The Incredible Disappearing Health Benefits Can a coal company get away with breaking promises to workers?

Eddie Bullock spent 27 years in the southern Illinois coal mines working for Peabody Energy, the largest coal-mining company in the world (infamously memorialized by John Prine.) He retired in 1998, when his mine shut down. He’s now 72 years old and suffers from black lung disease; his wife has emphysema, and both have oxygen tanks at their side at all times. But they’re fortunate in one regard: Bullock has a good pension and solid health benefits that were negotiated for him at Peabody by the United Mine Workers of America.

Or he did, at least. In 2007, Peabody created a new entity called Patriot Coal, and transferred to it 13 percent of its coal reserves. It also transferred to it about 40 percent of its health care liabilities—the obligations for 8,400 former Peabody employees. A year later, Patriot Coal was loaded up with even more liabilities when it acquired Magnum Coal, an offshoot of the country’s second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by last year, total liabilities of $1.37 billion. Patriot Coal is now seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy, through which it will seek to limit or discharge its pension and health obligations to 22,000 retired miners and their spouses, 90 percent of whom never worked for Patriot Coal—among them Eddie Bullock, who, oxygen tank and all, joined the UMWA’s outspoken president, Cecil Roberts, and a handful of other former Peabody miners in getting arrested at the first of two recent rallies at Peabody’s St. Louis headquarters.

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