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The Department of Justice must “go up Massey’s chain of command as far as possible” and hold accountable those individuals responsible for the deaths of 29 coals miners at Massey Energy’s Big Branch (W.Va.) mine in 2010, a group of lawmakers urged Attorney General Eric Holder.

In a letter to Holder from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and 15 other House members, they say that although the recent settlement between the federal government and Alpha minerals—which took over Massey several months after the deadly disaster—includes a non-prosecution agreement with Alpha in exchange for $210 million in investments in mine safety and research, civil penalties and restitution to families,

It does not prevent the Department of Justice from investigating or bringing criminal charges against the individual’s responsible for the April 5, 2010 disaster.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA) investigation of the blast found that individuals acting both alone and in concert were responsible for the unsafe mining practices and conditions that led directly to the explosion.

Though these individuals stood at the head of the disaster, they have thus far escaped justice. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

The day after federal mine safety officials announced a series of “outrageous” safety violations at a Massey Energy West Virginia coal mine, mining industry officials were on Capitol Hill calling for fewer federal inspections and a voluntary safety program.

At the hearing before the Education and Workforce’s Workforce Protections Subcommittee, the Republican majority allowed just one worker’s witness, Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts, while three mine industry executives testified. Said Roberts:

The disaster at Upper Big Branch, as well as the other deaths and illnesses that continue to plague the mining industry make it clear that Congress must do more to protect miners. Operators should be required to make better efforts to prevent illnesses and injuries in the first place. After all, the mining industry has shown time and time again it is not very effective at self-policing.

Roberts said the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) needs more enforcement tools, not fewer. He called for stronger safety rules, frequent and unannounced inspections and tougher penalties. (Click here for his full testimony.) (more…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

When word got out two weeks ago that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had ordered the windows of the state Capitol building bolted shut during the ongoing protests against his attacks on public employees, it was a chilling reminder of a similar action by the employers of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

Nearly 100 years ago to the day of Walker’s order—which he rescinded after public outrage—146 workers, mostly young immigrant girls, burned or jumped to their deaths from the 10-story building, unable to escape a fire because factory foremen had locked all the doors. The owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, worried the workers would steal from the company.

Hyman Meshel worked on the eighth floor. When the rescue crew found Meshel, who was still alive,

the flesh of the palms of his hands had been torn from the bones by his sliding down the steel cable in the elevator, and his knuckles and forearms were full of glass splinters from beating his way through the glass door of the elevator shaft.

Thirty dead bodies clogged the elevator shaft. All were young girls. Among the many victims, the New York Times reported the day after the disaster, were two girls:

charred beyond all hope of recognition, and found in the smoking ruins with their arms clasped around each other’s necks…. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

The April coal mine explosion at the Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine that killed 29 miners “was preventable” if the mine had been in compliance with federal safety rules, Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) officials told the families of the victims this week.

MSHA officials briefed the families on its findings in a closed-door meeting, but family members who spoke with reporters later said MSHA coal administrator Kevin Strickland said the blast could have been prevented if a coal cutting machine had been properly maintained and if highly explosive coal dust had been controlled.

On Wednesday, in a briefing with reporters, MSHA detailed what it believes was the cause of the blast.  On the day of the blast, a long-wall mining machine was cutting coal about two miles underground in a mine that was known to have high levels of flammable methane gas. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

In a continued crackdown on coal mines with histories of serious safety and health violations, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has issued notices that 13 mines will be placed in a special stepped-safety enforcement program unless mine owners begin immediate corrective actions.

The mines were notified earlier this month that they were on the verge of being put in what is known as pattern of violations (POV) status because of chronic and persistent safety and health violations uncovered during inspections in the past 12 months. A POV status brings the mine under more intense scrutiny and gives MSHA broader power to stop mining operations and withdraw miners.

These notifications are the first MSHA has issued since it began reforming the pattern of violations program after the Bush administration, at the urging of the coal industry and with former coal industry executives running MSHA, changed the rules to make it harder to crack down on pattern violators. Says MSHA administrator Joe Main:

I have been saying since I arrived at MSHA that the POV system is broken. This screening represents a positive step forward, but it won’t be the only step. POV is on MSHA’s rulemaking agenda, and there are also statutory changes pending before Congress that would further improve the system. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

A Massey Energy Co.-owned mine in Kentucky, which has amassed nearly 2,000 safety violations since June 2008, is “one accident away from tragedy” and needs to be shut down, say federal mine safety officials.

