A Union Coal Miner's Perspective on the Industry

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Post by Coal Miner » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 4:40 pm

Greetings from Australia Friends...
Working at a BHP coal mine in Queensland under union conditions, on a ten hour overtime shift on Sunday night, I am on around forty four bucks an hour, plus coal bonus, and height and dirt money, I expect to get around five hundred bucks for the shift, working as a rigger, variously on an oxy acetylene torch and driving the crane, doing demolition on night shift, preparing the coal wash plant for an upgrade.
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I was working with an experienced welder, who had spent at least twenty years in the industry, I arrive on the site at the start of night shift, the pay clerk who was just knocking off gave me my pay slip for the previous week.

Later in the shift, the guy I was working with asked for a look at my pay slip, I gave it to him and when he read it he started crying, his tears had washed the coal dust from his face, I said "…what’s up Mate," and he broke down and told me ...a contractor had rang him about this job, he declined on the grounds that he was only gonna pay eighteen dollars hours an hour, flat rate, no overtime rate, no coal bonus, no height money, no nuthin’.
The contractor then rang his missus, and told her there was a job if he wanted it, where upon she presented him with the ultimatum of going to work or moving out, so on union rates on that shift I got around three hundred and twenty dollars more than him...


No wonder he was crying!!


I gave him my undertaking, that I would be sponsoring a union motion that all trade union people, at all BHP coal mining operations, thence all BHP hard rock mining and on shore facilities, cease work until this pay claim which has existed since 1995, and all other similar pay claims are met.

2008: This union proposes that the Australian workforce drop their tools, and walk off the job on strike, in protest at the lack of police and government action, in relation to killings, the thuggery and the scabbery, in Australian Construction and Mining sector unions.

Western Australian Mining Union Elections November 2008.
Yo Readers...**Broken Link(s) Removed**... who gets to spruik from the back of this baby, that's what the electors will decide on November 4!!

Check the latest union technology... **Broken Link(s) Removed** this item is made in Russia, it has the same coil pickups as Eric Clapton's guitar, guaranteed to 99 decibels at five hundred meters, then get a pair of brass knuckles, and you are ready for a career as a Western Australian trade union leader!!
The election came and went, nor was one syllable of coherent discourse received from any of the union operators!!

None of the candidates had any policy on this type of thing, the unions dropped the ball, then go public at union meetings, describing men that have been forced by domestic pressure to take jobs, as scabs for goin' to work!!
The kids are starving, the only job I can get pays twenty an hour below the award, and the union hung up the @#&! phone.

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cArNaGe
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Post by cArNaGe » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 4:58 pm

That just confused me.

 
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Post by Coal Miner » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 5:04 pm

I do not see how there can be confusion, the unions are run by crooks and scabs, they say, MY WAY or THE HIGHWAY,

That means starvation pay and filthy dangerous conditions, the mine bosses say dig it out just as fast as you can, then the mine becomes explosive cos there is coal dust everywhere, and no one has the time to fix it, cos they are diggin' just as fast as can be, so they can get a big fat coal bonus, to pay the sub prime at three one a month!!

Next thing BOOOM, the whole town wakes in the early hours when the mine explodes, and everyone underground is killed!!

During my mining career, Moura mine in Central Queensland in Australia, has exploded on three separate occasions since 1974, killing thirteen men on two occasions and twenty two the last time, Box Flat blew one early morning in 1982, killing seventeen underground coal miners, and waking the entire town of Ipswich!!

Murder bashings and violence are commonplace, the way to take back the ship is for there to be massive stoppages right across the industry!! To get rid if the crook union leaders, who very often go from positions in the unions, to seats in the National and State Legislatures.

Strike!! Strike!! Strike!!!

 
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Post by SAU » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 8:51 pm

Well I don't know much about Austrailia, but where I'm at the top wage is about U.S. $30.00 medical, dental. 401k matching contributions at 4%, triple time on holidays, time and a half for OT, and there isn't a union in sight.


 
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Post by Coal Miner » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 9:57 pm

Well I don't know much about Austrailia, but where I'm at ...top wage... and there isn't a union in sight."


I can relate to that, and certainly in this country, if you are a mine employee, you do get top dollar and better extra's etc!!

However here, and I have no doubt in America also, there is a two tier system, the mines do not keep large maintenance crews on the mine pay roll, preferring to bring contractors in, so unless you are a mine employee, where there is very often a bias toward employing non Australians, from the Pacific Islands for instance,

You are left at the mercy of contractors, and it ain't so good at all!!

 
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Post by SAU » Sat. Nov. 29, 2008 10:42 pm

True, we do have contractors. They de-water the pit, do janitorial work, and we do have maintenance contractors. Mostly they work on the trucks because Bill Klinton passed EPA laws requiring stricter emissions. The mines mechanics work on everything except for the trucks and I think those laws are a huge reason as to why. Klinton, supposedly a union supporter, pissed away more high paying jobs than the union ever could have saved by supporting him. Another strike to the unions was Klintons passage of NAFTA. How can anything with 800 pages of regulation be called free?

