Coal Country Has Been Burned Before
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A group of unpaid miners has blockaded a railway in Harlan County, Kentucky. The goal? Stop a train car full of their former employer’s coal from going to market until they get what they’re owed. It’s a straightforward protest that has been going on for more than six weeks now. One thing that isn’t so straightforward, however? How to help coal mining communities, like the ones in Harlan County, confront a future with less and less coal.
Guests: Gary Lewis, Harlan County miner, and Ken Ward Jr., reporter at the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gary Lewis has worked in Harlan County, Kentucky for 24 years. |
| 0:08.6 | He's a coal miner. |
| 0:10.2 | The work comes and goes, but the money is pretty solid, or it was until this summer. |
| 0:17.3 | Did you notice checks bouncing, or did you just not get paid? |
| 0:21.2 | Well, now I got a check. |
| 0:23.9 | Deposited on a bank on a Friday. |
| 0:26.1 | And then the following Wednesday, my bank called me at the check bounced. |
| 0:31.2 | After the bills that done being paid, they take money back out of my checking's account and left me $1,800 in red. |
| 0:37.1 | Oh, you must have been mad. |
| 0:38.9 | Oh, yeah. |
| 0:40.0 | It turned out the company Gary worked for, Black Jewel, was filing for bankruptcy. |
| 0:45.7 | Gary says when he called his superintendent to figure out what was going on, the boss was driving to his own bank. |
| 0:52.7 | He got to his bank and got money out, which I think he still left him in the red, |
| 0:57.0 | but he had a little bit of money in his pocket to hold him over. |
| 1:01.5 | How much money is owed to you at this point? |
| 1:05.0 | I'm thinking right around $6,000. |
| 1:09.0 | Over the next couple of days, black jewel workers like Gary would figure out all the ways they hadn't been paid, the child support that never got sent, the retirement accounts where money just hadn't shown up for weeks. |
| 1:22.4 | Then the workers found out there was a train full of black jewel coal, and it was set to leave town. |
| 1:28.0 | I mean, if they can sell like how, they can sell it and pay us. If they can't afford to pay us, |
| 1:36.2 | why should they be able to sell us coal and them get more money? This is why dozens of coal workers |
| 1:41.6 | ended up pitching tents in the middle of those train tracks, |
| 1:44.8 | daring the mining company to haul their coal out of town. |
... |
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