No one questions whether mining is a dirty and dangerous business. The history of coal mining is filled with stories of deadly explosions, poison gases, and black lung disease which have plagued mine workers and their families over multiple generations.

However, there are degrees to all things, and what has become clear in the week since an explosion at the Massey Mine in West Virginia is that the shocking number of safety violations at the non-union company over its history, and even recent months, should have been enough to shut the company down and avoid such a tragedy.

But the bureaucracy, corruption, and consolidation of mining over a generation all but guaranteed such a tragedy. Massey Mine has been cited with over 450 violations in the past year, 57 in the past month alone including 60 orders issued to close part or all of the mine down. Their ugly safety record isn’t isolated to one particular mine. The 29 miners who died in West Virginia last week are among 45 miners who have been killed at Massey’s mining operations since 2000.  http://wvgazette.com/News/201004080359

Massey Mine is among a group of international mining operations that have consolidated unprecedented power over world mining rights. Just last month it acquired Cumberland mines in Appalachia. http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20100316-908168.html?mod=wsjcrmain

The Massey Mine in West Virginia produces coal, and one of the byproducts of its extraction from the earth is methane. The failure to properly ventilate this toxic and flammable gas, as documented by the above-mentioned safety violations, likely caused the enormous explosion.

But running its operations to skirt MSHA standards and remain open has proven for Massey to be an extremely profitable business, and a disaster which slows profits at one mine only prompts these companies to extract still more at their other mine operations.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuni/news.newsmain/article/5/0/1634387/Business/Massey.to.move.miners..make.up.loss.at.blast.mine

This Massey mine disaster that apologists try to dismiss as just part of the cost of the coal business fails to focus on how the working families were manipulated by the Don (Blankenship) of their monopolized economy.

There were no other good jobs to be had in the area around Massey. This was it. This was West Virginia, after all, Appalachia – the place that Robert Kennedy first displayed to the nation at large-and which remains-among the poorest regions in the country.

According to National Public Radio, which has covered the story with superb acuity, current and former workers have reported that Massey implements incentive practices that discourage reporting of workplace injuries and other MSHA issues. The union was contentiously busted in the 1980’s under Reagan. Since then the company has initiated point systems that equate to bonuses in their paychecks. Anyone who reports an “incident” be it MSHA or other related, gets blacklisted from these points.  Workers who keep quiet and work heavy over time can earn more than $100,000 per year.

Yes, mining is a dirty and dangerous business, but it is also extremely profitable especially as it has consolidated. Mine owners have never been known for their generosity or kindness toward the workers who descend hundreds and thousands of feet below the earth’s surface to extract the precious coal, ore, gem or nuclear materials contained therein.

The mining business is owned by fewer and fewer corporations whose headquarters are often located half way around the globe.  

What happened in Massey was a combination of corruption among enforcers and silencing of the workforce.

I decided to do a little research to see how many mine disasters / injuries / reports of safety and other violations were at unionized mines versus non-unionized or those whose unions got busted, like Massey’s, in the last couple decades since the Reagan revolution

Since 1989, of the eight largest mine disasters in the United States, seven have occurred at non-union companies.

Year          Mine                    Fatalities          Union/Non-Union 

2010         Massey Mine           29                 Non-Union

2007         Crandall Canyon        9                 Non-union

2006         Sago Mine              12                 Non-union

2006         Darby Mine               5                 Non-union

2002         Quecreek Mining Inc.  0                 Non-union
                Brookwood Mine no 5,
                Jim Walter Resources, Inc
2001          Inc.                       13                Union

1992         Norton Mine No. 3                         Non-union

1989         Pyro Mining Co.          10               Non-union

http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/statistics/discoal.htm