Barbara Rose Butero spent most of her life in what was known as the Southern Colorado Mine Field where East Coast robber barons and railroad tycoons bought miles of coal seams from Trinidad to Walsenburg, paying miners chump change to dig shafts, chip at coal and haul it to the railways that were part of their empires. In the early 20th century, coal was mined at a frenzied pace to manufacture steel for more rail lines and to generate the electricity that kept street lights and bulbs lit in neighborhoods and kitchens just like hers.
After workers struck and lost to CF&I in 1914, miners gradually earned union recognition that raised their pay and made it more likely they’d make it home after each shift. Barbara Rose was a wife and mother in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when massive UMWA gains helped families like hers break into the middle class. But by the time she died last year, coal miners were facing a new kind of struggle.
In a state where coal once dominated the economy, the number of mines now can be counted on two hands. There are 2,050 coal company employees in the state – down from more than ten times that number in the Ludlow era. After a mine in Gunnison County shut down last year, Colorado dropped from the 9th to the 11th highest coal producing state in the country, according to the Colorado Mining Association. Three of Colorado’s nine remaining coal mines are unionized. About 200 coal miners are among the UMWA’s 600 working members in the state. Declining membership reflects heavy drops in state and national union density since 1985.
The decade-long slump in mining jobs stems partly from the fact that coal is now extracted by giant machines that have elbowed out the human beings who used to hack at it and haul it out manually. The machinery is used both for underground mines, which are generally unionized, and for strip mines, most of which are non-union.
by SUSAN GREENE
Frenetic expansion of cleaner fuels threatens coal miners and their union
Coal train blues
“Underground,” for Barbara Rose Butero, was as much a feeling as a place.
The daughter of a miner, she spent her youth fearing the dark, unsteady shafts where her father loaded coal for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. One day in 1922, she was taking a bath and felt the ground shake. The Sopris mine had blown up. Her father had surfaced from underground just minutes before the explosion.
Years later, her husband Jasper Butero went to work at CF&I’s mine in Frederick hand-loading coal like her dad. She knew men who had lost their limbs and wits in mine accidents, and wives who had lost their husbands. Each morning when Jasper left for work, she’d wonder if he’d make it home for supper.
It was with an aching dread that Barbara Rose watched her son, Bob, go to work underground like his dad and granddad. He had grown up near Trinidad and took a job west of town at the Allen Mine, also run by CF&I – the Rockefeller-owned company notorious for killing strikers and their families 100 years ago this week.
By the 1970s, when Bob Butero became a mineworker, the Allen Mine was seven feet tall – more than four feet higher than the wormholes miners partly struck about in 1914. Federal safety measures had been put in place to help prevent the kind of gas explosions that had rattled Barbara Rose’s bathtub and killed thousands of miners each year in the decades before and after the Ludlow Massacre.
Those protections – along with higher wages, regular work hours and other benefits – were what Barbara Rose’s father dreamed of in the Progressive Era. They’re what her husband rallied for in the 1950s as an officer of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). They’re what her son -- now the union’s regional director, leading about 4,500 workers in all of western United States and Canada -- has spent his career working to preserve.
Still, until she died at age 92 in November, she never forgot how the ground trembled from the Sopris blast. She never shook the memory, each time a mine exploded, of holding her breath wondering if her father, husband or son was inside. She never went into the dark, dusty shafts where the men in her family made their living for almost a century. Just the thought – underground -- haunted her.“
She worried about me. She worried about all three of us down there all the time,” says Bob Butero, 61. “She’d say ‘I’m going to outlive all of you.’ And she believed it, I think, because she carried that fear to the end.”
When Bob Butero first went underground 39 years ago, coal mining was a proud occupation. Given the national swing away from carbon-based fuels, he admits the job has lost some of its luster.
“There’s a lot of people who would rather do a lot of other things than mining coal underground,” he says.
The straight-talking union boss is a pragmatic booster of the fossilized carbon that, 44 years after the Clean Air Act started setting controls for air pollution, has a permanent black eye.
“We’re not flat-earthers. We’re not those people who figure they could stick their head in a smokestack and nothing would happen to them. We breathe the same air that everybody else does,” he says. But, he adds, “We oppose the elimination of coal, especially when it’s being used outside of the United States. Global warming is just that – global. We don’t want to be the only ones taking the hit with our jobs.”
The hit smacks hard in Colorado, where coal mining is one of the state’s most lucrative blue-collar vocations. Annual pay and benefits for coal miners and other coal company workers (including management) averaged $115,759 in 2012 – vastly more than what most Coloradans earn. Those wages are hard to replace in communities like Somerset where 250 workers lost their jobs last year when the Elk Creek Mine went under.
“These mines are located out in rural America. So when they shut down, there’s little or no jobs for people in those areas. It’s not like the city of Denver where if you lose a job you can find another one,” Butero says. “In rural America, when you have a coal mining job that’s paying people somewhere between $20 or $30 an hour, the next job is $10 or $11 an hour, and even that is hard to find. Unless there’s a prison or a government project, there’s often very little there in terms of other…options.”
