Progressive Voices http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/cms/2010/04/27/when-does-willful-neglect-of-worker-safety-become-criminal/
When does willful neglect of worker safety become criminal?
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
By Tom O'Connor
Imagine that West Virginia coal mine owner Don Blankenship got in his car one day and, in a big hurry to get to the bank, raced through town at such high speed that he lost control of the vehicle, plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, and killed 29 people.
Imagine further that the vehicle had been inspected dozens of times and each time Blankenship had been told that it had serious safety flaws that made it a danger to the public. He had been cited and fined hundreds of times for unsafe driving, but, because he appealed each of the citations, he managed to keep his license and continued to drive the dangerous clunker. Meanwhile, in an attempt to intimidate his critics, imagine that he had launched a multi-million dollar smear campaign against the sheriff who attempted to enforce the law.
This analogy with the recent disastrous explosion of Massey Coal's Upper Big Branch Mine and its CEO Don Blankenship is much closer to reality than you might think. A few facts:
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Prior to the explosion, Blankenship sent a memo addressing mine safety to his superintendents, telling them to remember that their job was to put coal production first. "[T]his memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills," Blankenship emphasized.
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Since 2005, the Upper Big Branch Mine has been cited with more than 1,342 safety violations.
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Massey has paid over $1 million in fines in the last year alone and has contested fines totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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At the Upper Big Branch Mine, inspectors have repeatedly found inadequate ventilation to prevent accumulation of methane and insufficient measures to prevent the build-up of coal dust-precisely the conditions that can lead to catastrophic explosions.
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While a $50 million judgment against Massey was before the WV Supreme Court, Blankenship underwrote a $3 million attack campaign against one of its sitting Justices. (Having previously vacationed on the Riviera in the company of another Justice, he apparently felt confident of his support.)
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In a 2009 interview, Blankenship stated that [safety regulations are] "very difficult to comply with. There's so many of the laws that are, if you will, nonsensical from an engineering or a coal mining viewpoint." In a speech at his annual anti-union Labor Day rally, he railed against the Mine Safety and Health Administration's efforts to protect miners' safety and health, calling them "as silly as global warming."
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Workers at Massey's non-union mines have been threatened with firing if they sought to join the union, according to the United Mine Workers of America. (Non-union mines have had far worse safety records than union mines, where workers have the power to stop production when they observe unsafe conditions.)
In sum, Blankenship and Massey Coal have demonstrated a single-minded focus on profit and a callous disregard for the safety of its workforce. That a catastrophic incident resulting in the highest worker death count in a generation should occur at a Massey mine can hardly be considered an unforeseeable accident. As investigative journalist Ken Ward argues in an excellent interview with The Nation magazine, methods to prevent mine explosions have been well-known for hundreds of years, but Massey failed to implement them adequately, preferring simply to pay some fines as a cost of doing business and to appeal as many citations as possible in order to clog up the enforcement system.
Mine Safety and Health Administrator Kevin Stricklin agrees with Ward, stating after the blast that mine explosions are "100 percent preventable."
So, back to our analogy-if Don Blankenship's reckless disregard for the safety of his workers resulted in 29 deaths, should he not be held criminally liable for these deaths? Under current MSHA and OSHA laws, such willful neglect to protect workers' safety can be prosecuted only as a misdemeanor, with the result that an infinitesimally small number of such cases are brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Massey case highlights the failings of the Mine Safety and Health Act (and the OSH Act that governs most non-mining workplaces) to provide real safety protections for workers. The deaths of these 29 miners call out for justice. We need real reform of the MSHA and OSHA laws including new, stricter criminal penalties for those company executives that put profit before workers' lives.
Tom O'Connor is the Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health
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Tom O'Connor
Executive Director
National Council for Occupational Safety and Health
(919) 428-6915
oconnorta@gmail.com
301 Fayetteville St. #2814
Raleigh NC 27601
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