VOICES: Preventing the next mine disaster through unionization

By Danny Chiotos, It’s Getting Hot in Here

Say, did you see him going; it was
early this morning

He passed by your houses on his way to the coal

He
was tall, he was slender, and his dark eyes so tender

His occupation was
mining, West Virginia his home.

It was just before 12, I was feeding the children

Ben Moseley came
running to bring us the news

Number eight is all flooded, many men are
in danger

And we don’t know their number, but we fear they’re all doomed.

— “West Virginia Mine Disaster,” by Jean Ritchie

Coal mining is dangerous business and the people of the Appalachian coalfields, from Tennessee to West Virginia to Pennsylvania, have come
to expect disasters out of the mining industry. Mining is a job that’s
full of risks and packed with hard work. Miners have come to be proud
of the work that they do which truly has had a great role in powering
the United States for more than the last century. It’s been work that’s
populated Appalachia with amazing people but has kicked up a lot of
coal dust in the process all over our great state of West Virginia.

After 9/11, where I was less than 10 miles from the Pentagon and
remember hearing fighter jets and helicopters flying over my house
throughout that tense night. I never thought I would feel that tragic
emotion that brought anger, anticipation, fear, mourning, and pride
together into one horrendous stomach ache again. Then came the disaster
at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine.

I could not work all week. I could not stop refreshing the WSAZ news page
and the Coal Tattoo
Blog for updates. I could not get my mind off the basic question of
whether there is good in the world where 29 hardworking men are killed
because of Massey Energy’s disregard for miner safety. I could not get
off the phone talking with students I work with and my own family
members who were grieving like I was for these men and holding out hope
that the four missing miners would be found alive. They were not.
And we continue to mourn through the weekend.

Both my great-grandfather and grandfather helped to pull 11 bodies
out of the Nellis mine which is a hair under 33 miles away from the
Montcoal mine. On November 8th, 1943, which was a Monday, his family
was watching a movie in Whitesville and they were rushed out of the
theatre to Nellis. His mother and sisters were sent home to pray for
survival, his father hurried down in the mine to search for life and my
grandfather stood sentry at the mouth of the mine with not much to do
but hope to see those men walk out of the mine. He was 13 at the time
and he saw those 11 bodies come out of the mine in a railcar without a
breath among them.

He is now the ripe age of 80, and once again mourning, this time for
the 29 miners that were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine. He and no
one in the coalfields should have to witness a disaster like this and be
reminded of a disaster they lived through 67 years ago. We have the
means and technology to make these kind of massive disasters a thing of
the past that exists only in our memories and history books.

Worker deaths should not happen, and we should be pushing to prevent
them whenever possible. The debate becomes about what is the safest
method of mining coal, since we will be mining coal for a long time
coming. Even if we quickly transition from burning coal for
electricity, there are a ton of uses for coal (including using metallurgical coal for
the production of steel, which is needed for wind turbines) which
will keep it as part of Appalachia’s economy. For a point of
information, the Upper Big Branch mine was mostly a metallurgical coal
mine and the coal mined is used for steel-making rather than
electricity production. Massey is known to export their metallurgical
coal overseas, so the 29 miners probably lost their lives not to power
the re-industrialization of the United States with renewable energy, but
to power the industrialization of countries like China and India. So,
even if we run a completely renewable energy economy, we need to keep a
focus on how we can mine coal in the way that’s most beneficial to the
communities under the safest possible conditions.

Flying in the face of these horrible realities, there has been the
disturbing development that mountaintop removal proponents have been
coming out with recently. From supporters of Massey CEO Don Blankenship to Congresswoman
Shelley Moore Capito, there has been an effort to use this horrible
mining disaster to spread support for strip mining and mountaintop
removal.

Countering this opportunistic assertion is the main point of this
piece.

Never mind the horrible leveraging of this disaster to increase
support for the form of mining that employs
the least number of people and
causes the most damage to Appalachia. While there is truth in the
statement that surface mining is safer for workers than underground
mining, the Blankenships and Capitos of the world would have you believe
that everything is hunky-dory and safe as grandma’s apple pie on a
strip mine.

The way that the Blankenships of the world make the argument is that
we could simply shift from underground mining to strip mining is a total
oversimplification of the realities of mining. The Upper Big Branch
mine was more than a thousand feet
underground. To get that coal, it takes underground mining, plain and simple. So we need to
talk about what the safest ways of mining are and what makes the biggest
impact on increasing worker safety.

As I’ve heard more of the pro-mountaintop removal opinion getting out
there, I became more interested in knowing the facts. I’ve been
hearing that strip mining was dangerous work, but I’ve never really
known just how dangerous. I came to the point of wanting to counter the
claim that the Blankenships of the world were making, but I didn’t know
the facts. So, I started crunching some numbers, making Excel
spreadsheets and asking friends for help. What I found didn’t really
surprise me, but it gave a sense of concreteness to talk about how
important unions are to worker safety.

What I found was that union strip mining was the safest for miners
and that non-union underground mining was the most dangerous. That
said, there is little way that we can or should be using that as a
justification for more strip mining. Seeing as how coal that’s mined a
certain way is generally mined that way for whole host of reasons, the
Blankenships of the world are oversimplifying it. If we look at the two
forms of mining independent of each other, because strip vs. underground
mining is generally not interchangeable, we can easily see that whether
a mine is union or non-union is incredibly important to worker safety.

I am using the very basic ratio of worker deaths per 10,000 miners to
create four statistics which compare both strip vs. underground mining,
and union vs. non-union mining. This leaves out a ton of really
important information, like worker
injury rates, black
lung and silicosis,
effects
on the communities around the mines, the different safety rates of
the different
forms of underground and strip mines, the
different safety rates at different companies, etc. etc. etc. But
what this analysis does is further the fact-based conversation about
what the safest forms of mining are in the real world.

Here are the stats that I developed using statistics from 2002-2008
(it’s pretty obvious what the stats would be for 2010 with the Upper
Big Branch disaster, but it’s too early in the year for good statistics
to be out there). The following chart summarizes the comparisons that I
wrote about earlier.