No coal mine has ever been shut down for a pattern of safety violations, but the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) asked a federal court last week to shut down a mine—Freedom Energy’s Mine No. 1 in Pike County. Says MSHA administrator Joe Main:

Freedom Energy has demonstrated time and again that it cannot be trusted to follow basic safety rules when an MSHA inspector is not at the mine. If the court does not step in, someone may be seriously injured or die.

Freedom Energy is a Massey subsidiary.

MSHA  says the  mine operates in a coal seam “that liberates massive amounts of methane gas” and has been cited for excessive accumulations of explosive methane and coal dust, failure to ventilate methane, failure to protect against roof and rib (mine sides) collapses, failure to test and maintain electrical equipment, among the 1,952 safety violations. MSHA also ordered portions of the mine shut 53 times this year for major safety violations. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

 By Leo W. Gerard, International President United Steelworkers, and Cecil Roberts, International President United Mine Workers of America

As oil mucked the Gulf of Mexico and families mourned 11 dead rig workers, BP officials proclaimed that the corporation’s priority always was safety.

This tracked the tack taken by Massey Energy, whose officials also declared safety was paramount after an explosion in the corporation’s Upper Big Branch mine killed 29 workers.

CEOs commonly make such incongruous assertions to protect profits after corporate-caused disasters. They’re driven by the same factor that is fundamental to the catastrophes – greed.  

Nothing wrong with that, right? Not in a society that has converted greed from a vice to a virtue. Not in the place that inspired the book, “Greed is Good: The Capitalist Pig Guide to Investing.”  Surely it’s no problem in the land where “Greed” has its own game show on Fox and where Ayn Rand, the “money-is-the-root-of-all-good” philosopher, reigns as Republican queen long after her death.

Americans worship God on the Sabbath and the rich every other day. Billionaire Warren Buffett’s word is investment gospel.  Americans gave Wall Street banksters hundreds of billions in bailout money — protecting their multi-million dollar bonuses. But in the midst of the Great Recession caused by Wall Street recklessness, America has repeatedly delayed renewal of unemployment benefits and now is terminating federal health insurance support for the furloughed middle class.

Middle class workers are the ones who die in coal mines and on oil rigs.

Afterwards, CEOs say anything to save the bottom line – the one that will determine their bonuses.

Discussing the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, Massey CEO Don Blankenship told stock analysts in a conference call late in April:

“Some of the implications have been that we don’t focus on safety or we put dollars in front of safety and nothing could be further from the truth.” 

Though the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 1,342 safety violation notices to Upper Big Branch over the past five years, Blankenship explained that’s just life in the coal business:

“Violations are unfortunately a normal part of the mining process.”

In addition, Blankenship said the titles of two Massey programs proved safety was supreme:

 “The naming of those two programs speaks for itself: S1 – safety is job one; P2 – production is job 2. That’s been the case for my entire tenure.”

Still, 29 miners are dead. And dozens died at Massey mines in the past decade. Three died at Upper Big Branch between 1998 and 2010. The Massey dead include two workers who suffocated in a mine run by Massey subsidiary Aracoma Coal Co. on Jan. 19, 2006, just three months after Blankenship issued a memo ordering underlings to produce coal to the exclusion of other activities, such as building ventilation systems called overcasts. Aracoma officials pleaded guilty in December, 2008, to removing and failing to replace ventilation devices, the lack of which contributed to the suffocation deaths.

And Massey workers aren’t as sure as Don Blanekship that safety is job one. Several spoke to NPR about it. Teddy Cole, who worked a dozen years at Upper Big Branch, said Blankenship prioritizes production:

“It’s supposed to be safety first, but to me, it was production first.”

 Former co-worker Brian Jerral agreed:

“A lot of times, it’s production first and safety third.”

Adam Vance, who worked at two Massey mines, described a culture of greed:

“They cover [themselves] with their safety meetings, but the main thing Massey’s out for is to get that all-mighty dollar. If the coal ain’t running, they ain’t making no money.”

And it’s a lot of money for Massey — $1.02 million a day in 2008.

