Many Americans Share Miners’ Problem
Your job may be a world apart from that of the striking U.S. coal miners, but you almost certainly share at least one increasingly serious problem with the embattled miners: the difficulty in getting and keeping adequate, often urgently needed, medical care after retirement.
The shameful move in January, 1988, by the profitable Pittston Coal Group to avoid its share of the cost of medical care for 1,500 disabled and retired miners--as well as for the widows and children of those who have died--was the initial spark that 14 months later ignited the first major coal strike in America in more than a decade.
Just the Pittston miners are on strike, in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia, but the future of all U.S. miners will be affected by the outcome of the dispute.
Pittston is not the only company trying to duck the expense of helping retired workers pay for their ballooning medical expenses, which are far and away the highest for older people.
An undetermined number of non-union companies are eliminating or sharply curtailing programs that help pay retirees’ medical costs. Union workers, too, are being plagued by a rash of similar moves across the country by large and small companies.
One example: A strike began nearly eight months ago against a Los Angeles facility of the French-owned food company Smart & Final Iris Corp. partly because the firm refused to continue paying health-care premiums for retirees represented by the Teamsters Union.
Like Pittston, both Smart & Final and its parent, Casino France, one of the world’s largest food marketing concerns, are financially healthy.
Also like Pittston, Smart & Final had belonged to an association of companies that had all signed union contracts providing uniform wages and benefits, including health benefits for retirees.
The first signs of the workers’ trouble with Smart & Final came when the company broke with its employer association. The miners’ first clue that trouble was brewing with Pittston was that company’s announcement that it was breaking away from the Bituminous Coal Operators Assn.
Leaving the employer associations meant that the firms were planning to use the wages and benefits of their workers as weapons in their competition for business--bad news for their rivals in their respective industries, but much worse news for their workers.
The two renegade companies, like a growing number of others, figured that they could grab a competitive advantage by slashing labor costs below those paid by rivals that are continuing to honor the union contract terms they had all negotiated together.
Both defectors started by hitting the most vulnerable people, the retirees who have little clout to force companies to continue helping them with medical costs.
Assistance from the retirees’ unions is usually very limited because federal labor laws require companies to negotiate “in good faith” with unions about the wages and benefits of active employees--not retirees.
That means that if retiree health benefits are snatched away by their former bosses, those still on the job cannot legally strike to aid them.
However, other issues are in dispute at both Pittston and Smart & Final, so those strikes are legal. And those other issues aren’t trivial.
At Pittston, management wants to gut the union contract by reducing pay, health and pension benefits for active as well as retired workers. The company also wants to be able to schedule miners for work on holidays and Sundays, and to use non-union companies to do more of the work now done by union miners.
Other unionized companies in their industries almost surely will demand similar concessions if Pittston and Smart & Final succeed in trashing the retirees’ benefits and reducing the wages and benefits of active workers.
Industry Changed
This would provoke more strikes and more trouble for the once-powerful United Mine Workers, whose membership has dropped precipitously from 500,000 in the 1940s to about 70,000 today.
When union miners produced almost all of the nation’s coal, the organization negotiated with companies that were engaged almost exclusively in the coal business.
Now miners produce about 30% of the coal and their union must deal with giant conglomerates that own oil, gas, coal and a host of other businesses. That enables the companies to use the profits of one division to fight unions in another division.
Never in the union’s nearly 100-year history has it faced such powerful economic forces.
Thriving companies justify their attacks on active workers by saying that they simply want to lower costs. They justify their attack on retirees by noting that medical costs for a 21-year-old worker average an estimated $80 a month, but are nearly $550 for a 60-year-old who is not on Medicare.
Even when Medicare does kick in at age 65, it still costs $175 for the older worker’s health care.
In sum, though Medicare offers tremendous help to retirees over 65, without some kind of national health insurance system for all Americans, all retirees are going to be increasingly buffeted by soaring medical costs and by employer efforts to back away from paying their part of the tab.
Major Victory
That’s why the Smart & Final workers, and especially the miners, have staked so much on their historic battles to prevent their employers from breaking with the rest of their industries and sharply reducing wages and benefits.
Miners in the Soviet Union are economically far behind their American counterparts, and the Soviet workers risked much more when they struck against their totalitarian government. But the miners there won a major victory.
If the American miners and other workers fail to hold onto their hard-won gains, more and more employers around the country will be forced by the renegade competitors to demand similar reductions of wages and benefits for both active and retired workers.
