IN 1912 coal miners in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek fields of the Kanawha coal district went on strike for company recognition of the union. Coal operators responded by hiring paramilitary private guards from the Baldwin Felts company, which had a record of murdering miners and their families. When the usual Baldwin Felts terror failed to break the strikers' will, the coal operators outfitted a train dubbed the "Bull Moose Special" with armor and drove it past miner housing, guns blazing, killing miners as well as their wives and children.
The century-old slaughter continues today, if in a less dramatic fashion. Private coal companies still own the mines and they continue to maximize profits at the expense of miners' lives. As long as coal companies own the mines and control the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect the miners, tragedies such as the recent one in West Virginia's Sago mine will recur. In the long run, the most sustainable solution is cooperative ownership of the mines by the miners.
On Monday, Jan. 2, an explosion trapped 13 miners in a coal shaft near Sago, W.Va. Twelve of the miners eventually died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Though the cause of the explosion remains unknown, it is clear that the negligent, profit-maximizing behavior of International Coal Group, which owns the mine, made such a disaster probable, if not inevitable. In the past year alone, International Coal received 205 citations for violations of health and safety standards in the Sago mine. International Coal paid a mere $24,000 in fines for these violations -- a pittance in comparison to revenues.
International Coal is not solely at fault. Since 2001, President Bush and his congressional allies have laid off 170 mine safety employees and allowed funding for mine safety to fall in real terms. The president has also appointed corporate cronies like Steven Giles to regulatory positions within the government -- ensuring that the bosses control the regulatory apparatus that is supposed to protect laborers. History Prof. John Echeverri-Gent said that "the current administration has cut back on mining regulation and in the process created an environment that has made the recent series of accidents more likely."
The inevitable disasters of the near future represent the continuation of a century-old trend. 100,000 miners have died in mine injuries since 1900, according to Dan Kane, a miner who now works for United Mine Workers. In an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Kane said, "We need a dramatic revamping of laws that perpetuate the corporate veil."
While improved regulations would be an improvement, what we need is mines owned by the miners themselves. The fundamental reason that the coal operators can send miners to their death is that the miners' lives have little market value. Their labor can be replaced, and when the coal companies can maximize profits by minimizing spending on safety precautions, tragedies will occur.
For example, in 1985, Bolivian state-owned mining firms shifted to cooperative, worker control. According to HistoryProf. Frederic Vallvé, the shift to cooperative production reduced accidents. Although in America the shift would be from private to cooperative control rather than from state to cooperative control, the interest dynamics are analogous.
Unlike coal companies, miners are not going to send themselves to their premature deaths in order to maximize profits. Because they value their own lives, they would take reasonable steps to ensure that their work is as safe as possible. Thus, the coal mines should be under the control of democratically run miner cooperatives, in which no miner is going to benefit disproportionately from the labor of another miner. So long as the political power of the miners is distributed evenly, through a genuinely democratic mechanism for electing mine managers, the miners will create safer mining conditions.
In 1969, in response to a mine explosion that killed 78 men in West Virginia, a Democratic Congress passed the Mine Health and Safety Act, which mandated quarterly mine inspections. This legislation has helped cut mine deaths dramatically, from 260 in 1970 to 22 last year. Unlike today's Republicans, the Great Society Democrats were not puppets of the corporate elite. Thus, unlike today's Republicans, the Great Society Democrats took some steps to improve the daily lives of working Americans. The flaw of the Great Society regulatory approach, however, is that the regulatory agencies are easy prey for the ravenous corporations. With appointees like Giles, ascendant plutocratic administrations can obstruct effective regulatory efforts with ease.
Cooperative ownership of the mines is a more effective solution to protect miners. Although we should not exculpate the administration and federal regulators for their failure in the short run, in the long run cooperative control represents the most lasting solution to preventable mine accidents. Miners themselves can do the best job extracting coal in a responsible manner because they have obvious incentives to protect themselves.
Zack Fields' column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
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