I Reckon: Which side are you on, National Labor Relations Board?

Coal miners occupy a pretty special place in my heart. And no, it’s not because I know any. Georgia, where I grew up, isn’t really known for its coal anyways. Maybe part of it comes from the fact that John Prine’s “Paradise” and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” — both coal miners’ laments — regularly appear in my most played country playlists (never mind the fact that I have the music taste of a 58-year-old Ohioan). I think a large part of that fondness comes from a place of understanding that no profession is quite as hard-caught between a rock and a hard place as coal mining.

Very few jobs today are as dangerous as the job of a coal miner. Employees in the coal industry are more likely to be killed on the job, and their injuries are more likely to be severe compared to those in other jobs. The danger also doesn’t just stop when a coal miner stops working, as the toxic gas and coal dust inhaled by miners toiling away underneath the surface of the earth often results in long-term diseases. Chief among those diseases is black lung, which scars lung tissue and makes it harder for those affected by it to breathe in the long term. 

One would think that folks experiencing this much risk on and off the job would be riding the unionization wave to get better job and health benefits. Unfortunately, it just isn’t the case with mine workers, especially in the South and those in the heart of Alabama.

Members of United Mine Workers of America in Alabama have been on strike for more than 500 days — longer than I’ve been on this campus. Actually, the strike has been going on for longer than “I Reckon” has been in existence. Like my column, the strike is starting to show signs of an inevitable slowdown. What originally started as a striking force at around 1,100 strong has dwindled down to around 900 or so. And yet, they’re still fighting the good fight. In the UMWA’s case, however, they have a new antagonist in the form of the National Labor Relations Board. 

In late July, the NLRB ordered the UMWA to pay $13.3 million to Warrior Met Coal, a settlement number that was 33 times the estimated amount that the UMWA had originally thought, and that was initially indicated by NLRB lawyers. A huge chunk of that amount is chalked up to lost revenue from coal that’s gone unmined as well as increased security. 

Never mind that members of the UMWA took on pay cuts to help bring the company out of bankruptcy in 2016. You’d be hard-pressed to find that level of self-sacrifice in any workforce today, much less in 2016. To that, I say good riddance to Warrior Met Coal’s lost revenue. If the NLRB cracked open a dictionary, they’d understand that a strike is an action, often involving a ceasing of work, in order to get an employer to comply with demands. What’s the point of a strike when the employees of a company have to end up paying the company for lost time and work? If that’s a new NLRB philosophy moving forward, I think it might as well be the end of this new age of labor.

The Biden administration has done a somewhat decent job so far with regard to new appointees to the NLRB, putting more labor-friendly folks in those positions of power. This new, aggressive NLRB was helpful in the unionization of the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island earlier this year, and just this week, it is demanding that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz apologize to unionized Starbucks workers whose raises had been illegally withheld.

Could you imagine the uproar that would ensue if the NLRB forced Starbucks union members to pay millions to their already uber-wealthy employer for revenue lost during their strikes and walkouts? The NLRB ought to treat the Warrior Met strike with as much pro-labor vigor as it treated workers in other industries across the country. 

No matter how far we move past coal, the folks that worked in that industry will always bear the scar of the mines. We shouldn’t force them to bear another scar in the name of corporate preservation.

Quynh Anh Nguyen is a rising junior writing about the implications of current Southern political events in her column “I Reckon.”