Worker safety

A bill guaranteeing healthcare for responders to the World Trade Center is scheduled for a vote Wednesday.

The head of Massey Energy is throwing thousands of dollars behind GOP candidates running for Congress in the heart of coal country.

Don Blankenship contributed $4,800 in the second quarter to Elliott "Spike" Maynard, a former West Virginia Supreme Court judge running against 17-term Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall (W.Va.), according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

David McKinley, the Republican taking on state Sen. Mike Oliverio (D) for West Virginia's first congressional district seat, received $2,400 from Blankenship over the same span, FEC filings reveal.

Sarah Palin's political action committee contributed $3,500 to both candidates. 

The conservative Blankenship has been a long-time supporter of the Republican Party — a contribution history that includes a $30,400 gift to the National Republican Senatorial Committee last November. 

But he has a special impetus to support GOP candidates this time around: Democrats this year are urging enactment of stronger mine-safety protections — legislation that would hike penalties for safety violations and bolster whistleblower protections for miners who report safety hazards.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), comes in direct response to an explosion at a Massey mine in West Virginia that killed 29 workers and injured another. Republicans, though, are opposing the reforms, arguing they're premature considering investigators have yet to determine the cause of the blast.  

Blankenship said last week that Congress' greatest contribution to miner safety would be to do nothing.

"We need to let businesses function as businesses," Blankenship said Thursday at the National Press Club. "Corporate business is what built America, in my opinion, and we need to let it thrive by, in a sense, leaving it alone."

A House proposal to bolster safety protections for miners will save the government hundreds of millions of dollars, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated this week.

The proposal, sponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, would hike financial penalties for mine-safety violations, leading to $200 million in increased revenues during the next decade, CBO reported Monday in a preliminary analysis. 

CBO is still crunching the effects on discretionary spending, which supporters of the bill said will be insignificant.

Miller's proposal would also enhance whistleblower protections for miners, empower federal inspectors to close problem mines more easily and force mine operators to continue paying workers when projects are shuttered due to safety problems. Taken together, the reforms are designed to rein in mine operators with a history of putting coal production over worker safety.

The bill is a direct response to a West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 workers in April. Workers at the mine have accused the owner, Virginia-based Massey Energy, of ignoring safety rules in order to harvest coal more efficiently.

Last week, Massey CEO Don Blankenship urged Congress to resist legislating a response to the tragedy. 

"We need to let businesses function as businesses," Blankenship said Thursday at the National Press Club. "Corporate business is what built America, in my opinion, and we need to let it thrive by, in a sense, leaving it alone."

A day earlier, Miller's labor panel had voted to send the proposal to the House floor, though Democratic leaders have yet to announce plans to take it up.

Meanwhile, Democratic labor leaders in the Senate haven't introduced their version of the bill. Instead, they're hoping that talks with GOP leaders will yield the bipartisan support Democrats will need to push the bill through the upper chamber. 

One by one, Democrats on a Senate health subcommittee took shots Thursday at one of BP's top safety officials, charging that the company's claims of prioritizing workplace protections are nonsense.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chairman of the HELP Committee's worker safety subpanel, said BP's "shameful record" when it comes to protecting workers marks "an extreme case" of a company that flaunts safety rules to maximize profits. 

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) noted a "systemic bypassing of an emphasis on safety in favor of an emphasis on profit." And Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) mentioned a "disturbing" disconnect between the BP's corporate messaging and the conditions for workers on the ground.

At the receiving end of the comments was Steve Flynn, BP's vice president of health, safety, security and environment, who had the unenviable job of facing the panel alone. Flynn conceded that the company has made mistakes before, but insisted that it's since installed processes "to learn from the past and manage risks in the future."

"Profit doesn't come before safety to BP," Flynn said.  

Workers groups plan to protest Don Blankenship, the fiery CEO for Virginia-based Massey Energy, who will address the National Press Club on mining policy Thursday.

The AFL-CIO says it will distribute fliers proposing that audience members grill Blankenship over Massey's reputation for putting profits above worker safety. The questions the labor group wants asked are:

1) How many workers have to die for you to follow safety laws?

2) When is Massey going to make the safety of miners, not production and profits, the first priority?

3) How many miners have to die because they are afraid to speak out about dangerous conditions?

4) Do you support or oppose Congress’ efforts to hold mine operators personally accountable for their failure to protect minders?

5) Would you work for you?

In April, an explosion at a Massey-owned mine in West Virginia killed 29 workers, prompting House Democrats to propose tighter work-safety rules in the nation's coal mines — a proposal approved by the Education and Labor Committee Wednesday. 

Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee are cheering Wednesday's passage of legislation to bolster the nation's mine-safety protections. Business lobbyists, not so much. 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a related business group, the Coalition for Workplace Safety (CWS), warned this week that the Democrats’ mine safety proposal — which also expands employee protections at workplaces other than mines — will hobble employers at a time when the economy can least afford it.

In separate letters to Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and John Kline (R-Minn.), who head the House labor panel, the lobbyist groups took shots at each of the major reforms promoted by the bill.

An expansion of whistleblower protections, for instance, will be ineffective, CWS wrote Tuesday, because “the vast majority of complaints brought are not meritorious.” 

“[N]o expansions of whistleblower rights are needed, nor will any expansions produce different results,” the group claims.

Hiking penalties for safety violations, the Chamber says in its own letter, is a “misplaced” policy that will only “make the compliance and enforcement process more contentious.”

Another provision, which would force employers to fix safety hazards even in cases where they appeal violations, could be complicated by demands from OSHA inspectors “who may not have a good understanding of the workplace at issue,” the Chamber said.

“Operators should not be forced to comply with costly and disruptive abatement measures specified by an OSHA inspector unfamiliar with the workplace without due process,” the group wrote.

And the list goes on.

Republicans on the House labor panel echoed those concerns during a markup of the bill Wednesday — to no avail. The panel approved the bill by a party-line vote of 30 to 17.

The Democrats’ mine safety bill came in direct response to a deadly explosion at a West Virginia mine owned by the Virginia-based coal giant Massey Energy. The company’s CEO, Don Blankenship, was a member of the Chamber’s board of directors until last month, when his six-year stint expired.

This post was updated at 5:44 p.m.

A House panel on Wednesday approved sweeping legislation to protect the nation’s miners in a direct response to April’s deadly explosion at a West Virginia coal mine.

But Wednesday’s partisan debate in the House Education and Labor Committee centered largely on broader workplace safety reforms that have nothing to do with mines.

Instead, lawmakers focused on provisions of the Democrats’ Miner Safety and Health Act that would greatly enhance the powers of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to police workplaces nationwide — reforms that Republicans maintain have no business in a mine-safety bill. 

The proposal, for instance, would hike civil penalties on companies that violate safety rules; expand whistleblower protections for workers who report safety concerns; and, perhaps most significantly, require employers to correct health and safety hazards even if they plan to appeal those violations — a stipulation that currently governs mines, but not other workplaces.

Rep. John Kline (Minn.), the senior Republican on the panel, called the OSHA expansion “a radical change” that is “worthy of debate” but said the proposal does not belong in the mine-safety legislation.

“This bill has a huge reach,” Kline said. “It seems to us that we ought to be focusing on miner safety.” 

Democrats hoping to bolster the nation’s mine safety rules this year are showing dramatically different degrees of urgency. 

The House Education and Labor Committee will mark up its mine safety bill next Wednesday, the panel announced this week.

The move is indication that lower-chamber Democrats hope to act quickly on the legislation, perhaps with the intention of passing the bill through the House before lawmakers leave town at the end of July for a month-long recess.  

Sponsored by Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), the proposal would expand whistleblower protections to miners, empower federal regulators to close unsafe mines more easily and extend worker protections to nearly all workplaces nationwide.

Republican leaders have opposed the measure, arguing in particular that the broad expansion of workplace protections is unrelated to mine safety, and therefore has no business in the bill.

The legislation came as a response to an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia, which killed 29 miners in April.

Senate Democrats are weighing similar reforms. But Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chairs the Senate labor panel, says he’s holding out in hopes of crafting a bipartisan bill.

An electrician at a Massey coal mine was instructed to dismantle a methane sensor two months before an explosion there killed 29 workers, NPR News reported Thursday. The safety sensor — wired to shut down a coal harvesting machine when methane levels hit a certain threshold — was doing just that, prompting a mine supervisor to order the device disabled to keep the project moving, witnesses to the Feb. 13 incident told NPR.

"Everybody was getting mad because the continuous miner kept shutting off because there was methane," Ricky Lee Campbell, a Massey worker who witnessed the episode at the Upper Big Branch mine, told NPR. "So they shut the section down and the electrician got into the methane detector box and rewired it so we could continue to run coal."

The accusation is similar to that from Chuck Nelson, a former Massey miner, who sat down with this reporter for a long interview a few weeks after the deadly blast at the Upper Big Branch.

"They had sniffers — what they called sniffers — and whenever you hit a pocket of methane [above a certain level], it shut the power off the [coal harvester]. … But I’ve seen these sniffers bridged out," said Nelson, now a volunteer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

The NPR report arrives two days after the House Education and Labor Committee met to examine a Democratic proposal designed to protect miners by reining in companies that prioritize coal production above worker safety.