The Militant Miners Who Exposed the Horrors of Black Lung

https://daily.jstor.org/the-militant-miners-who-exposed-the-horrors-of-black-lung/

by HBlix • 8 years ago

100 24 8 years ago

daily.jstor.org

ainiriand• 8 years ago

Very good article. My grandpa died from black lung as well. I never met him and that really sucks.

Work safety is not something given, it is almost always taken by the workers themselves.

maxxxxx3• 8 years ago

That's what people forget when environmental and workplace regulations get marked as "burdensome"band something to be removed. There is a long history of employers ignoring harmful conditions although the problem is well known. Profit is more attractive than saving workers' health.

brogrammer5• 8 years ago

My grandpa did as well. He was a WW1 veteran and came back and was a farmer and miner. I never met him as he died when my dad was still young.

beezlebubba• 8 years ago

My grandfather left the mines in 1958, died of black lung in 1978. An insidious, nasty disease.

lazysheepherd• 8 years ago

Words of Margaret Mead comes to mind, once again;

"Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals."

arethuza• 8 years ago

Sometimes though those passionate people can make it into government and genuinely make a difference e.g. Aneurin Bevan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

alexpotato2• 8 years ago

Colin Powell has a great quote that lines up with this (paraphrased):

"I see lots of great people in the middle ranks of the military who have great ideas that challenge the status quo. The problem is that they express too early and that limits their career. They should instead play the game, climb the ladder and then implement those ideas once they've reached a higher position."

I think about that every time I see an entrenched idea or process that isn't working. It helps me fight the urge to address it immediately and aids in making me more patient to get to the point where I can actually change things.

YeGoblynQueenne• 8 years ago

> From past experience, miners knew that neither the companies nor the state and federal legislatures they controlled through hefty donations would ever voluntarily agree to regulations to protect the health of workers.

Yeah, I don't get this. This kind of behaviour is lauded as good business sense (though certainly not in the open!) but all it is, is short-term, and dumb as bricks.

You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that work for you now will die out and the new batch will see the death rate and go do something else, flip burgers or fix cars or whatever.

Not to mention, you'll get the worse publicity possible, as an industry, that of uncaring, selfish assholes who kill your own workers.

And then the suits will start coming in- and there goes your margin, that you supposedly secured by being an utter bastard (or, in any case, an organisation full of them).

People find a way to saw the branch they sit on 0.5% more efficiently than ever before and feel so smug and smart about it.

dwyerm• 8 years ago

I want to agree with you, but I'm maybe too cynical about this. My dad was murdered with asbestos, and today people are taking paychecks doing work that could net them a miserable end with an untreatable cancer. "All I have to do is scrape these ceilings, and I'll get $20/hr? Okay!"

Meanwhile, W.R. Grace still exists and is trading within a few dollars of their 52-week high.

The tobacco industry still exists, despite their decades of lies. BATS is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index!

Killing your workers and the public is apparently not enough of an disincentive. Forget 'past experience'; current experience suggests there's some wrists that need more than another slap.

Aloha• 8 years ago

Asbestos can be handled safely - the issue was in the past it was not. Not even close to safely. The various Asbestos companies also paid dearly for their mistakes and omissions in the safety of it.

Asbestos is a material that for some applications, its very literally the only material which is suitable.

r0p3• 8 years ago

You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that work for you now will die out and the new batch will see the death rate and go do something else, flip burgers or fix cars or whatever.

I think this underestimates how desperate people were (are) for jobs that pay enough to raise a family on. I.e. there is almost always desperate surplus labor at the bottom.

Just my anecdotal experience.

pwg• 8 years ago

Another aspect unstated in the article is that in the parts of Appalachia being referenced in the article, and during the time frames given, often coal mining was one of very few jobs even available to the residents to begin with. When your majority work choices amount to: "coal miner", "logger", or "unemployed" one does not have a lot of options.

The Appalachian mountain coal mining areas are rough country, and until relatively recently (last 20 some years or so) there were not many job options available (beyond mining or other hard labor jobs) for the families that live in those areas. Even today in 2018, while better, the job opportunities pale in comparison to the opportunities in major metropolitan cities.

Source: Maternal grandparents are from VA portion of Appalachian mountain chain, grandfather was a coal miner, although luckily he did not succumb to black lung disease. Large extended family still lives there.

