Vic Svec, a Peabody spokesman, said that average industry wages were lower than those at Peabody, whose coal miners “can earn wages<br />and bonuses nearing six figures per year.” He said the majority of stock bonuses would be shared by employees below the company’s executive ranks, though he declined to give a detailed breakdown.<br />Pay for chief executives in the coal industry also grew much faster, on average, than<br />that of their counterparts across the wider economy, while the average pay for coal industry construction workers failed to keep up with similar jobs in other fields.<br />Average annual wages of:<br />Longer-term change in wages<br />Shorter-term change in wages<br />“The company boards seem to think they need to keep executives from fleeing a sinking ship,” said Sarah Anderson,<br />an executive compensation expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington research group.<br />From 2004 to 2016, the average annual wage for chief executives in the coal industry grew as much as five times<br />faster than those of lower-paying jobs in the industry, like construction or truck and tractor operator jobs.<br />Average pay for a miner under a United Mine Workers of America contract comes out to at least $61,650 a year,<br />and closer to $85,000 a year with overtime, said Phil Smith, a spokesman for the union.<br />At the same time, wages for truckers and construction workers in the coal industry have been outpaced by peers in other industries —<br />and for coal construction workers, have even fallen in the last six years.
