When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney visited an Ohio coal mine this month to promote jobs in the coal industry, workers who appeared with him at the rally lost pay because their mine was shut down.
The Pepper Pike company that owns the Century Mine told workers that attending the Aug. 14 Romney event would be both mandatory and unpaid, a top company official said Monday morning in a West Virginia radio interview. ...Cleveland Plain Dealer
The line I like best comes from the mining company's CFO, Rob Moore who said that managers "communicated to our workforce that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend."
(Mandatory: conveying a command, compulsory)
Because the company's mine had to be shut down for "safety and security" reasons during Romney's visit, Moore confirmed workers were not paid that day. He said miners also lose pay when weather or power outages shut down the mine, and noted that federal election law doesn't let companies pay workers to attend political events. ...Records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics show that Murray Energy has contributed more than $900,000 to Republican candidates in the last two years. ...Cleveland Plain Dealer
The founder and CEO of Murray Energy, the owner of mine, is militantly anti global-warming science and has been a keen lobbyist against proposed mining safety measure proposed after the Sago mine disaster in West Virginia in '06.
I get the feeling he's a Soviet Republican, don't you?
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