Sunday Gazette-Mail Published: 02/23/92 Category: News Page: P1B Keywords: national coal labor org health care insurance fund Correction Date: Correction: Photo/Graphic: HEADLINE: BROKEN PROMISES MINER'S WIDOW IS ONE OF 120,000 WHO ARE FACING THE LOSS OF HEALTH INSURANCE Byline: Ken Ward Jr. CINDERELLA _ Dixie Woolum packed her husband's dinner bucket every morning. Jimmy left early to work in the mines outside Williamson, heart of the billion dollar coalfield. ""He worked eight hours a day,'' Dixie Woolum said. ""Sometimes he'd double back and work 16 hours a day. He would always come in so tired he would lay down and sleep for two hours before he'd eat his supper.'' After 45 years, Jimmy Woolum retired on July 27, 1979. Three months later, he died of black lung disease. The one thing Dixie never thought she'd have to worry about was health care for her and her adopted daughter Tammy. The company was supposed to provide it. She never imagined the United Mine Workers health funds would be $115 million in debt. She never dreamed she'd be one of 120,000 miners or widows _ 35,000 in West Virginia _ who might lose their health insurance in April. ""I'm due this because my husband gave his life for this,'' Dixie said. ""It was a promise. Suppose I fell and broke a hip or an arm. What would I do without insurance? I don't know what I'd do .'' In 1950, President Harry Truman promised Dixie and Jimmy Woolum health care from cradle to grave, in a historic agreement with legendary UMW President John L. Lewis and the Bituminous Coal Operators Association. Lewis agreed not to oppose mechanization of the mines, a move experts say saved the American coal industry but cost tens of thousands of coalfield jobs. In return, operators paid a per ton coal tax, which was supposed to pay for health care for miners and their families. That's the way it worked for Dixie Woolum, at least until 1984, when A.T. Massey Coal Co. bought the mine where her husband had worked. ""It was union, and then Massey took it over and made it non-union,'' said Dixie Woolum, now nearly 73. ""I got a letter from Rawl Sales, which is a branch of Massey, saying I no longer had health care, and if I wanted to keep it I would have to pay $325 a month. ""When you are a widow, you get to keep your Finsurance G card until you remarry, and I never did remarry. They took it anyway.'' Dixie Woolum became a victim of broken promises and cutthroat competition, said Ron Lewis, a labor historian at West Virginia University. In the 1960s, non-union coal production in the western United States and abroad increased dramatically. Those companies had lower production costs, meaning they provided intense competition for traditional operators in the east. Some Appalachian operators went out of business. Others cut labor costs by jumping the UMW's ship and ditching health and pension benefit payments, Lewis said. The moves transformed the coal industry forever. ""You have a destabilization of the Fhealth G plan because there's a destabilization of the economy,'' Lewis said. ""You talk about the industry, but the industry hardly exists anymore. The people who made the agreements are no longer around. The companies are even different. They have different puppeteers pulling the strings.'' In 1974, the union and the operators tried to stabilize things . They formed a second health plan to provide for ""orphans'' like Dixie Woolum who were dumped by companies like Massey. Operators who stayed union paid for those who didn't. BCOA firms now pay $2.50 per hour worked for the health funds. It amounts to paying $3 for people they didn't employ for every $1 they pay for people they did employ. It wasn't enough. Health costs kept rising. The annual costs of both health care plans, per working miner, have increased from about $883 in 1979 when Jimmy Woolum retired, to nearly $5,000 today The $115 million deficit could double by next year. Union officials, however, predict bankruptcy for the funds sometime this spring. Dixie and 120,000 others like her will lose their health care if something isn't done. U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., wants to do something. He proposes transferring money from an overfunded UMW pension plan to cure the health care deficit. To pay for future benefits, Rockefeller suggests a 75 cents per hours worked levy on companies similar to the national coal tax for cleaning up old mines. ""I want to fix this problem and fix it forever,'' Rockefeller told miners at a meeting in Charleston last month. ""I say that a country that can take care of abandoned mine lands ought to have the decency to take care of abandoned people.'' In 1935, Jimmy Woolum went into the mines. He was 17. Two years later, Dixie moved to Mingo County from Martin, Ky. She was 17. Her parents had died and she had come to live with her older sister. Soon after that, Dixie met Jimmy and they were