Jul. 5-By Greg Edwards, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va. Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Mickey Carrico worked 15 years for a construction company in Kingsport, Tenn., before a chance meeting at a campground with a coal-company boss set him on a new career path.
Companies are holding job fairs and advertising for workers in inventive
ways. Massey Energy Co. of Richmond, the largest coal company in central
Appalachia, hired an airplane to tow a banner above Myrtle Beach, S.C., trolling
for potential miners.
Companies are offering wage increases and bonuses to keep workers and attract
new ones.
Katharine Kenny, a spokeswoman for Massey, said her company opened five major
mines last year and found it tough to find enough workers. "We have to hire
two times the number we want because the turnover is significant," she
said.
With the coal business booming, miners who have been commuting an hour or
more are finding mining jobs closer to home. Others stuck for years on the night
shift are finding day work with another employer.
Today's miners can earn $60,000 to $75,000 a year, counting overtime. Those
with special skills, such as underground electricians, can make $80,000 to
$100,000. Big companies offer a full range of benefits, including pensions,
401(k) plans and 90/10 medical plans whose premium is paid totally by the
company.
Pick-and shovel mining is a thing of the past, despite the image portrayed by
a popular GE television commercial, featuring well-oiled male and female models
skimpily dressed as miners. The work can still be hard and physical at times,
but today's miners are specialists -- engineers, electricians, mechanics and
operators of computerized equipment.
"The days of hiring some guy because he has a broad back and big biceps
is probably gone," said Thomas Hoffman, a spokesman for Consol Energy, a
Pittsburgh company that operates a large Buchanan County mine. "Nobody is
out there 'loading 16 tons and what do you get' anymore," he said,
referring to a popular mining song.
Carrico said he was attracted to mining by the challenge of the job and by
the fringe benefits that it provides for his wife and son. Now a "red
hat," or beginning miner, at Paramont Coal Co.'s Deep Mine No. 7 near
Coeburn in Wise County, he has been training since October to be an electrical
and mechanical repairman.
"I love it, absolutely love it," Carrico says. "Some of the
old miners are some of the best people you ever met."
Carrico said he hopes to retire in his new job. That is looking like a
possibility now, even in an industry that 15 to 20 years ago was laying off
miners by the thousands.
Last month, Carrico settled into the rear seat on a diesel-powered shuttle
car as it entered the half-moon-shaped portal of Paramont's Deep Mine No. 26 in
Dickenson County.
Sitting next to him was 20-year-old Jonas Houseright of Gate City, another
apprentice miner. Houseright is an engineering student at Virginia Tech and will
work in the mines during the summer months. He is a linebacker on the Hokie
football team, on which his father, Bill, and older brothers Jake and Bill Jr.
played before him.
The shuttle car rides on rubber tires, low to the ground. Passengers keep
their heads down. The mine shaft in most areas is only 5 feet high.
For the first several hundred feet inside the mountain, the car follows a
gentle slope until it reaches the level of the coal bed or "seam"
being mined. The car shares the entryway with a rumbling conveyor belt that
moves coal out of the mine.
To enter the mine, a group of visitors dons coveralls and steel-toed boots, a
helmet and safety goggles. A heavy belt holds a battery for a helmet light and a
box containing a "self-rescuer," which provides an hour of emergency
oxygen.
It is an abnormally hot June day, but the temperature underground is 58
degrees. A strong breeze generated by powerful fans carries any explosive
methane gas out of the mine, the state's third-most gassy.
As the shuttle car leaves daylight at the mine's mouth, the car's headlamps
and the helmet lights pierce the thick darkness. The light flits in streaks
across the mine walls as miners turn their heads this way and that.
Besides "red-hat" miners Carrico and Houseright, the shuttle car
carries supervisors for Paramont and its parent company, Alpha Natural Resources
Inc. of Abingdon. Alpha was formed in 2002 when two investment groups bought the
Virginia coal operations of Pittston Coal Co. from The Brink's Co. of Richmond.
Driving the shuttle car is mine superintendent Henry Keith. Keith, 47, has
worked in mines since he was 20 and does not hesitate to recommend mining as a
career.
Mining is much different and the training much better now than when he
started, Keith said. "For young people who are going to stay in the area, I
don't think you can beat this kind of work."
It is a 2-mile ride from the entrance to the area where a crew is mining. The
roof of the sandstone tunnels where coal has been removed is held up by row
after row of 6- to 12-foot steel bolts that bind rock layers together like glue
bonds plywood.
The mining crew is "pulling" pillars, large blocks of coal that
were left to support the roof as the mine was developed. A remote-controlled
machine grinds away at the coal with steel teeth, and hydraulic jacks support
the roof as the pillar is removed. When the coal is gone, the jacks are moved by
remote control and the roof is allowed to collapse.
Albert Meade, the mining crew's foreman, says the job is safer than when he
started 26 years ago. Then, a machine operator would have been in the machine
and close to the unsupported roof. Now, the operator stands 40 feet away from
the danger.
