BY DEBRA McCOWN
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
CASTLEWOOD, Va. – If the fish hadn’t been fried, they might’ve swum away as the rain pounded Saturday’s United Mine Workers fish fry.
The rain was falling so hard it was difficult to hear the event’s speakers, but a crowd still turned out, huddling under tents at the Russell County Fairgrounds to hear comments from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, union leaders, and other speakers.
Deeds and fellow Democrat Jody Wagner, a candidate for lieutenant governor, spoke about jobs and workers, while health care seemed the issue of the day among union leaders who spoke at the event.
“We fought for it 20 years ago, we deserve it and we plan to keep it,” Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said after asking those who participated in a 1989 strike for health benefits to stand and be recognized.
“Everybody who lives in America is entitled to health care because it is a necessity,” Roberts said. “If you’ve got a breath left in your lungs, you ought to be standing up fighting, saying it’s time this country has national health coverage for every single American.”
Roberts also unveiled a plaque that will be placed on the union’s Castlewood office to honor Sam Church, a former UMWA president from Southwest Virginia who died earlier this year, and vowed to organize miners at Alpha Natural Resources, a large coal company based in Abingdon, Va., that is mostly non-union.
The consensus among those attending the event seemed to be that national health care reform is overdue.
“We need it,” said Carroll Yates, of Buchanan County. “You work for years for it … to raise your family and then have health care after you retire. A lot of jobs don’t have health care, and they need it.”
Alan Vozel drove from Greene County, Penn., for the fish fry.
“I honestly think it’s a shame that in as great a nation as the United States we have people who don’t have health care, can’t afford it, can’t take their children to the doctor to get the kind of preventive medicine they need,” Vozel said.
Billy Barnhart, of Honaker, Va., said he knows a national health care plan will be hard to fund, “but we pay it now anyway.”
Also speaking Saturday was Dan Kane, secretary-treasurer of the UMWA, who decried the unequal distribution of wealth in America, saying the top 1 percent of people own as much as the bottom 95 percent combined.
“We need to take from that upper 1 percent that portion of the wealth they’ve been stealing for the past 35 years and return it to the workers,” Kane said. “We’re well on the way to making this a true and just country, and we’re not going to stop ’til we get it done.”
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
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