UMWA, allies fight black lung, apathy at Labor Day gathering | Politics

“A lot of people think that Labor Day is for working people,” said Phillippi, who the UMWA billed as the featured speaker in its first Labor Day celebration since perennial headliner, firebrand orator and 30-year union president Cecil Roberts retired in October. “Just all working people. I’ve got to tell you that there ain’t no truth to that at all. Labor Day is for the people that stood up in the workplace. Labor Day is for the people that stood up for the coworkers, that stood up to their bosses.”

Anyone who didn’t do that, Phillippi added, “should probably be at work today.”

Moments before taking the stage, Phillippi, who became secretary-treasurer in October to succeed Brian Sanson upon the latter’s ascension from that role to become the new UMWA president, had told the Gazette-Mail, “Events like this are to let people know you’re here.”

Members of UMWA’s long-dwindling ranks — mainly older retirees, their family members and Democratic state office candidates — were still there in Racine on Monday for the union’s 88th annual Labor Day celebration.

But in the United States’ semiquincentennial year, a growing share of increasingly younger West Virginia miners find themselves short on critical support in federal and state government in a country that has long left them fighting just to breathe.

West Virginia’s congressional delegation has been quiet on Trump administration moves to weaken miner protections and, in the Support Our Miners Act, a proposal to increase black lung disability compensation for miners.

And the UMWA must contend under new leadership with a multigenerational decline in membership and political influence both within its own organization and throughout America’s unions.

“The strength comes from the membership,” Phillippi told the crowd.

That strength has been tested heavily by a Trump administration that has made deep cuts to federal miner safety and health resources — and a state government whose Republican majority leaders in recent years have been hostile to unions, presenting headwinds blowing against miners already gasping for air.

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration has agreed to delay enforcement of a rule finalized in 2024 but since put on hold — designed to lower miner exposure to toxic silica dust driving up incidence of deadly black lung disease throughout West Virginia, discussing a potential settlement with industry groups after a federal court put the rule on hold in April 2025 in response to a challenge from those groups.

That delay followed the Trump administration accelerating a long-term decline in MSHA staff.

Carey Clarkson, national vice president with the National Council of Field Labor Locals union that represents MSHA employees, told the Gazette-Mail in April 2025 a hiring freeze ordered by Trump cut off the hiring process for 90 people who had been offered MSHA positions. Roughly 120 more employees were lost after they took a voluntary resignation offer amid the Trump administration’s significant downsizing of the federal workforce.

MSHA has deemphasized impact inspections, inspections for mines deemed in greater need of enforcement oversight due to poor compliance history, accidents or injuries.

A Department of Labor Office of Inspector General report issued April 30 identified inadequate emergency preparedness that it said “could lead to unnecessary delays or confusion in MSHA’s response” and registered concern that MSHA “may be insufficiently prepared to handle multiple simultaneous mine emergencies or a larger mine emergency, such as a mine disaster.”

The report determined MSHA needed to improve its preparedness, including fixing issues identified from previous emergencies.

In May, Trump moved to terminate a commissioner and staff members at a key, independent federal agency that adjudicates legal disputes regarding miner safety and health, a move that portends more searing cuts to worker protections, with support from Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va.

Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission member Moshe Marvit filed a federal lawsuit May 7 contending Trump unlawfully terminated him just two years into a six-year term despite federal code allowing the president to remove commissioners only on grounds of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Marvit’s lawsuit reported that the commission announced this month a layoff of additional staff.

The commission, which adjudicates disputes under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, oversees cases that deal with civil penalties assessed against mine operators and address whether alleged health and safety violations occurred as well as the appropriateness of proposed penalties.

Last week, Marvit voluntarily dismissed his own case in response to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Slaughter overruling Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that had upheld Congress’ use of statutory provisions limiting the president’s removal of members of the Federal Trade Commission.

Although the Republican-supermajority court only addressed the president’s removal authority over FTC commissioners, dozens of agencies headed by independent regulatory commissions, including the National Labor Relations Board, which also has been undermined by Trump firings, have similar statutory removal language.

