• Pittston Quits the Coal Business

  In 1998, A.T. Massey Coal Co. bought Pittston's Elkay Division, including most of its operations in Logan County and southern West Virginia. UMW President Cecil Roberts expressed concern about the sale of a long-unionized company to Massey.

  Beginning in the early 1980s, Massey led coalfield efforts to defeat UMWA locals where they existed and to prevent the Mine Workers from organizing any new company mines. Massey won a series of strikes between 1980 and 1986. (See the Appalshop documentary Mine War at Blackberry Creek for an excellent depiction of this strike).

  During the 1989-1990 Pittston strike, some of the most violent and bitter episodes in recent labor history occurred when Massey companies tried to fill coal orders for strike-idled Pittston mines. Roberts fears proved well founded as Massey has eliminated union jobs whenever possible.

  In December 1999, the Pittston Company announced plans to quit the coal business and sell all of its mining assets. A major force in southwestern Virginia for 100 years and a mainstay of the West Virginia coal industry for 70 years, Pittston said poor market conditions and an unstable regulatory climate led to the decision to leave the coal business. Pittston’s chairman Michael Dan said the coal division was profitable, but it was not producing enough income to cover what the company called its "legacy liabilities" - primarily its long-term medical costs for current and future retirees.

  Pittston sold most of its coal properties in Kentucky to Massey Energy Company and announced plans in summer 2002 to sell its remaining West Virginia holdings, about 300 million tons of coal reserves, to Horizon Natural Resources.

  In September 2002, Pittston announced plans to lay off all of its 900 workers in Virginia's coalfields in preparation for the sale of all of its coal mines and other assets in Russell, Dickenson and Wise counties to First Reserve Corp. of Greenwich, CT.

  In November 2002, Ashland, KY-based Horizon Natural Resources, now the country's fourth-largest coal company, filed for bankruptcy. This was done just six months after emerging from bankruptcy under its former name, AEI Resources. A Pittston spokesman said that despite the reorganization, the Horizon sale remained on track.

  Horizon Natural Resources then asked a federal bankruptcy judge to void the terms of its contract with the UMWA . Judge William Howard in Lexington, KY, issued a ruling on Aug. 31, 2004 that nullified the UMWA contract, allowing Horizon to void union contracts that provided guarantees to future jobs and health-care coverage for nearly 3,000 employees, including 2,300 retirees in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois. The health-care benefits that thousands of miners and their spouses were depending on to sustain them through retirement were gone. Many Horizon pensioners suffer from black lung and other debilitating diseases and injuries from working in the mines.

  In October 2004, International Coal Group was formed by billionaire Wilbur L. Ross Jr. to buy part of the holdings of bankrupt Horizon Natural Resources. Massey Energy bought the rest of Horizon.

  On Jan. 2, 2006, the worst mining disaster in West Virginia in nearly 40 years killed 12 miners and critically injured another at the International Coal Group’s Sago Mine.

  During the past decade the coal industry, like much of corporate America, has increasingly used political clout and the courts to eliminate/shift their responsibility for the health and welfare of their employees and the communities they mine/ reside in to individuals, and ultimately the taxpayers.

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