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United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard talked to Ed Schultz tonight and slammed Massey Energy and Don Blankenship for their negligence that led to the deaths of 25 miners in West Virginia.
Watch it:
Gerard, whose union represents thousands of hard rock miners in the United States and Canada, said that the disaster “absolutely could have been prevented.” While Massey racked of hundreds of violations and millions in fines, Gerard said the company would rather pay the fines than care about the safety of its workers while noting that CEO Don Blankenship “promotes himself as a unionbuster.”
“I can absolutely say that if these miners were members of a union, they would have been able to refuse unsafe work… and would not have been subjected to that kind of atrocious conditions,” said Gerard. “In some places like in Australia and Canada, this kind of negligence would result in criminal negligence [charges] being brought against the management and the CEO.”
We can only hope.
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Help me out here: Is it an issue that the UMW no longer exists, or that the miners at Massey simply aren’t represented by the UMW?
Seriously, unions might be useful in this instance, but it’s more important that regulatories actually do their jobs and make it completely painful when fining for violations.
For instance, for this immediate issue alone, the explosion and recovery work done by emergency workers? Massey should be fined 1 million dollars a day for each victim. So Monday cost him 25 million, Tuesday cost him 25 million, Wednesday cost him 25 million and so on, and so on, and so on.
Huh? Five USW members get killed in a refinery explosion last week, and Gerard chooses this moment to come out with these statements? Look to your own back yard, Leo.
The United Mine Workers of America — see http://www.umwa.org — is very much alive, but does not represent workers at this particular mine. Massey is notoriously anti-union, so I don’t think the UMWA has contracts at any of the company’s numerous mines.
Although I’m not familiar with UMWA’s specific contract language, it is quite common in industrial union collective bargaining agreements that the union have the right to refuse to work when unsafe conditions exist. In other words, if a union safety steward had been doing his job correctly, the union would have had the power to shut the mine, and save the lives of those 25 men.
Union representation made this country prosper when we still had a consumer economy that relied on disposable income shared among all of us. Even owners of mines damage their own prosperity when they cut into the ability of the populace to afford their basic needs.
Jeff Goddell author of big coal was just interviewed on MSNBC. Chyron posted 57 violations at that mine in March alone.
Just more examples that money is more important than peoples safety and lives. Terrible!
Good thing the Democrats are in charge this time. I’m sure they’ll stand up for the working people of America. They’ll crack down on the mining companies and make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I’m joking, of course. The Democrats wouldn’t stand up to a wet paper bag.
Exactly. I wrote about this in my diary as well. i live in West Virginia so it is a huge issue right now.
Unionized mines are more safer and more efficient than non-unionized. They can protest working in unsafe conditions, have fire bosses looking for safety hazards and efficient ways to fix them, and their safety regulations are better still.
Thanks, laborite57. I really needed that clarification. I completely agree with the others that the union might’ve saved those lives.
What I don’t understand is the regulatory agencies not having the authority to close down the mine. Problem is, then everyone would again scream ‘socialism’. I wonder if they would now that 25 people are dead.
When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, did anyone scream socialism then? And no one died as a result of it either.
Problem is, from another thread, why do people keep going to the mines and working when they know it’s so dangerous? The answer is, it’s all they have there for work. There are no other industries in the area and the traditions go back so far that they would be hard-pressed to find another way to survive there. Were the mine shut down, all those folks would be out of work until someone else came in and re-opened it. How would they be able to survive financially? They’re only making some 40K a year.
Unfortunately they were not union and therefore if they had complained or refused to work, they would have not only been unemployed but unemployable. At least as coal miners.
It is amazing that in this country a poor person could do some rather reckless driving, accidentally kill some as a result of the car wreck and go to jail. Yet someone who spends years systematically and knowingly making a work environment unsafe and as a result kills a dozen people will probably not ever see the inside of a jail.
Could be he couldn’t get any tradmed face time over five refinery deaths. It’s not like he owns a cable news channel.
This is unregulated capitalism. big business unaccountability, and bought and paid for politicians at it’s finest. Given the outlandish amount of safety violations by this company, it should have been shut down months ago.
I don’t know under whose purview mine safety falls, but surely a gov’t agency exists to monitor this sort of thing. Once again the Obama administration is asleep at the wheel and profits before paople reign supreme. I hope I live long enough to see capitalism crash and burn.
