Dec 9, 2016 4 min read

The United Mine Workers are vowing to fight for a long-term solution for the union’s ailing health care and pension funds despite the expected passage of a short-term spending bill in the U.S. Senate late Friday.

“We are not going away,” Ed Yankovich, UMW international vice president of District 2, said Friday hours before the Senate was expected to vote on a bill to keep the government operating.

The U.S. Senate was scheduled to consider the temporary spending bill late Friday, though several senators from coal-producing states, including Bob Casey, D-Pa., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said they opposed any action unless it included passage of the Miners Protection Act that would guarantee health care benefits and pensions to retired miners.

The emergency spending bill, which earlier this week was approved by the House, would keep the government operating until April 28.

In a yearlong campaign, the UMW has pushed for passage of the Miners Protection Act, which would provide long-term funding to cover health care benefits for union miners who worked at bankrupt coal companies, as well as for the union’s failing pension fund. About 16,000 retired miners from bankrupt coal companies stand to lose their health care benefits on Dec. 31. Another 6,500, including those from the Alpha Natural Resources’ closed Emerald Mine, will lose their benefits next summer.

Yankovich said Friday morning that the union was still pushing for inclusion of the entire Miners Protection Act in the emergency funding bill. With that vote in doubt, he said the UMW would push for it again “as soon as Congress reconvenes.”

“We’ll be back,” he said.

The House bill last week had only included funding to extend the health care benefits for four months and included no fix for the pension plan. Manchin and other senators had been pushing Friday for the extension of the health care benefits to last at least a year. Yankovich said reluctantly Friday morning that temporary funding for the health care benefits “is probably what we’ll end up with.”

Yankovich criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who earlier assured the bill’s sponsors the legislation would be considered for a vote provided it went through the normal committee process.

That was done, Yankovich said, when the Senate Finance Committee approved the bill in September, but the bill was never scheduled for a floor vote.

“He went back on his word,” Yankovich said of McConnell. “We have the votes to pass it (the entire bill), but he reneged on his word.”

Making matters worse, Yankovich said, the House bill proposes funding the four-month extension with money the union gained through negotiations in bankruptcy court.

The money, available only because of the union’s intervention, was set aside to pay for healthcare coverage for the bankrupt companies’ retired miners until a permanent fix could be found. Any money remaining in those funds after the extension, futhermore, will be turned over to the Treasury, Yankovich said.

“That’s ludicrous,” he said. “It’s insulting and it’s a crime.”

The Miners Protection Act proposed using excess money in the Abandoned Mine Land fund to support the pension plan and provide health benefits to those who worked for companies that have filed for bankruptcy.

The act would also include money to supplement the union’s underfunded pension plan.

The pension plan, which was almost fully funded prior to the 2008 recession, now faces insolvency. It provides pensions to about 90,000 retirees and covers future claims for an additional 16,000 miners. The plan could become insolvent within just a few years.

In pushing the legislation, the UMW has asked Congress only to keep the “promise” made by the federal government to union miners in 1946.

That “promise” of lifetime pensions and health benefits to miners and their families was first made in 1946 during negotiations between the UMW and the federal government, which had seized the nation’s coal mines to resolve long-running strikes. It was included in subsequent union contracts.