Apr 12, 2007 By Steve Ferris 3 min read

KIRBY – Striking union coal miners took a break from their rain-soaked pickets Wednesday to receive some encouragement from Deborah Hamner, the widow of a non-union miner who died in the tragedy at the Sago Mine in West Virginia last year. Hamner, whose husband, George “Junior” Hamner, was one of the 12 miners who died in the Jan. 2 explosion at Sago, and her daughter Sara Bailey visited picketing miners at Foundation Coal’s Cumberland Mine in Kirby, Greene County, to express their support for the workers.

“We support them and we’re really proud,” Hamner said, adding that her late husband would have also supported the striking miners.

Hamner said her husband, who was 54 years old, worked in a unionized mine before he started working at Sago in June 2004.

“He always wanted to go back to a union mine,” Hamner said inside a small shanty that members of United Mine Workers of America Local 2300 built outside of Portal #6 for shelter from the cold, rain and snow that has tested the miners’ resolve since the strike began on April 4.

Nearly 1,000 workers at Foundation’s Cumberland Mine, its Emerald Mine in Waynesburg and the 241 miners at the company’s Wabash Mine in Illinois went on strike because Foundation would not sign the 2007 National Bituminous Coal Wage Agreement for employees at those three mines.

The UMWA negotiated the national contract in December to cover all of its members in the country, but Foundation has not signed the contract that would cover workers at those three mines.

Although there were no new developments in the strike, Foundation, the nation’s fourth largest coal producer with 14 mines in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Wyoming, said it still hopes talks with the UMWA will result in an agreement in which the company would sign the national contract.

Chuck Knisell, a Cumberland Mine worker and strike captain for the dayshift on Wednesday, said union and non-union miners support each other and share the goal of improving mine safety.

“We’re all miners. Union and non-union,” said Knisell, of Morgantown, W.Va.

He said even though miners at Sago were not in a union, they backed federal mine safety laws that grew from the tragedy and benefited all miners.

Hamner and her daughter are friends of workers at the Cumberland Mine and, Knisell said, they called him saying they wanted to come and show their support.

“They really helped us out. They’re real good friends of ours,” Knisell said.

Hamner said she and her daughter met some Cumberland Mine workers at hearings held on the Sago disaster and they want back those miners.

“They stick together. We’re so proud of them,” Hamner said. “We’re here because we believe in unions.”

She said she wishes Sago had been unionized because workers would have been able to refuse to work due to unsafe conditions with less fear of losing their jobs.