing.

The new surge in the worst forms of black lung is more evidence that these regulations haven’t been working as well as they were intended to. Coal mines can be an extremely cost-conscious and productivity-oriented environment, and for years there have been widespread and well-documented cases of mine operators cutting corners and ignoring safety regulations.

A new dust rule may finally address some of the issues causing the current uptick, but because black lung is contracted through years of exposure, it’ll be at least a decade before anyone can tell if things have improved.

In the meantime, some in the region are concerned about the future of the federal black lung benefits fund. Among them is Evan Smith, an attorney at the Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the man behind blacklungblog.com. Smith said the recent bankruptcies and the increase in black lung claims could put the fund at risk.

That’s especially worrying since the fund will also be losing income as the per-ton tax on coal that supports the fund will fall along with declining production. A temporary increase in the tax is also set to expire in December, 2018. Members of Congress have asked for an updated report on the fund’s viability.

Federal black lung benefits have been been a major income source in the Ohio Valley region. Since 2009, Ohioans have received more than $95 million in federal black lung benefits. In Kentucky, the amount is over $230 million. And in West Virginia, federal black lung benefits have paid out more than $300 million. This money goes straight into the pockets of black lung beneficiaries and is one of the biggest cash streams that’s still flowing into some coalfield communities.

A New Barrier

Click to view a flow chart on how to apply for black lung benefits.

Another possible change in the federal black lung program could come if the Republican Congress repeals the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare). One section of the Act, known as the Byrd Amendment, made it easier for miners with at least 15 years of experience to file for black lung benefits, essentially shifting the burden of proving the cause of the disease from the miner to the mining company.

If the Affordable Care Act is repealed and the Byrd Amendment gets struck along with it, it could open a new set of challenges and delays that miners like Mackie Branham Jr. would have to face in trying to claim their black lung benefits.

Hope for Christmas

The benefits process is adversarial and difficult to get through even with the help of a lawyer. Both Mackie and Amber Branham’s fathers have form of black lung, but neither was able to get benefits, and that seems to be a common story.

It looks like Branham’s story is going to be different. On December 13th, the Branhams got some good news. After Branham submitted a diagnosis from seven doctors— including a final one chosen by Alpha Natural Resources— a Kentucky judge awarded Branham his worker’s compensation benefits, and Branham has hope that he’ll get a benefits payment in time for Christmas.

McConnell's Plan Doesn't Include Long-Term Options for Miners Benefits

A stopgap bill by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to temporarily protect health care benefits for thousands of retired coal miners has been met with resounding criticism from Senate Democrats.

The pensions and benefits for thousands of retired coal miners are set to run out by the end of this year. Senate Democrats have been working for years to pass the Miner’s Protection Act – a bill that would move money from the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund into the miners’ pension and benefits plan. This bill has been met with resistance by Senate Republicans who are wary of bailing out unionized workers.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell counter proposed paying for miners’ health care by taking money from their current health-care plan. This proposal only provides enough funds for four months.

In a Tuesday statement, Sen. Joe Manchin, says he will block other bills on the Senate floor until miners get their full health care and pension money. Senator Capito also released a statement expressing her disappointment in Congress’ failure to pass the full bill.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.