Mammoth case massive headache for Massey

Massey Energy lost a major appeal yesterday in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

The court ruled to uphold a lower court ruling that requires the Richmond-based coal company to rehire 85 union miners who lost jobs after it bought the Mammoth Coal complex in West Virginia.

Massey bought the operation from the bankruptcy of Horizon Natural Resources. The suit against them claims in December 2004 it began hiring production and maintenance workers for the new facility.

The company offered interviews to non-union employees of the previous mine operator, but the suit against it claims that union members were denied job opportunities.

The union then filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

From the Charleston Gazette Coal Tattoo blog:

The NLRB judge ordered Massey to both offer UMWA members their jobs back, and to bargain in good faith with the union. Goodwin issued a temporary order that required Massey to offer workers their jobs back, but did not implement the requirement that the company bargain with the workers toward a union contract. The 4th Circuit has upheld Goodwin’s ruling. But Massey is still appealing the rest of the NLRB judge’s decision, and that case has not yet been decided by the full NLRB.

Phil Smith, a spokesman for the UMWA, said that Massey has offered some union  workers jobs. Smith said “a handful” of miners accepted, but that many did not because they did not want to go back under Massey’s non-union working conditions.

Read the full story (4th Circuit backs ruling against Massey in Mammoth case)  for extensive background and documents on the case.

Recently, Massey CEO Don Blankenship started his own Twitter account. So far no word from him there about the appeals court decision, but he has been firing away tweets all week including:

The Cap and Trade bill is essentially a Ponzi scheme that dwarfs Madoff.

American labor is so disadvantaged by excess regulations that they can’t compete.

It’s easy to be popular. All you have to do is agree with everybody.

And from the most recent one posted yesterday:

Coal is America’s Energy. Oil is Iran’s Energy. Which do you want to depend on?

Meanwhile, UMWA President Cecil Roberts said the union is pleased with the court’s decision.

“We look forward to the day when miners who were illegally discriminated against get their rightful jobs back, and to all the miners at the Mammoth mine having the benefit and protection of working under a UMWA contract,” he said in a statement.

Beware of Twitter squatters

Earlier this month we ran a series on how local businesses are using social media. In some cases, the tools are effective and cheap ways to reach targeted customers. But they can also allow any rouge individual to speak on behalf of the company. And in that sense, the battle for public opinion keeps getting trickier.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that companies have had to be on the lookout for imposter-twitterers, people who claim to be a company, such as Exxon Mobil, but are just tweeting spam.

From the article:

Exxon Mobil Corp. has found at least two unauthorized Twitter accounts under variations of its name. Twitter — a networking service where users create profiles and send out short messages, or “tweets” to their followers — terminated one of the profiles last summer. An Exxon spokesman says the oil company is considering what to do about the second profile, which it discovered several weeks ago.

The dangers of this are obviously that a company could loose control of a message more quickly than ever. Imagine if I started an account called DomminosGuy12 and tweeted “Still molesting the pizza dough here at Dominos.” Imagine the firestorm that would create, a PR disaster.

You can read the first part here of our investigation here.

Massey CEO joins the Twitterati

Don Blankenship, chief executive of Massey Energy, has been tweeting away on Twitter since June 19.

Massey is the nation’s fourth largest coal producer and the repeated target of protests over their mining practices in Appalachia.  Last week, actress Darryl Hannah and a top NASA scientist were arrested in West Virginia at one such protest.

A good chunk of Blankenship’s tweets have been aimed at his adversaries:

I wish the protesters understood that there are more important issues than surface mining – like diseases and poverty.

Those having worked in coal mines in W.V. don’t need uninformed people from out of state telling us what is right when it is wrong.

Whether this is a bold move toward radical transparency for the company or just a soapbox for launching barbs at environmentalists, time will tell.

The Associated Press picked up the story this afternoon. From their article via the Charleston Daily Mail:

Massey spokesman Jeff Gillenwater says Blankenship believes there are many issues facing West Virginians and America that merit relevant thought and twittering is a way to communicate concisely with numerous people.

You can follow Don Blankenship on Twitter here.

For some in-depth reading on Massey, check out this story published last month in Style Weekly.

Web 2.0 has some Richmond businesses in a Twitter

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first installment of a series examining social networking and how Richmond businesses are navigating the web to meet one another and promote their businesses. On Thursday we will be examining Facebook and LinkedIn, and on Friday the business of selling social media.

In one corner there are Twitterers. Richmonders like NBC newscaster Ryan Nobles, who uses the website to post blurbs about his life several times a day:

“Wearing this shirt the way Mr. Crew intended.”

And: “I hate the #Phillies. Seriously. As much as I hate people who kill puppies. #fb”

Or Chris Wilmore from Carmax, who recently wrote, “At Tara Thai at Short Pump Mall meeting a friend for lunch!”

In the other corner are Richmonders who find the idea of posting exclamation-point-laced minutiae absurd and are baffled as to why companies are using the same websites as teenagers.

For all the talk about how Web 2.0 is “revolutionizing” business, local professionals say the rules of blogging and Twitter are almost identical to those that apply to old-fashioned, face-to-face networking. Don’t blatantly plug your business. Try to make yourself likable, and then people will want to do business with you.

According to dozens of interviews with local business owners and marketing professionals, it’s unclear how helpful Twitter is for most businesses, or even if it is more effective than more traditional marketing strategies (handing out business cards, cold calling, seminars, etc.). And businesses report spending a varying amount of time with the website. Read more