National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017--Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. MANCHIN. Madam President, let me first of all say thanks to my dear friend Senator Casey from Pennsylvania. If you don't come from a coal-mining region or a coal-mining State, you probably don't understand the culture of coal mining, the people who do this work, and the families who support them. It might be hard to explain it, but we are going to try to give you a picture of the most patriotic people in America.
What I mean by that is they have done the heavy lifting. They have done everything that has been asked of them by this country to basically make us the greatest country on Earth--the superpower of the world, if you will. That has been because of the energy we have had domestically in our backyard and the people willing to harvest that for us.
So when you look at this country and you look at how we are treating people who have done the job and heavy lifting for over 100 years, the coal miners in West Virginia feel this way: They feel like the returning veterans from Vietnam, the returning servicemen who came from Vietnam--a war that was not appreciated and soldiers who were treated less than honorably for doing the job they did in serving their country. Americans now want to cast them aside. It is just unfair-- totally unfair.
This country was so dependent upon this industry that in 1947--which will be 70 years tomorrow--President Harry S. Truman and John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers--and back then, in the 1940s, anybody who mined coal was a member of the United Mine Workers of America because it was all unionized--made a commitment and a promise they would get their benefits. It would be their health care, and they would get their pensions, which were so meager--so meager--just to keep working and to keep the country energized after World War II. If they had shut down and gone on strike, the country would have fallen on extremely hard times coming off of World War II.
That is how important this is. It is the only agreement where you have an Executive order by a President committing the United States of America to keeping its promise to our coal miners doing a job that made our country as great as we are today. Yet here we are, about ready to default on that, and we can't get people to move on it for whatever reason.
The miners are facing multiple pressures on their health care, pension, and benefits as a result of the financial crisis and corporate bankruptcy. This is not because of something they have mismanaged themselves. As we heard Senator Casey mention, the 1974 pension plan was 94 percent funded, which is extremely healthy and solvent, up until 2008, when the financial collapse happened. It was not their fault, but now they are thrown into disarray.
Most of the people still collecting these pensions are widows. A lot of the husbands have died from black lung. These people are depending on a very meager amount of support for any type of quality of life, and we have it paid for also. We have had it paid for. We are talking about the excess AML money that could basically take care of this. Also, there is another pay-for. There is a $5 billion fine that Goldman Sachs paid the DOJ for their financial shenanigans during this financial collapse that could go to pay for this. I mean, it is Wall Street that caused the problem. It wasn't the miners, basically the miners' pension fund or the plan that was being managed at all.
When you couple this with the fact that 60 percent of the beneficiaries are orphan retirees, which has been explained, and that we have 10,000 active workers for 120,000 retirees, that has placed the plan on the road to insolvency. I think everyone understands that.
The Miners Protection Act is not only important to all miners in all States--my good friend here Senator Warner from Virginia has a tremendous mining community in Southwest Virginia, along with our entire State. Pennsylvania is the home of anthracite coal. The coal industry really got started there. We have Senator Brown in Southeast Ohio, which butts up to West Virginia and is a major mining area. So it is important to my State and all the other States that have retired miners.
People are asking about the nonunion. I am concerned about the nonunion miners, and I will do everything and commit myself to helping them also, but if we can't even keep our commitment to the United Mine Workers of America that was basically signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947, we are not sincere or intent on helping anybody. This is something that must be done and must be done immediately. I have said that, and I have been preaching this, so I hope we all come to our senses and do something as quickly as possible about this.
These retirees--as far as basically their medical, runs out the end of this year. The following year they lose their pensions too. That is how desperate this is and what we are dealing with.
To address these issues the Miners Protection Act would simply do this: It would amend the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to transfer funds in excess of the amounts needed to meet existing obligations under the Abandoned Mine Land Fund to the UMWA 1974 Pension Plan to prevent its insolvency; second, make certain retirees who lose health care benefits following the bankruptcy or insolvency of his or her employer eligible for the 1993 Benefit Plan. These assets of Voluntary Employment Benefit Association, created following the Patriot Coal bankruptcy--and if you don't know about the Patriot Coal bankruptcy, I will give you a minute or two on this one.
Patriot Coal came out of Peabody. Peabody spun Patriot off and put all of their liabilities--all of their liabilities--which were basically doomed to fail, into Patriot. They threw all of the union workers into this liability. And guess what. They went bankrupt. It went bankrupt. It was designed to go bankrupt so they could be shed of all the liabilities.
It is our responsibility to keep the promise to our miners who have answered the call whenever their country needed them. They have never failed us. When our country went to war, these miners powered us to prosperity.
A lot of these young people we have here today don't understand that basically coal mining was so important to this country, when we entered World War II, if you were a coal miner, it was more important for you to stay and mine the coal to power the country--the coal that made the steel, that built the guns and ships--than it was to go on the frontlines and fight. They were on the frontlines every day. They never left the frontlines.
When our economy was stagnant, the miners fueled its growth and expansion. After the war, there was so much buildup, the economy started dipping. You had to continue to work and produce in order to make that happen, and we needed energy to do that, so the coal miners did that.
They kept their promise to us, and now it is time for us to keep our promise to them. We need to honor the commitment. We need to honor the Executive order signed by the United States of America to make sure they get their pension and make sure they get their health care.
Senator Casey and I introduced the Robert C. Byrd Mine Safety Protection Act to, among other things, make it a felony for mine operators to knowingly violate safety standards.
Six years and 1 day after 29 brave miners were tragically killed at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship received 1 year in prison, the maximum allowable sentence, for willfully conspiring to violate mine safety standards.
Put simply, the penalty does not fit the crime committed there, and we aim to change that. I stood with the families of the beloved miners in the days following the devastating tragedy at Upper Big Branch. Through moments of hope and despair, I witnessed again and again the unbreakable bonds of family that are as strong or stronger than anything I have ever seen. While no sentence or amount of jail time will ever heal the hearts of the families who have been forever devastated, I believe we have a responsibility to do everything we can in Congress to ensure that a tragedy like this never, ever happens again.
I thank Senators Casey, Brown, Warner, Wyden, and all of my colleagues for putting these miners first and keeping the promise that we made to them. It is vitally important that we hold executives who are willing to put the health and lives of our workers at risk accountable for their actions. We must hold everybody responsible. We must hold ourselves responsible first to do the right thing. That is what we are standing here talking about today. If we don't stand up for the people who basically have stood up and defended us, powered a nation and did the heavy lifting and if we can't keep the promise that was made 70 years ago, then God help us in the Senate and the Congress.
I hope we do step up and do the right thing. I tell all of my colleagues that this is not a partisan issue. This is truly bipartisan. This is truly bipartisan. These people work for all of us, not just for part of us.
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