Vol. 81/No. 28 July 31, 2017
Coal miners face new rise in scourge of black lung
In the late 1960s and ’70s, coal miners organized a revolution in their union — the United Mine Workers of America — to fight for safety on the job and against the scourge of black lung disease. In a series of battles they forced the coal bosses to accept union safety committees in the mines with the power to shut down production to reduce coal dust and other unsafe conditions. The strengthening of the union — and the vigilant actions of the miners — led to a decline in black lung and improvement in the social and living conditions of working people in the coalfields.
The bosses never stopped pushing back against this encroachment on their authority because it cut into their profits. Their pressure increased as competition from natural gas grew and the coal industry contracted. By 2015 only 21 percent of miners worked in union mines. While as recently as 1998 the union had 240,000 members, today there are fewer than 10,000 working UMWA members. The last unionized mine in Kentucky shut down two years ago. Without union protection, miners face a new explosion of black lung. One in 14 underground miners with more than 25 years experience will get back lung, double the rate in 1999. And there is a sharp increase of progressive massive fibrosis, the worst form of the disease. West Virginia, the second largest coal-producing state, now ranks 49th in life expectancy.
“We are in the midst of an epidemic of black lung disease in central Appalachia that is historically unparalleled,” Scott Laney, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, told a June 29 public meeting held in Morgantown, West Virginia, and publicized by the UMWA.
Laney launched his investigation after a radiologist from Pike County, Kentucky, reported to NIOSH his clinic was seeing a sharp increase in coal miners with progressive massive fibrosis. Sixty miners had come in with the disease in just a year and a half. Twenty-six of them were roof bolters and 20 operators of continuous miners, both jobs that expose workers to high concentrations of dust. In contrast, there were only 31 cases nationwide from 1990 to 1999.
Progressive massive fibrosis, which shows up as large masses of scar tissue and nodules on the lungs, is caused by breathing silica dust. George Williams, a black lung benefits counselor at the Tug River Health Association in Gary, West Virginia, and a former miner, told the Militant in a phone interview July 17 that in the last three years the number of miners with progressive massive fibrosis coming to the clinic has “about doubled.”
“The companies mine smaller coal seams and cut more rock to get the height to put in the conveyor belts,” he said. The belts carry the coal out of the mine.
Cutting the rock, and sandstone that’s mixed with it, produces toxic silica dust.
“Ninety-five percent of black lung benefits cases are fought by the insurance and coal companies. Most go to court,” Williams said. “It’s a battle.”
“After a couple of years, progressive massive fibrosis begins cutting the air ducts off. You end up on oxygen,” he said. “Several miners have had lung transplants.”
As coal miners face this reborn threat to their life and lungs, state governments, which are subservient to the mine bosses, are slashing mine inspections. Kentucky just passed a law that will halve mandated inspections, replacing them with so-called “analyst visits” to “coach” miners about safety.
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