On March 9, one day after a federal inspector cited the Scotia Coal Company for three explosion-related safety violations, a blast killed fifteen miners.

Two days later, a team of miners accompanying federal inspectors met a similar fate. Eight miners and three inspectors died in that explosion.

It is the worst mine disaster in the United States since a 1970 explosion killed thirty-eight men in nearby Hyden, Kentucky. In this sparsely populated area, there is hardly a person that the tragedy hasn't touched through the loss of a father, brother, husband, cousin, or friend.

The number of lives lost has focused national attention on the conditions at Scotia. But to the nearly 500 employees of the mine, its dangers were never secret.

With nothing but a company union to speak for them, Scotia miners have long realized that they risk their lives every day they enter the mine. In the past nine years, there have been eight other fatalities at Scotia.

The lowest of three seams of coal in the Scotia mine, where both explosions occurred, is well known as one of the more gassy or "hot" mines in Eastern Kentucky.

Since the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act was passed in 1969, more than 1,000 miners have died in work-related accidents. Of the 185,000 miners in the United States, one is killed on the average every other working day. It's just not as profitable to run safe mines as unsafe ones.  
 
March 26, 1951
Delegates to the 13th annual CIO United Auto Workers convention which convenes April 1 to 5 in Cleveland meet at a time of political crisis for the American labor movement. They will weigh problems which involve no less than the whole future of the working class.

The major question before the convention is this: how to protect the living standards, working conditions and organizations of labor against the Big Business-dictated policies of the Truman administration.

When the United Labor Policy Committee split with the Wage Stabilization Board, and then with all the war mobilization agencies, the labor leaders took a big step forward. Labor cannot fight against the wage freeze, runaway prices, soak-the-poor taxes, uncontrolled rent increases, threatened conscription of labor, inadequate housing, and government strikebreaking, while the union leaders serve as window dressing for the Truman-Wilson anti-labor program.

At the very time when all of labor's problems lead to Washington, the unions have no independent political voice. That is the end result, today so clearly demonstrated, of the policy of depending upon Democrat and Republican "friends of labor." The burning need is the formation of an independent labor party, which can mobilize the potentially gigantic political strength of the working people.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home