15-04-2010, 02:22 AM
From: http://www.crocodyl.org/wiki/massey_energy
Mining
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Massey Energy
Last edited by tallenvt on April 12, 2010 - 8:07am
Profile editor:
Phil Mattera
Company Snapshot:
Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities. Massey, which for two decades was owned by the engineering giant Fluor, is also notorious for its aggressive anti-union stance and for environmental problems such as a massive coal sludge spill and its reliance on terrain-destroying mountaintop removal projects.
Ownership status:
Publicly traded
Number of employees worldwide:
5,851
Chief executive officer:
Don L. Blankenship
Website:
http://www.masseyenergyco.com
Tel:
804-788-1800
Net Income:
US$104 million
Total revenue:
US$2.7 billion
Corporate accountabilityAccountability overview:
Few companies have been at the center of more corporate accountability controversies than Massey. The April 2010 disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia was part of a string of safety problems at company facilities that caused numerous deaths and produced an exceptional number of violations of state and federal regulations. The company’s operations have also sparked repeated charges for environmental offenses, especially in connection with a 2000 collapse of a coal waste dam in Kentucky that contaminated 100 miles of waterways. Massey has been a prime target of campaigners against mountaintop removal mining. And Massey is notorious in union circles for instigating a 1984 strike, and then using harsh tactics to prolong the dispute. Over the past two decades, Massey has succeeded in making its mines almost entirely non-union.
Labor:
Until 1984 Massey’s unionized operations went along with the industry-wide collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the major coal operators and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). But that year, at the urging of a young executive named Don Blankenship—who would later rise to the top position at the company—Massey withdrew from the employer association, and tried to go its own way to reduce costs. The company also insisted on negotiating separately at each of its unionized mines.
UMWA members found these moves intolerable, and in October 1984 more than 1,000 of them went on strike at several Massey mines in West Virginia. The walkout started peacefully, but after several months the dispute turned volatile as picketers faced off against company guards leading attack dogs behind new chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Massey brought in strikebreakers to keep production going, and the strikers fought back. The confrontation went on for 15 months, until the company and the UMWA announced a settlement in late 1985, though the terms of that agreement were unclear.
The two sides continued their dispute in court. Ultimately, in November 1988 the UMWA announced that it had achieved an out-of-court settlement under which Massey agreed to pay about $2.4 million in back wages to strikers fired during the strike.
Yet the tensions between labor and management continued as Massey phased out most of its unionized mines, and the UMWA found it difficult to carry out new organizing efforts at a company that was open about its anti-union stance. When Blankenship was promoted to president of Massey in July 1990, the Wall Street Journal, noting his role in pushing a hard line against the UMWA six years earlier, headlined its story “Massey Coal Picks Union Opponent as Its President.” While testifying in a federal lawsuit in 1996, Blankenship declared: “No [coal] operator in their right mind would go union” (Charleston Gazette, April 20, 1996).
One of those places where the company exhibited its hard line against unionization was the Upper Big Branch mine, where the UMWA launched a high-profile organizing drive after the operation opened in 1995. Although the area was considered a union stronghold, the company put so much pressure on the workers that they narrowly voted against UMWA representation twice—in 1995 and in 1997.
When Massey was seeking to purchase bankrupt Lady H Coal Co. in 1996, a company executive testified in a court hearing that Massey would not go ahead with the deal unless it could temporarily shut the operation down and get rid of the unionized workforce (Charleston Gazette, Feb. 6, 1996).
By the time the company was spun off from Fluor, and issued its first 10-K annual filing as Massey Energy in 2001, it was able to report that only 152 of its 3,610 employees were affiliated with the UMWA. By the end of 2009, the reported number of union members was down to 76 out of 5,851.
In September 2009 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Massey subsidiary Mammoth Coal violated federal labor law by refusing to hire 85 union members who had worked at a West Virginia mine for the previous owner, and by refusing to recognize and bargain with the UMWA after it took over the facility. A month later the company agreed to pay $8.75 million to settle an age discrimination suit that had been brought by the same group of workers.
Workplace Safety
The safety violations believed to have contributed to the 2010 tragedy at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia were not an anomaly. Massey had a long record of such violations at its various operations.
