This is the second part of Mountain State Spotlight’s discussion with Cecil Roberts, who is retiring after 30 years as president of the United Mine Workers of America. Read part one here.
Ward: I’ve really kind of wrangled around trying to figure out how to ask this. Lots of people pontificate a lot about West Virginia’s sort of political flop to being majority, super majority in the Legislature, Republican. But I wanted to ask something really more basic, and it’s just this: What do you think of President Trump?
Roberts: I think he obviously came from a very wealthy family. I don’t think he’s ever had to work, like most West Virginians have had to work. He never served in the military. And you don’t have to do any of those things, obviously, to be a decent person.
I think he really dislikes people who disagree with him. There’s a lot of people who disagree with me and our union, and I don’t want to get rid of them. I just accept the fact that in a democracy, that’s got to be something as a leader, you accept. You accept criticism.
And I think we’re in a dangerous position in this country right now, because too many people are hating too many other people. And I think I would prefer the President of the United States try to prevent that. Because I don’t care who you are, you don’t have a right, or you shouldn’t be taking a gun and killing somebody, or going in a church and killing people and trying to burn the church down, or going in a governor’s mansion and trying to kill his family because you disagree with him. There’s too much of that going on. And I wish the President of the United States would mediate that, as opposed, in my opinion, to probably causing a lot of it.
Ward: Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced a series of steps, reopening millions of acres of federal land, spending $600 million to retrofit coal-fired power plants. This is part of the president’s plan to reinvigorate the coal industry. Is his plan the right thing to do and the right way to do it? Do you think it’s going to work?
Roberts: The coal industry was contracting, mines were closing, beginning probably in 2003, but it really went completely out of control around 2012 forward. All of these bankruptcies. And in those bankruptcies, some of the most precious things that we had to protect our workers and our retirees were guaranteed pensions, guaranteed health care, and the collective bargaining agreement itself for active workers. And in every one of those bankruptcies, the pension plan went out the window, the health care for pensioners went out the window, and the contract itself was terminated. So we had to figure out how to deal with that.
So to answer your question, what I’ve said recently about this, we applaud any efforts to keep coal miners working, and we’ve tried, and we make no apologies for trying to keep our coal miners that we represent working, because I think that’s part of my job here. If you get a president here who doesn’t care if coal miners have a job, you have to get rid of him.
But let me tell you what the real problem is here with keeping the coal mine business going, keeping coal miners working is where is the marketplace for that coal? The marketplace for metallurgical coal is overseas, and here recently, the marketplace for steam coal has been out of the country, because this country has started to convert to some other form of electric generation. For years now, I’ve said the only way for coal to continue to be part of the fuel source for generating electricity is technology.
I still recall, in 2008, going right back to this area where we engaged in this major strike in 1989, Barack Obama standing on the stage and saying, if we can figure out how to put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to burn coal cleanly. At this point in time, in our history, we don’t have that technology. We’ve got some promises of the technology that may work here, but utilities, believe it or not, are in the business of making money. Jay Rockefeller, one time told us, see, these utilities don’t care what they burn. They want to burn the cheapest product out there, allowing them to stay in business. I fear that utilities are not going to take it. I wish they would, because that would keep our people working, right? But they’re not going to do it. Here’s the reason they’re not going to do it. Here’s the reality of this situation. These coal-fired power plants are billion-dollar, billions of dollars and 40-year investments. These utilities, I’m afraid, are not going to say what, oh gee, what President Trump’s doing here encourages us to build a 2, 3, 4, 5 billion-dollar coal-fired power plant now, understanding that four years from now, somebody else will be in the White House and tell us we can’t do this. So your 40-year investment became a four-year investment. So I’m concerned without the technology that we’ve been talking about here for years and years and years. I don’t see that being something that’s going to put people to work.
Ward: When you got the legislation through for the health and retirement funds, was that a weight on you that was lifted? It was just how many tens of thousands of people that were depending on you to take care of this huge problem for them?
Roberts: Our pension plan would have collapsed about a year or about two years ago, if we hadn’t passed this legislation that dealt with both the pensions and the health care. And people who had been opposed to this for years switched and Republicans and Democrats alike. Remember, you can’t pass legislation, or you couldn’t then, without Republican help. And we got it, and I’m so appreciative of that.
Ward: The numbers I mean, the numbers speak for them, for themselves. There’s about 45,000 coal miners working, give or take, in the United States today. It’s less than half of what were working when you and I met. The number, the percentage drop in West Virginia is similar. When people talk about a reinvigorated coal industry, what do you think that looks like for a place like West Virginia and other places in the coalfields? I asked that because one of the things I wonder about is our politicians and others sort of talking about this in a way that, hey, you know, if we just do this thing, we’ll have 100,000 coal miners working again in this country. And what do you think reinvigorating the coal industry looks like?
Roberts: The question I get asked the most by people, my fellow brothers and sisters in the labor movement. So what happened to West Virginia? Used to be 100% Democrats, and now they’re 100% Republicans. It may not be 100% but it’s probably 98.2% or something. We’re in that neighborhood. And the answer to that is relatively simple to me. When I was vice president of District 17 there were 70,000 union coal miners working in the state of West Virginia, and every office holder that I can think of, for the most part, was a Democrat. Now, does anybody not see the connection there, that when you’ve got a lot of union coal miners, unions have a lot of power to do good things. In the state of West Virginia, unions have an opportunity to do good things up on the hill. When unions shrink, everybody suffers from it.