Butero’s office in Wheat Ridge is full of old miners’ equipment, union banners and reminders of the leaders who proceeded him. Images of Mother Jones, the UMWA’s eloquent firebrand, Louis Tikas, an organizer at the Ludlow camp, and John R. Lawson, the union’s regional chief during the 15-month strike, line the walls. The trio was unsuccessful in their strike against CF&I and the Rockefeller family intent on breaking them. But 100 years later, they’re heroes to Butero, his members and others who see the massacre less as a tragic fact of history than as a teachable moment.
“Organizing 12,000 people to take on a giant corporation and the richest family in the world, convincing the wives and the families to go with a strike under those conditions that long – that took something pretty special,” Butero says.
The UMWA is expecting more than 1,000 people at its centennial commemoration May 17 and 18 at the Ludlow memorial about 12 miles north of Trinidad. The granite sculptures of a striker, wife and child were beheaded and vandalized with a sledgehammer in 2003. The rebuilt memorial is now a national historic landmark. Butero, who’s organizing the gathering, notes that the topics of job losses and union attrition won’t on be the schedule. It’s not about coal, he says, but conviction.
“The biggest hope for me is for people to understand how this all started, where we’re at today and how the union gave the workers a seat at the table,” he says. Barbara Rose Butero knew more than most folks about what things must have been like during the Colorado Coal War of 1913-1914. She understood the dangers her men faced underground. Two of her six children died as babies. She had plenty of reasons, all around, to worry. But, like her family’s union, she took her knocks.
Out of her fear and sorrows came a life the strikers dreamed of. A house and car. Health insurance. A vacation once a year. Weekends off. The ability to send their kids to college. A pension. The pride of watching all of her grandkids earn college degrees. The satisfaction of living – and dying – at home in her old age.
“Nothing fancy. Just the simple American dream,” Butero says. “My family got what the strikers were fighting for. They did it for us.
“We are the products of Ludlow.”
[photos by JAMES BRENNAN]
Bob Butero
Butero family photo
Another factor is the economics of public policy. Government air quality standards limiting use of the polluting, carbon-based fuel source have caused the coal market to plummet. In 2011, coal generated 42 percent and natural gas generated 25 percent of the nation’s electricity. In 2012, coal had dropped to 37 percent and natural gas rose to 30 percent. Ironically, Colorado – home of what former Gov. Bill Ritter dubbed “The New Energy Economy” – still uses coal to generate about 60 percent of its energy. Yet much of the coal fueling Colorado’s electrical plants comes from other states, especially Wyoming, the nation’s top coal producer. Wyoming’s Campbell County -- specifically the surface mines 15 miles north and 70 miles south of Gillette -- supplies about 40 percent of coal in the U.S.
It’s mainly Wyoming coal, not Colorado’s, that’s piled into the trains whistling every day and night through Denver, Greeley, Grand Junction and Pueblo. The uncovered coal cars heaped with tons of black lumps seem endless, as if there were an infinite supply.
However plentiful as a resource, declines in coal usage will continue. By 2040, natural gas is expected to surpass coal 35 to 32 percent for national electricity production. An energy plan in the works by the Obama administration likely will further slash coal as a future energy source.
“Our production is way down,” says Stuart Sanderson, president of the Colorado Mining Association.
“Yep,” Butero adds. “Times are pretty tough.”
So tough, in fact, that for its annual meeting in Keystone this summer, the Rocky Mountain Coal Mining Institute has hired a crisis consultant to hold a workshop called “I Once Knew a Coal Miner – The Crisis of Confidence Affecting Coal.” The goal, according to the Institute’s website, is “to understand how coal mining got the reputation it has, who the enemies are, what can be done, and how to be a strong advocate for the industry.”
The “enemies” the brochure refers to aren’t just environmentalists working toward tighter government reforms cutting coal for energy production. Also topping the industry’s list of so-called “enemies” are the oil and gas companies edging out coal with cleaner power sources like natural gas. In Colorado, “underground” is now the domain of hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – drills that bore into the landscape, injecting chemical cocktails that environmentalists say are killing wildlife and poisoning water.
The frenetic expansion of oil and gas drilling threatens the UMWA and its workers far more than mining-related accidents, which, despite devastating mine accidents like the one that killed 29 miners in West Virginia in 2010, have decreased so exponentially that there were 20 coal-mining fatalities nationally in 2012 compared to 2,219 in 1912. The mining industry is scrambling to portray itself as clean – at least in comparison to oil and gas production. In hopes of tarring natural gas’s image, the UMWA is mimicking environmentalists’ outcry about fracking, which has been banned in some communities in Colorado.
A recent cover story in the United Mine Workers Journal, entitled “The Truth about Fracking,” raises questions about the safety of fracking fluids. “What’s in that stuff?” the article asks. “Chemicals that are injected into shale deposits during fracking…include acids, detergents and poisons.”
Just as Barbara Rose’s bathtub shook during the 1922 Sopris Mine explosion, homes and neighborhoods near Colorado’s many gas patches tremble from fracking and occasional explosions in pipelines and tankers.
Still, as a product, not a production process, natural gas is a far cleaner fuel source than coal. Even the union journal acknowledges that this “threatens coal’s long-term future.” The union that’s raising environmental concerns about fracking is vigorously opposing government efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions by lowering the use of coal in power plants.
“We are supporting several different bills in Congress that would put coal and gas on a level playing field and roll back overly aggressive regulations on new power plants, and even taking the government to court to protect our members’ jobs,” the UMWA’s journal assures its readers.