For example, in 1992 Massey paid $39,185 in fines to settle charges brought by the Mine Safety & Health Administration related to coal dust samples submitted for testing. After abnormalities were found in the samples, federal officials accused the company of tampering with the samples to reduce the amount of airborne coal dust that would be detected. The company claimed the dust dislodgement was accidental (Coal Week, Aug. 3, 1992).
In 1995 a worker at Massey’s Low Gap No. 2 mine in West Virginia was killed in a roof cave-in on the same day the facility had been cited for 14 violations of state safety regulations (Charleston Gazette, Sept. 24, 1995).
As incidents such as this continued, UMWA President Cecil Roberts in 2001 charged that Massey had the worst safety record in the industry (Charleston Gazette, July 19, 2001).
That record got even worse in January 2006, when a fire erupted at Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal’s Alma mine in Logan County, West Virginia, killing two workers. A state investigation later found that uncorrected safety violations were responsible for the deaths. In December 2008 Aracoma agreed to pay a record $4.2 million in criminal and civil penalties to resolve federal charges of willful violation of mandatory safety standards.
Massey’s poor safety record became a matter of controversy again in April 2010, after a methane gas explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine caused the deaths of 29 workers. News reports pointed out that the company received large numbers of safety violations, but blunted the impact of those citations by filing time-consuming appeals. It came to light that the specific mine where the disaster occurred had been cited more than 50 times in the month before the explosion. A dozen of those citations related to problems with ventilating the mine to prevent a buildup of methane. Upper Big Branch had racked up 1,342 violations over the previous five years.
Environment and product safety:
Massey’s performance on environmental compliance is as checkered as its track record on health and safety. Sometimes it tried to evade regulations entirely. In September 1995 the Charleston Gazette reported that the company had built a small coal-processing plant without first obtaining the necessary state environmental permits.
In 1996 Massey subsidiary Performance Coal was fined $30,000 by the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection for spilling mining waste into the Coal River (Charleston Gazette, April 9, 1996).
In the late 1990s Massey joined other coal operators in pursuing a radical form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal. While critics charged that the practice disfigured terrains, the company in 1998 tried to get around a requirement that land be restored to its approximate original contour, arguing that by flattening hilly areas it was improving them.
In 2000 Massey subsidiaries Elk Run Coal and Goals Coal agreed to pay a total of $25,900 for allowing coal refuse to leak into waterways in West Virginia.
Massey found itself receiving unfavorable national attention in October 2000 when a coal waste dam in Martin County, Kentucky, collapsed, sending some 250 million gallons of toxic slurry into two streams feeding into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. The torrent of sludge, larger in volume than the infamous Buffalo Creek spill of 1972, contaminated the drinking water of various towns, destroyed aquatic life, and prompted the governor of Kentucky to declare a 10-county state of emergency. The company later paid a state fine of $3.25 million for the incident.
In June 2001 a Massey facility in Boone County, West Virginia,spilled some 30,000 gallons of polluted mine water into a stream (Charleston Gazette, June 20, 2001). Two months later, there was another spill at a Massey mine in Boone County and another in Logan County. At a public hearing in December 2001, an official from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said that Massey’s operations in Boone County had the worst compliance record he had ever seen (Charleston Gazette, Dec. 7, 2001). In April 2002 the DEP took the unusual step of suspending the licenses of three Massey facilities for 35 days because of a “pattern of violations” (Charleston Gazette, April 23, 2002).
In March 2003 two Massey subsidiaries involved in the Boone County spills in 2001 admitted to criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act, and paid fines of $200,000 each. They were put on probation for five years (Charleston Gazette, March 13, 2003). To add to the pressure, a federal magistrate later ordered one of the subsidiaries to offer cash bonuses to employees who reported wastewater spills (Charleston Gazette, Nov. 5, 2003).
In January 2006 the West Virginia DEP announced that it had reached an agreement with Massey under which the company would pay $1.4 million to settle a backlog of five lawsuits and 14 other major enforcement actions (Charleston Gazette, Jan. 7, 2006).