Massey miner Ricky Lee Campbell 24, of Beckley, W.Va., told reporters about his safety concerns on April 7. Massey suspended him a week later, then fired him. He has filed a federal whistle-blower complaint.  

Similar to Massey, BP officials claim safety is job one.

Shortly after BP named Tony Hayward CEO in 2007, he told the Houston Chronicle:

“I think we have the opportunity to set a new benchmark in industrial safety. . .We have to have a work environment where people don’t get injured or killed, period.”

That was significant since an explosion two years earlier had killed 15 workers and injured another 170 at BP’s Texas City, Texas oil refinery, and federal regulators blamed the catastrophe in part on cost cuts initiated by Hayward’s predecessor. The following year, BP admitted oil leaks into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay were caused partly by cost cutting.

Despite Hayward’s safety assertions, another 11 workers are dead. And survivors told CNN that PB routinely cut corners and pushed production despite potential safety problems. They also told CNN co-workers had been fired for raising concerns about dangerous practices  that could delay drilling if remedied and that BP had insisted on an unsual process shortcut on the day of the blast.

Immediately after the rig explosion, BP contended its under-Gulf pipe was spewing only 1,000 barrels of oil a day. Fairly quickly, it revised that estimate to 5,000 barrels, but continued to refuse to make public its live video of the oil-churning pipe.  

After a freedom of information request and Congressional pressure forced BP to release the video, federal officials estimated as much as 40,000 barrels are being discharged daily.  

Still, BP’s Hayward flatly denied the existence of underwater oil plumes, saying:

“The oil is on the surface. There aren’t any plumes.”

And he discounted the effect of the unleashed oil on the environment:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Hayward had a good (greed-based) reason to deny access to the video, discount the amount of oil spewing into the sea and defy the assessment of government and university researchers who confirmed the plumes of dispersed oil stretching for miles beneath the ocean surface. BP will be fined based on the number of barrels of oil its well disgorges into the gulf – somewhere between $1,100 and $4,300 a barrel — depending on whether the government can prove gross negligence.  

David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, described BP’s Texas City, Gulf of Mexico and Alaska crises this way:

“Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may.”

Greed.

It’s one of the seven deadly sins. When it afflicts corporate CEOs, it’s deadly to workers.

Honest profit is fine. But it’s perverse to celebrate greed, to elevate it over human life.

Leo W. Gerard
USW International President 

BP, Massey Energy and Tesoro all have hauled out plaques celebrating safety achievements to deflect allegations of corporate recklessness in the aftermath of explosions in April that killed 47 of their workers. 

Though each of these corporations accepted awards for safety statistics, not one has taken responsibility for workplace deaths. 

The disconnect between safety awards and dead workers has enabled these corporations to characterize the explosions as accidents, random events for which no one really is to blame, certainly not corporate officials who control conditions in workplaces. That’s why these pseudo-safety awards are so destructive. 

The prizes congratulate corporations for reducing incidents such as slips and falls that injure workers to the point that they must miss work. Decreasing worker injuries is good, no doubt about it. But preserving workers’ lives is imperative. The corporate awards programs fail to recognize employers who successfully institute more complicated, costly and rigorous procedures called “process safety management” to eliminate workplace catastrophes that kill.    

Awards for slip and fall reduction promote complacency. The plaques hanging in hallways say the oil rig or coal mine or refinery is super safe – so secure it’s worthy of commemoration.  They create the illusion of protection in workplaces where process safety management hasn’t been properly implemented. The safety plaques are paper shields, easily immolated in explosions, along with the workers they beguiled. 

Some BP executives actually experienced a little of that burn on April 20. A group of BP bigwigs was aboard Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico when it exploded. They’d traveled out to the oil rig to celebrate a safety milestone. Workers on the rig had gone seven years without a lost-time accident – well, seven years without reporting one, anyway. Corporations routinely subtly and overtly discourage workers from reporting injuries. For example, companies grant cash awards for designated time periods during which no injury reports are filed and force mishap victims to wear distinctive clothing like orange vests so they get the blame – and not the corporation – for injury reports that cost entire crews their cash awards. 

The BP executives escaped Deepwater Horizon with their lives. Eleven roustabouts and roughnecks on that day of safety celebration did not. 

