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It has ever been thus. Just a little better covered now.
By Tom | August 19, 2007
After the tragic deaths and injuries among the rescue workers at the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah compounded the tragedy of the six miners buried in the original mine collapse, I spent some time this weekend thinking about what I know about the coal mining industry and miners.
As the Sago mine disaster did not so long ago, this current episode triggerd my memories of another disaster in another time.
I wasn’t born when, in 1940, an explosion killed 72 miners at the Willow Grove Number 10 mine, just a few miles from where I would eventually grow up in a small Southeastern Ohio town. By the time I was old enough to comprehend such a thing, the Willow Grove disaster was two decades in the past. But as a child and a young man growing up in a town of fewer than 7,500 people, many of whom were miners, I had schoolmates who lost family members — uncles and cousins they would never know — in that explosion. Their parents lost brothers, fathers, uncles and cousins they did know and love.
You might think that a tragedy as horrific as Willow Grove would cast a pall over a town that lost so much, but the events of that Saturday morning were seldom talked about and accepted with a kind of grim resignation. Mining then was seen as a constant battle between labor and management where safety was the enemy of profit and workers were held in a kind of serfdom that they couldn’t escape.
In my little town, and the others around it, there were few college grads and plenty who didn’t graduate from high school. For them, there were only two jobs worth having — a job at one of the ‘mills’ or a job in the mines.
The mills were not the steel mills like those up river in places like Steubenville and Weirton, or even Pittsburgh. They were mainly finishing plants that turned steel into semi-finished products like galvanized sheets. They offered long-term relatively safe employment with pensions and benefits, but only to a relatively few. Those who had such jobs gave them up only when they retired or died. When there was an opening, you had to know someone to even get in the door to apply.
For the rest, there were the mines. The pay was good. Think $15-$20 per hour at a time when the minimum wage was $1.25. You didn’t have to ask to know who were the young miners, fresh out of high school. They were the ones marrying their high school girlfriends, buying or building modest homes, driving cars the rest of us could only dream about. My cousin was one of them. And when he got out of the Navy, so was my brother.
In return for that slice of the American dream, they went to war.
Their war wasn’t like the one in the jungles of Viet Nam, which raged at the time. It did have a few similarities, however. They enemy of the miners was management. And like the enemy in Viet Name, this foe was clever, always at work and patient, preferring to chip away rather than engage in a man to man fight. Those who owned and ran the mines cut a corner here, skirted safety regs there, all in the name of profit.
If the foreman needed something done that went beyond the rules, a little extra pay or paid time off get them what they wanted.
Sure, there were strikes, sometimes violent ones, but I don’t ever recall a strike over safety. Truth is, strikes were always about money and when the coal companies were ready to give the miners enough money to buy a new deer rifle or make a down payment on a new car, strikes tended to end.
All of which is to say that from 1940 and Willow Grove, to the time I remember in the Ohio Valley, to Crandall Canyon, things haven’t changed much.
Mines still are the place where those who want to make a better life for their families — immigrants and those who lack the patience to hang in for a better education and a better job when coal companies dangle money in front of them — risk their lives in return for the kind of check they can’t get anywhere else.
And where coal companies, knowing they can’t get the real low-cost labor, push the safety envelope and fight bitterly to oppose anything that might make mines more safe, because that’s the only place where they can have a positive impact on profits.
Six miners and three rescue workers are dead in Crandall Canyon, in all likelihood. 72 died in Willow Grove Number 10. You might be tempted to think that today’s smaller toll reflects safety improvements. What it represents is the difference in the size of the crews needed to mine coal in the age of technology. The attitudes of miners and coal companies, and their behavior, is remarkably unchanged.
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