After 18 Months, Striking Warrior Met Miners and Families Hold the Line
The annual Miners' Memorial Service in Brookwood, Alabama, was held in September. The service honors the 13 miners who died in a series of explosions at Jim Walter Resources Mine No. 5 on September 23, 2001. Today that mine is part of Warrior Met Coal, the company at the center of the longest and largest ongoing strike in the U.S. Photo: Ericka Wills
by Ericka Wills
A somber bell toll broke the silence outside the West Brookwood Church in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. The white-gloved hand of Larry Spencer, International Vice President of Mine Workers (UMWA) District 20, solemnly struck the Miners’ Memorial bell as the names of victims of mine-related deaths were read aloud.
“As we gather this evening for our service, it is appropriate that we remember in the past twelve months over 2021 and 2022 there has been tremendous heartache as the result of mining accidents across this country,” Thomas Wilson, a retired UMWA staff representative, announced from the podium. “Twelve coal miners’ lives have been snuffed out—also, 19 metal and non-metal miners—for a total of 31 fallen miners since we last gathered.”
The annual Miners’ Memorial Service commemorates not only those who left for work in the mines over the past year never to come home again; it also honors the 13 men who died in a series of explosions in Jim Walter Resources Mine No. 5 in Brookwood on September 23, 2001. Standing on the front lawn of the church in the shadows of mine tipples, families reminisced about gathering at the same location on that fateful day in September when they anxiously waited to hear if their loved ones had survived the blasts.
In 2001, the No. 5 mine was owned by Walter Energy. Today it is part of Warrior Met Coal, the company at the center of the UMWA’s 550-day strike, the longest and largest ongoing strike in the United States. As strikers, families, and community members gathered to remember the fallen miners, all were reminded that what is at stake in the Warrior Met strike is, literally, life and death.
MINERS RESISTS CALL TO SETTLE
“One of the United Mineworkers’ goals is to make sure that you have a safe place to work and that you come home and to be with your family,” Spencer explained before the ceremony. “We are ready to go back to work at Warrior Met, but we aren’t going to roll over and let things like this [explosion] happen again. So we are going to stay strong and continue to fight.”
The Warrior Met strike epitomizes the imbalance of power between Wall Street and workers in the United States. Currently, these 900 miners are confronting the trillion-dollar assets of Wall Street funds that own the company.
In 2016, after Walter Energy filed for bankruptcy protection, the union agreed to temporary 20 percent wage and benefit cuts until profitability could be achieved by the newly formed entity (Warrior Met) assembled by private equity firms including Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and KKR.
Since Warrior Met went public in 2017, it has returned over $1.4 billion in dividends to shareholders. By 2019, the original equity firms had sold their shares to a new group of Wall Street investment funds. BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street are currently the company’s largest shareholders. Warrior Met continues to report record profits, including $297 million in the second quarter of 2022, signifying the company’s financial ability to address workers’ economic demands. Nonetheless, the striking miners have yet to see a reverse in wage and benefit cuts—which prompted them to launch their strike in April 2021.
With Warrior Met serving as a revenue machine for investment and asset management firms, UMWA has had to strategize a ground game that not only targets the Warrior Met Coal facilities in Alabama but also these global Wall Street funds. Throughout the strike, BlackRock has generally held the largest number of shares, fluctuating between 13 and 14 percent. For nearly a year, UMWA took their fight to BlackRock’s Manhattan headquarters, as well as expanding actions nationally to the investment fund’s offices in Washington D.C., Denver, and Boston.
In April, a year after the strike began, BlackRock finally issued a statement calling for a labor agreement and questioning Warrior Met executives’ choices in protracting the strike.
“Prolonged operational disruptions, such as labor disputes, can have a negative impact on a company’s financial performance and business resilience. We believe it is in the best economic interests of our clients for Warrior Met Coal and the UMWA to reach a resolution,” BlackRock wrote in a bulletin explaining why it was voting against the re-election of two top Warrior Met board members and the board’s executive compensation proposal. “We don’t believe key executives should be rewarded when the company has been impacted negatively by the ongoing labor dispute and related fall in production.”
While BlackRock’s statement represents a significant victory for the Mine Workers’ campaign at the Wall Street firm, it has yet to result in a resolution to the strike. As Phil Smith, UMWA chief of staff and executive assistant to the president, explains, this raises new questions: “Who is the Warrior Met Board of Directors accountable to? Clearly it isn’t their largest shareholder.”
Despite the advice of BlackRock, key Warrior Met executives continue to reap financial rewards while workers and their families are struggling to keep fed, clothed, and housed—and conscious that another holiday season on strike draws ever closer.
THE AUXILIARY LOOKS TO THE FUTURE
Cheri Goodwin and Haeden Wright, working wives of striking miners and mothers of young children, were founding members of the UMWA Auxiliary in Brookwood that formed quickly after the strike began.