Worker safety

Passage followed months of contentious debate over whether the government has an obligation to pay emergency workers who fell sick.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday shot down a Democratic effort to pass legislation strengthening safety protections for the nation's miners. 

Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) rejected Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.Va.) request to approve the measure unanimously, accusing the Democrats of abandoning the bipartisan negotiations that might have led to such an agreement. 

"I'm interested in [miner] safety," Enzi said. "[But] if the majority really wanted to pass a bill on this issue then they would have continued with those bipartisan negotiations."

Sponsored by Rockefeller, the Democrats' bill would hike the penalties for mine safety violations; expand whistleblower protections for workers who report hazards; empower federal investigators to close unsafe mines more easily; and grant regulators subpoena power when investigating mining accidents. 

A similar proposal was passed by the House Education and Labor Committee earlier in the year, with every Republican voting against it.

Central to the GOP objections, both chambers' bills would expand some employee protections at all workplaces nationwide, not just at mines. The Republicans say that's a job-killing provision that oversteps the authority of legislation that's supposed to target miners — an argument Rockefeller on Tuesday rejected outright.

"The mining industry is not the only industry where significant improvements to workplace safety are necessary," he said. 

The mine safety push is a direct response to April's explosion at the Upper Big Branch in southern West Virginia, which killed 29 miners and maimed a 30th. The cause of that blast remains under investigation by federal and state authorities.

The House is expected to vote Wednesday on a bill guaranteeing medical care to 9/11 first responders.

A mine industry group has been lent an advance look at a long-anticipated study gauging the cancer risks facing underground miners, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) reported Monday.

The move has raised the eyebrows of mine safety advocates, who say the early glance gives the companies an undue advantage to mold a response and release it quickly when the findings are made public. 

 "Government researchers do studies all the time and publish them in peer-reviewed journals," Celeste Monforton, former work-safety official in the Labor Department who’s now at George Washington University, told CPI. "This is the only example I know of where an industry group gets access to the information before anybody else does.

"As soon as the study is published [the industry] will already have another paper prepared that will dissect it and explain away any risks that are identified.”

The study — conducted by researchers at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) — is designed to determine the extent to which diesel exhaust affects lung cancer rates among workers in non-coal, underground mines.

The findings are intended to help labor and health officials finalize new rules designed to protect workers from diesel exhaust.

“When there is uncontrolled diesel equipment in an underground mine, it is like working in the tailpipe of a city bus,” Mike Wright, health and safety director for the United Steelworkers, told CPI. 

The mining lobby isn't thrilled about the undertaking. And one industry group — the Methane Awareness Resource Group Diesel Coalition — hired a prominent Patton Boggs attorney, Henry Chajet, to make its case, CPI reported. 

In turn, Chajet filed legal arguments claiming that the two health agencies were acting “unfairly, unjustly and unreasonably” toward the industry by not allowing the companies an early glance at the study, according to CPI.

In June, a federal judge agreed, requiring the agencies to turn over their findings 90 days before publication, CPI wrote. 

The study is scheduled to be published next month. 

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis this week warned the mining lobby that worker safety is the industry's responsibility — and the White House won't tolerate offenders. 

"The law is clear," Solis told the executive board of the National Mining Association, an industry lobbying group. "Mine operators are ultimately responsible for the safety and health of everyone working in a mine. Period.

"We will not tolerate mines that cut corners on safety, put miners at risk, pay their fines, and view it as a cost of doing business," the California Democrat added. 

Solis was quick to note that many mine operators make worker safety the highest priority. For the others, she warned, "you need to change the way you approach mine safety — and you need to make those changes now."

The relationship between the mining industry and the White House — already chilly over the administration's steps to rein in mountaintop removal coal mining — have grown colder since April, when Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine exploded in West Virginia, killing 29 workers.

Since that disaster, the Labor Department's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has cracked down on safety violators, launching a series of surprise inspections and even shuttering several operations. 

Just this week, the agency tightened rock-dusting standards for coal mines — rules that aim to prevent the accumulation of highly combustible coal dust underground. 

Many in the industry, however, are pushing back against the new scrutiny. Just last week, for instance, Massey blamed its low production estimates on "increasingly stringent enforcement actions by MSHA."

Democrats are pushing legislation in both chambers that would install even more worker protections, hiking the penalties for safety violations, protecting whistleblowers who report hazards and empowering inspectors to close mines more easily.

Solis this week urged mine companies to get behind the reforms, rather than siding knee-jerk with the worst safety offenders in the industry. 

"It’s what we’ve seen repeated, time and time again – a disaster happens, the public is outraged, Congress and the regulators propose reform, and industry fights back," Solis said. "The problem with the 'industry-versus-the-government' approach, is that it lets the bad actors set the terms of the debate, and become the face of your industry.

