Miners: Needs are urgent for numerous members

FAIRMONT — They walked off buses on Thursday night, wearing camouflage shirts sporting such sayings as “The Fight Starts Now. Get Ready.” and “We Are One. We Are Everywhere. UMWA.”

These men and women, from Fairmont, Morgantown and the surrounding areas, earlier in the day had participated in a United Mine Workers of America (UMW) rally in Washington, D.C., to fight for the health and pension benefits of miners.

The approximately 10,000 people in attendance at the rally were demonstrating to get the Senate to bring Senate Bill 1714, the Miner’s Protection Act of 2015, up for a vote, according to Marion County Delegate Mike Caputo, who also serves as the UMW International District 33 Vice President.

The bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate in July 2015. The lead sponsor of the bill is Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

If the bill is passed it would require money from the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund to be transferred to the Multiemployer Health Benefit Plan and the 1974 UMW Pension Plan, Caputo said.

This bill will protect the pension benefits for 120,000 retired coal miners and their families, and the health-care coverage of 20,000 retired coal miners threatened by coal company

bankruptcies, according to a press release from Congressman David McKinley, R-W.Va.

David Bienkoski, 63, of Rivesville, is a retired miner. He attended the four-hour rally in Washington, D.C.

He retired in 2008 after working 38 years as a coal miner for Consol Energy in the Blacksville No. 2 mine in Monongalia County. He retired after he had a heart attack.

Bienkoski is a member of the UMW District 31, Local 1702.

He attended the rally because it is important to the membership of the UMW, he said.

“After the first of the year, people are going to start losing their health care,” Bienkoski said. “Later on in the year if we don’t get this passed, people are going to get a reduction in their pension. Overall the average pension is about $500 a month. Me, I get a bigger pension, but some of the older folks they don’t get much.”

The bankrupt coal companies do not have to contribute to the health insurance plan or the pension plan, he said.

“The bankruptcy judges have said, ‘You don’t have to contribute,’” Bienkoski said. “Everybody else gets their money. Vendors and all these lawyers get all their money. But not the people that work for a living, that made these companies rich all these years.”

He gets a pension and Social Security. If he loses his pension it will be tough but he’ll make it, Bienkoski said.

“A lot of people that are drawing these pensions are widows in their 70s, a lot of them in nursing homes. It’s going to affect them a lot more than it affects me.”

If the mine he worked for goes bankrupt and the law protecting miners is not passed, then he will not have health insurance either, he said.

“That would ruin me,” he said. “I would go bankrupt. That is the way a lot of our members are. When it comes to the point where a person has to decide whether they buy their medication or eat, that’s why I’m worried about some of our members.”

There were people from other unions and from several states including West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah, Caputo said.

“All these people traveling all this distance, it shows the need,” Bienkoski said. “It shows these people, especially a lot of these older folks, were passing out from the heat, but they wanted to be there, because they know the only way it was going to change was to petition our government.”

Not only were rally participants passing out in the heat, but some of them were arrested as well.

“There were approximately 100 of us that were placed under arrest,” including Caputo himself, he said.

All the people who participate in the rally were trying to send a message, Caputo said.

“We’re trying to send the message to Congress that we need this bill passed,” he said. “It is of the utmost importance to protect and preserve the health care and the pensions that these coal miners have earned and have been promised by the federal government since 1946.”

The UMW wants Congress to do its job and put the bill up for a vote. There has been a huge bipartisan effort working on this bill for the past few years, but it has not come up for a vote, Caputo said.

“For the last couple of years Sen. (Mitch) McConnell out of Kentucky has blocked it,” Caputo said. “We hope he is coming around. We certainly have been working with him. He has a lot of miners in Kentucky that this would affect. Hopefully he’ll do the right thing.”

Congress needs to act on this bill soon, Caputo said.

“If Congress doesn’t act soon, by the end of the year there’s going to be a lot of miners — I hate to sound harsh here — but they’re just going to die, because they’re not going to be able to afford their health care,” Caputo said. “They’re not going to be able to afford prescriptions that they need every day.”

The UMW believes there will be a vote on the bill by the Senate Finance Committee next week, he said.

“That’s pretty much been promised to Sen. Manchin and Sen. (Shelley Moore) Capito,” he said. “We hope that that is the springboard that will put us before the full Senate. We believe we have the votes to pass it. We certainly have the votes in the House. It just always gets stalled in the Senate.”

Bienkoski is hopeful that the rally brought attention to the bill too.

“I think the response was good,” he said. “I think it opened up a lot of people’s eyes. I think we’re going to get a lot of people looking at what’s going on.”

Email Michelle Dillon at mdillon@timeswv.com.