The operative descriptive there being “poor” person. This clown will only see a fine and he will appeal endlessly. Meanwhile, he’s free to go around the country, wearing the American flag and giving speeches to teabaggers.
Welcome to the days of yesteryear, when the robber baron’s ran the country. History repeats.
People DIED to unionize, but, these days, that’s called “socialism” and maybe it is. During the “Bush Regime” ( which I was glad to hear it called), the Federal government gave all the criminals carte blanche to put profits above people.
We’re seeing capitalism at it’s worst now…well, maybe it CAN get worse.
But it strikes me as grimly amusing that the American people think their “safety” is only in terms of military might and “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” and here we are fighting them here.
I wonder if the American people will twig to the fact that the right to unionize has been taken away at peril of their lives? And what will they do as the right wingers/bosses scream “SOCIALISM” like they did back in the 1920′s?
While a strong union, being fairly rare these days, would have protected these workers more effectively than laissez faire, the real culprit for the loss of lives lies in the easy relationship that the safety regulators had with Massey Energy as well as the rest of the large producers of lobbyists. The ongoing focus on profits at the expense of lives has become standard practice and is bigger than union buster Blankenship.
Fortunately condolences sans offers to address this will fix everything up in a jiffy and we can move back to subject of the business of America.
Sounds like the crowds of mining families he finally addressed( after the news gave out the story) nearly lynched him and he had to “escorted” away under armed guard.
Mine Owner Faces Scrutiny as Rescue Effort Continues
The management didn’t even call the families, they had to hear about on the evening news…………
Jeebus! At least that jerk owner in Utah PRETENDED to be concerned and remorseful.
Massey Energy is apparently the WalMart of Coal Mining. No unions, poor working conditions, and billionaire ownership preferring fines over fixing safety violations.
(Ask any fire inspector about WalMart.)
Just one of literally thousands of reasons I won’t set foot in Wal-Mart
the miners, for sure, know that their right to unionize imperils their lives. and, with this story on page 1 of the msm, a lot of people who weren’t paying attention before, also know it.
what’s already been said is that this mine should have been shut down long ago. either the regulators were lax or the regulations need to be strengthened. and massey should be indicted for criminal negligence.
edit: should read “taking away their right to unionize”
“In some places like in Australia and Canada, this kind of negligence would result in criminal negligence [charges] being brought against the management and the CEO.”
Too bad Obama doesn’t like punishing rich people for screwing over poor people. Gotta keep those campaign contributions coming in!
Miners everywhere in this country should walk off the job TODAY!! How many scenes of weeping family members holding photos of their loved ones and well-coiffed correspondents feigning solemnity as they opine “will they find any survivors?” do we need to see before people wake up. Stop working for these trolls. They don’t give a flying fuck about you or your family. Stop being sheep.
That’s unrealistic in today’s economy. The owners will just hire new workers and the present workers will be just as unemployed as the new hires were the day before. Massey prides himself in his union busting. He wouldn’t hesitate to fire every striking worker, even if that mean a 100 percent turnover.
Blankenship and the govt will blame the workers for the accident, fining the families of those killed.
Obama said an “Easter Prayer” for the miners. That should fix everything. That and everyone picking themselves up by their own bootstraps.
If that creep Blankenship doesn’t get indicted, there is no justice.
Those miners are to blame for their own deaths. Like Harry Whittington putting his face in the drunk Cheney’s line of fire.
Americans love praying.
It infuriates me so much when our wonderful leaders answer questions about how they are addressing a given tragedy by saying they “prayed” for the victims and their families. Next time the IRS or creditors come knocking at your door, asking what you are doing to address your outstanding debt, tell them you are praying about it. See how far THAT goes.
Harry Whittington even blamed himself for that one. Either he fawns over Cheney or he’s terrified of him. How many actually believe the former?
In the face of injustices, I seen comments saying things like that. Like, Hey, next Wednesday everyone should stay home from work, or something like that. How nice it must be to have the luxury to say that.
This disaster has to be viewed as a case of negligent homocide.
How nice it must be to have a job to stay home from….
New post up top…
Exactly. Good, honest, hard working people get “prayers” instead of tangible aid, while incompetent jerkoffs on Wall Street get a kajillion bajillion dollars for screwing up. God Bless America.
I finally got an interview set for that music company. Friday. But, I think I’d better confirm it. Musicians! Sheesh. :)
And “God” bless Barack Hussein Orahma. Change we can only imagine.
