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Bob Murray’s Mission to Save the Coal Industry

Bob Murray, who rose from Appalachian pauper to commodity king, says he’s on a divine mission to help save the coal country he’s lived in his whole life.

And on that mission he brings a sword as often as he brings peace.

At 75, the leader of Murray Energy Corp. is still cutting billion-dollar deals and inspecting conveyor belts underground. He wants to be visible, he says. He wants workers on the lowest rung of his company to know he personally cares about them. And he wants his rivals and his workers alike to know he’ll challenge them if they obstruct his life’s work.

The boardroom in his company’s new headquarters features a framed federal appeals court decision that he won in 1996, allowing one of his companies to open nonunion mines. John Roberts, now chief justice of the Supreme Court, was his lawyer.

“The meek shall inherit the earth … but don’t cross me,” Mr. Murray said in an interview, standing in front of the framed court decision. He grabbed me by the tie, pulling from just below the knot. “Don’t cross me. I’ll take your f─ing head off.”

The list of people who have crossed him is long. He’s suing the Obama administration, he’s suing the patron saint of natural gas, Aubrey McClendon, the former CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp. and one of the country’s biggest proponents of fracking and natural gas. And he’s always prodding his union miners to work harder.

Mr. Murray looks at plummeting coal prices and competitors that have become penny stocks and knows he’s in a fight for survival. Federal regulations, cheap gas and unions all make it harder for him to compete, he says.

He tries to instill that urgency in his workers. Visiting with them underground is part of his effort to inspire.

“Never before have I been able to walk up to a CEO and him know my name and things like that,” said Leon Lieser, 68, of Martins Ferry, Ohio, who’s been a miner for 51 years. “It’s a family here.”

Mr. Lieser is now “miner emeritus,” training and mentoring younger workers. When The Wall Street Journal visited Murray operations in October, Mr. Lieser waited an extra six hours for the group to arrive for a tour.

“He stayed here for me,” Mr. Murray said.

“You sure he didn’t stay here for the overtime?” I asked. About a dozen other workers there laughed. Mr. Murray did not.

“There’s no overtime. What the hell?”

Critics see his attitude as patronizing and exploitative.

Mr. Murray has a history of opening nonunion mines immediately next to union mines to create internal competition, undercutting the union’s leverage. He openly encourages his employees to donate to coal-friendly politicians, usually Republicans, and has been accused of firing workers who don’t do it. He denies those claims.
Once a month he leads an “awareness meeting,” visiting a mine at the start of each of its three shifts: midnight, 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The presentation he gives at union mines is twice as long as the one he gives at nonunion mines, and union leaders filed federal labor charges alleging that Mr. Murray’s comments at the meetings were illegally coercive. (The case was settled, according to the National Labor Relations Board.) For Mr. Murray, it’s a chance to use production and price data to persuade his workers that nonunion competitors are outdoing them, which could endanger the business and their jobs.

Giving his PowerPoint presentation at a union mine in Ohio County, W.Va., which he bought in a 2013 deal with Consol Energy CNX +1.89%, he focuses on slide No. 15. It reads simply: “Do you have another job to go to that pays the same wages and benefits as the one you have at The Ohio County Coal Company?” Every time he gives this presentation, this is the moment when he pauses for a sip of coffee, he said.

“Stop. Let ‘em think about it,” he explained. “Because they know they don’t have anywhere else to go.”

source: http://blogs.wsj.com