Just last year, the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) gave BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, Safety Awards for Excellence –SAFE awards. MMS bestows these on offshore oil and gas corporations for “outstanding safety and pollution prevention performance.” Again this year, BP was a finalist for a SAFE award. After the Deepwater Horizon explosion, MMS postponed announcement of this year’s winners. Last year, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)  presented BP Alaska with a three-year re-certification of its Star award, which recognizes safety performance. 

All of that would lead workers to believe BP is a safe employer – not like the BP with a refinery in Texas City, Texas that blew up in 2005 killing 15 workers and injuring 170, the BP that OSHA slapped with its second largest total penalty ever — $21 million – for safety violations at Texas City that led to the massive explosion, the BP that OSHA hit with its largest ever fine — $87.4 million – last fall for failure over four years to comply with the terms of its settlement agreement to correct the potential hazards at Texas City. 

No, the safety-award-winning BP must be different, a corporation that recognizes its responsibility to establish and conduct safe workplaces. 

A study after the BP-Texas City explosion showed that one of the best ways to prevent such catastrophes is meeting the standards of process safety management. These use engineering and management techniques to continuously ensure that machinery and piping are in good condition, meticulously manage and record changes, and properly train workers.  The concepts are not exclusive to refineries. They can be used to improve safety in other industrial processes as well. 

The refinery industry accepted the process safety standards but hasn’t rigorously implemented them. The United Steelworkers union, which represents oil workers, met with oil corporations and the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade group for drillers and refiners, in an attempt to write two new standards addressing leading indicators in the refining industry and worker fatigue. But the union abandoned the effort last fall because the industry was more concerned about image than safety. 

Then, on April 2, an explosion at the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash. killed seven workers. Like BP, Tesoro is a safety award winner – but not for comprehensive process safety management. The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association (NPRA) has granted the Anacortes refinery numerous prizes over the years – “merit” and “achievement” and “gold” — including two last year. Tesoro notes on its web site that this recognition is for reducing “recordable injury rates”– the lost-time injuries that must be reported to OSHA. 

NPRA doesn’t sponsor an award for corporations that improve process safety management. It’s trying to collect statistics on process safety from drillers and refiners, but participation is anything but compulsory. NPRA stresses that the information it receives on process safety will be collected on an aggregate level so it’s not specific to individual refineries, will be kept secret and will be used for benchmarking only.  Clearly, it is striving to entice reticent refiners to participate. 

Three days after the Tesoro tragedy, 29 workers died in an explosion in Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. Massey CEO Don Blankenship immediately began blaming God and the workers themselves for the catastrophe and citing Massey’s safety awards. In 2009, The National Mining Association and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) gave Massey three “Sentinels of Safety” awards, the most any mining company had ever received in one year. These recognize, as the NPRA and MMS awards do, low levels of lost-time injuries.  “At Massey Energy, we embrace our commitment to safety at all levels – from executive to miner. The Sentinels of Safety awards reflect the company’s dedication to safety at all of our facilities,” Blankenship said six months before the worst mining disaster in 40 years killed 29 Massey workers. 

After two Massey miners suffocated in 2006, the corporation pleaded guilty and paid $4.2 million in criminal fines and civil penalties – the largest settlement in coal industry history — for willful violation of mandatory safety standards. By a count the United Mine Workers of America conducted, 52 people have been killed on Massey Energy properties in the past decade. UMWA President Cecil Roberts called Massey mines the most dangerous in America. 

And yet, Blankenship touts Massey’s safety awards. Like BP and Tesoro. 

 The standards for these prizes must change to stop deluding workers and deceiving the public. No agency or association should ever again laud workplaces that are lax on meeting process safety management standards.

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

More than 1,000 Mine Workers (UMWA) and other union members and allies marched to the doors of Massey Energy Co.’s shareholders meeting this week in Richmond, Va., demanding that CEO Donald Blankenship step down and three board members be ousted.

Speaking at a rally before the march to the ornate Jefferson Hotel site of the Massey shareholder meeting, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said Blankenship and the three board members up for re-election have:

“presided over a company whose safety and environmental record is the worst in the industry. They’ve demonstrated their dedication to the pursuit of short-term profits at any cost.

Don Blankenship is the wrong man in the job. His priorities are wrong. He’s bad for the miners and their families. He’s bad for Massey Energy.”

Since 2000, 52 people have been killed on Massey Energy property, according to the Mine Workers (UMWA). On April 5, 29 coal miners were killed in an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The nonunion mine had a long record of safety violations.

