Leaders of the United Mine Workers union have joined the miners’ counsel in criticizing the "woefully inadequate" report on the incident released by the Department of Environmental Protection. The report aids and abets the company cover-up of its responsibility for the catastrophe.
The coal bosses, who reduce the problem to one of "bad maps," knew about the safety hazards. The area where the workers were mining had been closed down earlier because of flooding.
Accidents don’t just happen. Corner-cutting on safety is typical of the bosses’ approach even in times of capitalist growth. Today, slumping profit rates and cutthroat competition drive the employers to demand concessions that put workers’ lives in peril.
The coal bosses’ disregard for the lives and limbs of working people is characteristic of other owners of capital. Union dockworkers on the West Coast have been locked in a contract battle that also includes the fight for safe working conditions and against dangerous speedup.
The same profit squeeze and intensifying competition drive the U.S. capitalist rulers and their imperialist rivals toward military aggression abroad. They push for greater control over the world’s natural resources, from Middle East oil to African cocoa, using workers and farmers as cannon fodder.
Waving the banners of "national security" and "national unity" the bosses and their two parties call for workers to sacrifice their interests on behalf of the exploiters. But workers have nothing in common with the boss class, either on the job or in the field of foreign policy.
The fight against life-threatening or body-sapping work conditions begins with telling the truth. The efforts of the Quecreek miners who survived the flood to bring the facts to the light of day is the kind of approach that should be adopted by the entire labor movement, as part of its fight against the brutality of capitalism.
Related articles:
Miners union fight bosses’ cover-up of Quecreek disaster
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