WooHoo! Good for you! You go girl. :-)
Yes, it’s disgusting that somehow “prayer” is acceptable, but if the gov’t actually does it’s job as in, you know, regulating the industry, the rightwing fundies will be shrieking and screaming about socialism.
I come from a fundie family. They are thoroughly brainwashed by their religion and their C Street Churches into mis-believing that EVERYTHING is up to “god” to solve, and that having the government (or unions) be involved in regulating it is evil socialism and satan is somehow involved. I’m not exaggerating.
I seriously doubt that our US population is ready yet to really “see” what’s going on. We are still too fully fed, made stupid by all of our many distractions, and not poor enough yet. I do have Republican friends who are really starting to feel the pinch, but they reflexively blame it all on Dems… not that Dems and BHO aren’t culpapble, but they’re not ready yet to see the bigger picture.
Condolences to the miners and their families. They were in a bind. The unions would’ve helped, but… I dunno. The owners today have so much money that they don’t give one crap about fines. Who cares about piffle like that?? And for sure, they don’t care one iota if someone dies. That’s something that their HR people are hired to handle. Not the owner’s problem. There’s plenty more serfs to be hired for peanuts out there who are willing to do the job.
And a nationwide strike: maybe a good idea, but not gonna happen.
People will not wake up until things get much worse, at which point, it *may* be too late. Unsure.
What’s the latest on your job prospect, or did I miss something?
Per the Wikipedia:
Also
Yep, that sounds about right.
Well, you did. When I was offered the job, it was an offer of 32 hours a week at 16 dollars an hour but when I got there, filling out all of the paperwork, they wanted me to sign an agreement to work 21 hours OR FEWER per week at 17 dollars an hour. Also it was only guaranteed to last through December 31st. Some quick arithmetic showed me that I could barely meet my average bills and then would have to buy food, gasoline, clothing, everything that isn’t bills or medication with less than 25 dollars a week. And that was the best case scenario of getting 21 hours a week, it didn’t touch the “or fewer” part. I asked if they could give me just five more hours a week and they withdrew the offer.
Religion is the ultimate abdication of responsibility. Everything is “god’s will” or “god’s plan”. You never have to accept responsibility for anything. Perfect for the exploitation of the insecure and the weak minded.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in the various blogs about the US Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
MSHA absolutely has the right to close an unsafe mine. They will get a lot of push-back if they do (one of the reasons that they rarely do it) but they absolutely have the legal authority to shutter an unsafe mine.
Friends of the Obama administration (myself included) are probably a little reluctant to go deep into this, because it suggests that the current MSHA chief (a widely raised Obama appointee) has some responsibility for regulatory failure in this latest mine disaster.
Holy moly, they just want people for work for nothin’. Sorry for ya. It sounded like a decent gig.
Seems to me the friends of mine and other workers should be delving into this as deeply as they can. If the friends of the administration are too reluctant to do so then they need to get the fuck out of the way.
And this is precisely why there will be no change–because people don’t want to suffer in the short run for something good in the long term. If everyone said no, there would be no one to hire. But Americans, in general, will not entertain the idea of personal suffering for one second for the greater good–and the corporations know that.
That’s what I understood last night. If it were any other industry, this would barely be under discussion, but somehow the mining industry gets away with literal murder and we all look the other way until someone actually dies.
Is MSHA different from OSHA or do they overlap here?
Thanks. I thought so too but they initially lied to me. I think they were trying to “boil the toad”. They told me it was without benefits at 32 hours a week and since I took that, they thought they could press it further. I pointed out that none of them were being asked to live on less than 25 dollars a week. I’m turning 50 next month. I’ve paid my dues. If they want an intern, they should hire one just out of college.
MSHA is different bureaucratically than OSHA, but they are both divisions within the Department of Labor. They don’t overlap because the statute that created MSHA specifically gives them jurisdiction over the mines, while OSHA’s jurisdiction is in other types of workplaces.
I agree with everything you said but my five year long suggestion of a week long general strike has always met with disinterest at best. It was treated with open scorn just last night on this very blog.
Just about everybody I’ve talked to who’s looking for a job says the same thing, “They don’t want to pay me anything.”
yep. Jobs are scarce so employers are gouging workers so the stockholders can get richer. It was a wrench to say that I couldn’t live on that but I’ve been around long enough to know that taking a job that won’t pay the bills is worse than pointless.
