Got a couple of good pm's from CoeburnCane on the whole union issue I brought up........



don't know about industry-wide, but I do know that out of all of Alpha's companies in WV, PA, KY, and VA (about 10 separate entities between Paramont, Callaway, Maxxim, Dickenson-Russell, Enterprise, Brooks Run, Amfire, Black Dog, and Alpha Services), that Dickenson-Russell coal company is the only mining company we have that has any union mines whatsoever, and they're maybe 30, 40 percent unionized. There used to be a few union men in our WV operations, but those dissolved on their own after we came in.

Post UMWA in the 80's, the unions had a quick increase, then a decline as more coal companies started working more on employee relations and giving more concessions in terms of salary & health care. A few years up the road, the price of coal jumped up again to high levels compared to what they were in the 90's. After that is when your larger regional companies on the eastern seaboard like Teco, ICG, Massey, and now Alpha started getting big and buying up all of the smaller mines to either A) mine them with as many men as they could throw at it to get the coal out and get it sold, especially in today's higher price coal market...OR...B) buy the small peanuts mines, do reclamation on the land, and gain reimbursements from the state agencies that in turn went right back into the mines that were worth running full bore.

With the advances in human resource management in the industry today, and with the approach to mining coal that changed from the 80's up to today, it's just not a very union-friendly environment in coal.


Yeah--the trick about unions is that they say "the union is here for the employees!", but they're really there for the union. As long as the employees believe they're a part of the union and it's success, then they'll be duped into going along with whatever the union decides, instead of allowing the individual to deal with HR and the company themselves on an employer/employee basis.

You ever notice, especially around mines, that the ones who are proudest about the union and shout it from the rooftops that they're a "union man", are most of the time the ones who don't get the full benefits of the union, or haven't been in it for too long?

Collective bargaining as a mine unit is one thing--unionizing and trying to bully a company you work for into doing something you want is a whole different issue. Thank God the unions at DR are really just superficial and holdovers from the UMWA days that don't have much power.