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26 July, 2010
US public criticism against a CEO and against his company in the wake of the deadly West Virginia coal mine explosion on 5 April has triggered measures for better and tighter overall workplace safety standards in the US Congress. The proposals stand as the first significant overhaul to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in its 40-year history.
A panel of the US House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee gave approval, with a 30-17 vote on 21 July, to HR 5663, the Miner Safety and Health Act. The proposed legislation would finally put teeth into America’s federal safety and health statute, and comes at a time when the US public is angry over the arrogance and power exhibited by companies following job-place deaths and ecological disasters, like BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion and deaths in the Gulf of Mexico.
The lightning rod for the tougher safety standards in the US continues to be Massey Energy and its CEO, Don Blankenship. It was at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine near Montcoal, West Virginia, on 5 April, that a methane gas blast killed 29 non-union miners in a colliery where workers were ignored when they spoke up against poor air quality. Blankenship has used the deaths, contemptibly, to argue for less oversight by the US Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and more reliance on business instincts in order to improve safety.
The proposed legislation is sweeping, and would lift the US statute to the level of some of the best safety laws in the world. OSHA violators could be charged with felony crimes, carrying heavy jail sentences and fines. It would grant expedited hearing, review, and protection in all-important whistle-blower cases, and it would give the US Labor Department’s safety agency heightened power to shut unsafe workplaces.
An existing but non-functioning “pattern of violation” status in the existing law would be given tougher enforcement mechanisms with strong penalties attached, and families and relatives of victims would receive more rights in the proposed legislation.
Also in mining, workers would be given the undeniable right to refuse unsafe work and MSHA would have the power to shut down a mine without waiting for a company’s appeals to exhaust, a common tactic used by Massey to continue production after safety violations are issued. At Upper Big Branch, Massey had been repeatedly cited for dust and ventilation problems, but the company’s appeals caused penalties to be reduced and safety deficiencies to continue.
Business and industry interests at the committee hearings in Washington, DC, opposed an updated OSHA, saying the proposed revisions are too much, too fast.
That caused United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts to say, “If we’re asking ourselves, ‘Are we moving too fast?’ maybe we should ask ourselves if we’re moving too slow, because miners keep dyin’ in our nation’s coal mines.”
UMWA President Cecil Roberts
The increase in US mining deaths to date in 2010 is markedly up, and on a pace not seen since the 1980s when US mining employment was half what it is now. So far in 2010, 40 miners have been killed, nearing the most recent record of 47 in 2006.
Thirty-one of the 40 deaths have occurred at Massey collieries. On 1 July, an electrician was crushed to death by a coal-laden shuttle car inside Massey’s non-union White Buck Coal Co. mine in West Virginia. And on 10 May, another miner was crushed between machinery and a longwall at Massey’s non-union Ruby Energy mine, also in West Virginia. He died a week later in a hospital.
Besides the BP disaster that occurred in American waters in the Gulf of Mexico on 20 April, killing 11 workers, the updated safety legislation is spurred by the 3 April explosion at Tesoro’s oil refinery in the state of Washington that killed seven – all members of the United Steelworkers (USW) – and another explosion at a power station of Kleen Energy Systems in the state of Connecticut in February, killing six. These accidents raise among Americans a late-to-arrive consciousness that perhaps the cost of profits over people in a free society has come at too steep a price.
The full US House of Representatives must now take up the safety bill, while the US Senate is standing back awaiting House action before it takes up the legislation.