The rally is scheduled for August 13 beginning at 10, and union workers, retirees and other supporters will meet at Kiener Plaza, across from Peabody Energy headquarters downtown.
UMWA president Cecil Roberts will be in attendance, the group said, as well as union secretary treasurer Dan Kane and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
“We are in ongoing talks with Patriot Coal to lessen the impact of severe cutbacks on active and retired miners, but nobody should forget who really caused this problem,” Roberts said.
“Executives at Peabody Energy created Patriot, they failed to give it enough assets to meet its obligations, and we’re not going to sit idly by and let miners and their families pay the price for their failure.”
The UMWA’s last rally on July 30, which took place outside of Arch Coal’s main office in the St Louis suburb of Creve Couer, attracted more than 3000 individuals and resulted in 10 arrests for civil disobedience.
Arch Coal created Magnum Coal in 2005. Patriot – a 2007 Peabody spin-off company – acquired Magnum in 2008.
The UMWA has argued that those companies were started to roll off their respective parents’ obligations.
“Every time we point out that the original employers of these workers are responsible for the promises they made to these workers, corporate executives say we’re ‘re-writing history’,” Roberts said.
“Actually, the history is pretty simple … [t]he overwhelming majority of people affected by this situation never worked a day for any company called Patriot … [t]hey worked their entire careers for Arch or Peabody.
“Arch and Peabody are still profitable companies, and it’s just plain wrong to use a corporate shell game to deny workers the benefits they rightfully earned during a lifetime of labor in the coal mines.”
Robert said he was not surprised Peabody and Arch executives kept trying to change the subject.
“But we’re going to stay on this case until justice is done,” he said.
The union, the largest industry union group in the country, has filed a lawsuit in West Virginia charging that Peabody, Arch and Patriot violated the federal Employment Retirement Income Security Act by “scheming to eliminate contractually-guaranteed lifetime health care benefits for retirees”.
It is also working with a bipartisan legislative group of more than 20 US representatives and senators from California, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia on legislation to provide help to retired miners and widows whose health benefits are threatened.