In January 2008 Massey had to pay a record $20 million civil penalty to resolve a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency charging the company’s operations in West Virginia and Kentucky with more than 4,000 violations of the Clean Water Act.
Opponents of a Massey mountaintop removal project in Boone County, West Virginia, began a campaign of civil disobedience at the site in 2009. At one event more than 30 people – including actress Daryl Hannah and NASA climate scientist James Hansen – were arrested. In February 2010 the company got a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction against further protests by groups such as Climate Ground Zero.
Massey CEO Don Blankenship has made statements questioning the reality of global warming, and has spoken out against climate legislation being considered by Congress.
Political influence (national and international):
In November 2007 the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy from a case in which Harman Mining had accused Massey of forcing it into bankruptcy and interfering with its business. Two months later, however, it was revealed that Chief Justice Elliott Maynard was apparently acquainted with Massey CEO Don Blankenship, and had spent time with him socially during a trip to Monte Carlo. The chief justice belatedly recused him from the case, but then it came out that another justice, Brent Benjamin, had been elected to the court in 2004 with the help of some $3 million in advertisements and other support from Blankenship.
A rehearing of the case was scheduled, with Maynard and another justice recusing themselves, but with Benjamin still on the bench. The court once again ruled in favor of Massey. Harman then took the question of Benjamin’s role in the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered him to recuse himself, too. When the West Virginia court heard the case for a third time in 2009, it ruled yet again in Massey’s favor.
Insider Trading Allegations
In 2002 a shareholder lawsuit was filed in West Virginia charging that Massey CEO Don Blankenship and other company officials falsified financial reports, and then engaged in insider trading. The case was settled in 2005 with the company agreeing to several corporate governance changes such as an expansion of its board and a lowering of the mandatory retirement age for directors.
HistoryMassey Energy had its origins in the years after the First World War. In 1920 A.T. Massey, a coal broker in Richmond, Virginia, incorporated a company named after himself. After the Second World War Massey’s grandson got the company to begin mining coal in West Virginia.
A.T. Massey Coal remained a minor player in the industry until the 1960s, when it began to expand its operations through internal growth and acquisition of competitors such as Peerless Eagle Coal. Massey attracted the interest of St. Joe Mineral, which bought control of the company in 1974. That same year, Massey bought Rawl Sales & Processing, and in 1976 it acquired Tennessee Consolidated Coal.
In 1980 St. Joe sold half of Massey Coal to Royal Dutch/Shell. The following year St. Joe was acquired by engineering giant Fluor, which in 1987 bought out Shell’s interest, and took full ownership of Massey, although the transaction involved the purchase of some Massey assets by Shell.
In 1992 Massey purchased various coal properties from the Island Creek subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. That same year Don Blankenship, who had been named president in 1990, took on the additional posts of chairman and chief executive—becoming the first person from outside the Massey family to head the company.
In 1997 Massey purchased United Coal Co., giving Massey its first coal mining operations in Virginia. During this period Massey generated more profits for its parent than did Fluor’s much larger international construction and engineering business.
Nonetheless, in June 2000 Fluor announced plans to split itself into two companies, with the coal operations taking the name Massey Energy, with Blankenship staying on as CEO. The conversion was completed in November 2000, and Massey Energy began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Massey has remained a pure-play coal company. In March 2010 it announced plans to purchase privately held Cumberland Resources for $960 million.
Financial informationStock ticker symbol:
MEE (New York Stock Exchange)
Fiscal year:
2009
Fiscal year:
2009
Major lines of business/segments:
Massey’s business consists entirely of coal extraction, but it has made its corporate structure complicated by setting up more than 100 subsidiaries to serve as the nominal owners of its various mining operations located in Central Appalachia. As of January 31, 2010 it operated 42 underground mines and 14 surface mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Production in 2009 amounted to about 38 million tons.
