Board Games: How The Collapse Of The Senate Has Crippled The NLRB And Damaged Lives

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/23/nlrb-senate_n_2934910.html?1364011349

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SMITHERS, W.Va. -- When he was a teenager, Barry Kidd went into the West Virginia coal mines, just like his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him. Kidd started out as a general laborer on the midnight shift at the Cannelton mine near Smithers, W.Va., 30 miles southeast of Charleston, in 1977. Cannelton was something of a family mine back then, and Kidd's own father was still running heavy equipment there when his son was hired and given the telltale red hat of a novice. Like his dad, Kidd brought home good money for hard and dirty work.

With a foot on one of the few blue-collar ladders into West Virginia's middle class, Kidd had hoped to spend a full career at Cannelton before retiring with a pension and health coverage through his union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). For a while there, it all went according to plan.

But in 2004, Cannelton's operator declared bankruptcy, throwing out the contract with the union and selling the mine to Massey Energy. One of the largest coal companies in the country, Massey later became famous for its culpability in the Upper Big Branch mining disaster, in which 29 miners perished at a Massey-owned mine in Montcoal, W.Va., in 2010. When it purchased the Cannelton operation, Massey could boast a workforce that was 97 percent union-free, according to court documents.

The miners all understood the significance of the Massey purchase: Unionized rank-and-file workers would be purged from Cannelton. This seemed all but a certainty, even though the miners already knew the operation and their jobs inside out, and even though, in Kidd's estimation, the Cannelton miners were "the coal minin'-est bunch of sons of bitches you ever seen in your life."

FULL story at link.