Miners union eyes Peabody Energy workers

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The once-mighty United Mine Workers yesterday said it plans to begin a campaign to organize workers at the nation's largest coal company.

Non-union miners at Peabody Energy Corp. have little job security, low pay and poor health benefits, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts told a rally outside the company's headquarters.

The St. Louis company has 8,200 employees worldwide, and the union represents 2,200 workers at eight mines in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and Colorado. Peabody operates 30 coal mines in the United States.

The union will face a difficult task in its effort to organize Peabody's non-union miners.

Mr. Roberts said the union will ask Peabody executives to remain neutral and allow use of a labor-friendly card-check program, which avoids bitter campaigning because it lets workers form a union when a majority sign cards asking for representation.

But company officials declined yesterday and said the mine workers must hold an election sponsored by the National Labor Relations Board, a procedure labor leaders view as rancorous, expensive and time consuming.

"We will not agree to card check and neutrality," Peabody spokesman Vic Svec said.

Even if miners vote in secret NLRB elections to join a union, employers are free to appeal the results. Labor leaders complain that appeals can delay unionization efforts by years.

"We don't plan to petition the NLRB for an election today, tomorrow or ever," Mr. Roberts said. "The greatest resource you have is the will of your own membership, and I think we have that."

The union also has an estimated $160 million in cash that it will use to help fund the organizing drive, Mr. Roberts said.

Labor leaders will have a difficult time fighting industry behemoth Peabody because the union's strength has waned, said Paul Clark, professor of labor studies and industrial relations at Pennsylvania State University.

"The union has faced a lot of challenges. It hasn't been able to make inroads and it's a shell of what it was 20 or 30 years ago. It had been one of the leaders of the labor movement with [former president] John L. Lewis, who was arguably one of the greatest labor leaders ever. Now it has virtually disappeared," Mr. Clark said.

The union had an estimated 500,000 members in the 1940s, Mr. Clark said.

U.S. coal mines now employ about 50,000 miners, according to the union, and 20,000 workers are members of the United Mine Workers.

In part, the union's density in the coal-mining industry has fallen as mines in the western U.S. have opened and workers there have not joined the union. The industry's most productive mines are in western states, and mines in two counties in Wyoming's Powder River Basin produce about 40 percent of the nation's coal.

Peabody may be an attractive target for the union because higher demand for coal has led to surging profits.

Peabody reported in October that third-quarter net income more than doubled to $113.3 million from $43.4 million a year earlier.

Shares of Peabody fell yesterday $2.72 to $81.18 at the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.