Mike Quillen, Alpha Natural Resources' president and CEO, guessed his company
would hire roughly 600 miners over the next three years, about half of them to
work in new mines and the rest to replace retirees.
The aging work force is a broader issue for coal companies than the labor
needs created by an improved coal business, said Consol Energy's Hoffman.
"We are expecting a big slug of people to retire over the next
decade."
Company executives note that the average age of miners in central Appalachia
is over 50 now.
A whole generation of miners was lost to layoffs in the$'80s and$'90s.
Laid-off miners moved into other occupations, often outside of the coal fields.
Today, nearly all the experienced miners who wanted to return to the mines
have already done so. Lists have mostly been cleared of laid-off miners
available for recall at unionized companies, said United Mine Workers spokesman
Phil Smith. The pool of experienced people has run dry.
The UMW recently received an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor
to train new miners for work underground. The first effort will be in northern
Appalachia near Pittsburgh, but plans are to expand the program, Smith said.
To deal with depressed coal prices in the past two decades, companies laid
off workers and increased productivity by concentrating on the easiest coal
seams to mine and by employing new technology and mining methods.
Technology, however, will not solve the looming miner shortage.
Quillen said miner productivity peaked around the year 2000 and has started
to decline. That is predictable, he said, when companies are mining seams as
thin as 25 inches and, in order to get their 42-inch-tall machinery into the
mine, are removing 6 tons of rock with every 4 tons of coal.
Companies are beating the bushes for new employees and sometimes looking far
afield.
Massey Energy, for instance, has advertised nationwide for miners in USA
Today and in newspapers in Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., areas where many former
miners moved during the industry slump.
Jeff Gillenwater, whose job is to find new miners for Massey, said last
year's flyover of Myrtle Beach, where many miners go during their annual
vacation, produced results for the company.
Massey also has advertised for miners in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, a
large coal-producing area where many former Easterners now work. Gillenwater
said Massey also goes to high school principals and coaches looking for
referrals.
Massey and Alpha have placed billboards in the coal fields to lure prospects.
Alpha has had good success with new hires who have come from the military, which
Quillen attributes to an atmosphere of camaraderie that develops in a coal mine.
Alpha offers bonuses to its miners if they refer a new miner to the company
who stays for a specified period. Massey pays a retention bonus to its workers
if they stay with the company for a certain period.
Coal companies have found it easier to find new surface miners than
underground workers because construction skills such as running a bulldozer or
driving a heavy truck translate easily to surface mining.
As a consequence, the underground-miner shortage has helped spur an increase
in strip mining. Massey, for instance, produced 85 percent of its coal
underground six years ago but now only half, Kenny said.
Coal companies are looking for employees of all kinds, not just miners.
Consol, for example, has stepped up recruiting at engineering schools in mining
states, such as Virginia Tech.
A need exists to bring back the vocational-technical schools that taught
mining skills in the coal fields before the industry slump, Consol's Hoffman
said. In Virginia, community colleges now provide some of that training.
Mountain Empire Community College at Big Stone Gap and Southwest Virginia
Community College near Richlands provide state-required new-miner training and
state-$and federal-mandated refresher training for miners, as well as two-year
degree programs in mining.
Jim Humphrey, one of two instructors at SVCC, said enrollment in the mining
programs has picked up with the improved coal economy. Enrollees are young and
old, he said.
Rumors, unsubstantiated, have accompanied the hunt for workers. There is one
about a mine foreman who was paid $10,000 to switch mines and brought his whole
crew with him to the new job. Another concerns an unnamed company planning to
import Hispanic immigrants to work in its mines.
Immigrants from several European countries provided much of the U.S. mining
industry's labor during the early 20th century, but coal executives note that
safety was less of a priority then. In 1907, more than 3,200 miners died on the
job in the U.S., compared with 28 deaths last year.
Non-English-speaking workers would pose a hazard in coal mines, in which good
communication is critical to safety, coal executives say. "A
misunderstanding can get people hurt," Consol's Hoffman said.
The Central Appalachian area has a well-publicized problem with people
abusing methamphetamine and prescription drugs such as Oxycontin. Coal companies
are also taking steps to ensure drug abusers don't find their way into the
mines. Alpha, for instance, requires new hires to take a wide-ranging drug test
of a hair sample that can detect drug use back for 90 days. The test, itself,
discourages drug users from applying for a job, George Owens, Alpha's personnel
director said. Roughly 5 percent of those tested fail, he said.
The future of Appalachian coal looks brighter now than it has in two decades,
but filling the industry's labor needs still poses a challenge.
Coal companies have responded with recruitment programs and incentives and
efforts to change the popular image of coal mining to align it more with the way
the job is done today.
"We will have a lot of people walk out with retirement," Consol's
Hoffman said. Because the retirements will come at the industry over time, it
will be able to meet the challenge, he said.
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