Massey Energy is notorious for the 2010 Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 workers at a coal mine with a long history of safety violations. Yet Massey, now owned by Alpha Natural Resources, has another dubious distinction: it was responsible for the largest back pay award mandated by the National Labor Relations Board in recent years.
Massey paid out $22.8 million after the Board found it had committed unfair labor practices when it refused to recognize the United Mine Workers after it purchased a unionized West Virginia mining operation (separate from Upper Big Branch) and declined to continue the employment of most of the union members there.
The information about Massey’s payment emerges from the latest expansion my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First have made to the Violation Tracker database. We obtained a list of some 3,000 back pay awards through a Freedom of Information Act request to the NLRB. The awards, covering the period since the agency adopted its new NxGen database system in 2011, total more than $284 million.
This is not the complete list of unfair labor practice back pay cases during the period. The NLRB excluded from its FOIA response what are known as non-Board settlements — those reached by the parties before the NLRB has ruled on the matter. The Board said some of the awards are confidential, and since its system could not easily identify which those were, it left out all the non-Board settlements.
Among the other biggest NLRB back pay awards since 2010 are: $16.2 million paid by Midwest Generation (a subsidiary of NRG Energy), $10.7 million paid by Delphi Packard Electric (part of Delphi Automotive), $10.3 million paid by Fluor-Daniel (a unit of the engineering company Fluor), and $10 million paid by Momentive Performance Materials.
The NLRB dataset is an important addition to Violation Tracker. The Board issues press releases about only a small number of back pay awards and does not make data about other awards easily retrievable in the case information on its website. This appears to be the first time extensive NLRB back-pay award data is readily available online.
It should be noted, however, that information on back pay awards for the dozen years preceding 2011 is buried in a large NLRB dataset posted on Data.gov. My colleagues and I extracted the data. The entries for 2010 (the current starting point for Violation Tracker) are part of the new update. Earlier entries will be included in an expansion of the entire database back to 2000 that will be posted in a few months.
Those earlier entries contain some back pay awards much larger than those cited above, including $130 million paid by Lucent Technologies and Avaya Inc., and $97 million paid by CF&I Steel.
Along with the NLRB data, Violation Tracker has also been updated with recent entries from the more than 40 federal regulatory agencies already covered by the website.
Also new on the site are links on the parent-company summary pages to the pages for those companies in the Project On Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database and in the list of the 100 largest federal contractors on POGO’s FedSpending site.
Violation Tracker now contains more than 161,000 entries with total penalties of more than $324 billion, the vast majority of which is connected to some 2,460 large parent companies.
It’s good to see unfair labor practice culprits take their place alongside corporate violators of environmental, health and safety, consumer protection and other laws that protect workers and the public.