Sep 21, 2016 3 min read

The U.S. Senate Finance Committee voted Wednesday to approve the Miners Protection Act, a bill that would provide funding to support the health care and pension benefits of retired union miners and their families.

The committee voted 18-8 to approve the measure, sending it to the U.S. Senate floor for consideration. Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., members of the committee, both voted in favor of the bill.

“It has been a long fight to gain a congressional committee’s approval of this critical legislation,” UMW President Cecil Roberts said following the vote.

He thanked those who supported the bill.

“Now that this important first step has been achieved, it is vital that Congress move as quickly as possible to finally pass this legislation that will mean so much to the lives of thousands of senior citizens across America,” he said.

The bill would ensure continuing health care and pension benefits to about 120,000 former union miners and their families.

It calls for using excess money in the Abandoned Mine Land Fund to support the union’s pension and health benefit programs, which are nearing insolvency because of a downturn in the industry and coal company bankruptcies.

Casey, a co-sponsor of the bill, said the committee’s action was an important step to guarantee coal miners and their families don’t lose their health coverage or pensions through no fault of their own.

“This effort has been about ensuring that the federal government keeps the promises it made to the coal miners who descended into the depth and darkness of our nation’s mines in order to power our country,” he said.

The union maintains the bill keeps a promise made in 1946 by the federal government, which had seized the nation’s coal mines to avert a lengthy strike and negotiated an agreement guaranteeing miners life-time health care and pension benefits.

The bipartisan legislation would ensure retired miners receive the benefits they have earned, Toomey said. But he also spoke of the damage to the coal industry caused by President Obama’s “war on coal.”

“The main reason that we’re here today … is because of the all-too-successful war on coal. That’s why we’re here,” Toomey said, speaking of clean air policies that have resulted in the closing of 350 coal-fired electric plants since 2010.

“The administration decided they wanted to put these people out of work. They decided they wanted to bankrupt this industry, and sadly, they’ve been pretty successful so far,” he said.

The bill is not expected to be considered by the full Senate until mid-November, UMW spokesman Phil Smith said earlier. A similar bill is being considered in the House.