Basically: workers owed thousands of dollars (each!) in back pay from a now-bankrupt company are blocking trains from leaving with the coal they mined. On top of the weeks of free labor, they haven’t been formally laid off, so they are unable to draw on unemployment. Some have even been issued bench warrants for lack of payments that were being garnished from their paychecks.
This action is part of a long standing tradition in Harlan County. Miners there have a long history of strikes and direct action against exploitative, extractive mining companies, including an all-out war in the 1930s, yet there is no longer a union to protect the rights they fought so hard for the past hundred years.
