100 Miners Rally, Demand That Safety Chief Meet With Workers

by James Parks, Oct 24, 2006

Nearly 100 coal miners from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, all members of the Mine Workers (UMWA), today marched into a federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) district office in Morgantown, W. Va., demanding that new MSHA head Richard Stickler beef up enforcement of mine safety laws and regulations.

So far this year, 42 coal miners have been killed, equaling the total in 2001.  Every year since then, the total has been fewer than 30. At this time last year, 16 miners had died in accidents. The total for all of last year was 22. This year’s worst mine disaster killed 12 men at the Sago Mine in West Virginia in January.

The two latest deaths came just days after President Bush made a recess appointment of Stickler, a former coal executive, to head the MSHA. Bush had been unable to get Stickler’s nomination approved by the Senate, which had sent it back twice because of his troubling mine safety record. The mines managed by Stickler from 1989 to 1996 incurred injury rates double the national average.

According to David Kameras of the UMWA, within minutes of the rally, MSHA officials contacted Stickler and he agreed to meet with UMWA safety officials in the Washington, D.C., area, as well as with rank-and-file members in the nation’s coalfields.

UMWA President Cecil Roberts said:

Stickler says that he’s got a plan to make the mines safer.  Well, let’s see it. Now is not a time for half-measures and a go-slow approach. Miners are dying at rates unseen in years, and MSHA is the agency charged with preventing those deaths. The time for talking about it is over. The time for doing something about it is now.

The Miner Workers want Stickler to:

• Discuss his plans for enhancing mine safety enforcement.
• Set a timetable for hiring MSHA inspectors to address the agency’s woeful lack of front-line personnel enforcing safety laws and regulations in coal mines.
• Review the proposed safety regulations that were dropped by the Bush administration in 2001, even though many of them could have played a crucial role in saving many of the lives lost in mines since then.
• Step up efforts to test the self-contained, self-rescue oxygen units miners carry underground in the wake of numerous reports of failures of these units in the Sago and Darby tragedies this year, and significant numbers of failures of the units in testing done by the states of West Virginia and Kentucky.

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