SourcesWatchdogs and related campaigns:
Citizens Coal Council
Climate Ground Zero
Coal River Mountain Watch
CoalSwarm
iLoveMountains.org
Mountain Justice
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
United Mine Workers of America
West Virginia Highlands Conservancy
Mining
Massey Energy
Last edited by tallenvt on April 12, 2010 - 8:07am
Profile editor:
Phil Mattera
Company Snapshot:
Massey Energy is one of the largest coal companies in the United States, and certainly one of the most controversial. In April 2010 the company received a great deal of negative attention when an explosion at one of its mines in West Virginia killed 29 workers. It later came out that the mine in question had been cited more than 1,000 times for safety violations, and that Massey had similar problems at many of its other facilities. Massey, which for two decades was owned by the engineering giant Fluor, is also notorious for its aggressive anti-union stance and for environmental problems such as a massive coal sludge spill and its reliance on terrain-destroying mountaintop removal projects.
Ownership status:
Publicly traded
Number of employees worldwide:
5,851
Chief executive officer:
Don L. Blankenship
Website:
http://www.masseyenergyco.com
Tel:
804-788-1800
Net Income:
US$104 million
Total revenue:
US$2.7 billion
Corporate accountabilityAccountability overview:
Few companies have been at the center of more corporate accountability controversies than Massey. The April 2010 disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia was part of a string of safety problems at company facilities that caused numerous deaths and produced an exceptional number of violations of state and federal regulations. The company’s operations have also sparked repeated charges for environmental offenses, especially in connection with a 2000 collapse of a coal waste dam in Kentucky that contaminated 100 miles of waterways. Massey has been a prime target of campaigners against mountaintop removal mining. And Massey is notorious in union circles for instigating a 1984 strike, and then using harsh tactics to prolong the dispute. Over the past two decades, Massey has succeeded in making its mines almost entirely non-union.
Labor:
Until 1984 Massey’s unionized operations went along with the industry-wide collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the major coal operators and the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). But that year, at the urging of a young executive named Don Blankenship—who would later rise to the top position at the company—Massey withdrew from the employer association, and tried to go its own way to reduce costs. The company also insisted on negotiating separately at each of its unionized mines.
UMWA members found these moves intolerable, and in October 1984 more than 1,000 of them went on strike at several Massey mines in West Virginia. The walkout started peacefully, but after several months the dispute turned volatile as picketers faced off against company guards leading attack dogs behind new chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Massey brought in strikebreakers to keep production going, and the strikers fought back. The confrontation went on for 15 months, until the company and the UMWA announced a settlement in late 1985, though the terms of that agreement were unclear.
The two sides continued their dispute in court. Ultimately, in November 1988 the UMWA announced that it had achieved an out-of-court settlement under which Massey agreed to pay about $2.4 million in back wages to strikers fired during the strike.
Yet the tensions between labor and management continued as Massey phased out most of its unionized mines, and the UMWA found it difficult to carry out new organizing efforts at a company that was open about its anti-union stance. When Blankenship was promoted to president of Massey in July 1990, the Wall Street Journal, noting his role in pushing a hard line against the UMWA six years earlier, headlined its story “Massey Coal Picks Union Opponent as Its President.” While testifying in a federal lawsuit in 1996, Blankenship declared: “No [coal] operator in their right mind would go union” (Charleston Gazette, April 20, 1996).
One of those places where the company exhibited its hard line against unionization was the Upper Big Branch mine, where the UMWA launched a high-profile organizing drive after the operation opened in 1995. Although the area was considered a union stronghold, the company put so much pressure on the workers that they narrowly voted against UMWA representation twice—in 1995 and in 1997.
When Massey was seeking to purchase bankrupt Lady H Coal Co. in 1996, a company executive testified in a court hearing that Massey would not go ahead with the deal unless it could temporarily shut the operation down and get rid of the unionized workforce (Charleston Gazette, Feb. 6, 1996).
By the time the company was spun off from Fluor, and issued its first 10-K annual filing as Massey Energy in 2001, it was able to report that only 152 of its 3,610 employees were affiliated with the UMWA. By the end of 2009, the reported number of union members was down to 76 out of 5,851.
In September 2009 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Massey subsidiary Mammoth Coal violated federal labor law by refusing to hire 85 union members who had worked at a West Virginia mine for the previous owner, and by refusing to recognize and bargain with the UMWA after it took over the facility. A month later the company agreed to pay $8.75 million to settle an age discrimination suit that had been brought by the same group of workers.
