US Workers Were Once Massacred Fighting for the Protections Being Rolled Back Today-
Ludlow and other acts of violence against labor unions helped convince Americans of the need for real reform. Over the next several decades, conditions for all American workers improved dramatically. United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis created the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, leading to the unionization of millions of industrial workers. New Deal legislation forced companies to negotiate with their workers in good faith. In the 1960s, rank and file mineworkers, angry over the continued lack of safety in the mines, organized to protest their working conditions. This led to the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, one of the most important pieces of worker safety legislation in American history.
In recent years, American mining companies have undermined the effectiveness of many of these reforms. West Virginia mandates that the state legislature must approve all environmental regulations, making meaningful regulation all but impossible. The companies managed to influence the scientific testing of black lung claims. Miners suffering from black lung need to have their cases confirmed by doctors, but a single pro-coal scientist at Johns Hopkins University denied all 1,500 cases he saw between 2000 and 2013. After the Center for Public Integrity exposed this travesty — winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process — Johns Hopkins suspended its black lung testing program.
In 2010, 29 miners died at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, the nation’s deadliest mine explosion since 1970. Don Blakenship, CEO of the mine’s owner, Massey Energy, had long fought against safety and environmental regulations. The mine’s operation was officially and notoriously unsafe, having racked up over 500 safety violations in the year before the explosion. After the disaster, Massey denied time off for miners to go to their friends’ funerals. Blankenship called the explosion an “act of God” and denied all responsibility.
Upper Big Branch was a non-union mine. The coal companies have managed to reduce the UMWA to a shell of its former strength by closing union mines while investing in new non-union mines in the West, and automating jobs that allow them to lay off union members. And when workers lack a voice to fight for their own safety, the results can be disastrous. The UMWA only has 75,000 members today, down from 500,000 in 1946 and 240,000 in 1998. In 2006, an explosion at the non-union Sago Mine in West Virginia killed 13 miners, but the mine was only fined $71,800 for safety violations. Robert Murray, owner of the non-union Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah blew off the safety violations his operation received in 2006 as trivialities. The next year a mine collapse killed six miners and, later, three rescue workers searching for their bodies. When the UMWA criticized Murray’s safety record, he told family members of the dead, “the union is your enemy.” The coal industry is now fighting to reduce the already limited inspections of its minesWhat is happening to miners is a sign of our declining labor rights more broadly. We’ve entered a New Gilded Age, a period of intense income inequality where capital mobility, corporate control over politics, union busting and degraded environments have lowered American workers’ standard of living.
http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/23/us-workers-were-once-massacred-fighting-for-the-protections-being-rolled-back-today/
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