President Cecil Roberts said the campaign, called “Fairness at Patriot”, would target the headquarters of Peabody Energy in the Missouri city. according to St Louis Post-Dispatch .
He did not say when when the protests would occur.
Peabody spun off Patriot as a separate company in 2007. Many workers who retired from operations previously owned by Peabody that became part of the Patriot portfolio may now be impacted the bankruptcy reorganization.
According to the paper, Roberts has drawn parallels regarding the UMWA’s plans to the union’s 1989 Pittston Coal Strike. That 14-month strike to protest the healthcare benefits of retirees as well as widows and disabled miners resulted in the arrest of 4,000 miners.
Roberts led that campaign prior to being tapped for his current seat as president.
The Post-Dispatch said Robert’s position was that Patriot’s Chapter 11 filing and events that led up to it were a “moral issue” that the UMWA must stand against.
“What we have here is a company reneging on its promises,” Roberts said of Peabody, the newspaper reported.
“We're not going to take it and we're going to do whatever we have to do to see that promises made by these corporations are kept. We know the way to St Louis, and we have the money to get people there.”
Peabody’s response
In an ILN interview Wednesday afternoon, a Peabody spokeswoman confirmed that, contrary to UMWA claims, one of its subsidiaries has assumed obligation to pay more than $600 million in healthcare liabilities under the spin-off.
“While these are administered by Patriot, Peabody has paid for these healthcare benefits since the spin off and continues to do so today,” Meg Gallagher said.
“The UMWA was fully aware of the plan regarding retiree healthcare benefits at the time of the spin-off and assented to the payment arrangement. And, contrary to union claims, Patriot was a viable company when it was spun off in 2007, and substantial events inside and outside Patriot’s control significantly altered its future.”
Gallagher went on to say that the company and the world have both significantly changed since October 2007, when the Patriot spin-off came into existence.
“These changes include Patriot’s transformational acquisition of Magnum Coal Company, significant changes in Patriot’s capital structure, decreased demand for US coal due to sharp declines in natural gas prices, the softening of global steel markets and more burdensome regulations,” she said.
“Patriot notes many of these same factors in its filings with the bankruptcy court.”
On July 9, 2012, Patriot announced that the miner and its wholly owned subsidiaries had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Following this news, the price of Patriot shares dropped 72% from a closing of $US2.19 per share on July 6 to 61c per share on July 9.
The company was the first to seek court protection for its financial situation since coal markets tanked; it blamed cancelled contracts, rising costs and plummeting coal prices for its woes.
Patriot holds 12 active mining complexes in Appalachia and the Illinois Basin and controls about 1.9 billion tons of coal reserves.
Its clientele is electricity generators as well as steel and coke producers.
The UMWA has been very vocal on the topic since the bankruptcy filing was first announced and has been critical of its filing in the state of New York. It is fighting to see the reorganization moved to the Southern District of West Virginia because it is “a case about coal and coal miners who live here in the coalfields”, Roberts said last month.
“No-one has ever mined an ounce of coal in Manhattan. Setting up dummy corporations to cherry-pick a legal venue, like Patriot did, is morally wrong.
“This case belongs in Charleston, not Manhattan.”
He also said recently that the UMWA would strike if it had to.
The Patriot bankruptcy case is In re Patriot Coal Corp., 12-12900, in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