MarkMc• 8 years ago

From Steven Pinker's great book "Enlightenment Now":

The miner, it was said, “went down to work as to an open grave, not knowing when it might close on him.” . . . Unprotected powershafts maimed and killed hoopskirted workers. . . . The circus stuntman and test pilot today enjoy greater life assurance than did the [railroad] brakeman of yesterday, whose work called for precarious leaps between bucking freight cars at the command of the locomotive’s whistle. . . . Also subject to sudden death . . . were the train couplers, whose omnipresent hazard was loss of hands and fingers in the primitive link-and-pin devices. . . . Whether a worker was mutilated by a buzz saw, crushed by a beam, interred in a mine, or fell down a shaft, it was always “his own bad luck.”

A railroad superintendent, justifying his refusal to put a roof over a loading platform, explained that “men are cheaper than shingles...There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”

dsajames• 8 years ago

The rate at which people die of black lung is nothing from the point of view of the population at large. It makes perfect financial sense to kill people and let them go while you get new people.

The slave trade operated this way for years.

Brockenstein2• 8 years ago

Hiring and training employees is expensive. Providing long term care and disabilities for disabled employees even more so though.

And I imagine some jobs, twenty years experience doesn't make you twenty times more valuable than some FNG, IE worth protecting. You're not an investment in that case.

maxxxxx3• 8 years ago

"Not to mention, you'll get the worse publicity possible, as an industry, that of uncaring, selfish assholes who kill your own workers."

Putting out a lot of propaganda and false facts is much cheaper than fixing the problem. The tobacco industry did that for decades and they are still doing great while their product kills its users.

NeedMoreTea• 8 years ago

The stock market and human decision making is short term.

There's always someone desperate for a job with no better choices at all (like flipping burgers etc). Some don't watch news to learn of the terrible risks. Industries with safety regulations will have some employers "encouraging" the belief that the clothing, masks and procedures are unnecessary, uncomfortable etc.

Globalisation is often little more than excuse to relocate somewhere without any of those protective legislation and publicity impacts.

Once it becomes a race to the bottom human and environmental safety become secondary. The idle threat to close the factory and relocate it to somewhere that doesn't yet care is real enough that the publicity of losing 1,000 jobs is worse to their political career than killing 2,000 workers over a 40 year span.

By the time the damage is clear the politicians have moved on to highly paid board and consultancy roles in the industries they failed to regulate.

People find a way to saw the branch they sit on

Situation normal, encouraged by quarterly reporting. See also climate change, soil loss, species loss and the reaction of business globally.

Brockenstein2• 8 years ago

You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for.

Well that's clearly not the case. Coal mining has been happening for centuries and it's been dangerous the whole time, black lung isn't a new thing. And yet we haven't run out of coal workers... and I don't imagine we're about to.

It is a slow death that can take years to develop. If you have a productive worker for five, ten, twenty years before black lung gets them... Well coal workers aren't dying faster than people are being born

And everyone knows it's dangerous work that can kill you a dozen different ways and companies have proven over and over again to be largely indifferent about protecting workers unless there's a gun to their head. So why does anyone agree to do this work? Well if you've got no options and it's the best paying work around and you've got kids to feed, well maybe you bite the bullet and hope you're one of the lucky ones...

anigbrowl2• 8 years ago

"I've got the money and I don't care."

Quite a lot of people are indifferent to the externalities or the sustainability of their investment, as long as it outperforms the market is not too volatile.

smacktoward• 8 years ago

You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that work for you now will die out and the new batch will see the death rate and go do something else, flip burgers or fix cars or whatever.

Mining towns are not places where there are lots of jobs available. Frequently, mine jobs were the only jobs. Even taking a job supporting the miners often meant working for the mine; if the miners are paid in scrip that's only redeemable at the company store (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store), say, you're not going to be able to get a job in retail working anywhere else.

So the mine owners felt they could afford to view workers as disposable resources. If the mine owns your whole community, where else are you going to work?

Not to mention, you'll get the worse publicity possible, as an industry, that of uncaring, selfish assholes who kill your own workers.

They just didn't care about this. Many still don't! Don Blankenship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Blankenship), for instance, got 29 of his miners killed in 2010, and had the nerve to run for a Senate seat in the same state eight years later.

And then the suits will start coming in

But you can afford the best lawyers, which a bunch of poor miners certainly cannot. And probably the judges in the state are all members of your country club, and your money funded the campaigns of all the people who wrote the laws. Not to mention that you own the only newspaper in town. And if you want to hire a bunch of thugs to come in and beat any worker who complains within an inch of his life, local law enforcement isn't going to stop you. Heck, they might even join in to make an extra buck.

The system in these communities was rigged against the interests of labor in a dozen different ways. In lots of them, it still is.

yread• 8 years ago

For once an article about miners that doesn't mention crypto!

The Militant Miners Who Exposed the Horrors of Black Lung

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