Hope Is Hard Won This Labor Day
(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Damn, I leave the shebeen for a week and everything goes even more quickly straight to hell. Wind. Rain. Gunplay. Bloodshed. When did the United States of America turn into a Michael Bay movie? Don't events know that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has errant drives to kick back onto the fairway? Don't events know he has the Debra Messing crisis to handle? And Paul Krugman is selling The Economy to Somali pirates? How can life be so unfair to a fella? How can a fake rich guy stand such times and live?
Anyway, it's Labor Day, and there are some real old-school J.H. Blair shenanigans going on down in Harlan County in Kentucky. Near Cumberland, some miners have blocked a rail line, freezing a train loaded with coal for over a month. The company they worked for, Blackjewel, is the very model of a modern major company, at least in this country. It shut down operations and dove into bankruptcy at the beginning of July. Because it is a modern American corporation and, therefore, doesn't have the social conscience god gave a Gaboon viper, Blackjewel went out of business without "fulfilling its salary obligations," as the term of art puts it. More simply, the miners saw their paychecks bounce. From the Washington Post:
“We had just bought a washer, and then the bank pulled the money back out, and it made our account negative,” said Stacy Rowe, Chris Rowe’s wife. The effect of those missed paychecks has rippled through the county’s economy. Many of the miners made $20 to $30 an hour, a middle-class salary in a county where the household median income is $24,000 a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Interestingly, there is a law in Kentucky that requires a company that shuts down suddenly to post a bond ensuring that its employees get paid. More interestingly, according to an investigation by the Lexington Herald-Leader, no coal company founded in Kentucky over the last five years ever has met that obligation upon shutting down—including, obviously, Blackjewel.
In the weeks after Blackjewel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the Herald-Leader reported the company appeared to be in violation of a law requiring it to post a performance bond to protect wages. The violation allowed the company to close its mines without paying employees for three weeks of work...KRS 337.200 requires “every employer engaged in construction work, or the severance, preparation, or transportation of minerals” that has continuously operated in Kentucky for less than five years to post a performance bond with the Labor Cabinet to cover its payroll for four weeks. If the company suddenly shuts down, the money could be used to pay employees.
Many Kentucky coal companies are exempt from the law because they’ve continuously operated in Kentucky longer than five years, but the Herald-Leader identified a handful that appear to meet the requirements for posting a bond. On Thursday afternoon, Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear released a report identifying 30 companies that may be in violation of the law. Altogether, the 30 companies employ 932 people.
Moreover, the Republicans in state government, led by Matt Bevin, the most unpopular governor in the country, tried recently to eliminate the requirement entirely. The attempt failed in the Kentucky House, but more than a few people suspect that the attempt was made at least partly to bail out Blackjewel. This, of course, is the classic marriage of the corporate class and a thoroughly sublet state government of a kind that's been mutating ever since organized labor lost its clout and there was nothing to stop the country's economy from transforming itself into a casino, a mere vehicle for financial speculation in which the profits were privatized and the losses socialized. However, on this Labor Day, there is a passage in the Washington Post story that shows how hard won hope is these days.
Cumberland is located in Harlan County, where Trump won 85 percent of the vote. But these miners say their fight isn’t a political one. At the camp, there is an informal policy against speaking about Trump or partisan issues, underscoring the president’s continued popularity in areas where the local economy has continued to suffer. “That is the main reason we have gotten as far as we’ve got now; it’s because we have kept the nonsense down,” Rowe said, referring to the nation’s divisive political debate.
Whether the miners want to be or not, in the strictest sense of the world, they are engaged in a political fight that eventually is going to have to have a political solution. Keeping "politics" out of this situation makes as much sense as refusing to discuss the role played in it by coal. Ultimately, the job requirements of being a citizen include a full immersion into the politics of your time. We all have been living with the consequences of avoiding these responsibilities for so long that we now pride ourselves on our independence from "government," as though it were some sort of Andromeda Strain dropped from the sky instead of the constantly evolving act of political creation that it was designed to be.
It is going to take work to place that country back on the right track again, if it's even possible, and I am in no way sure that it is. That is the work to begin on this Labor Day.
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