Tweety on MSNBC interviewed a man last night and he asked how much the miners made and the guy said $70,000, Tweety said “for a 40 hour week” and the guy said, “no, there are no more 40 hour weeks, that’s with overtime”. Made it sound so good I wondered if they were trying to get workers to come down and apply for a job.
This is a disgrace! How long can companies continue to put profits before the safety, welfare and well-being of their workers, particularly in dirty, risky jobs as coal mining before there’s an even bigger disaster?
That was $70,000 a year, NOT for a week.
As the abject poverty among West Virgina coal miners demonstrates. The guy had to be talking about union miners, not Massey miners.
My head almost blew off when I saw Obama make the “let’s say a prayer” remark. How is saying a prayer an appropriate reaction to 25 men getting killed in a preventable industrial accident!!
I calmed down after it became clear to me that he made the remark at a previously scheduled prayer breakfast. I am eagerly awaiting a less prayerful statement that makes some reference to his past statements about accountability in both the private and public sectors.
I agree – we need unions – but that is not the end of the story
We need judges that are not owned by corporations (read “elected”) -Massey avoid much by way of penalty via the judge that he is now backing for higher office.
criminal negligence charges should at least be before a grand jury – but our DA’s are also afraid of corporations.
Massey Energy’s chairman and chief executive officer Blankenship was at the center for the Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. legal challenge in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a West Virginia state judge was required to recuse himself from a case involving Massey Energy.
In 2004, Blankenship contributed $3 million to the campaign of Brent Benjamin, who after winning a seat on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, provided key votes in overturning a $50 million judgement against Massey Energy.
That same year, Blankenship contributed $2.46 million to a federal 527 committee called And for the Sake of the Kids, which opposed the election of West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Justice Warren McGraw with an aggressive media campaign.
During the 2008 election cycle, the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that PACs and people associated Massey Energy contributed $27,100 to federal candidates and another $27,000 to state-level candidates, including two West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals candidates and Kentucky Republican gubernatorial candidate Ernie Fletcher.
Campaign Finance reform – and making life easier for unions – guess those are socialist goals.
Can you doubt that Massey has already written a large check to Orahma?
There is no justice…at least not for the likes of us.
Yeah, these miners are pretty much force into a 10-12 workday nowadays
Ah, Margaret, you are clever indeed…my guess is that the money will flow rather freely (but quietly) through the Blue Dog/DNCC back channels.
At one time of high unemployment, my nephew, a laid off steelworker during the late 1980s, worked 3 jobs just to make a reasonable gap between the ends that did not meet. That was after 2 years of unemployment, and he didn’t get any of those jobs until well after all unemployment or “sub-pay” benefits ran out.
$80,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at.
“He wouldn’t hesitate to fire every striking worker, even if that mean a 100 percent turnover.”
That’s why workers should occupy or block the mines, rather than just walk off.
-
“[T]he really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.”
-Howard Zinn
I don’t think Obama is on his pay list.(… yet…)
http://www.newsmeat.com/ceo_political_donations/Don_Blankenship.php
Don Blankenship a greed ridden jerk if there ever was one, makes me sick, paying off lord knows who and paying fines instead of fixing what’s wrong in the mines.
Take a look at the nonsense he spends time Tweeting while the miners are knocking at deaths door.
http://twitter.com/DonBlankenship
I suppose the yellow-bellied bag of donkey dung will be closing his Twitter account soon.
Here’s the backstory on the selling out of Massey workers by the UMWA.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/mass-a07.shtml
$70,000 a year would be for someone very senior (20+ years) in a union mine. Shift time depends on the type of mine. Deep underground mines can be 12 hour shifts 5x per week (60 hours, though much of that is just getting to the actual mining face), open pit can be less since it is just walk/drive in and out. Base/precious metals mines are off in remote locations so they operate a camp structure where you go live there for a month/season then get “shore leave”
Considering that mining does take a certain skill level, involves a high degree of risk and eventually extracts a high health toll on the miners (black lung, joint problems, …) its not hard to see how Chris “I need a bigger limo for my liberalism” Matthews begrudging a senior miner making $70k killed his career in PA politics.
A lot of you here are Democrats so I will remind you. Your party controls congress and the white house. Union organizers NEED card check. Please turn your back on Blankenship’s money and help us out.
Could it be the corruption in WV that keeps business’ out of there?
Who said any thing abt $80,000?