The Charleston Daily Mail reports that, according to U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) officials, "less than 40 percent of the first 10,000 miners eligible for free chest X rays have taken the agency up on the offer." Another MSHA official reported that only 25 percent of eligible miners have taken the X rays.

In Kentucky the figures are even lower. MSHA officials said that just 10 percent are participating in the program. The reason for the low turnout in the government program is not hard to find. At a recent government hearing in Frankfurt, Kentucky, coal miners testified that they are not "volunteering to be tested because they don't trust MSHA and fear retaliation by their companies," according to a report in the Louisville Courier-Reporter.

Kentucky is the third-largest producer of coal in the United States, behind Wyoming and West Virginia respectively, but has more than 500 underground mines, the largest of any state. Only 4 percent of these mines are union. Nonunion miners who voice complaints about dust conditions are often "fired and blackballed, which make it almost impossible to get another job in a nearby mine."

Black lung, or coal workers' pneumo-coniosis, is caused by breathing coal dust. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) estimates that 1,500 miners die every year from the disease. About 5,000 miners and widows submit claims for black lung benefits every year, according to government figures.

In recent years, the workers compensation laws that cover black lung benefits have been drastically cut in the coal fields. In response, miners have turned to the federal government for help. But according to a government report in the past 10 years only 4 percent of those who applied received benefits on the first try.

Only 1 percent of Kentucky miners got black lung compensation in 1997. Taking appeals into account, the number rises to 7.5 percent. In 1997, 418 miners won benefits out of 6,791 filed claims. The appeals process can take years, sometimes up to 20 years.

The grim reality is that scores of miners die every year while their appeals are pending.  
 

'Miners don't trust the program'

"Why don't they participate? They don't trust the system," said Butch Odom, a UMWA official from Madisonville, Kentucky. "They don't trust MSHA. They don't trust the operators, and they don't trust the sampling program. They don't trust the X ray program."

MSHA announced that it was taking over dust sampling in underground mines beginning October 1999. Part of this was launching a program to track black lung through the free X-ray program. Up until that time, the dust sampling was the responsibility of the coal bosses.

However, in the aftermath of extensive reports from the Courier-Reporter in 1998, which documented dust sampling fraud and cheating by coal companies, MSHA was forced to take over dust sampling.

But for coal miners this change is hardly reassuring because for decades MSHA, the federal agency responsible for protecting miners, ignored overwhelming evidence of cheating. MSHA officials claim that their main concern was preventing accidents, even though they had evidence that black lung was killing more miners than accidents.

Throughout the coalfields miners have begun to speak out. They are asking: After Congress passed the federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act to prevent the disease 30 years ago, why is black lung still the number-one killer of coal miners? Even the Charleston Gazette, hardly a champion of coal miners, editorialized recently that, "black lung is a national disgrace" and "should have been wiped out long ago." The reason it didn't is because "the federal government and the coal industry never took coal dust monitoring seriously."

In response to rising complaints from coal miners, the government began a review of black lung regulations in 1997, which included public hearings. In October of last year, the U.S. Labor Department issued new proposed regulations. The UMWA is pushing to strengthen these regulations. Last month the union launched a lawsuit to force MSHA to implement a government-run dust sampling program in underground mines across the United States.

Weighing in on the other side, the National Mining Association (NMA), the insurance industry, the American Bar Association, and the U.S. Small Business Administration are working overtime to ensure that black lung laws remain as weak as possible. Their main concern is the impact stronger laws would have on their "profitability," as one NMA report put it.

All of this is leading to sharper conflicts. The fight for strong black lung laws to prevent the disease and provide just compensation is at the heart of the growing resistance to the coal bosses today.  
 
 
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