Hundreds of coal miners and their families wait in line to attend a rally Aug. 14 at the Century Mine near Beallsville, Ohio. (Associated Press)
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Remember John Cole’s post about “Mitt Romney’s Post-Truth Campaign” dropping in on those coal miners in Ohio for the benefit of Fox News? Details have since leaked out about the real cost of R-money’s photo shoot:
When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney visited an Ohio coal mine this month to promote jobs in the coal industry, workers who appeared with him at the rally lost pay because their mine was shut down.
The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview.
A group of employees who feared they’d be fired if they didn’t attend the campaign rally in Beallsville, Ohio, complained about it to WWVA radio station talk show host David Blomquist. Blomquist discussed their beefs on the air Monday with Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore.
Moore told Blomquist that managers “communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend.” He said the company did not penalize no-shows.
Because the company’s mine had to be shut down for “safety and security” reasons during Romney’s visit, Moore confirmed workers were not paid that day. He said miners also lose pay when weather or power outages shut down the mine, and noted that federal election law doesn’t let companies pay workers to attend political events.
Moore said he didn’t see anything negative in attending Romney’s campaign appearance with U.S. Sen. Rob Portman and Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel.
“We are talking about an event that was in the best interest of anyone that’s related to the coal industry in this area or the entire country,” Moore said in the radio interview…
Shorter CFO Moore: When Crown Prince Romney chooses to survey our humble barony, you serfs will be standing in neat rows to greet him with the panoply he expects. And don’t expect us to pay you for the honor of witnessing his cortege, either.
Weather disasters, power outages, Romney visits — all acts of God, in the eyes of the Pepper Pike mining company. This is why we have to keep fighting.
Baud
Actual serfs didn’t have the power to vote their lords out of office.
K488
“[the] event was mandatory, but no-one was forced to attend.” The English language – how does it work?
AT
@Baud:
You’re assuming that they will be allowed to leave work in the 3 hours that the polls will be open, and that once there they will have the 7 forms of ID required to legally vote…
Ruckus
Ahhh, another company town. A place where the only thing you have to call your own is the coffin you are buried in. And even on that your “estate” probably owes money.
Suffern Ace
Romney lacks the charisma to be considered in the same category as a power outage or bad weather.
Baud
@AT:
I don’t think miners are in the demographic group that the GOP is targeting for voter suppression.
suekzoo
So how many of those miners are going to vote for Romney anyway?
pseudonymous in nc
Rob Moore: putting the you know what in Coal Country.
Anya
How’s this even legal?
Davis X. Machina
@suekzoo: Three of them –counting from the left in that picture, #9, #54, and waaaay in back, #108. And they’ll feel compelled to lie about it to their friends.
The rest — all Romney.
J
Do those miners have a union? If ever there were an argument for strong independent unions, this is it.
Richard
David Shuster tweets…
https://twitter.com/DavidShuster
GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying “This is how we feed animals.”
Steve
What is a mandatory meeting that you don’t have to show up for?
Baud
@Richard:
BOTH SIDES DO IT!
Richard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
Elmo
Where the hell is the Dept of Labor in this? I’m exec management in a service company, and the DOL is constantly auditing our books to make sure we pay every minute of time that we “suffer to be done,” let alone instruct or mandate. WtF?
Percysowner
@AT: Actually in Ohio you don’t need voter ID. They are cutting out all the early voting they can, but we do have a very lenient absentee voting policy. I have voted every year, but I haven’t been to the polls since forever.
MikeJ
@Anya:
If you complain, you’re fired. Sure, you could take them to court and in six or seven years you might actually win. Of course you’ll lose your house and your car because there aren’t any other jobs in East Bumfuck, WV. And then the appeals process will start.
Alternately, they might be smarter and not actually fire you for failing to cheer for Republicans. They might just start having two different managers approach you with conflicting orders and then fire you for incompetence or insubordination.
Xj27b/6
Just got back from Obama rally in Ft. Collins. The man can flat out stump.
Xj27b/6
Just got back from Obama rally in Ft. Collins. The man can flat out stump.
Beauzeaux
@Baud: Nor do we. We vote in and out the various reps of the overlords.
Rome Again
I see something negative in the way you decide what might or might not be negative to other people.
James E. Powell
I’m sure that a lot of hard-workin’ God-fearin’ America-lovin’ people, and not just miners and not just in WVa and Ohio, would gleefully give up a day’s pay to get rid of that ni-clang! in our White House.
Baud
@Beauzeaux:
Speak for yourself.
HelpThe99ers
It gets worse:
maody
thank you, Anne Laurie
beltane
@HelpThe99ers: Smells like FREEDOM!!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
I saw this on wonkette, and there is something about that radio interview that wasn’t mentioned here. The management guy on the radio interview (hereafter referred to as “asshat”, in the interest of brevity), indeed said that attendance was “mandatory”.
Immediately after that however, “asshat” claimed that if people didn’t show up he didn’t see a problem with that.
These two statements were one right after another, and directly contradict each other. Either “asshat” does not know what the word “mandatory” means, or he was lying – about which statement, I don’t know, but at least one of them, for sure.
So, I just figured I’d put that out there.
NotMax
testingNotMax
Corporations are
peopletsars, my friend.Anya
@MikeJ: Why do they have to go to court? Isn’t there a federal statute or something that prohibits employers from forcing their political believes on you? We’re not living in the seventeen century after all.
MikeJ
@Anya: The way you get laws enforced is by going to court.
ETA: You’re actually better off when you can take them to court yourself. Otherwise you have to convince a DA that they’ve usually bought to do it for you.
Maude
@NotMax:
1, 2, 3.
