The UMWA-Manchin grand bargain
A United Mine Workers of America convention could fill Heinz Field with all of the folks working in the coal industry in 2021 and still have plenty of seats left over.
The capacity of the Steelers’ stadium is 68,400. There are some 44,000 men and women drawing coal-related paychecks. According to UMWA President Cecil Roberts, just 34,000 of these are actual coal miners.
In 2020, 7,000 coal jobs were lost. Lest you imagine this was an aberration due to COVID-19, consider this: despite its best efforts, the Trump administration was unable to stem the tide of coal-field job losses in the months before the virus struck.
According to an S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis, the Trump years “marked a new low in average coal mine employment.
“Average quarterly coal mining employment fell 23.6% from the first quarter of 2017, when Trump took office,” to the end of 2020, the S&P found.
Coal has been bleeding out jobs for years. It’s a shadow of its former self. So too is the UMWA. Once proud and powerful, the union may still be proud but it is by no means powerful, at least as far as membership numbers go.
However, it has a powerful ally in Sen. Joe Manchin, Democrat, of West Virginia. In a Senate split in half (50 Democrats, 50 Republicans), Manchin’s vote is key for Democrats.
A moderate hailing from a deep red state, Manchin has tremendous leverage when it comes to the legislative agenda of the Biden administration. When he speaks, the administration would do well to pay attention.
He spoke the other day to a National Press Club audience via Zoom. He was joined by the UMWA’s Roberts.
Both men made news. “We’re for jobs,” Roberts said, who went on to note that “two-thirds” of all the wind turbine and solar panel parts manufactured worldwide are made in China.
Roberts called for the enactment of federal tax credits to encourage the domestic production of such parts. “There needs to be tremendous investment here,” the union chief said, alluding to the administration’s long term infrastructure plan and its climate change goals.
“We (coal miners) always end up dealing with climate change, closing down coal mines. We never get to the second piece of it,” Roberts said, namely the creation of union-level-pay jobs to take the place of lost coal jobs.
According to the New York Times’ Norm Scheiber, reporting on Roberts’ remarks, “The UMW signaled a transition away from fossil fuels (coal) in exchange for new jobs in renewable energy (and) spending on technology to make coal” a cleaner and safer bet for the environment.
“We’re on the side of … a future for our people,” Roberts said. “If (these measures are) not a part of the conversation, at the end of the day we’ll be hard-pressed to be supportive” of the Biden administration plans.
Manchin spoke of the need to use carbon-capture technology as a means both of saving, as far as possible, existing coal jobs and of helping out the environment.
He suggested that without developing, perfecting and then exporting such technology around the world, the prospects for lowering fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere to the point of halting the planetary slide toward higher and higher average temperatures would stall out, owing to the strong reliance on so-called dirty coal in developing nations.
“I’m for innovation, not elimination,” Manchin said. It is “ridiculous,” he continued, for U.S. environmental activists and lawmakers to believe this nation could help cure the worldwide climate crisis without a robust carbon-capture effort here at home.
The senator also backed Roberts on switching out coal jobs for jobs in the burgeoning energy sectors of solar and wind with targeted tax credits for companies building plants in West Virginia and elsewhere where coal was once king.
As the UMWA’s chief Washington lobbyist, Phil Smith, told the Washington Post, “Let’s say there’s a plant that relocates to Marion County (Fairmont, which coincidentally, is home to the Manchin family) that makes ball bearings for wind turbines or makes turbine blades themselves – (those would be) skilled jobs … with long term career” prospects.
“We don’t want (union) coal miners who are making 32, 33 bucks an hour with great health care to step down into a $15-per-hour job with no health care.”
“We can’t leave people behind,” Manchin told the National Press Club.
The administration appears to be on board, though the devil is in the details. Its $2 trillion infrastructure plan has penciled in $15 billion for carbon-capture research, along with other emerging technologies.
According to a White House summary, Biden’s plan would also revise the carbon-capture tax credits enacted in the Trump years for application to existing power plants.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.