 
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Post by Richard S. » Sun. Nov. 30, 2008 2:53 am

Most of the deep mines in this area are small family run operations and I'm pretty sure non-union. Most are still digging it out the same way they did 50 years ago because there is no better way as anthracite mining differs from bituminous mining. Most of the miners from my understanding would prefer to get the government out of their way because they are applying unrealistic regulations made for bit. mining that in some cases pose a hazard from understanding. There's two or three active miners on this forum, perhaps they'll chime in.

Slightly different situation here at least for deep mines.

 
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Post by Coal Miner » Sun. Nov. 30, 2008 6:02 am

Coal Mining operations here are on a massive scale... The open cut at Goonyella Riverside is twenty two kilometers, that's fourteen miles long, ninety nine percent of the coal goes for export, and they only burn second rate coal that they cant sell to the Japanese, in the furnaces at the Power Stations which all have their own mines, the bad coal is full of sulfur, which ends up as acid rain!!


Most of the contractors in the industry go from mine to mine, they put us up in work camps, all found and all food, so most of the guys that have been around for a while, would usually have worked in maybe twenty or more different coal mines!! We work on the mine plant and equipment, rather that dig the black stuff out.

Very often there is an "us and them" approach at work, a dump truck weighs in at three hundred tons, and it carries three hundred tons of coal, stories of dump truck drivers howling with maniac laughter, as they chase contractors around the marshaling area of the mine are legion... we call them Vegetables, "Veggies" for short, they call us "Grubby Subbies," the company miners get a clothing issue, we do not, so a lot of the men wear ragged clothing!!
Dragline Shutdown ...Newlands Coal Mine Central Queensland Australia 1996, I was swinging shifts which meant I had a day off... the truck driver asked me if I wanted to accompany him to Mackay, we were gonna be leaving early, he said it would give me something to do, and since I had asked him prior about driving some of the gear, I would be able to drive the semi trailer into town, and he would then drive back with the load on.

We were working for Eagle Engineering, a Gladstone based firm doing a shut down on a dragline ...I turned up early for the trip into Mackay, adjacent to where the truck was parked, the undesirable trash element were partying on, this element was at war with the rest of the community, with loud drunken parties attended by thug trash, this trash element was at that time terrorizing the truckie.
One particularly revolting creep was sledging and abusing us, the driver had had to go and change his shirt already, someone had smeared blackjack, which is heavy grease used on the moving parts of a dragline, all over his seat and on the trucks steering wheel. We made our way out of the truck park, this same creep throws a rolled up wad of rubbish at the truck, it hits the window my side ...we go into Mackay pick up the load return with no incident.

Afternoon shift the following day… Chicken Lauder the boss at Eagle, says as we turn up for work... "Don't go on the job boys, Johnny wants to talk to you all," Johnny was the welding foreman, he had kept the day shift there he told us, so we could all hear what he had to say.
He sounded something like this... "Now listen up, since we've been here there has been nothing but s*** on the job..." Johnny was about forty years old, he was lean and dehydrated, his face was black from soot after welding all day, he wore hard toe Red Wing boots and his jeans were faded, his belt buckle attested to decades in the industry, while his check shirt evoked images of Steve McQueen in The Bounty Hunter, hard hat and mine issue sunglasses completed the picture, he was laying down the law in a big way...

"...And in the camp now I'm f***** sick of it, if you want to f***** play.. or if you want to f****** play f***** games, well I'm the gamest **** here... if any of you all want to f*** about, well the way to do that is to fight... now if any of you all have got any guts... or if all you are is a mob of ****s... the way to find that out is to fight... any more s***, or any more crap, or if any **** reckons he is good enough... then fight," this went on for a while, then Johnny hops into his truck and off he goes.
Chicken tells us to go onto the job, and he gives me the task of using de greaser to clean a bull gear, part of the propel mechanism of the dragline, I am doing that for a while when along comes Eric, the dude that threw the wad of trash at the truck the previous morning, I tell him he does not want to go throwing things, he gets super trashy says what the ****.

I tell him I am an expert in throwing my knuckles around, and did he want to try throwing something now ...he advances and I belt the him right in the mouth, he has his guard up, so instead of following up with another fist to the head, I give him a backhander then get him in a headlock ...he is struggling hard, and I don't want to chance him wriggling free, so I kick his legs out from under him, seeing to it that his head is rubbed hard against the teeth of the bull gear going down, and my weight prevents him getting his balance, as I drive his face hard into the ground where the blackjack and degreaser have pooled, he is trying to breathe, but is only filling his lungs with dirt.

Chicken Lauder is screaming... "let him go Martin!! ...let him go!!"
I did not let him go ...so a giant Kiwi rigger picks both me and him up, then I let him go, then I raised my arm, that's how I dealt with thuggery at Newlands Mine.
Take it easy guys and gals!!