Steve
@HelpThe99ers: What’s trippy is that the case was actually about a union that forced its employees to participate in independent expenditures in support of a Democratic candidate. The Republicans all said it wasn’t illegal for the union to force them, and the Democrats all disagreed.
Smedley the Uncertain
@suekzoo:
A Lot!! Remember , Pres. Obama is anti-coal.
The miners believe that.
Mnemosyne
I remember that the Giant Evil Corporation had John McCain come give a talk at our company but (a) IIRC it was in 2007 before he was officially a candidate for president (though obviously he was already campaigning) and (b) it was during the lunch hour, so it was very clearly an optional event.
Mr Stagger Lee
Where are the Molly Maguires? The spirits of Harlan County and Mingo County are in tears, in the afterlife. John L. Lewis do thy need you now!
MikeJ
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Executed.
PurpleGirl
@J: The Century Mine is a non-union mine.
pseudonymous in nc
@HelpThe99ers:
But the FEC splits 3-3 on everything right now, so none of their rulings have any weight.
(Note also that this specific case was a union putting pressure on workers to campaign on behalf of a Dem candidate in Hawaii; the three Dem commissioners considered it coercive.)
El Cid
Sure, we told the employees that if they didn’t do a certain thing they’d be putting their livelihood at risk because we might fire them, but no one forced them, like, you know, with a gun, which we could have, and you know us coal-mine-ownin’ types, but we didn’t.
gogol's wife
@Richard:
Someone always beats me to it.
Elmo
@Anya:
Forget political views, this is a straight-up violation of the FLSA. Failure to pay min wage for hours worked. I know – because it’s my job to know – the BigCorp I work for would absolutely get slammed for that. Shitfire.
BruceFromOhio
@Baud: This. Go and vote. This country will always need coal, as long as there is coal to be had.
Anya
@Elmo: Someone should challenge the greedy bastard on behalf of these poor minors.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
If you go to a mine manager and say “Give me money or I will burn your mine down”, you will be arrested for extortion. It is a type of theft to take someone’s money away from them by intimidation.
If a mine manager goes to you and says “Give me your day off or I will fire you”, this is apparently not extortion. Apparently it is not a type of theft to take someone’s time away from them by intimidation.
Which says something about the role of the law when there is a society divided into those who live off their money and those who live off selling their time.
Zach
If the mine was closed, why the silly hats?
Also, a few points in Romney’s 59-point “jobs” plan boil down to banning political activity by unions. Good to see that management’s not under the same sort of scrutiny. Very level playing field for labor negotiations there.
Charles Ray Batchelor
Sorry, federal law says that if it mandatory, hourly employees MUST be paid.
Zach
I really don’t get why this isn’t blowing up my Google reader more; why it’s not being mentioned on the convention broadcasts tonight, etc. This goes beyond normal image-making. Imagine if Obama had gone to a GM plant that was saved by the stimulus and the same thing had happened (plant shut down for the day; employees ordered to show up, in uniform and without pay, and pose for a photograph waiting in line for the event). It also reinforces every storyline about what Romney thinks about workers.
e.a.f.
I thought these types of activities by employers went out with the Victorian era. I guess not. These workers need a very good union & collective agreement.
Now up here in Canada, what the employer did is actually illegal. I know the U.S.A. doesn’t adhere to its own constitution any more but I thought people still were a little free. Quess not. Sort of sounds like they are living in /Russia or China.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Charles Ray Batchelor:
Sorry, federal law says that if it mandatory, hourly employees MUST be paid.
Sure, de jure. And to quote MikeJ above:
“If you complain, you’re fired. Sure, you could take them to court and in six or seven years you might actually win. Of course you’ll lose your house and your car because there aren’t any other jobs in East Bumfuck, WV. And then the appeals process will start.”
De facto, nope.
It’s sorta like how the US is democratic de jure, but de facto your vote may not count if you’re black, or a student, or live in the wrong part of town, or use a polling station that has a queue three miles long, or if your voting machine ‘malfunctions’…
aussie sheila
This is absolutely unbelievable. ‘Mandatory’ means ‘must be done’ where I come from. Those miners just have to be paid imo, but the larger question is US law on the rights of employers to even suggest attendance at a political rally. Incredible. God help us all in the rest of the world. This is exactly the type of thing that requires the whole world to demand a vote in US elections. What starts there,finishes everywhere else.
Where is the general outrage?
Mart
Fracking natural gas is killing coal, not Obama. Once that boom busts who knows what is the next flavor of the week.
M.J.
This is a little off-topic, but the company I work for has health screenings where a separate entity (not your doctor)takes a sample of your blood. Which raises concerns of privacy in my mind.
The company says I am perfectly free to not be tested. Of course, if I refuse to be tested they must take 50 bucks out of my paycheck each and every week. Other than that I’m completely free to choose.
Sgaile-beairt
where are the libertarians denouncing this?
Interrobang
@M.J.: How is that not a huge HIPAA violation? Pardon me, I’m Canadian, so I don’t know these things. We don’t have mandatory testing like that here, because it’s considered unconstitutional, and unless we keep electing ReformaTories, we still have some minimal right to privacy.
NCSteve
If only there was some kind of a organization these coal miners could join that could bargain for them collectively and negotiate work and pay conditions rather than having them set unilaterally by the mine owner. An organization with members in many, many mines and an affiliation with similar organizations of laborers in other industries giving it sufficient clout to prevent the mine owner from treating the workers like serfs.
Yes, if only …
M.J.
Honestly, I don’t know if they they share the results with anyone but me and as an associate of a business under HIPAA, there is an expectation of confidentiality.
The part I detest is the obvious extortion.