Dirty coal
By Max J. Castro
maxjcastro@gmail.com
In the mining industry, workers are expendable. The tragedy at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, where 29 miners died in an explosion, was the product of years of neglect of worker safety in the mines and other workplaces in the country. The Bush administration put pro-business administrators to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). It was a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
The Obama administration has changed all that but the institutional legacy remains. The mining industry is a particular dangerous one. The mines are operated to extract the maximum amount of coal and profit. Safety is a secondary consideration. The mine where the accident took place, owned by the Massey Energy, had an unusually large number of safety violations, including 54 in the past 12 months, a rate 11 times the national average. It was a non-union mine; union mines are generally safer because workers are less afraid to speak out and to refuse to work under dangerous conditions.
The 2006 Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act toughened mining safety laws. But Massey and other mine operators have found a way around enforcement by contesting numerous violations, clogging up the system and preventing mine regulators from imposing tougher restrictions. As a result, the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission has a backlog of more than 16,600 contested cases! Regulators cannot count contested violations to place a mine in the “pattern of violation” category which triggers a higher level of supervision. By contesting a large percentage of citations, mines can avoid or delay paying fines and continue with business as usual.
Coal accounts for about half the energy in the United States. Not only is it a dangerous industry scornful of safety regulations, it is also a major danger to the environment. Surface mining destroys thousands of acres of each year. Coal-powered electric plants are a major source of greenhouse gases.
Aside from tightening enforcement of mine regulations, the United States needs to move away from coal. That won’t be easy, even though coal is probably the single most pernicious factor in relation to global warming. Coal has a lot of friends in Congress. The coal industry and the utility companies have powerful lobbies. Dependence on coal runs deep in the United States. It is one of the few remaining sources of relatively well-paid blue collar jobs. And the fact that China burns more coal than the United States provides a good pretext to do nothing.
The recent tragedy is likely to lead to tougher mine safety regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency is already cracking down on surface mining by prohibiting the disposal of wastes in streams, a common practice. And clean energy is part of the Obama administration’s agenda.
But coal will be with us for a long time. And tragedies like Upper Big Branch mine and other preventable deaths on the job will continue to happen as long as profits matter more than the lives of workers.