“I brought this case to protect an institution that miners rely on, that can literally serve as the difference between life and death for mine workers.

“I hope that future presidents and Congress will again make miner safety a priority and actively improve the condition of miners, rather than using miners as a political talking point while in fact making their working conditions less safe,” Marvit said in a statement released by his legal counsel’s national law firm Katz Banks Kumin LLP.

Marvit predicted that without an independent agency overseeing government enforcement of the 1977 Mine Act, more miners will die on the job in accidents that could have been prevented through proper enforcement and oversight.

“Make no mistake: more miners will die or be seriously injured on the job because of the Supreme Court majority’s decision in Slaughter,” Hugh Baran, counsel for Marvit, said in a statement.

Last month, research was published in which National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health experts — whose agency had been dismantled by a Trump administration shutdown reversed by a West Virginia federal judge last year after a challenge from state mine veterans — found that black lung prevalence among coal workers participating in a federal black lung screening program has reached its highest level in the past 35 years.

“I never thought I’d see a president so antiunion,” Larry Matheney, 78, of Jackson County, who became a UMWA member 60 years ago this month, told the Gazette-Mail at Monday’s celebration.

Black lung clinic representatives and occupational health experts say what’s driving the spike in regional occurrence of the disease is miners cutting into thinning rock seams and thus suffering greater exposure to silica dust.

But members of West Virginia’s congressional delegation have been noncommittal or quiet on the silica rule in response to Gazette-Mail requests for comment.

“Silence,” Brian Lacy, vice president of UMWA District 17 covering southern West Virginia, southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina, said when asked by the Gazette-Mail about West Virginia congressional delegates’ stances on the silica rule during a break from hosting Monday’s celebration.

“They represent a state that’s at the forefront of the black lung crisis, so I think they need to come out and voice their support for the coal miners of the state of West Virginia,” Lacy said.

As Lacy spoke offstage, West Virginia Democratic Party chair and state Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, sang and played “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on an acoustic guitar after having argued that Democrats were the party that could reverse declines in protections for miners and their families.

Pushkin was followed by Wyatt Lilly, Democratic candidate for state Senate District 6 representing all or parts of Mercer, Mingo, McDowell and Wayne counties, who observed that Republicans hold 91 out of 100 state House of Delegates seats and 32 out of 34 state Senate seats, in addition to gubernatorial control under Gov. Patrick Morrisey.

Morrisey was accompanied during a two-day water quality-focused listening tour of southern West Virginia by Lilly’s opponent, incumbent Sen. Mark Maynard, R-Wayne.

“If there’s anything you don’t agree with, you can’t blame it on Democrats,” Lilly asserted. “It is time for a change.”

Of the UMWA’s 74 2026 West Virginia general election endorsements, 44, or 59%, are for Democrats. Two of the Republican endorsements, though, are for U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and U.S. Rep. Riley Moore, Capito’s nephew. UWMA representative Chad Francis told the Gazette-Mail at Monday’s celebration that some candidates were “really good labor votes” but came out against coal-fired power plants, “and that hurt them.”

The UMWA has viewed as an existential threat a plan by FirstEnergy to build a gas-fired power plant Monongalia County to become operational at the end of 2031, predicting it represents a long-term fuel-switching away from coal. FirstEnergy has renewed its commitment to operating the coal-fired Fort Martin Power Station in Monongalia County nearby at least through 2035.

But in his final Labor Day celebration address as UMWA president last year, Roberts, now 79, lamented what he indicated was a decline in the union’s political influence.

“I want to get back to those days when people came into my office when I was here as a 30-year-old and said, ‘Mr. Roberts, what do we have to do to get the United Mine Workers’ endorsement? Because that’s the best endorsement that you can have running for office in West Virginia,’” Roberts told last year’s crowd.

The political story of the day for West Virginia heading into Labor Day weekend was the possibility of a 2028 Republican gubernatorial showdown between Morrisey and coal magnate Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va.

