While some Consol retirees have given up, others fight for healthcare
It didn't work, in part,
His group, Consol Retirees United, protested outside Penguin playoff games when the hockey arena was still called Consol Energy Center.
When he chartered buses to bring 250 company retirees to a demonstration outside Consol's Cecil headquarters in
He was dumbfounded by the lack of interest. "There were some people that were eager to do something about it but you could never get a large group together to make a difference," he said.
"They were just apathetic, (saying) 'Oh well, it happens to everybody, what are you going to do?'"
In 2014, after Consol sold five
With competition from cheap natural gas and environmental regulations straining finances, it was, and still is, a tenuous time for coal companies -- many of which shed their post-retirement obligations through bankruptcy or other reorganization plans. Consol, in shifting its focus to oil and gas development, has shed all but one of its mine complexes over the past several years.
When Murray Energy said it would stop providing healthcare benefits to Consol retirees, Consol put out a statement saying it wasn't expecting this.
Murray doesn't provide post-retirement benefits to any of its employees, the company said, and continuing coverage past a year for Consol retirees wasn't a stipulation of the deal.
"While we respect the fact that Murray Energy is a different company with different priorities, this is an unfortunate and disappointing decision," Consol said at the time.
"We are committed to getting Consol to fix their broken promise," he wrote in a Facebook post of the group's page in
Prior to the meeting, he sent the company a letter stating his wish that all Consol retirees -- those from mines that remained under the company's control and those sold to Murray -- would be treated the same.
A week after
"They said, 'Bob, we wanted you to be the first to know that all other retirees have had their healthcare benefits terminated,'" he recalled.
After that,
He said he needed the public show of force to put pressure on the company because he had found no viable legal options.
Concerned retirees had consulted lawyers in three states and all, he said, concluded the same thing: that the fine print on the benefit plan warned that the company could change or cancel it at any time.
"That's the statement that clears them,"
Taking the fight to court
Meanwhile, a group of retirees in
The lawsuit -- filed by two retirees of the Fola Coal operation in central
The document states that former employees didn't receive a copy of the post-retirement plan until after they retired, so they couldn't have known that what they were told orally was contradicted on paper.
Plaintiffs
During one unionization effort in 2010, the president of operations at Fola and several human resource officers named in the complaint assured the miners that the healthcare benefits they were receiving at the time would "vest upon retirement" and continue until death, the document states.
"Don't worry. You'll have insurance for life," Consol's manager of human resources told
Consol declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
He said he had no idea that discontinuing healthcare was an option. "They acted like we could pay the premium and we'd always have insurance for the rest of our lives," he said.
He said he heard it from human resources and mine presidents, over and over, especially when unions would come around and try to organize mine workers.
"I would have gone to work in the union mines and tried to get different type of pension," he said, if he had known that his benefits weren't a sure thing.
"I don't blame the previous management at all," he said. "Having non-union mines was a huge benefit to them. These were the most productive mines in the world. Nobody beat us.
"But the unfortunate thing here was they promised a lot of people early retirement at 55."
That meant those who retired early and had their benefits canceled would have to find other insurance until they reached the eligible age for
A culture of loyalty
There was a culture of loyalty to the company and a sense of pride that workers didn't need a union to get good treatment and care. It was a time, he said, when it wasn't naive to think that just because there was a legal disclaimer in a document, it didn't mean as much as a supervisor looking you in the eye and telling you your family would be taken care of for life.
"This is what you were told. This is what you were promised. Your wife was brought in when you were hired. You went through three days of orientation to lure you into a non-union job,"
After he read the lawsuit filed in
The lawsuit makes another charge that is novel to this effort -- discrimination based on age and health history.
It says that when Consol ended post-retirement benefits for active employees, it gave them lump sum payments to compensate but it did not make a similar offer to retirees. According to the plaintiffs, that's a violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
The lawsuit seeks a reinstatement of healthcare benefits and restitution for retirees to give them the same payout as was given to active employees last year.
While it purports to represent a class of about 2,000 non-union retired employees, the lawsuit speculates there might be as many as 12,000 that may have been impacted by Consol's decision to end benefits.
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