For decades coal mining was both the lifeblood and curse of deep southern Illinois. It brought fat paychecks, bass boats and shiny trucks, but at a price measured in poisoned lungs, severed limbs and lost lives.
These days that legacy is much on the minds of people in Benton and towns like it throughout this region. The reason: Billions of dollars in tax incentives from Washington and Springfield hold out the hope of revival for an Illinois coal industry devastated in the last 15 years.
Suddenly, an energy-hungry nation seems to think dirty old Illinois coal–until recently considered too expensive to burn cleanly–isn’t so bad after all.
Lee Roy Mumbower, a top local official with the United Mine Workers of America, was driving south on Illinois Highway 29 last spring in his black Grand Cherokee when he heard a radio report about California’s rolling energy blackouts. He cheered.
“I said, `Yes!’ Once those rich people in California couldn’t take their sauna baths, I knew that the coal market was coming back,” Mumbower said. “They need that old southern Illinois boy down there risking his life mining coal.”
Coal’s fresh hopes are rooted in those West Coast blackouts, which sparked a renewed debate about the nation’s energy policy. Partly in response to that, President Bush recently won House passage of an energy bill that includes more than $5 billion in tax incentives and research for “clean coal” technology.
That vote came just weeks after Gov. George Ryan signed legislation offering companies $3.5 billion in state incentives to dig more Illinois coal and to build power plants near the mines to burn it.
Soon after Labor Day the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs expects to accept the first applications from companies seeking to qualify for the incentives.
“We have no fewer than a half-dozen serious prospects for developing coal-fired plants in Illinois,” said Michael Murphy, chief of the department’s coal development office. “I believe we’ll have some applications this fall. That doesn’t mean there will be a plant built, but that’s certainly a good sign.”
Miners’ views
If utilities do respond to such legislation, King Coal may be coming back to Illinois in a big way. But all the attention surrounding coal’s new hopes has ignored a crucial fact: Many former miners don’t care to return, and the long years of economic gloom have pushed their children into other jobs or out of southern Illinois entirely.
The state’s coal miners watched their numbers plummet from about 18,000 in 1980 to no more than 5,000 today, according to the Illinois Coal Association. Those numbers include Billy Muir, who worked 18 years at Old Ben 21, not far from Benton, until it shut down a decade ago.
Muir now stocks shelves on the midnight shift at the local Wal-Mart. He has no plans to return to the shafts.
“Coal mining is a good living. It’s a southern Illinois tradition,” Muir said. He can’t argue with the many young people who have found other work. “The way things are, the way the market has gone, I’d tell them [to] get their education and go into something else.”
Nursing battered knees and egos, many former miners are now driving long-haul trucks or working at prisons–one of the few growth industries in this part of the state in recent years. The pay isn’t as good, and some miss the almost combatlike camaraderie of the mines; then again, they no longer have to worry about being buried alive 300 feet underground.
“Nobody twisted my arm to go down there. The money was good,” said retired coal miner Shannon Fletcher, 57, as he waited recently to have his breathing tested at a black lung clinic in Herrin. “But with all this,” he added, nodding to the respiratory equipment attached to his bare chest, “it’s not really worth it.”
Those willing to return are mostly older and anxious to get that last year or two needed for a full pension. Younger and healthier miners are more skeptical. After being let go, some returned to the mines temporarily in recent years, only to be disappointed again.
Billy Muir’s brother, Jim, a 19-year veteran of Old Ben 21, remembers a manager telling him and other rehired miners that he had 17 years worth of work for them.
“Some guys went out and bought new trucks,” said Muir, who has since become a newspaper reporter. Three months later the mine laid them all off.
So while local union leaders and others publicly praise the state’s incentives for new coal-fired power plants, privately they’re more cautious. “The passage of the bill is a step of faith,” Jim Muir said. But “if you’re burned a couple times, you’re leery.”
Talk to union leaders such as Mumbower and you’ll sense the seismic shift in the UMWA, whose legendary leader, John L. Lewis, made southern Illinois his home turf.
Lewis’ sometimes violent confrontations with coal companies helped bring miners some of what they enjoy today: safer and healthier working conditions, $19 an hour in pay. But more than a decade of lost jobs has left the union weakened. No more than 30,000 of the UMWA’s 120,000 members nationwide are active miners; only 1 in 3 of America’s miners is unionized.
Gone, too, is much of the in-your-face rhetoric. “We’re all in this together,” Mumbower said while sitting in his union office in Benton the other day. “I don’t care if John Doe coal company makes $10 billion a year, as long as they give us a decent wage and maintain the safety.”
Even union rallies aren’t what they used to be. The UMWA’s international president, Cecil Roberts, recently did his best to fire up the troops for a march in Galatia, Ill., to the site of the state’s first non-union mine.
About 150 miners showed up, and many were retirees. After a few rounds of “Solidarity Forever,” police officers quietly escorted the 16 miners designated for arrest into waiting vans.
The scene seemed a fitting coda for the nation’s unionized coal miners. Thousands of them lost their prime, if perilous, jobs when stricter air standards passed in 1990 made Illinois’ high-sulfur coal less profitable to mine. Men who had been making $70,000 a year with a high school diploma suddenly found themselves scraping by on $11,000 in unemployment benefits.
Some moved to Wyoming, which has low-sulfur coal preferred by power plants whose owners didn’t want to buy expensive scrubbers that could make Illinois coal cleaner to burn. (The legislation signed by Ryan includes incentives for utilities to install scrubbers.)
Those who stayed behind tried to get by with other jobs. Some have done well. Many have struggled, leaving divorces and even suicides as evidence.
“Nobody wants a 45-year-old man who’s worked 20 years in a coal mine and has health problems,” said Danny Johnson, a former miner who now works as an outreach worker for the Farm Resource Center. Founded to help families affected by the 1980s’ farm crisis, the resource center now helps mine workers recover from the financial and psychological shock of losing the only job many have known.
Something’s lost
Even union leaders such as Mumbower, while boasting that the new demand for coal will pump life back into the UMWA, acknowledge that something has been irretrievably lost.
“Thank God that bill has been passed to revive the coal industry in Illinois,” said Mumbower, 55. But “for the generation I represent, it may be too late. [And] it may be difficult to get the young generation to put their lives at risk in a coal mine.”
It’s certainly too late for Victor Tasky. After he died in 1985, his wife got black lung benefits for 11 years. But his old employer, the Freeman United Coal Co., and the federal government challenged the initial ruling of a U.S. Department of Labor administrative law judge.
Fifteen years after his death, an appellate court ruled against the Tasky family. His widow is fighting back.
“My husband was the healthiest man in the world until he worked in the coal mine,” Maria Tasky, 79, said as she relaxed one recent evening, shaded by the awnings she bought with some of her husband’s black lung benefit money. “I’ve only got an 8th-grade education. But I do know right from wrong. And what they did to me is wrong.”
