Gazette photo by Chip Ellis

Hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe Labor Day weekend. We’ve got tons of coverage on the Gazette’s Web site about the Friends of America rally  and the UMWA’s annual Labor Day Picnic.

It was interesting that speakers at the UMWA event focused on health care reform, especially given the story that my friend Paul Nyden wrote in the Gazette-Mail on Sunday. In Harman miners hope court will reverse itself, pay for medical bills, Paul detailed a litte-mentioned result of the Hugh Caperton v. Massey lawsuit: The loss of medical benefits for the miners who worked for Caperton’s Harman Mining.

Much of the attention has focused on Massey President Don Blankenship and his bankrolling of the election of Brent Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court at a time when this dispute was headed for the high court. As happens with we media types, the underlying issues often get lost in the political back-and-forth coverage.

Paul started off his story with Jeff Colman,  Harman miner who lost his job in 1997, after 21 years at the company’s operations outside Grundy, Va.  He’s one of 126 miners and 28 clerical and management workers who lost their jobs when Harman went bankrupt.  A Boone County jury blamed Harman Mining’s competitor, Massey Energy, and awarded Harman Mining and its workers $50 million. The UMWA eventually picked up the miners’ health coverage, but Colman and others are owed tens of thousands of dollars they paid out of pocket before that happened.

Hugh Caperton told Paul:

We have been fighting for 12 years to get these people’s benefits restored. That has been the main focus of this fight — to restore benefits to these miners and to pay off our vendors, who were mostly small mom-and-pop operations.

We hope to right the wrongs against Harman and its employees by Don Blankenship and Massey.

Of course, we know now that the Supreme Court in West Virginia tossed the verdict against Massey. But the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that Benjamin should have stepped down from the case. And Justice Spike Maynard is gone from the court, having lost a re-election bid after photos surfaced of him vacationing with Blankenship.

A new court is scheduled to re-hear argument in the case this afternoon. The Webcast starts at 2 p.m.

And not for nothing, but make sure to read Paul’s story about the guy who was a pawn in Blankenship’s effort to put Benjamin on the court …  I wonder if any other West Virginia media will bother to pick up this item.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 10:49 am and is filed under Labor, Legal actions, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.