Several thousand current and retired Mine Workers (UMWA) and their supporters—including striking fast-food workers—rallied this morning outside the St. Louis headquarters of Arch Coal, protesting the company’s move to slash health care benefits for retired and active miners through corporate chicanery and bankruptcy maneuvers. 

A number of workers and retirees were arrested as they sat down in nonviolent civil disobedience on the front steps of the Arch Coal building.    

The fight centers on what is now known as Patriot Coal, though most of the thousands who face the cuts or elimination of their benefits never worked a day for Patriot. The company, says the UMWA, was created solely for the purpose of ducking health care and other obligations to retirees.   

Arch Coal, where today’s protest took place, created Magnum Coal in 2005 and unloaded $560 million in retiree health care liabilities onto the new company. Patriot Coal, created by Peabody Energy in 2007 in a similar transaction, acquired Magnum and its liabilities in 2008.

Patriot declared bankruptcy in 2012 and has threatened the effective elimination of health care for retired workers. The company won approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to impose terms and conditions on both retired and active workers. UMWA negotiators are currently in talks with Patriot to lessen the impact of proposed cuts on miners and their families.

Sea of people here - @mineworkers retirees, many on oxygen, fast food workers, faith & community #1u #stl pic.twitter.com/2xOJglEGqj

— Cathy Sherwin (@cathysherwin) July 30, 2013

Shirley Inman, a UMWA Local 2286 member from Madison, W.Va., worked 18 years for Arch Coal, before suffering a disabling injury. She says:

I never worked a day in my life for Patriot. It's just not right for these companies to play a corporate shell game, set up a new company that goes broke and then say they don't have any obligation to us. Arch Coal made that promise to me, not Patriot. Arch needs to keep its promise and live up to the obligations it made.

While Patriot declared bankruptcy, the corporate twosome that spawned Patriot is rolling in profits. Arch Coal posted gross profits of $721 million in 2012, while Peabody Energy earned $2.14 billion. Says UMWA President Cecil Roberts:

We want to remind Arch executives that we haven't forgotten about them. They started this scheme when they set up Magnum Coal in 2005. These corporate executives can play accounting games all day long, but we know who made the obligations to these miners. A wrong has been done to them, and we're not going to stop until that wrong is made right.

Today’s rally was the latest in a series of actions aimed at Arch and Peabody, as part of the Fairness at Patriot campaign. Earlier this month, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker was among the 31 arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience near Peabody’s Federal No. 2 mine in Fairmont, W.Va.

For a closer look and more photos of today’s action, see Cathy Sherwin’s (AFL-CIO field communications Midwest director) Twitter feed.     

Additional information about the UMWA campaign to stand up for active and retired miners is at Fairness at Patriot and on the campaign’s Facebook page.