Tony Lane, Socialist Workers candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, released the following statement July 28, 2002. Lane is an underground coal miner and a member of United Mine Workers of America Local 1248 in southwestern Pennsylvania. He visited the town of Quecreek, Pennsylvania, while nine coal miners were trapped for three days in a flooded underground shaft, and spoke with working people in the area.

Nine coal miners were found alive today in Quecreek, Pennsylvania, after a round-the-clock rescue operation by fellow workers. Working people in the area and across the country met their survival with a wave of relief and celebration. Millions of working people saw ourselves bound up in the fate of these miners. We know firsthand the conditions the bosses have imposed in factories, mines, and mills across the country and that we could be next. According to government statistics, some 6,000 workers are killed and 2.5 million are injured on the job year after year in the United States.

Company and government officials all treat the Quecreek mining disaster as if today’s coal bosses are not responsible for what happened. One local paper wrote the "disaster that trapped nine miners had a simple cause: bad maps." A representative for PBS Coals, the owner of the Quecreek mine, put the blame onto past mine operators by claiming they didn’t keep the kind of computerized maps and surveys that are the norm today. "A lot of it was just penciled on the back of a lunch bag," he said. Nonunion PBS Coals is the largest strip mine operator in the state, producing 2.5 million tons a year.

The disaster is part of the antiunion drive by the coal bosses that myself and thousands of coal miners know well. It includes the erosion of safety, speedup, and lengthening of the workday and workweek. A retired union miner told me that the bosses at the Quecreek mine were not ignorant of the dangers. Another miner said mine accidents "don’t just happen. Someone had to have seen something." During my visit I learned that in the days leading up to the flooding, water had been leaking into the Quecreek mine from the roof, walls, and floor.

The accident was a direct result of capitalism’s unrelenting and deadly drive for profits. It is part and parcel of the ruling-class assault on wages, pensions, health care, and safety. More incidents like Quecreek and the explosion at the Jim Walters Number Five mine in Brookwood, Alabama, last September that killed 13 miners, are what the bosses have in store for working people as they try to shift the burden of the capitalist economic crisis onto our backs.

Coal miners, like my co-workers at the Maple Creek mine, are part of the resistance of working people. Struggles by miners, both union and nonunion, for better safety conditions, to demand black lung benefits, and to retain some measure of control over working conditions have taken place across the country. It is only through decades of often bloody battles that coal miners have forced the bosses and the government to take steps to improve conditions in the nation’s coal mines. Working people in the Somerset area have a long history of union struggle, including fights in the late 1970s to organize the mines.

In its statements and actions since July 24, PBS Coals has hidden behind the state government as it tries to cover up its responsibility. Gov. Mark Schweiker and the head of the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) did not descend on Somerset to defend the interests of working people. They represent the interests of big business. It is state officials who are responsible for mine safety inspections that have given the industry bosses a clean bill of health. A DEP spokesperson said that the coal bosses "have done a good job complying with these [safety] regulations." Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration head David Lauriski reinforced that mistaken notion by saying that the industry has greatly improved its safety record.

State officials and politicians have flippantly said that "coal miners are a special breed," and Governor Schweiker talks about how miners’ families "know there are some unsafe dimensions to the world of mining"--as if we should accept these dangers as a "normal" part of life in coal mining regions. But miners want and deserve to work in the safest working conditions possible.

What is the real safety record of the coal bosses? In the year since they opened the Quecreek mine there has been a bad roof fall that buried a roof-bolting machine. Two miners have died in fatal accidents in the Somerset area over the past three years, including a miner from Quecreek village who died in a roof fall at a nearby mine. The bosses say they are mining more coal today with fewer injuries. But this covers up the fact that the percentage of miners who are likely to be injured or killed on the job has not decreased in the last 20 years. And the number of miners killed on the job has been on the rise for the last four years.

The long-term capitalist economic decline and growing signs of a coming depression mean more such disasters and attacks will be inflicted on working people. The only response the superwealthy rulers have to the crisis of their system is more attacks on workers and farmers at home and wars abroad, such as that now being prepared against the people of Iraq. As Washington presses towards a massive military invasion, it will simultaneously seek to clamp down on the space working people have to fight back against the conditions we face here. The bosses and their government will ask "all Americans" to "unite" and accept restrictions on workers’ rights, concessions on the job, and austerity measures in order to prosecute a war against the "axis of evil" countries. But working people have nothing in common with the boss class, whose system of exploitation produces new Quecreeks and Brookwood disasters.

The Socialist Workers campaign in Pennsylvania and other states across the country will work with other union fighters to educate and get out the truth about the Quecreek events and the struggles of coal miners and other working people, both at home and abroad, against the assaults by the bosses and their government. We will continue to point to the necessity and possibility of workers and farmers to fight to replace the government of the ruling rich with one of our own.
 
 
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