Question:
A piece in USA Today was fairly typical. “Despite tragedy,
miners’ way of life will live on,” the headline reads. We
are told that following these deaths, things will continue
on as always because “Coal mining is a lifestyle and a
family tradition.”
Answer:
In the 1930s, the miners’ union provided the organizing base for the construction of
the mass industrial union movement in the United States, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO). Despite retreats and setbacks, the struggles of the miners
ultimately culminated in the unionization of virtually the entire US coalfields.
Before and during the Second World War, coal miners launched two major strikes and
defied the ferocious attacks of big business and the Roosevelt administration, which
was demanding that labor leaders place the unions fully behind the war effort.
In the immediate post-World War II period, substantial improvements were made in
wages, pensions, health and safety. When Congress ordered hundreds of thousands of
miners back to work under the newly passed Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, the miners
defiantly declared, “Let the Senators dig coal.” In 1952, a mine safety act was
passed, after an explosion that killed 119 miners in West Frankfurt, Illinois, that
for the first time established a federal role in mine safety.
However, the improvements won by miners were quickly eroded as the coal industry
entered an extended depression during the decade of the 1950s, as coal prices
plummeted and the mine owners used new mining machinery to increase productivity and
eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs. Between 1950 and 1960, employment in coal
mining fell from 488,000 to 166,000. Many of those who remained in the mines were
working part-time and were barely able to feed their families.
The organization built by the miners, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA),
proved unable to respond to this change in a progressive fashion. UMWA President John
L. Lewis, who had led the formation of the CIO in the 1930s and had called numerous
nationwide coal strikes, capitulated to the owners’ demands for layoffs and cost
savings.
The resulting social catastrophe in the Appalachian mining region was a stark
demonstration of the inability of trade unions based on a pro-capitalist and
nationalist perspective to defend the interests of the working class. Lewis rejected
demands for measures, such as a shorter workweek, to shift the burden of the crisis
onto the backs of the employers. Instead, he sought to work with the operators to
drive up profits through squashing militancy and eliminating “surplus” labor. After
1950, he never again called another nationwide contract strike. He even offered to
help owners purchase more-efficient mining equipment through exempting them from
payments to the union’s health and welfare fund.
The destruction of mining jobs and the deterioration of overall social conditions
forced the emigration of hundreds of thousands of impoverished workers and their
families from the mining areas to big cities in the Midwest, where they often
encountered discrimination.
They are the only tips of the crowns of the real
causes of this problem. Because if the lives of
the miners weren't as cheap, or the profiteers
from mine operations weren't as greedy, there
would have been more attention paid to their
safety and locating in cases of mine accidents.
So, just as Bo has mentioned about investing
money into safety measures would have cost
to the mining operators their expected profits...
Therefore, I think miners "mental debility" and
their "locked lifestyle" don't really play any role....
