Vic Svec, a Peabody spokesman, said that average industry wages were lower than those at Peabody, whose coal miners “can earn wages

Vic Svec, a Peabody spokesman, said that average industry wages were lower than those at Peabody, whose coal miners “can earn wages
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.
Pay for chief executives in the coal industry also grew much faster, on average, than
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.
Average annual wages of:
Longer-term change in wages
Shorter-term change in wages
“The company boards seem to think they need to keep executives from fleeing a sinking ship,” said Sarah Anderson,
an executive compensation expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington research group.
From 2004 to 2016, the average annual wage for chief executives in the coal industry grew as much as five times
faster than those of lower-paying jobs in the industry, like construction or truck and tractor operator jobs.
Average pay for a miner under a United Mine Workers of America contract comes out to at least $61,650 a year,
and closer to $85,000 a year with overtime, said Phil Smith, a spokesman for the union.
At the same time, wages for truckers and construction workers in the coal industry have been outpaced by peers in other industries —
and for coal construction workers, have even fallen in the last six years.