More than 22,000 retired miners and their dependents will lose their health care benefits on April 30, 2017 unless Congress passes the Miners Protection Act. Miners who for years accepted lower wages in exchange for lifetime health benefits are faced with the loss of the benefits due to the bankruptcies of a number of mining companies.

Coal miners who are being stripped of medical benefits due to a string of coal company bankruptcies are furious over one firm’s plan to pay millions in bonuses to the executives who managed the company as it failed financially.

Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez got a taste of the coal miner’s life on Dec. 1, when he descended 1,000 feet below the earth’s surface for an underground tour of a Cumberland Coal Resources LP mine in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.