What the Mine Act gives you

For most of American mining history, the only safety rule was the one the operator wrote for himself, and he wrote very few.

Coal came out of Pennsylvania by the ton through the eighteen hundreds, cut by men lying on their sides in seams three feet high, hauled by mules and by boys. In the breakers above ground, boys sat astride the chutes pulling slate out of the coal with their bare hands, twelve hours a day, breathing dust that stayed in their lungs for the rest of their short lives.

The mines were ventilated by a furnace at the bottom of a single shaft. One shaft meant one way in, one way out, and one way for a fire to find the air it needed. Gas was a fact of the work. Men carried a flame on their hats to see by, and that flame could not tell them anything until it was already too late.

Whole towns belonged to the companies. The house, the store, the doctor, the school, the preacher, all of it on the company ledger, paid in scrip that spent only at the company store. A man who complained about a bad roof did not lose an argument. He lost his house.

There was no federal mine safety law. Not one requirement, not one inspector, not one penalty.

In nineteen oh seven, American coal mining killed three thousand two hundred and forty two men and boys in a single year. On the sixth of December that year, at Monongah in West Virginia, two connected mines blew apart within moments of each other, and three hundred and sixty one men and boys died. It is still the worst mining disaster this country has ever had.

The country was shocked, and being shocked is not the same as being protected. It would take sixty more years, and tens of thousands more funerals, before the law would finally say out loud what miners had been saying all along. A man’s life is not a cost of production.