Kentucky Miners Are Camped Out on Railroad Tracks, Blocking a Coal Train, Demanding Their Stolen Wages

How the rich get that way - stealing workers salaries.

If you like Trump, you will be fine with this, since this is the kind of thing he has habitually done to workers.

This is common in the coal industry. The owner gets rich, mine out an area, declare bankruptcy and stiff their workers and creditors, then start another company and do it again.

https://labornotes.org/2019/07/kentucky-miners-are-camped-out-railroad-tracks-blocking-coal-train-demanding-their-stolen

Kentucky Miners Are Camped Out on Railroad Tracks, Blocking a Coal Train, Demanding Their Stolen Wages
July 31, 2019 / Alexandra Bradbury

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For three days now, miners and their families have occupied a railroad track, blocking a train that’s loaded up with coal that these workers dug out of the earth and never got paid for.

Word spread quickly July 29 that someone was loading up the train to move. A few laid-off miners headed down to the site to find out what was going on, and it didn’t take long to decide they weren’t going to let this train go anywhere.

The miners want their jobs back, if possible—but bottom line, they want their wages for the work they already did.

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“If we can’t get our money, they need to do something with [former CEO] Jeff Hoops for what he’s done,” said Shane Smith, a fourth-generation miner. His youngest daughter was born three days after the company announced its bankruptcy a month ago and stole workers’ wages.

Both men said they are owed nearly $4,000 in their last two paychecks.

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Blackjewel LLC abruptly shut down all its mines July 1 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Partway through a shift, workers were told the bad news and sent home.

Cornett heard about it on Facebook, but showed up anyway for the night shift, “just to see.” He found no one there but a security guard.

The miners never got their last paycheck. Their second-to-last paycheck, already deposited, evaporated out of their bank accounts.

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Adding insult to injury, the miners never received any paper notice of their layoff, which caused a bureaucratic headache when they went to file for unemployment—they couldn’t prove they were out of work.

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Even once that was straightened out, the company’s paperwork was a mess, said Cornett. Everyone’s case was slightly different. It turned out that Blackjewel hadn’t reported most of his wages to Social Security all year. He filed additional paperwork and expects to wait two to three more weeks for a reconsideration by the unemployment department.

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Besides the six mines in Harlan County, the bankruptcy hit Blackjewel’s mines in Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming, laying off 1,800 miners in all. The stiffed miners have been exchanging information and encouragement cross-country through a Facebook group.

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The mismanagement is shocking. A nonprofit public-interest research firm called the Sightline Institute pored over Blackjewel’s bankruptcy filing and reported that Hoops specialized in taking over financially struggling mines, that his companies were chronically short on cash and routinely stiffed creditors and tax collectors, that he had no way of tracking the finances of individual mines, and that he repeatedly transferred money back and forth between the company and his personal account, apparently to keep checks from bouncing.

Hoops is also building a $30 million Roman Coliseum-themed resort called “The Grand Patrician” on the site of an abandoned hospital in West Virginia.

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