married. ""I met my husband and thought "Oh Lord, that is the prettiest man I ever saw,' 9'' Dixie said. ""When I fell, I fell hard.'' Jimmy ran a Joy Loader, a machine that virtually ended hand loading of coal and began the mechanization of the mines. The coal industry was in trouble in the 1930s, writes Curtis Seltzer in "Fire in the Hole: Mines and Managers in the American Coal Industry.'' Coal's traditional market _ home heating and railroad fuels _ was eroding. Oil and natural gas were easier to transport and, like coal, were abundant and cheap. Coal reserves were dispersed, promoting destabilizing competition that bred wage cuts, labor strife and inefficient production practices, Seltzer says. ""Overcapacity and oversupply crippled suppliers and poisoned the industry's labor relations,'' Seltzer writes. ""Supply-side competition impoverished both mining companies and their workers.'' In those days, Jimmy made maybe 70 cents an hour. The family struggled, buying much of what they needed from the company store. ""It's just like that song Tennessee Ernie Ford made,'' Dixie said. ""You sold your soul to the company store. That's just about what you did. We bought all our food, all our clothes up there. ""Many times we didn't have anything,'' she said. ""You could take $20 and live a month off of it. I've eaten many a basket of biscuits made without any baking powder. I canned everything I could get my hands on and still do.'' At the time, health care for miners and their families was ""deplorable,'' a federal report concluded. The job was dangerous . The UMW estimates that about 35 miners were permanently disabled on the job every week. Most were treated by ill-trained company doctors. Operators deducted the cost from the miners' paychecks. Dixie Woolum gave birth to her first two daughters at home. Her husband scraped together $50 each time to pay the doctor for a special trip. ""We always tried to take care of ourselves so we wouldn't get sick,'' she said. ""We'd dress warm in the winter and all, so we didn't have to go to the doctor. ""You had to worry about it, because if you didn't have the money you didn't get the care.'' Then the miners got the union. Jimmy took a job at another mine down the road. He started running a continuous miner, a technological wonder that both cut and loaded coal. Things were supposed to get better. ""John L. Lewis, you couldn't do a thing with him. He got what he wanted,'' Dixie said. ""When they would negotiate a better contract, you could get better pay and you could go to better stores ""I would love to see every mine union,'' she said. ""I don't think it's right for some to have everything and others have nothing .'' Jimmy's wages rose slowly. By 1948, an average miner made about $1.84 an hour. But coal production wasn't growing, and the industry was still in trouble. John L. Lewis saw mechanization as the only solution, Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine wrote in their 1986 biography of the labor leader. ""He consented to use the union's resources to advance the industry's productivity, to find new markets for coal, and to eliminate non-union mines,'' the authors say. ""Because Lewis believed that the miners' standard of living could advance only if the coal industry prospered, he did not perceive any of these activities as injurious to his members' interests.'' But Lewis, a strong advocate of national health care, sought pension and health benefits to protect the miners who would lose their jobs to machines. After World War II, Lewis proposed a 10 cents per ton royalty on coal to provide health care for miners and their families. A similar system had been in place in Great Britain since 1920. At first, American coal barons rejected the idea. Only a series of long strikes and Truman's involvement in White House negotiations between Lewis and the BCOA resolved the situation . National pension and health plans for miners started in 1950 with the 10 cents per ton royalty. Miners got what some call a ""Cadillac'' health plan. They pay only a $50 co-payment annually and no deductible. ""That was the model,'' said WVU's Lewis, who is no relation to the late labor leader. ""Nobody had the benefits the miners had and they paid for that.'' Between 1950 and 1960, 250,000 miners lost their jobs, but production began to soar. In 1970, deep miners produced nearly two tons per man hour, more than twice the 1950 level. Surface miners produced more than four tons per man hour, also twice the 1950 level Coal found new markets providing fuel for electric power plants . Today, total national production tops a billion tons, more than twice the 1960 total. Cinderella became a thriving little community. In the 1950s, more than 250 families were Dixie Woolum's neighbors. ""We had houses all the way down this way,'' she said. ""There were houses on both sides. This place was booming then. We had a