Coal Miners Say They Were Forced to Attend Romney Rally Without Pay

Company denies attendance was mandatory, and paying them would violate laws.

A group of coal miners in Ohio feel they would have been fired if they did not attend an Aug. 14 event with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and contribute to his campaign — and to make matters worse, they lost of day of pay for their trouble.

In phone calls and emails to WWVA radio host David Blomquist, employees at the Century Mine in Ohio said they feared retaliation if they did not attend the Romney event.

"Yes, we were in fact told that the Romney event was mandatory and would be without pay, that the hours spent there would need to be made up my non-salaried employees outside of regular working hours, with the only other option being to take a pay cut for the equivalent time," the employees told Blomquist. "Yes, letters have gone around with lists of names of employees who have not attended or donated to political events."

Comments

[Joe Emenaker]

"...We had managers that communicated to our work force that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend the event."

Wait, what? You told them then had to go, but you don't consider that you "forced" them? Why, because they weren't in shackles?!?!

As long as crap like this keep happening, I'm going to continue to support workers organizing into unions so as to bring the number of "labor-supplying" units down to a comparable number as the number of "labor-consuming" units. Otherwise, there's disproportionate competition on the labor-supply side and employers start pulling this "A lot of people would love to have your job" coercion.

Why do employers act as though they *own* their workers, outright, like they're trucks or desks? Maybe employers feel that they built the *workers*, too... on the days after they built the roads and wrested the land from the injuns. Okay... I'm done ranting...