Pensions for Mine Workers

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I wish to speak about an issue that is--to say it is unfinished business is an understatement. The fact that we are standing here in the fall of 2016 and the Congress of the United States hasn't fulfilled its promise to coal miners is really an insult not only to coal miners who spent a lot of years in the mines in a lot of States, mine and other States, but it is also an insult to the country because their government--our government--made a promise to them more than a generation ago.

Some people may remember the book ``The Red Badge of Courage.'' That was written by Stephen Crane, a great novelist who didn't even make it to the age of 30. He died in his late twenties.

Stephen Crane is known for being a great novelist and known for writing ``The Red Badge of Courage,'' but one of the most compelling accounts he ever wrote or anyone has ever written about the dangers and horrors of a particular line of work was Stephen Crane's essay, just before the turn of the last century, about a coal mine in my hometown of Scranton. The name of the article published in Collier's magazine was ``In the Depths of the Coal Mine.'' I will not of course read all of it and recite major portions of it, but suffice it to say that Stephen Crane, a great novelist, went into a coal mine and reported what he saw there, not as a work of fiction but as a work of the harsh realities in nonfiction of what the miners were facing.

In one part of the essay, he described the mine he was in when he descended all the way down. Of course, you only have to go down a very short distance before it is pitch black. You can't even see your hand in front of your face. He described the mine as a place of ``an inscrutable darkness, a soundless place of tangible loneliness. . . . ''

Then he went on from there describing what he saw, describing young children working in the mines, children the ages of 10, 11, 12, and into their teens, working in the mines; describing the process of how the coal got out of the mines, mules pulling these carts full of coal. He described what my fraternal grandfather saw when he was there as a young boy at the age of 11, who entered a mine not too far away from this particular mine, just as Stephen Crane was writing.

Stephen Crane concluded the essay by talking not only about all of the horrors of the mine but how miners could die in that mine. He described it at one point in summation as the 100 perils or the 100 dangers that those coal miners faced.

Why do I raise that today? I realize coal mining in the present day or even 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, maybe even 30 years ago, was not nearly as dangerous as it was in the 1890s or the early part of the 1900s, but it is still very dangerous work today and has been for all these years. We have seen too many places where miners have been trapped and rescued or trapped and never rescued, killed, in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and other places over more than a generation--in fact, many generations. Those miners worked there for, in many cases, more than 10 years or 20 years. Some of them also served our country in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or beyond.

They were promised by their government that they would have a pension. A number of us, in a bipartisan fashion, came together to support the Miners Protection Act, which would make sure that at a minimum the now 12,951 miners in Pennsylvania would get that pension they were promised and a smaller number--but a big number, in the thousands, in Pennsylvania--would also get the health care they have a right to expect. This was a promise by the Federal Government. It wasn't a ``we will try to'' or ``we hope to do it'' or ``we will make every effort to do it,'' it was a hard-and-fast, irrefutable promise, and it is time the Federal Government has delivered on that promise to those miners and their families.

They went into the darkness and the danger of a coal mine in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. Some of them were younger than that. Some of them still do it and still engage in that work. They should have a right to expect that just as they kept their promise to their families that they would go to work every day and work hard and bring home a paycheck, just as they made a promise to their employer that they would go into that mine every day and do impossibly difficult work year after year and sometimes decade after decade--and they fulfilled that promise to their employer and to their families. Some of them made a promise to their country that not only would they work hard, but they would serve their country in war and combat.

The question is, Will we keep our promise to them?

Their promise was much tougher than our promise. All we have to do here to keep the promise is vote the right way, vote in the U.S. Senate to make sure miners get their pensions and health care and vote in the House in the same way. That is not hard to do--to walk into the well of the U.S. Senate or somewhere in this Chamber and put your hand up. That is pretty easy to fulfill the promise we made to them. This isn't a lot of money for these miners. In addition to Social Security, sometimes it is about 530 bucks a month for all of that work they did. So it is not hard to fulfill this promise that our country and our government made to them.

These are people who are not in the newspaper every day, they are not on television. They may not have a lot of power. They may not be connected to people who are powerful or people who are wealthy. They are just hard-working people who did their job and deserve to have that promise fulfilled.

I believe this is a matter of basic justice. It is basic justice whether we are going to fulfill that promise. Saint Augustine said a long time ago, hundreds of years ago: ``Without justice, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers.''

If you apply that to today's terminology, a kingdom in some sense is like our government--a governing body for a nation. Without justice, what is a government but a great band of robbers. We owe people that basic justice, that promise.

So let's fulfill our promise as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in the U.S. Senate. Let's not allow inaction or other circumstances, political or otherwise, to prevent us from doing the right thing. Let's not rob these miners and their families of what they deserve, what they earned. We are not giving them anything. We are just voting the right way so they have a promise fulfilled.

I would hope that before everyone goes home to do whatever folks will do--travel to their States or campaign or whatever they are going to do--I would hope, at a minimum, we would take action on a number of things we talked about today but in particular that we make sure families don't have to worry about the horror and threat of Zika, something we can prevent the spread of if we take action; that families will not be threatened by it in Florida or Puerto Rico or anywhere because beyond that, we don't get to the solution, the action. Of course, we hope we can go home and say we at least said to miners and their families: We have fulfilled the promise the government made to you generations ago. That is the least this body and the other body should do before we leave Washington.
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