Breaking Promises: Shed Billions and Earn Bonuses
Article rank 31 Mar 2013 The Philadelphia Inquirer
Michael Carroll is a Philadelphia writer
I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal this month about how some retired coal miners in West Virginia might lose their health insurance because the coal company they once worked for — the one that promised them health insurance for life — had been sold and resold and was now owned by another big company that was asking a court to allow it to break that promise. The promise was no longer convenient or profitable.
The company was also making another request to the court: for permission to pay its managers a $7 million bonus. Presumably, they were doing a heck of a job.
I know a little about coal, not from ever getting my hands or lungs dirty mining it. I never went into a mine except as a reckless teenager sneaking around where my parents told me never to go, or when I visited an old mine reborn as a tourist attraction. But I grew up around coal, in Mount Carmel, in the Anthracite Region.
I am a member of the first generation of my family not to work in the mines since they arrived in that part of Pennsylvania more than a century ago. There was never a chance that I would take on such hard and dangerous work. The industry was dying, and I was leaving after high school. My parents insisted that I be a college boy. My father got out of the mines after the war, just before they collapsed, but not before he did enough damage to his lungs to collapse them years too soon.
Coal was always there. It was in our basement, in our furnace, and in the hot water Johnny stove when I was a kid. It was in trucks in and around town. It was in chutes rattling down into neighbors’ coal bins from raised truck beds at all hours in all seasons.
The word coal was always coupled with any mention of the region. Coal Region football. Coal Region food. Coal Region people. Coal Region drinking. Coal Region contact sport politics.
I also worked in southern West Virginia for a year, about 35 years ago, at a legal services office that served miners who were laid off.
As for promises, we all make them, and most of us try to keep them. One dictionary definition says that to promise is “to assure somebody that something will certainly happen or be done … to cause somebody to expect something.” I guess that covers the miners’ situation.
There is another type of promise, one that can be enforced at law, a contract. Of course, there are many bright, maybe brilliant, lawyers from the best schools who have perfected the art of breaking even those promises.
And it may go back further, but I have early adult memories of when the modern-day trend of promise breaking to workers began. Airlines and other industries grew tired of keeping their unprofitable or inconvenient promises to provide wages, pensions, health insurance, and other benefits in exchange for years of employee work. So they went to court and shed the obligation — ducked the promise without consequences. That idea spread from industry to industry until it looked like any promise that was no longer convenient could be broken legally.
The common excuses were changed circumstances, and impossibility of performance.
Life is full of changed circumstances, and even seeming impossibility, which often turn out, upon closer inspection, to be workable hardships. To guard against changed circumstances, human beings have, over the millennia, done something: made promises.
Too often, the same people who wag fingers at workers and consumers — the little guys — when they failed to make house or car payments are the very same managers who break promises to West Virginia coal miners. The managers who earn bonuses shed millions, even billions, of dollars in promises and walk out of courtrooms with heads held high, claiming the mantle of saviors of the economy.
I don’t get it. Some promises seem chiseled in stone — others only in coal.