Coal mines: No pay for mandatory attendance among friends

Remember that Republican candidates' day earlier this month in Ohio coal mining country that featured Mitt Romney, Josh Mandel and the gang telling a group of miners how much they cared for the welfare of the workers?

The back-channel story in the Plain Dealer  is much more interesting.  It  reported the backlash to the event  by some mine employes to Radio Station WWVA (Wheeling) over how the political love-in   was orchestrated.  The miners in attendance lost a day's pay because their mine closed that day in their absence.

The Pepper Pike owner of the Century Mine conveyed  word down the line that the event would be  mandatory and unpaid,  according to the company's  chief financial officer Rob Moore. "No one was forced to attend".  (In the companies I worked for over the decades, mandatory implied force.)

Moore did try to engage in damage control by  telling WWVA host David Bloomquist there was nothing wrong with having the miners show up for the GOP tourists.   "We are talking about an event that was in the best interest of anyone that's related to the coal industry in our area."

Lest I forget:  The PD reported that the Center for Responsive Politics "show that Murray Energy  [ the mine 's owner] has contributed more than $900,000 to Republican candidates over the past two years."
With that kind of money up for grabs,  you'd think that the company would find a way to pay the miners for their mandatory attendance to hear Romney assail Obama for his "job-killing war on coal."

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