Warrior Met Coal celebrates labor day with propaganda website attempting to smear striking coal miners
1,100 coalminers represented by the United Mine Workers of America in Brookwood, Alabama, have been on strike since the start of April against Warrior Met Coal amid new union contract negotiations.
Heading into the six month of their strike, Warrior Met Coal decided to celebrate Labor Day weekend by publishing a ‘facts’ website about the strike, which is just a list of disingenuous analogies or claims, often no citations, raw data, or actual sources, and many of the facts don’t even disprove the claims made by workers on strike.
Warrior Met Coal took over the Brookwood, Alabama mines previously owned by Walter Energy in 2016. During bankruptcy proceedings, coal miners accepted several concessions, including pay cuts. Now in their new contract negotiations, miners are asking for proper compensation to reflect those concessions. The union estimates the concessions amount to around $1.1 billion, while Warrior Met Coal executives receive millions of dollars in compensation annually while never mining a piece of coal themselves.
One of the most egregious and shameful “facts” cited on Warrior Met Coal’s website is comparing the average compensation for a miner to the average salary in Alabama, inferring these workers already make enough or too much money for the work they do, obviously never mentioning the six figure salaries of the PR flacks who wrote the content for the website or the company’s executives and shareholders, which include hedge fund investment firms such as Blackrock.
Coal mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world. Miners have died in the mines, suffered debilitating injuries, and nearly all of them will suffer from black lung disease or similar health effects from the inhalation of coal dust.