Morrisey has received campaign finance contributions from a wide variety of coal companies and executives, defended 2016 state right-to-work legislation denounced by many speakers at the Labor Day celebration as state attorney general, and as governor has requested bills that became laws barring many state employees from the state’s classified civil service system and stripping them of the right to grievance procedures.

Justice has controlled coal companies with a long history of serious mine safety violations and set years of distrust in state mine regulators into motion by his 2022 appointment of Frank Foster to direct the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training after Foster had served as safety director at Massey Energy Co., which owned and operated the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County where a 2010 explosion killed 29 mine workers.

Foster, previously administrator for the West Virginia Board of Coal Mine Health and Safety, was one of more than 100 people who wrote letters defending former Massey CEO Don Blankenship in 2016, after a federal jury convicted Blankenship of conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards. Blankenship later served a year in federal prison and a halfway house.

The UMWA and four retired miners last month renewed an April request for a federal court to hold the Justice firms in contempt for what they said was the companies’ failure to comply with a June 2021 consent order for them to abide by a 2016 agreement requiring them to provide uninterrupted healthcare and prescription drug coverage to eligible retirees and their eligible dependents.

Of the 18 mining fatalities in West Virginia since the start of 2022, 15 have occurred in nonunion mines, according to MSHA data, and studies have indicated that union mines are safer than nonunion mines.

But miner and other worker union density has dropped sharply in West Virginia.

West Virginia’s 8.5% share of workers who are represented by unions in 2025 was 25th-highest out of 50 states and lower than all bordering states but Virginia. In 1964, West Virginia’s union density was 12th-highest nationally, meaning the Mountain State has become significantly less unionized even compared with other states.

West Virginia’s number of employed union members fell from 83,000 in 2015 to 60,000 in 2025 — a 27.7% decline even as the number of overall employed West Virginians grew from 665,000 to 703,000, a 5.7% increase.

Of UMWA’s roughly 11,000 members, some 10,000 are retirees, Lacy estimated.

Miner allies at Monday’s celebration attributed declines in UMWA and overall union membership to a lack of awareness of the health and safety gains that the UMWA and other unions have fought for in past generations.

Nancy Peyton, 30, development coordinator at the West Virginia Wars Museum, recalled not learning about the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest labor uprising in U.S. history — until becoming a news reporter for the Williamson Daily News. That’s despite having grown up 15 minutes away from the site where miners fought to unionize against 3,000 state police troopers, private security forces and other strikebreakers in Logan County.

Miner advocates have decried the lack of any acknowledgment of the mine wars in educational curricula.

“It comes from an erasure of the history that people don’t know what the power of a union is, because they haven’t been taught about it,” Peyton said.

Peyton was standing at a Mine Wars Museum table at which museum representatives gave away copies of the organization’s “In These Hills” spring 2026 journal. It features an examination from former MSHA head and Mingo County native Chris Williamson of the new silica rule and fallout from its delay, a recap from scholar Barbara Ellen Smith of the history of those who fought for miners’ health and safety, and a spotlight on an exhibit covering the long history of black lung called “Entirely Preventable.”

“If we love coal miners so much,” museum director Kenzie New Walker wrote in a letter in the spring issue, “why can’t we help them breathe?”

Delores Cook of Ridgeview, a tiny Boone County community some 10 miles from Slack Park, has attended most of the UMWA’s 88 Labor Day celebrations, 32 years after having concluded a six-year term representing Boone County in the House of Delegates and nearly 14 since her husband, Dennis, died at 85 after a 42-year coal mining career.

All those years have added up for Cook, who braved the September heat to make it to another UMWA Labor Day gathering.

“My health is not that good,” Cook said. “But I still have a voice.”

She used it Monday to cheer on friends of miners, who she called “the salt of the earth.”

That salt, Cook said, will always be worth preserving.

“I am so happy that this celebration has gone on for these many years,” Cook said, “because we need to be abreast of all the things that’s taking place in our world and let our young people know the background, how our forefathers fought to keep the union alive.

“Without the unions, I don’t know where our country would be,” Cook added. “And I hope that it will get stronger instead of weaker.”