Massey Energy

Until 1984 Massey’s unionized operations went along with the industry-wide collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the major coal operators and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). But that year, at the urging of a young executive named Don Blankenship—who would later rise to the top position at the company—Massey withdrew from the employer association, and tried to go its own way to reduce costs. The company also insisted on negotiating separately at each of its unionized mines.

UMWA members found these moves intolerable, and in October 1984 more than 1,000 of them went on strike at several Massey mines in West Virginia. The walkout started peacefully, but after several months the dispute turned volatile as picketers faced off against company guards leading attack dogs behind new chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Massey brought in strikebreakers to keep production going, and the strikers fought back. The confrontation went on for 15 months, until the company and the UMWA announced a settlement in late 1985, though the terms of that agreement were unclear.

The two sides continued their dispute in court. Ultimately, in November 1988 the UMWA announced that it had achieved an out-of-court settlement under which Massey agreed to pay about $2.4 million in back wages to strikers fired during the strike.

Yet the tensions between labor and management continued as Massey phased out most of its unionized mines, and the UMWA found it difficult to carry out new organizing efforts at a company that was open about its anti-union stance. When Blankenship was promoted to president of Massey in July 1990, the Wall Street Journal, noting his role in pushing a hard line against the UMWA six years earlier, headlined its story “Massey Coal Picks Union Opponent as Its President.” While testifying in a federal lawsuit in 1996, Blankenship declared: “No [coal] operator in their right mind would go union” (Charleston Gazette, April 20, 1996).

One of those places where the company exhibited its hard line against unionization was the Upper Big Branch mine, where the UMWA launched a high-profile organizing drive after the operation opened in 1995. Although the area was considered a union stronghold, the company put so much pressure on the workers that they narrowly voted against UMWA representation twice—in 1995 and in 1997.

When Massey was seeking to purchase bankrupt Lady H Coal Co. in 1996, a company executive testified in a court hearing that Massey would not go ahead with the deal unless it could temporarily shut the operation down and get rid of the unionized workforce (Charleston Gazette, Feb. 6, 1996).

By the time the company was spun off from Fluor, and issued its first 10-K annual filing as Massey Energy in 2001, it was able to report that only 152 of its 3,610 employees were affiliated with the UMWA. By the end of 2009, the reported number of union members was down to 76 out of 5,851.

In September 2009 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Massey subsidiary Mammoth Coal violated federal labor law by refusing to hire 85 union members who had worked at a West Virginia mine for the previous owner, and by refusing to recognize and bargain with the UMWA after it took over the facility. A month later the company agreed to pay $8.75 million to settle an age discrimination suit that had been brought by the same group of workers.

Workplace Safety

The safety violations believed to have contributed to the 2010 tragedy at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia were not an anomaly. Massey had a long record of such violations at its various operations.

For example, in 1992 Massey paid $39,185 in fines to settle charges brought by the Mine Safety & Health Administration related to coal dust samples submitted for testing. After abnormalities were found in the samples, federal officials accused the company of tampering with the samples to reduce the amount of airborne coal dust that would be detected. The company claimed the dust dislodgement was accidental (Coal Week, Aug. 3, 1992).

In 1995 a worker at Massey’s Low Gap No. 2 mine in West Virginia was killed in a roof cave-in on the same day the facility had been cited for 14 violations of state safety regulations (Charleston Gazette, Sept. 24, 1995).

As incidents such as this continued, UMWA President Cecil Roberts in 2001 charged that Massey had the worst safety record in the industry (Charleston Gazette, July 19, 2001).

That record got even worse in January 2006, when a fire erupted at Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal’s Alma mine in Logan County, West Virginia, killing two workers. A state investigation later found that uncorrected safety violations were responsible for the deaths. In December 2008 Aracoma agreed to pay a record $4.2 million in criminal and civil penalties to resolve federal charges of willful violation of mandatory safety standards.

Massey’s poor safety record became a matter of controversy again in April 2010, after a methane gas explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine caused the deaths of 29 workers. News reports pointed out that the company received large numbers of safety violations, but blunted the impact of those citations by filing time-consuming appeals. It came to light that the specific mine where the disaster occurred had been cited more than 50 times in the month before the explosion. A dozen of those citations related to problems with ventilating the mine to prevent a buildup of methane. Upper Big Branch had racked up 1,342 violations over the previous five years.