 
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Post by SAU » Sun. Nov. 30, 2008 10:28 am

Holy cow. The regular miners would lose their job and be blackballed from mining in this area if we did that to our contractors. Discourse between the contractors and miners is quite respectful. The mechanical contractors are paid almost as well as the miners if not better, depends on their level of competence. Janitorial and pit pumper not as well. A good portion of our pumpers are out of prison, and on probation. They have pretty good jobs considering their history but I would not want to be in their shoes. The guy that runs the pumper company knows that they must retain their jobs as part of the probation so they just deal with his crap and are paid between $10 and $20. I have no idea what they pay the janitorial staff. But we never speak down to them let alone lay our hands on them.

I have worked at a union mine in the past. there were at least three unions in the place, steel workers, equipment operators and the electrical brotherhood. They were completely ineffective. It was the lowest wage mining job I have ever worked at and the management was out to get you. The idiots in management saw fit to buy aluminum chock blocks which would fill with ice and water during the winter. A truck driver was trying to place one of his chocks in the bracket mounted on the bumper of a 240 ton truck. He missed the bracket and tried to catch the chock block on it's way to the ground. The weight of the block ripped his bicep loose from it's tendons and the mine wanted to fire him for being incompetent. My experience with the unions is very bland at best. I'll never work for a Rio Tinto mine again, worst company out there. I've also worked for BHP, I thought they were pretty good.

 
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Post by mike » Mon. Dec. 01, 2008 3:55 pm

When I was still in construction yet I was (still am actually) in the IBEW. They worked good with the contractors. At contract time both sides sooner or later came up with a contract that they could live up too, strikes are non existent, and greivances were far and few between. Now I work at three mines, two producing and one tourist mine. Of the two producing mines ones Union and the other isn't. At the union mine grievances are common, pay is ok, conditions on the whole are pretty good, but some guys need to get a set and just deal with stuff instead of running to the union all the time. The only time they bring in a outside contractor is for major repairs and our guys work right alongside the contractors so nobody complains much. The deep mine that I work at is non union. Pay is good, conditions are as good as it gets, all in all a guy shouldn't get paid for working at a place like that it's that good. None of the deep mines here are union and probably never will be for a bunch of reasons. The biggest being that the deep mines that we have today in the Anthracite are a direct result of the big union mines closing down during the depression and our miners having to go out and bootleg just to survive. Plus during the 30's and 40's the UMWA started to pay more attention to the soft coal mines instead of ours and finally the UMWofA likes to try to stop the deep mine operators from getting Petitions for Modification from MSHA in a attempt to shut them down.

 
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Post by Coal Miner » Tue. Dec. 02, 2008 1:51 am

On union rates on that shift, I got around three hundred and twenty dollars more than him.


That's the bottom line here, things are not usually as overtly violent as in the story above, and very often we work in the same work teams as the company miners, and get on fine... though when you are on a two tier system, stresses do develop!!

And trouble is never far below the surface... dog eat dog it is, and its even worse since racist New Zealanders entered the industry... they work as family groups and cover the place with anti Australian graffiti... F*** You Aussie, scrawled everywhere.

I take 'em on!! Read about a union meeting at Gove, an Alumina mine in Northern Australia in 2005, the issue was a detectable level of Mercury had turned up in a test result weeks before...
...at this point heckling and slander had broken out, a Maori guy in the crowd starts screaming '... whose this ****...' at this point I tell him that I am not a ****, and for him to address me that way rendered him liable to getting smashed in the mouth, he says '...wha... what the f***, ...read above about Eric at Newlands Mine, same s*** different day, he says "you're an old man, you're not worth bashing," I say "hop up here we'll see who is an old man."

The jerk never had the cojones for it... thats the Maori race!! We have a day and a half off, the dispute had no merits and was a power play by the meeting's organizers.
They got back at me later in the year, when the prob was smoking in the company vehicles we used on site, it is a big mine like twenty miles from side to side easy... so goin from one part to another, means a lot of vehicular travel.
Up until this time the major drama apart from racism on site, consisted of smoking in the twin cab company vehicles used to get around the mine. As an employees elected representative, the most requests I got were from workers who were made ill, constantly day after day, and in response to the same persons smoking in the vehicles.

I told them at duly constituted employees meetings: It was against Civil Law, company policy and site rules, and the union policy was that any departure from site rules constituted a breach, thus anyone sacked, reprimanded, disciplined, or served notice as a result of smoking in a non smoking area, had no case at all. Month after month, the same ones did not care about anything, their mates going home crook after breathing smoke in a twin cab all day.

I try to get the safety officer on side, about all I knew about him was his chortling and chuckling, when he showed photographs of deceased workmates, which are included in incident reports when a fatality occurs in the industry, his response was to hop into his company vehicle on site, stick a fag in his gob, light up and drive away.

The supervisors approach, he was a Dutchman and a dog, was smoking was OK, provided there were no non smokers in the vehicle, during this debate a black guy from Mackay in Queensland, spat a big blob of slag out of his mouth, just where I would have to put my foot when I got out my truck, I climbed into the back seat of the truck he was in, and gave him the whoppin' of his black life.
I got the union and they sold me out, I was fifty five years old, one of the last Vietnam veterans in the mines and lost everything!! That's where we are at here Guys... we are fighting just to stay afloat, and the difference between union and non union is three hundred and twenty dollars a day!!

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