Coal Comfort

There’s a Latin American saying among the miners: “We eat the mines, the mines eat us.” Anyone who has ever traveled to certain areas of Appalachia has seen how some coal mines have devoured entire hilltops. The work may keep food on the table for many miners and their families, but at what cost? Coal Mining, by its very nature, is a dirty, dangerous business. But it doesn’t have to be as dangerous, as dirty, or as exploitative as it is made to be.
The job of mining in itself is quite dangerous. The environment in which people must work is hazardous. There are frequently accidents in the mines, ranging from cave-ins, which could either kill or trap unfortunate workers, to explosions, which are far too common due to the presence of flammable gas in the mines. Similarly, mine gas can poison or suffocate miners as well, which is why canaries are so commonly found, as a canary is more sensitive to the gas and signals danger through its own death. In 1970, 234 men died in mining accidents, and from 1930 to 1972, nearly 1.5 million lives were claimed. Cases of Coalworker’s Pneumoconiosis, or “black lung”, as it’s informally known, have almost doubled within the past ten years, and almost nine percent of miners with 25 years or more in experience have tested positive for the disease, which has claimed over 10,000 lives within the past 10 years. But even discounting the natural disasters occurring in the mines, the mining unions make the jobs far more dangerous.
In the case of the Harlan County mining disaster, the mining unions made the situation far worse. The outstanding case of the Yablonski murders in 1969 makes this abundantly clear. In 1969, the candidate Joseph Yablonski, who opposed the president of the United Mine Workers Association, ran against him, and was defeated. However, Yablonski later asked the Department of Labor to investigate the election for fraud, and was assassinated just under two weeks later. During the year of the Farmington mining disaster, 1968, the union’s actions are further damned, as in 1968, the United Mine Workers Association reported only one safety expert in its Washington Headquarters and only 14 dollars spent on safety education in its district offices where the disaster took place, but $75,000 spent on having the National Coal Policy Conference openly promote and support the job of coal production, completely refusing to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the job. These financial “allowances” are also noted in the documentary Harlan County, USA, which follows the 1976 strike of the Harlan County mine workers. During the film, it’s shown that Duke Power Company, the owners of the mines, had increased their company’s properties 170 percent during 1976. In contrast, the mine workers only received a wage increase of four percent, not nearly enough to help them out of the squalid poverty they lived in, with a lack of utilities, like running water, that most would consider necessary for a good standard of life. (It should also be noted that the cost of living increased by seven percent that year, which would push the miners and their families deeper into poverty.)
To the mines, the families’ poverty was entirely unimportant. Rather than pay attention to the horrid conditions that miners were forced to live and work in, they paid more attention to their own profits, as is clear in the story of Elmer Lockhart, a miner who fell ill with black lung thanks to working in the mines for Amherst Coal Company. His black lung was presumably made worse by his working double shifts in an attempt to make ends meet for his family. It was not lessened by Amherst’s repeated denials of the fact that coal dust was harmful to the lungs. Once Elmer caught black lung, however, the mines immediately fired him, and further, prevented him from ever getting a job in a coal mine again rather than pay compensation for his illness. His daughter, Pat, gave her account of the story in the book In Our Blood, by Matt Witt:
“‘I think about the men who run Amherst, of course I do,’ Pat says. ‘The men who decided to fire my father, they went back home the night they did it, and their families didn’t have to worry. They didn’t have to fetch for themselves. Their children didn’t have to give up their education.
“‘Black lung destroyed my father’s life and his family,’ she says. ‘But to Amherst, he was just another coal miner.’”
But these mining accidents and hazards aren’t things that only happened in the 1970’s. In fact, just last year, the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh, West Virginia, exploded, killing twenty-nine miners. Just this past week, a settlement of $209 million was paid by the mining company, but only 22% of that money was given to the families of the dead miners. Although there were several investigations made, all of which found 458 outstanding safety violations in the mines, the executives responsible were never tried in federal court. Almost ten percent of Big Branch’s mine violations were listed as “unwarrantable failures to comply”, making five times more citations in this category than the percentage of failures to comply that is seen as allowable in other mines. A review recently put out by the Mining Safety and Health Administration has further pointed out that at least twelve of the existing safety violations contributed to last year’s accident.
The story of the coal industry and the treatment of its workers reminds us that it doesn’t have to be this way. While true that conditions, even at best, in the coal industry are extremely dangerous, individual, personal decisions can and do make the situation much worse than it needs to be. Selfishness, corruption, and disregard for the value of the lives of workers have created a misery that goes against all that America is supposed to stand for. It denies miners any true liberty, and it strips them, and the community around them, of their common humanity. The coal companies claim that, unless the government leaves them alone, the lights all across the nation will go out. Billboards around this very state claim that, without coal, all the cities will go dark. But there is already a darkness over the country, and only a more humane attitude will give light back.