UMWA President Cecil Roberts told NBC12 that Massey’s mines are “the most dangerous mines in the United States of America.”

Something need to be done here. It’s a drastic situation and we’re hoping to save other miners’ lives.

UMWA member Charles Dixon told Richmond’s WTVR:

“We think it’s just time for the people in this country to tell CEOs like Don Blankenship and big profitable corporations like Massey Energy it’s no longer acceptable to kill coal miners and put profits above their health and safety.”

Holt Baker said the serious safety problems at Upper Big Branch “did not come by mistake.”

The evidence is overwhelming. In 2009 the Upper Big Branch violated federal safety rules 515 times, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The citations were serious. They pointed to the lack of escape routes….To unsafe ventilation.

But in a memo to mine superintendents, Don Blankenship told them to ignore everything except to “run coal.”

She said the message this morning was “simple”:

America has had enough of profits-at-any-cost….It’s not right to run coal over the lives of miners….This must stop.

Hundreds of miners from Virginia and other Appalachian coal states held a prayer vigil outside Massey’s headquarters for the 29 Upper Big Branch miners and the 23 others killed on the job at Massey’s mines. While hundreds held candles, 52 miners stood somberly and turned their miners’ cap lamps on to honor the dead. UMWA member Tanya James said, “We’re tired of miners dying in unsafe mines.”

Meanwhile, more than 12,000 people signed the American Rights at Work petition calling for Blankenship’s firing. This morning, the workers’ rights group is asking people to call Massey Energy (1-804-788-1800) and tell them it’s time for Massey Energy’s board to fire Don Blankenship and replace him with a CEO who cares about workers’ rights.

Both Roberts and Blankenship are scheduled to testify before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee Thursday. The committee is looking into the huge backlog of mine-safety violation appeals that enable companies to escape stricter enforcement, delay fines and allow violations to go uncorrected.

According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), it takes an average of 500 days to adjudicate a contested violation. In a preliminary report on the Upper Big Branch blast, MSHA says that Massey “contested the majority of its serious violation citations” that would have led to putting the mines under a tougher safety watch.

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Re-Posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

 By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Members of the Mine Workers (UMWA) and other union members and activists will march and rally in Richmond, Va., Tuesday, May 18, at Massey Energy Co.’s annual shareholder meeting to protest the company’s shameful safety record and demand that CEO Donald Blankenship be held accountable.

Since 2000, 52 people have been killed on Massey Energy property, according to the UMWA. On April 5, 29 coal miners were killed in an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The nonunion mine had a long record of safety violations.

Following Tuesday’s rally, UMWA President Cecil Roberts and Secretary-Treasurer Daniel Kane, holders of Massey shareholder proxies, will enter the shareholder meeting. Roberts, who has said CEO Donald Blankenship should be arrested, will call for his resignation and the defeat of three board members up for re-election.

Nine state pension funds or treasurers’ offices with some $64 million in Massey stock say because the company has “an abysmal safety record,” they will vote against the three Massey board members, including Richard Gabrys, who has been appointed to review the company’s safety failures and a related FBI investigation.

Tuesday’s action will follow a prayer vigil, led by Roberts, outside for the miners at Massey’s Richmond headquarters.

From 2009 through this year, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued 639 citations and orders at the Upper Big Branch Mine. According to the agency’s preliminary report on the Upper Big Branch blast, the citations were higher than the national average and also have been more serious.

Over 39 percent of citations issued at Upper Big Branch in 2009 were for “significant and substantial” (S&S) violations. In some prior years, the S&S rate at Upper Big Branch has been 10-12 percent higher than the national average.

In addition, the rate for repeated serious violations at Upper Big Branch was 19 times higher than the national average. The Upper Big Branch and five other Massey mines were singled out for increased safety inspections scrutiny by MSHA in August 2000 because of safety violations.

Earlier this month, Business Week reported:

The company is being investigated by the FBI for possible bribery of state and federal inspectors, according to a person familiar with the probe. More than a dozen current and former employees have been interviewed by the FBI.

The AFL-CIO will live Twitter the Tuesday march and rally, and you can follow on Twitter with the hashtag #firemassey or at the AFL-CIO Now blog.

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Re-Posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog