Several dozen workers were bused in from the Alabama picket line. One of them is third-generation coal miner Brian Kelly, who was also arrested Thursday.

“I’m on strike for my family and for my brothers and sisters in the mines. We go down there, it’s a dangerous job, put your life on the line,” said Kelly. The mines reach 2,000 feet underground, making them the deepest coal mines in North America, according to the union.

“We love our jobs, but we’re not getting any respect, we’re not getting any time off — we get Thanksgiving off, Christmas Eve and Christmas as far as holidays — the rest of the holidays we have to work while our families are celebrating holidays,” Kelly said.

Workers flexing muscle

On Wednesday 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City, including graduate students working as instructors, went on strike.

The Warrior Met Coal strike has halted operations at one of the two mines the company operates in Alabama, and has limited operations at the other. But the company continues to extract coal at one of the mines using management staff and 200 hourly workers who are willing to cross picket lines and report to work.

The company’s most recent financial report shows production is down 40% in the three months ending September 30, compared to a year ago. But coal prices have more than doubled during that time, allowing Warrior Met Coal to ride out the loss of production.

The coal mined by the company is used for steel mills, not power plants. And all of its coal is shipped to overseas mills, not the US mills that still make steel out of raw materials rather than melted scrap steel.

Demand driving prices

But while it is expected that prices will fall once Australia is able to ship coal to China again, company officials say that they believe strong demand for steel worldwide means Warrior Met Coal’s profit outlook is good.

“We recognize that the likelihood of pricing reset is high,” CEO Walter Scheller told investors this week. “However, when a reset does occur, we expect pricing to remain above historical averages due to the strong market fundamentals.”

The company said that the strike has cost it $16.2 million in increased costs in the most recent quarter, not counting lost sales from reduced production from the closed mine. But it said it should be able to meet customer demands for its coal even with one of the mines shuttered.

BlackRock declined to comment on the protest. Warrior Met Coal officials defended their position on the strike, saying that it values and appreciates its employees’ hard work, but that it needs to contain costs in order to remain financially stable in a volatile coal industry.

But the company is clearly doing very well in the current market with the price for its coal at record highs. And its financial success is a key factor in the strike.

The previous owner of the mine, Walter Energy, filed for bankruptcy in 2015 due to a steep drop in price of coal. The union says it agreed to deep concessions, including reduced pay, with workers having to pay more for health insurance and cutting health benefits for 2,500 retirees, along with changes in retirement benefits in order to help the company emerge from bankruptcy. The union says the average hourly wage for workers at the mine is now $23 an hour, down $6 an hour from their pay before the bankruptcy.

Those concessions have saved the company a total of $1.1 billion since it emerged from bankruptcy through the formation of Warrior Met Coal, according to the union.

But the company said it doesn’t believe it should have to restore the pay and benefits the workers previously received.

“When the 2016 collective bargaining agreement was negotiated, no representative of Warrior Met Coal ever indicated to the union in any way that specific terms of any previous contract under which they had worked would be restored in future contracts,” said D’Andre Wright, the company’s vice president for external affairs. “Our priorities have always been keeping people employed and working safely with long-lasting careers and ensuring the company remains financially stable in a particularly volatile coal market.”

He said the company’s employees are among the top 10% of wage earners in Alabama, and that employment at the mine has tripled since 2016. That means that 60% of the current workforce were not working at the mines under the earlier, more lucrative contract, he said.

Strikers are getting union strike benefits of $400 a week, less than half of what they earned from a 40-hour week. Some are able to find temporary employment to help supplement their incomes, even if those jobs don’t pay as well as their mining jobs.

The union says a recent court order keeping strikers at least 300 yards away from the entrance to the mines constitutes an improper elimination of members’ “free speech rights and freedom of assembly.” It said that is why it is moving its protest to BlackRock’s New York offices.

Warrior Met Coal says the court order was justified by picket line violence, and posted a video showing vehicles being hit by picketers and windows being broken in buses carrying non-striking workers past the picket lines.