Originally posted to PolluterWatch
Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the US and one of the largest in the world, is once again embroiled in controversy over shady treatment of employees.
In 2007, Peabody Energy created Patriot Coal, a spin-off company comprised of Peabodys eastern US mines. According to lawsuits involving the United Mine Workers (UMW), Patriot was formed as a place to stash union mines in West Virginia and the Midwest, along with the significant pension and health-care obligations that these eastern mines held. According to UMW, Patriot was essentially a “company created to fail,” to give Peabody Energy and Arch Coal (another major US coal company who sold union mines to Patriot) an easy way to avoid paying union pensions and health-care benefits, while continuing to profit from their giant, nonunion surface mines in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.
Once Patriot declared bankruptcy, which it did last July, all of the pensions and medical benefits Peabody was obligated to pay their workers were put on the chopping block, just as Peabody had hoped. If Peabody succeeds, 10,000 retirees and another 10,000 dependents will lose the benefits promised them.
Now, retired mine workers who labored for Peabody under the promise that they would receive health care and pensions, are outraged. Protests have forced Peabody to move its annual meeting to Wyoming, to avoid the civil disobedience by coal miners in the east.
This is just the latest chapter in a long history of deceptive and exploitative practices by Peabody Energy and the coal industry in general. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a coal front group funded by Peabody claims Coal = Jobs. But Peabodys callous treatment of pensioners exposes what math the coal industry really cares about.
Peabody is currently attempting to open up coal export terminals in the Pacific northwest, to ship coal mined from the Powder River Basin to China. Of course they promise jobs and prosperity in return for the tremendous pollution shipping this coal will cause. But given Peabody’s treatment of workers, people in the Pacific northwest should be extremely skeptical about the Peabody’s promises.