Workplace Safety
The safety violations believed to have contributed to the 2010 tragedy at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia were not an anomaly. Massey had a long record of such violations at its various operations.
For example, in 1992 Massey paid $39,185 in fines to settle charges brought by the Mine Safety & Health Administration related to coal dust samples submitted for testing. After abnormalities were found in the samples, federal officials accused the company of tampering with the samples to reduce the amount of airborne coal dust that would be detected. The company claimed the dust dislodgement was accidental (Coal Week, Aug. 3, 1992).
In 1995 a worker at Massey’s Low Gap No. 2 mine in West Virginia was killed in a roof cave-in on the same day the facility had been cited for 14 violations of state safety regulations (Charleston Gazette, Sept. 24, 1995).
As incidents such as this continued, UMWA President Cecil Roberts in 2001 charged that Massey had the worst safety record in the industry (Charleston Gazette, July 19, 2001).
That record got even worse in January 2006, when a fire erupted at Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal’s Alma mine in Logan County, West Virginia, killing two workers. A state investigation later found that uncorrected safety violations were responsible for the deaths. In December 2008 Aracoma agreed to pay a record $4.2 million in criminal and civil penalties to resolve federal charges of willful violation of mandatory safety standards.
Massey’s poor safety record became a matter of controversy again in April 2010, after a methane gas explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine caused the deaths of 29 workers. News reports pointed out that the company received large numbers of safety violations, but blunted the impact of those citations by filing time-consuming appeals. It came to light that the specific mine where the disaster occurred had been cited more than 50 times in the month before the explosion. A dozen of those citations related to problems with ventilating the mine to prevent a buildup of methane. Upper Big Branch had racked up 1,342 violations over the previous five years.
Environment and product safety:
Massey’s performance on environmental compliance is as checkered as its track record on health and safety. Sometimes it tried to evade regulations entirely. In September 1995 the Charleston Gazette reported that the company had built a small coal-processing plant without first obtaining the necessary state environmental permits.
In 1996 Massey subsidiary Performance Coal was fined $30,000 by the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection for spilling mining waste into the Coal River (Charleston Gazette, April 9, 1996).
In the late 1990s Massey joined other coal operators in pursuing a radical form of strip mining known as mountaintop removal. While critics charged that the practice disfigured terrains, the company in 1998 tried to get around a requirement that land be restored to its approximate original contour, arguing that by flattening hilly areas it was improving them.
In 2000 Massey subsidiaries Elk Run Coal and Goals Coal agreed to pay a total of $25,900 for allowing coal refuse to leak into waterways in West Virginia.
Massey found itself receiving unfavorable national attention in October 2000 when a coal waste dam in Martin County, Kentucky, collapsed, sending some 250 million gallons of toxic slurry into two streams feeding into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. The torrent of sludge, larger in volume than the infamous Buffalo Creek spill of 1972, contaminated the drinking water of various towns, destroyed aquatic life, and prompted the governor of Kentucky to declare a 10-county state of emergency. The company later paid a state fine of $3.25 million for the incident.
In June 2001 a Massey facility in Boone County, West Virginia,spilled some 30,000 gallons of polluted mine water into a stream (Charleston Gazette, June 20, 2001). Two months later, there was another spill at a Massey mine in Boone County and another in Logan County. At a public hearing in December 2001, an official from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said that Massey’s operations in Boone County had the worst compliance record he had ever seen (Charleston Gazette, Dec. 7, 2001). In April 2002 the DEP took the unusual step of suspending the licenses of three Massey facilities for 35 days because of a “pattern of violations” (Charleston Gazette, April 23, 2002).
In March 2003 two Massey subsidiaries involved in the Boone County spills in 2001 admitted to criminal violations of the federal Clean Water Act, and paid fines of $200,000 each. They were put on probation for five years (Charleston Gazette, March 13, 2003). To add to the pressure, a federal magistrate later ordered one of the subsidiaries to offer cash bonuses to employees who reported wastewater spills (Charleston Gazette, Nov. 5, 2003).
In January 2006 the West Virginia DEP announced that it had reached an agreement with Massey under which the company would pay $1.4 million to settle a backlog of five lawsuits and 14 other major enforcement actions (Charleston Gazette, Jan. 7, 2006).