lot of people up here when Jimmy was still alive. We were just a bunch of good neighbors.'' Dixie had four more children, three boys and one girl. She eventually adopted Tammy, her granddaughter, when Tammy's mother died . Because she had the union health plan, Dixie had those children in the hospital. ""You didn't have to worry,'' she said. ""You knew if anything happened, say my husband got really hurt in the mines, then we had the benefits to take care of him.'' The favorite game for Dixie's kids and their friends was marbles ""They all played up here. They all played marbles,'' she said . ""They had a place to play. We had a swimming pool. It was just wonderful. It would be a better place to live in if all that was back the way it was.'' Dixie Woolum still lives in Cinderella hollow. Her little green house sits between a sharp hill and railroad tracks leading to the abandoned mine. The company store is a few hundred yards down the road. Inside are ledgers listing how many tons Jimmy mined and how much he was paid before he retired and got sick. ""When he went to the hospital, he just thought he had a cold,'' Dixie said. It turned out to be black lung. That turned into cancer . Dixie had to prop him up on the couch so he could breath. In October, he died. ""The twenty-seventh of July to the fifteenth of October, that's quick,'' Dixie said. ""We had buried him and on his last payday they held out union dues. When he passed away I got to keep my card. ""He gave his life. He died of black lung and he said, "If anything ever happened to me, you and the kids will be taken care of .' 9'' In the mid-1980s, Massey bought area mines, Dixie said. They closed them, then reopened them under different company names with non-union workers, she said. ""Every mine that they closed down, Massey comes in and buys it out and subleases it to these other companies,'' Dixie said. ""I think why they do that is to get out of paying taxes or something. I think why they do this, change these names, is to get out of paying a lot of things.'' Massey wasn't the only one, Professor Lewis said. Dozens of Appalachian coal companies went non-union to cut their production costs, Lewis said. Competition was stiff from new operators cropping up in Wyoming's Powder River Basin and other areas. Many of those companies used huge strip mining techniques, allowing them to produce record amounts of coal with few workers and low production costs. ""You had more coal being mined non-union and that puts much pressure on union operators to reduce their production costs,'' Lewis said. ""You have people who are trying to cut costs to try to compete.'' By the early 1980s, operators who signed the UMW national contract accounted for only 40 percent of the country's coal production, down from 80 percent in the 1950s. Today they mine less than 30 percent of the nation's coal. ""Companies withdrew from the BCOA and sought to individualize their bargaining relationship, often in an effort to end their financial obligations to the Fhealth G Funds,'' said a 1990 report by the Coal Commission, a bipartisan panel appointed by then-Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole to examine the crisis. In 1984, Massey stopped paying for Dixie's health care. She was 65 and had a 16-year-old daughter. For five years, Dixie struggled to pay for her own insurance before the UMW orphan fund picked her up ""I had nowhere to turn. My husband was gone,'' Dixie said. ""When you know that you need insurance you don't know what to do. If that bill doesn't pass I'm gone. What would I do?'' Cinderella hollow is quiet and empty now. The neighbors are gone . Most of the mines are closed. Tammy, now 24, still lives with Dixie. She works managing a clothing store in the mall and takes classes at Southern West Virginia Community College in Williamson. Dixie's dog Alex keeps her company when Tammy is at work or school. ""She's the most company. I don't know what I'd do without here. I'd do without food to feed this dog. I love animals.'' Dixie still brings in her own wood for the fire. She goes to the mall and visits her sister. She goes to antique shops with Tammy to buy dolls for the daughter's collection. She has her own collection of ceramic Indian statues. On the wall of Dixie's house is a picture of Christ. On the table is a Bible. ""I don't like what Massey did,'' Dixie said. ""A Christian wouldn't do that. It was money and the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil. He just doesn't know God like I do. But yes, indeed, God will forgive him.'' Dixie keeps a jar of marbles that the kids used to play with. She says she collected them when her neighbors moved and their houses were torn down. ""Anything that's connected with this area for memories, I collect,'' she said. ""I've watched them come and I've watched them go and I'm the last. ""This up here is just a land of nowhere.''