Progressive Democrat Elizabeth Warren, who has made fighting for workers a focus of her Senate campaign, was a hired legal gun for a steel conglomerate trying to dodge paying health and pension benefits to thousands of retired coal miners, records show.

Warren represented LTV Steel in 1995, when she was a Harvard Law professor, aiding the bankrupt company’s bid to overturn a court ruling forcing it to pay its former employees and dependents $140 million in retirement benefits.

Warren was one of two LTV lawyers who wrote a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the appellate court decision siding with the coal miners, documents obtained by the Herald show. The high court never took up the case.

Warren was paid about $10,000 for her work, according to her campaign. The latest disclosure comes after the Herald reported that Warren defended an insurance giant against asbestos victims.

Richard Yauger, 58, who worked in an LTV Steel coal mine in Southern Pennsylvania between 1976 and 1986, called Warren’s campaign claims of fighting for the little guy “hypocritical.”

“She’s just trying to win some votes for the working class. You have to have the blue-collar votes to win,” said Yauger, who just started to get his pension from the mining company last year. “If you do one thing and you say you’re doing another, I don’t think you have to look very far to see what’s going on.”

In Warren’s petition to the Supreme Court against the coal miners and the Clinton administration, she argued that the steel giant should be exempt from the Coal Act, a law passed by Democrats in Congress that required companies shutting down their coal mining operations to keep paying benefits to former workers.

Warren’s campaign said in a statement that her work for LTV was limited to protecting the bankruptcy system, adding the Cambridge Democrat was not trying to get the Coal Act overturned...

The disclosure of Warren’s involvement with the controversial steel company plan could damage her image as a champion for the working class and health coverage for all. She has repeatedly attacked her Republican opponent, US Sen. Scott Brown, for trying to repeal Obama-care.

Warren’s work for LTV did not keep her from slamming the company 11 years later. In a 2006 PBS interview, she upbraided LTV for treating employees “like paper towels. You use them and you throw them away.”

Warren did not mention in the interview she was a paid lawyer for LTV.

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Editor's Note: Or, a better title for this article would have been, "When Progressive Politicians Lie to Dupe You Out of Your Vote"...Honestly, any coal industry worker who votes Democrat or Progressive has to have his or her head examined.


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