In January 2008 Massey had to pay a record $20 million civil penalty to resolve a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency charging the company’s operations in West Virginia and Kentucky with more than 4,000 violations of the Clean Water Act.
Opponents of a Massey mountaintop removal project in Boone County, West Virginia, began a campaign of civil disobedience at the site in 2009. At one event more than 30 people – including actress Daryl Hannah and NASA climate scientist James Hansen – were arrested. In February 2010 the company got a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction against further protests by groups such as Climate Ground Zero.
Massey CEO Don Blankenship has made statements questioning the reality of global warming, and has spoken out against climate legislation being considered by Congress.
Political influence (national and international):
In November 2007 the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a $50 million jury verdict against Massey Energy from a case in which Harman Mining had accused Massey of forcing it into bankruptcy and interfering with its business. Two months later, however, it was revealed that Chief Justice Elliott Maynard was apparently acquainted with Massey CEO Don Blankenship, and had spent time with him socially during a trip to Monte Carlo. The chief justice belatedly recused him from the case, but then it came out that another justice, Brent Benjamin, had been elected to the court in 2004 with the help of some $3 million in advertisements and other support from Blankenship.
A rehearing of the case was scheduled, with Maynard and another justice recusing themselves, but with Benjamin still on the bench. The court once again ruled in favor of Massey. Harman then took the question of Benjamin’s role in the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered him to recuse himself, too. When the West Virginia court heard the case for a third time in 2009, it ruled yet again in Massey’s favor.
Insider Trading Allegations
In 2002 a shareholder lawsuit was filed in West Virginia charging that Massey CEO Don Blankenship and other company officials falsified financial reports, and then engaged in insider trading. The case was settled in 2005 with the company agreeing to several corporate governance changes such as an expansion of its board and a lowering of the mandatory retirement age for directors.
HistoryMassey Energy had its origins in the years after the First World War. In 1920 A.T. Massey, a coal broker in Richmond, Virginia, incorporated a company named after himself. After the Second World War Massey’s grandson got the company to begin mining coal in West Virginia.
A.T. Massey Coal remained a minor player in the industry until the 1960s, when it began to expand its operations through internal growth and acquisition of competitors such as Peerless Eagle Coal. Massey attracted the interest of St. Joe Mineral, which bought control of the company in 1974. That same year, Massey bought Rawl Sales & Processing, and in 1976 it acquired Tennessee Consolidated Coal.
In 1980 St. Joe sold half of Massey Coal to Royal Dutch/Shell. The following year St. Joe was acquired by engineering giant Fluor, which in 1987 bought out Shell’s interest, and took full ownership of Massey, although the transaction involved the purchase of some Massey assets by Shell.
In 1992 Massey purchased various coal properties from the Island Creek subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. That same year Don Blankenship, who had been named president in 1990, took on the additional posts of chairman and chief executive—becoming the first person from outside the Massey family to head the company.
In 1997 Massey purchased United Coal Co., giving Massey its first coal mining operations in Virginia. During this period Massey generated more profits for its parent than did Fluor’s much larger international construction and engineering business.
Nonetheless, in June 2000 Fluor announced plans to split itself into two companies, with the coal operations taking the name Massey Energy, with Blankenship staying on as CEO. The conversion was completed in November 2000, and Massey Energy began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Massey has remained a pure-play coal company. In March 2010 it announced plans to purchase privately held Cumberland Resources for $960 million.
Financial informationStock ticker symbol:
MEE (New York Stock Exchange)
Fiscal year:
2009
Fiscal year:
2009
Major lines of business/segments:
Massey’s business consists entirely of coal extraction, but it has made its corporate structure complicated by setting up more than 100 subsidiaries to serve as the nominal owners of its various mining operations located in Central Appalachia. As of January 31, 2010 it operated 42 underground mines and 14 surface mines in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia. Production in 2009 amounted to about 38 million tons.
SourcesWatchdogs and related campaigns:
Citizens Coal Council
Climate Ground Zero
Coal River Mountain Watch
CoalSwarm
iLoveMountains.org
Mountain Justice
Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
United Mine Workers of America
West Virginia Highlands Conservancy
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