And the other thing that we should remember here is for every coal miner that has a job, the ratio is pretty strong here that about four other people have a job somewhere, either they’re making the roof bolts, or they’re making the equipment, or there’s a greater demand for electricity because of all the coal mines that utilize electricity throughout Appalachia. So it wasn’t just the coal miners losing their jobs, it was everybody else that supported. Might be somebody who just had a little hot dog restaurant somewhere, making $50,000 a year. The unions brought clinics and doctors and hospitals to Appalachia because of their contracts. John L. Lewis built 10 hospitals from 46 on, people, everybody benefited from this.
So what does it look like? It looks like more technology to me. It looks like more uses for coal, and the marketplace has to expand somehow. And I’m not saying there’s an easy answer to that, but the other thing is, why aren’t you? Why didn’t somebody, anybody, everybody, think about the future for the coal industry? They were devastated when this was all done.
I’ve told every Democrat that ever ran for office that what you’ve done and what’s happened in the coalfields of the United States has been devastating to the economy. I had the occasion to be in Mingo County a couple weeks ago, and I drove back through Pineville and then over to Beckley, and it might bring tears to your eyes. You’ve got all these stores that used to be able to employ people, and they’re closed, trees growing up around. Many a mobile home that people used to live in has been abandoned. People have left this area. As we know, the state of West Virginia has lost more population than anybody. We never look at these things. And I’ve had some really, really high Democrats, and I wouldn’t use their name, because I promised not to, that told me that we should never do what we did here to Appalachia without a plan for the workers. There’s no such thing in this country, Ken, as a just transition.
Ward: Let me come at this in a little different way. With this question, you described being in Mingo County and that drive through Pineville back to Beckley …
Roberts: Bad as it can be, man.
Ward: It’s tragic. Let me ask about this this way. Governor Marland, many years ago, 1953, I think, was the first to call for a severance tax on coal. And Governor Marland said, “Let’s use this equitable source of revenue because, whether we like it or not, West Virginia’s hills will be stripped. The bowels of the earth will be mined, and the refuse strewn across our valleys and our mountains in the form of burning slate dumps. And he said we should tax this resource as it’s being mined, so that the riches of it aren’t mostly hauled away someplace else. When you look at West Virginia now, and you look at some of those places. Do you think that we’ve kind of squandered what could have been if we had planned for someday in the future when all the coal would be gone? What do we do then? Did we miss our chance to make sure that the kids in Mingo County, their schools should be palaces. The roads should not be falling apart. The bridges should not be falling apart. Did we miss our chance?
Roberts: Oh amen, You’ve never heard me say I feel really sorry for the coal industry with respect to the fact that we should have taxed them in the past. We should have when we had that opportunity. But as we all know the history of West Virginia is not the best. I mean, when it comes to how West Virginians have been treated over the years. I know somebody’s going to get mad at me for saying that, but I’ve managed to have everybody that I know mad at me at some point in time.
Not only did we not take advantage of the fact that we had a booming business here for many, many years, and we never asked them to pay their fair share. My gosh, they told us there was no such thing as black lung for years and didn’t want to fund a program or be responsible for a program. People were dying and choking to death. And here we have this issue with silica dust. This seems like we’re just back in 1969, fighting that same fight we fought before.
There’s no question in my mind that Appalachia, not just West Virginia, but all through Appalachia and all through the coalfields of the United States, they’ve never paid their fair share.
Ward: Something that I’ve kind of observed in being a reporter trying to talk to coal miners. My family wasn’t a family of coal miners. My dad was a school teacher, and the people in the little town where I grew up, most of them worked in a paper mill, but it was a company town. But one of the things that I’ve noticed that in reporting that I hear from people that has changed is when I started this work, I heard a lot from coal miners that I talked to, that talked about what they were doing, if it was why are we on strike here? We’re trying to protect their health care for the retirees. But I also heard a lot of — I go down into that mine every day, because I want those kids of mine to go to college and to not have to do that to be able to do something else, if that’s what they want. But it happened somewhere around the second Obama administration. I started hearing a lot more of they’re trying to get rid of the coal industry. And if we don’t have the coal industry, what could we, here in West Virginia, ever have? What could a kid from here ever do? And I’m just wondering if maybe that’s just an observation that as a reporter, kind of an outsider of those communities that I picked up on. But do you think that there has been a, perhaps because of the contraction of the industry and the economic fear that brings with it, there has been that sort of a change?
Roberts: I can tell you, my dad, I think I broke his heart when I went underground. He didn’t want me to be a coal miner. He wanted me to find something else to do.
But I think if people think they’re going to lose the basic industry that supports employment. Maybe look at all the different counties where coal was booming at some point in time, and that’s what West Virginia is going to look like if you don’t have some kind of industry that provides jobs. And that is a fear, and it’s a fear they should have.
Ward: I remember Rich Trumka gave a speech in which he talked about climate change and coal miners, and he reflected that coal miners probably understand that the climate is changing better than most people. They like to hunt, they like to fish. They’re outside. They see the seasons changing. And it was just a remarkable sort of speech. Could you talk about what it does to the communities like the one where you grew up, or, for that matter, like the one where I grew up, the paper mill there is gone. What does it do to the willingness of people in those communities to talk about change, if the change is kind of being portrayed as getting rid of the only thing that they see is the major opportunity to support a family in the community where they live?
Roberts: I think I can speak to that easily. The community where I was born doesn’t exist anymore. There’s not a single home. And unless it’s up on top of the mountain somewhere, and I’ve missed it, there isn’t a single coal mine there. There are no jobs there. So everybody knows in West Virginia what happens when there are no more coal mines in the area that you’re from. So everybody understands that what you get here is unemployment or low employment, or you have to move and move out of state. So excuse me, if we haven’t learned what happens when the coal industry leaves by now, and for no other industry to go to. I just don’t know. I don’t think there’s any way where we will ever know.