"Any industry that tolerates bad actors," Solis said, "will ultimately find itself subject to regulations designed to target those bad actors."

West Virginia's Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine contained excess amounts of combustible coal dust when an explosion ripped through it with deadly results in April, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) revealed Friday.

Kevin Stricklin, MSHA's head of coal mine safety, told reporters that 1,423 samples taken from the Massey-owned mine after the blast — representing roughly 80 percent of all samples taken — were out of compliance with MSHA coal dust standards.  

Under current rules, mine operators are required to dilute coal dust through a process known as rock dusting (which usually means dousing mine walls with limestone dust). Rock dusting should occur throughout the day, to make the highly combustible coal dust inert in case of an explosion.  

Some Massey miners, however, have said the company discouraged frequent rock dusting, which distracted workers from what was supposed to be their central focus: mining coal. 

Former Massey miner Chuck Nelson, for instance, said rock dusting was commonly done only at the end of the shift — or after miners were warned that safety inspectors were on site.

"They call and tell us to start hanging our curtains, start cleaning the coal dust up, start rock-dusting the ribs — get everything right because he’s on his way in there," Nelson said in an interview from his West Virginia home earlier in the year. "But as soon as they’re on their way outside — before they get outside — these line curtains are jerked down again. They’re back to doing the same old business as usual."

The official cause of April's UBB disaster, which killed 29 miners, has yet to be identified. But based on the sheer size of the blast, mine safety experts suspect that ignited methane, combined with the presence of coal dust, is the culprit.

Stricklin said Friday that more samples than 80 percent would likely have failed MSHA's tests just before the blast, which would have burned up much of the coal dust.

The details about the UBB's non-compliance with MSHA's coal dust standards were first reported Thursday by The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr.

The Democratic leadership has agreed to hold a new vote on a bill guaranteeing healthcare for first responders to the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, the bill's sponsors said Wednesday. 

"We have talked to the Democratic leadership and they have told us that the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act will be brought to the House floor soon after Congress returns from recess," New York Democratic Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler said in a joint statement. "We anticipate that the bill will be taken up the second week we are back in session and will be considered under regular order, with the expectation and belief that neither side will play politics with this vitally important legislation."

The House took up the bill in July under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The bill fell short with 255 votes, significantly more than the 218 simple majority under regular order.

The bill would provide medical monitoring, treatment and economic compensation for those who were injured or sickened by the attack and its subsequent toxic cloud. It would cost about $5 billion.

The lawmakers made the announcement in New York at a press conference attended by labor leaders and other New York House members including Republican co-sponsor Pete King and Democrats Charles Rangel, Anthony Weiner and Joseph Crowley.

Two executives for the mine company running the doomed Upper Big Branch (UBB) project roamed the mine unsupervised for four hours in the immediate aftermath of April's deadly explosion, NPR reported Thursday.

The executives for the Performance Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy, got as far as the longwall section of the UBB, NPR says, leaving some regulators to wonder if the men tampered with any evidence related to the blast.  

“There’s an issue, whether it occurred or not, there's a question that's gonna come up of whether there was any tampering that took place,” Kevin Stricklin, chief mine official at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, told NPR.

Massey issued a statement denying that any tampering occurred, NPR reported. Rather, the executives were simply searching for survivors, the company said. 

"Card-check" might be dead, but mine safety legislation remains pending among "organized labor’s top priorities in this Congress," the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned its members Thursday. 

The proposal, sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), "purports" to fix "perceived problems" that led to April's deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) coal mine in West Virginia — although "no official report on the cause of the accident has been released," the Chamber wrote in its annual Labor Day assessment of the country's business climate.

Miller’s proposal, which passed through the House Education and Labor Committee in July, focuses largely on protecting the nation's miners underground. But it also includes language that would greatly expand the powers of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to police other job sites as well.

The Miller bill, for instance, would hike fines on companies that violate OSHA safety rules; expand whistleblower protections for workers who report safety concerns; and require employers to correct health and safety hazards even when they plan to appeal those citations — a stipulation that currently governs mines, but not other workplaces.

"Workers should have basic workplace protections no matter if they work in a mine extracting coal or at an oil refinery handling explosive chemicals," Miller said during the July markup of his proposal.

The Chamber has a different take, saying the "troubling" reforms represent "the most sweeping changes to [OSHA's powers] since its inception in 1970" — changes that will hobble businesses trying to emerge from the recession.

The expansion of whistleblower protections, for instance, "will lead to an increase in the number of lawsuits against employers," the Chamber said; the mandatory hazard abatement rule "restricts an employer’s due process rights," forcing employers "to immediately begin correcting problems;" and making executives more liable for safety hazards targets folks "who may not have been aware of any of the alleged violations." 

Of note, Don Blankenship, the CEO of the coal giant that owns UBB, was a board member of the U.S. Chamber until June, when the last of his three two-year terms expired.