Westmoreland Coal (NasdaqGM:WLB) said March 22 that a new collective bargaining agreement has been reached with the represented employees at Westmoreland Savage’s Savage lignite mine in Sydney, Mont.
The new agreement with the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 400 is effective April 1, 2012, and will expire March 31, 2016.
“Westmoreland is pleased that we were able to promptly negotiate and ratify a new collective bargaining agreement for our Savage mine,” said Joseph Micheletti, Senior Vice President, Coal Operations. “The employees of Savage exemplify our core values of safety, operational excellence, integrity and company pride.”
“Westmoreland Savage Corporation’s Savage mine is an 874-acre strategically-placed single pit surface mine located on the Montana-North Dakota border,” said the Westmoreland website. “The Savage mine has a full-requirements contract with the 57 megawatt Lewis & Clark Station which utilizes emission control technologies and is owned by Montana Dakota Utilities, and a longstanding annual supply relationship with a sugar beet refinery near Sidney, Montana. The Savage mine produces approximately 350,000 tons of lignite annually.” The Savage contract to supply the Lewis & Clark plant expires at the end of 2012, Westmoreland said in its March 13 annual Form 10-K report.
Westmoreland is an energy company whose operations include six surface coal mines in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and Texas. It sold 21.8 million tons of coal in 2011, with that amount to grow sharply this year with the recent acquisition of the Kemmerer strip mine in Wyoming.
