Black Lung on the Rise; Excessive Mining and Corporate Malfeasance to Blame

[phantom power]

For decades—at least until the big economic crash of 2008—the country has grown increasingly fond of the conservative narrative that claims that the only reason the majority of government regulation exists is because liberals are all secret communists who want to regulate corporations out of business just to do so. Regulations are seen as unnecessary for any purpose other than to clip profits, and the actual reasons behind most regulation—safety, human rights, environment—are minimized or outright denied with claims liberals are making it up as part of an anti-corporate agenda. There are a handful of leftists who reject any kind of regulation, no matter how useful otherwise, that doesn’t serve the purpose of clipping corporate profits (they’ve been loud in the aftermath of the ACA decision), but they’re a tiny minority. The reality is that most of us want government regulation not because we love “Big Government” or have some secret agenda, but simply because we think that corporations’ right to do business ends where the rest of our noses begin.

Unfortunately, this big-government-is-out-to-get-us narrative seems to go a long way towards explaining why, as reported by NPR and the Center for Public Integrity, black lung is rapidly on the rise amongst coal miners, a generation after it was optimistically believed it could be stomped out completely.

...

Not only are we seeing more cases overall, but the cases are increasingly happening in younger men who haven’t even been working in the mines as long. Increased coal production is a big part of this. Miners are working 11 hours more a week than they used to, adding up to 600 hours more exposure a year. The mining techniques being used are more efficient at getting at coal, and thereby at kicking up coal dust. And the system for monitoring exposure is broken because of rampant cheating and regulations that basically encourage rampant cheating by a puzzling attempt to accommodate the demands of mining companies instead of always putting the needs of actual human beings who work for a living first.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/10/black-lung-on-the-rise-excessive-mining-and-corporate-malfeasance-to-blame/