[The state’s just transition plans promised by the Energy
Transition Act haven’t panned out for many workers.]
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NEW MEXICO’S DISPLACED COAL MINERS HAVE GOTTEN THE SHAFT ON
SEVERANCE PAY  
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Nick Bowlin, High Country News
November 7, 2023
High Country News
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_ The state’s just transition plans promised by the Energy
Transition Act haven’t panned out for many workers. _

San Juan Basin Coal Areas and Mines, New Mexico Bureau of Geology and
Mineral Resources

 

In early 2022, the San Juan coal mine outside of Farmington, New
Mexico, was preparing to shut down, along with the coal-fired power
plant it fed. Meanwhile, Dave and a small crew continued to work
underground, running the machinery that extracted the coal. But it
wasn’t going well: “Everything that could go wrong did,” he
said. (“Dave” is a pseudonym; he asked that his real name not be
used, since he continues to work in the coal industry.)

San Juan was a longwall mine, meaning that its coal was extracted by a
colossal shearing machine that worked back and forth across an exposed
panel of coal, like a deli slicer shaving off wedges of ham. An
internal memo said the mine’s final coal panel had “difficult
geologic conditions like nothing we had ever encountered.” A series
of hydraulic jacks held up the mine’s ceiling, each jack weighing as
much as 40 tons. But at San Juan, the jacks, which were supposed to
sit flush with the floor, were tipped precariously back toward the
coal seam. Giant rocks twice the size of Greyhound buses obstructed
the work zone.

In mining terms, Dave and his coworkers were “iron bound,” meaning
that their equipment was stuck in the mine; the machinery on the
longwall couldn’t move without colliding. “Every contractor that
walked in and saw that longwall face told us to just bury” the
equipment, he recalled.

Dave and the remaining miners pulled the last ton of coal out of the
San Juan Mine that September. The closure of the mine and plant left
him and some 400 other workers — many of them Navajo Nation citizens
— without a job, pulling the plug on one of the Four Corner
region’s largest economic engines. Even before the closure, a
quarter of the people in San Juan County, where the mine was located,
were living below the poverty line.

“We look out for each other. With this law, we seal that promise.”

After they were laid off, the miners were supposed to get some
financial relief from New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act (ETA), a
sweeping climate and renewable energy law with provisions for
severance payments and job training for laid-off workers. In a
statement after signing the bill, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham
emphasized that communities that relied on fossil fuel industries
would not be left behind. “We look out for each other,” she said.
“With this law, we seal that promise.”

But by the time Dave’s last shift ended, the International Union of
Operating Engineers Local 953, to which he belongs, was embroiled in a
fight with mine owner Westmoreland over the distribution of the ETA
funds. The dispute continues today. While most of the power plant
workers and some mine employees have received their checks, Dave and
other unionized miners either haven’t received a dime or else got a
mere fraction of what upper-level management did. New Mexico is indeed
transitioning from coal-fired power, but many miners are feeling left
behind.

In the San Juan Mine’s final months, Dave and the remaining miners
worked to keep it running with what he called “brute force
hydraulics and a little bit of luck.” Then, over a weekend, the
headgate — the main entrance to the mine — collapsed. At that
point, the doomed mine had little time left, but the miners repaired
the collapse anyway. “We got that sucker running again,” Dave
recalled. “We pulled off not one, not two, but three different
miracles.

“We fought it every inch of the way,” he went on. “And so all
this ETA stuff was just an extra slap in the face after we did all
that work.”

Marissa Garcia/High Country News

THE SAN JUAN GENERATING STATION began churning out power in 1973. In
2017, its operator, Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM), the
state’s largest regulated utility, shut down two of the four units
to comply with clean air rules. The power plant was retired altogether
in the fall of 2022, prompting the closure of the nearby mine, which
existed to feed it.

The Energy Transition Act allowed PNM to issue bonds to finance the
costs of energy transition, including everything from closing the
power plant to compensating displaced workers. PNM paid its power
plant workers directly. And this summer, after extensive delays, the
state — through the Department of Workforce Solutions — began the
process of paying out more than $20 million in direct financial aid
and job training to displaced plant and mine workers.

More than a year before, in March 2022, PNM also transferred $8.8
million to an escrow account, intended for severance payments to
workers at the San Juan mine. A financial institution would control
the escrow account, but the amounts of those payments and who received
them would be guided by data provided by Denver-based Westmoreland.

Each of the approximately 200 workers at the mine stood to get around
$40,000 from this chunk of change if it were evenly divided. But it
seems that after PNM deposited the money, there was little remaining
public oversight on how the money was divided up.  That calculation
was left up to Westmoreland. And, according to more than 10 interviews
with former Westmoreland employees, both union and management, the
company decided to use the money to pay its managers significantly
more in severance than it paid the laid-off miners.

On the surface, it looks like a simple matter of workplace inequities
persisting even after the workplace closes: Since managers get paid
more than miners, their severance payments are going to be higher. But
the severance payments for the most senior unionized workers, who
spent decades in the mine, appear to have topped out at around
$35,000. Salaried managers — even those with far fewer years on the
job — routinely pulled in well more than double that amount. Nothing
in the Energy Transition Act suggests that management should have been
favored to this extent — but nothing in the law prevented it,
either.

Duane Calhoon, an underground miner who had moved into a management
position, confirmed that he received about $78,000 in Energy
Transition Act severance from Westmoreland. Eric Hanon, another miner
turned salaried employee, voluntarily left Westmoreland before
receiving severance, but said that his superiors told him that the
standard payout for salaried employees was approximately $84,000. He
said that he heard of some other managers who received more than
$100,000. Hanon didn’t know how the payout amounts were determined,
but his hunch is that favoritism played a role. “It was a good old
boy system,” he said. “Most coal mines are. They take care of
their buddies.”

