Mine owner ran up serious violations

From MSNBC:

The coal mine rocked by an explosion that killed at least 25 workers in the nation's deadliest mining disaster since 1984 had been cited for 600 violations in less than a year and a half, some of them for not properly ventilating methane — the highly combustible gas suspected in the blast.

The disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine has focused attention on the business and safety practices of the owner, Massey Energy, a powerful and politically connected company in Appalachia known for producing big profits, as well as big piles of safety and environmental violations and big damage awards for grieving widows.

And

Massey became a political and industrial powerhouse under the guidance of Blankenship, who rose from poverty to become one of corporate America's highest-paid and least apologetic executives, a guy who proudly displays in his office a TV set with a bullet hole from a striking union miner's rifle.

He freely spent millions of dollars from his personal fortune to help install a West Virginia Supreme Court justice, a maneuver that led to an important conflict-of-interest ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, and on a failed bid to elect a Republican majority in the state Legislature.

And

Blankenship's hard-driving approach was illustrated in a 2005 memo in which he told mine workers that if their bosses ask them to build roof supports or perform similar tasks, "ignore them and run coal."

"This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills," he wrote.

More here.

In 1981, President Reagan, using a rarely enforced law preventing government workers from striking, fired almost all civilian air traffic controllers, who were on strike at the time, and banned them for life from federal service. Even though it took nearly a decade for the FAA to fully restaff American airports, employers from coast to coast rejoiced: the federal government now had their backs in labor disputes. That is, this was the beginning of the end for conceptualizing workers as human beings and citizens, rather than as resources to be economically exploited. Three more presidential administrations, one of them Democratic, followed Reagan's example, Congress, too. Today, worker rights are something of a joke. Employers generally hold all the cards, hiring and firing at will, regardless of their workers' grievances, while employees hold none.

Business sections in newspapers thrive as never before; labor sections, once deemed just as important, aren't even a memory. The entire culture no longer understands the difference between workers and capital--that is, when considering economics, it's always from a business perspective.

This is the context in which this latest mining disaster, and, of course, the big one in Utah three years ago, take place. Massey's CEO Blankenship sounds like an extraordinary son of a bitch. But he's not too terribly different from lots of other CEOs. His problem is that he was too aggressive, that he killed too many workers in one fell swoop, creating the spectacle on which the corporate mass media love to feast. So now he's in the spotlight, and will probably have to pay dearly for his crimes. Other CEOs are smarter, more cautious, but have no more human decency than Blankenship does. That is, if it's profitable, if they don't get caught, or sued (and oftentimes even if they are sued), mining companies, manufacturers, car makers, all of them would happily throw their workers into meat grinders. Because in this era of business-as-holy-ritual, workers aren't people. They're meat.

Why wasn't this operation shut down after 600 safety violations in only eighteen months? I mean, by its very nature, mining work is already dangerous. When you have 600 safety violations in such a short amount of time, I think it's safe to say that such a work site is not suitable for human occupancy. But the federal government allowed the fates of these miners to languish in legal limbo. I'm not sure what President Obama has been doing to reverse decades of relaxed regulation oversight, but it's obvious that he's not doing enough, at least, not enough to help these 25 dead workers, real people, who had real lives and real families.

I guess, in some ways, it isn't fair to lay blame for this on the President. After all, he's a product of the times, operating within a social context that makes workers a fairly low priority. Really, it's this dominant cultural strain, the one that makes most of us identify with business owners instead of the people they employ, you know, people just like you and me, that makes capitalist disasters like this mine collapse inevitable. Personally, I'd love to see a change in the American consciousness on this issue. But such things don't just happen. Historically, lots of people have to die, have to be maimed, have to be forced into intolerable situations. As long as the corporations keep the price of air conditioning within reach, and as long as their propaganda apparatus, a.k.a. the mass media, continues to bombard us with capitalist friendly messages, workers will continue to be meat.

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