“It was a good old boy system. Most coal mines are. They take care
of their buddies.”

After the transition payouts from the escrow account began, union
officials said they asked Westmoreland to share its calculations for
the severance payments, but that the company refused. (Westmoreland
also refused to share this information with _HCN._) According to
Chris Roop, the union’s former master steward, who had worked at the
mine for 15 years, the company stonewalled the union. “Over the long
timespan talking with Westmoreland,” he said, “that turned into:
‘These are the numbers that we have, and we’re not going to
disclose to the union how we came up with these numbers.’”

So, last spring, the union filed a charge with the National Labor
Relations Board, accusing Westmoreland of refusing “to bargain with
the Union regarding the payment of severance and the provision of job
training services for workers laid off.” The complaint claimed that
even though the funds came from a publicly regulated utility,
Westmoreland was given “sole authority to determine distribution and
authorize payment,” adding that the company claimed that the funds
were “private money.” In response to a list of questions, Jon
Heroux, Westmoreland’s corporate counsel for external affairs,
called the allegations “spurious and unfounded” and said that the
union “made no formal or informal request to Westmoreland to bargain
on this matter.”

“Westmoreland does not have any statutory right to bargain with,
control, or administer any of these funds,” he said, adding that the
funds were to be administered by PNM, the state-regulated utility.

The agreement for the escrow account suggests that Westmoreland does
have some level of control over the funds – in addition to
determining the severance amounts paid out to the workers. Signed by a
Westmoreland representative, the agreement stated that the coal
company and the financial institution that created the escrow account
would “work together to facilitate and coordinate disbursement” of
the severance money. It also stated that PNM would have “no duties
or obligations … relevant to facilitating or coordinating the
disbursement of the severance amount.”

This was not the first time Westmoreland favored management at the
expense of miners. In 2018, as the company approached Chapter 11
bankruptcy, it paid out $10 million to its top executives while trying
to avoid paying health benefits to retirees, according to its
bankruptcy filings. Meanwhile, Westmoreland handed out retention pay
to 243 employees “critical to the Debtors’ business operations,”
who were mostly high-level management, not actual miners.

After the NLRB case was filed, union members said that Westmoreland
halted all payouts of the energy transition funds, pending a decision.
In his statement, Heroux blamed the union for the delay. “That is
why we believe the Union should withdraw this particular case
immediately,” he said. “Doing so will help speed up the process of
getting funds to all those who rightly deserve them.”

The holdup meant that Dave and his coworkers, who had helped seal the
San Juan Mine’s tunnels for good in September 2022, were laid off
without receiving the funds specifically set aside to ease their
transition away from coal. (Some of the miners have accessed, or are
applying for, different Energy Transition Act funds.) Nearly a year
and a half after the union’s complaint was filed, the Labor
Relations Board is still investigating.

Marissa Garcia/High Country News

SINCE THE MINE’S CLOSURE, most of the miners have found other
employment. Hanon drained his 401(k) to purchase a few Freightliners
and start a trucking company, which he said is struggling. Dave found
another job in mining, at a small non-union operation in southwestern
Colorado, across the border from Farmington.

Lisa Kennedy, who worked at the mine for more than two decades, at
times with her son and other relatives, told me she and other union
members are considering a motion to accept Westmoreland’s severance
payout terms at the next union meeting, which is in December. Kennedy,
who is known as a hard-liner on the ETA payout issue has long urged
the union to keep fighting, but even she is growing weary.

“I’m just tired of waiting and waiting and holding my breath and
thinking that something’s going to happen.

“I’m just tired of waiting and waiting and holding my breath and
thinking that something’s going to happen,” she said. “It’s
shitty money compared to what the company guys are getting, but I’m
done with it.”

After he was laid off, Roop became a licensed life insurance salesman.
The union’s former master steward comes from a proud line of western
Colorado coal miners; at one point, he worked at San Juan alongside
his father and grandfather. His current income doesn’t match that of
his union job, though his schedule is more flexible now, allowing him
more time with his daughter.

In a Farmington coffee shop, Roop, who is stockily built and has a
black beard, grew animated discussing the end of the mine. It was once
a “proud” place to work, he said, and it meant something to him to
work at a place where his father had voted on previous union
contracts. “For that mine to have been open for so many years,” he
said, “and so many families retire from there, the massive amount of
benefits that came out of mine — for it to end the way that it did
is really sad.”

_Image credits: The San Juan Generating Station, flanked by its
surface coal mines near Farmington, New Mexico, in 2012. DOC
SEARLS/CC VIA FLICKR; A geological and topographical sketch map of a
Westmoreland mine in 1883. NORMAN B. LEVENTHAL MAP & EDUCATION
CENTER/BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY; A Navajo worker at Peabody Coal Co. in
1972. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY; A road sign near Farmington,
New Mexico. ADAM COHN/CC VIA FLICKR_

_REPOSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM HIGH COUNTRY NEWS
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_NICK BOWLIN is the interim South Desk editor at _High Country
News_. Email him at [email protected] or submit a letter to the
editor [[link removed]]. See our letters to
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_HIGH COUNTRY NEWS _is an independent, reader-supported nonprofit
501(c)3 media organization that covers the important issues and
stories that define the Western United States. Our mission is to
inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the West's diverse
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