One Of America's Worst Workplaces

The tragedy at the West Virginia, Sago mine illustrates the dangers of bad workplaces in America. This nonunion mine which operates for lower wages in one of West Virgina's poorest areas has had a long history of far worst than usual safer standards. In the last three years this mine has had more than 273 safety violations. In 2004, these included 18 incidents of roof falls.

There were 18 recent violations which included D Orders. These desist orders prevented any more work in the mine until the safety violations were corrected.

But as bad as these past incidents are, conditions actually improved somewhat under the current mining company led by CEO Ben Hatfield. For only the last two months has this new company been operating the mine.

While these problems with the mine no doubt greatly contributed to the deadly mine accident, yesterday's actions where Hatfield or other company officials failed to issue a statement when they knew that the earlier belief that 12 of 13 miners may not be alive, 45 minutes after this wrong message was believed to be true for nearly three hours was outrageous.

It was the duty of this company to issue a guarded statement when it had information that was important. Both the Governor and a Congresswoman were kept in the dark about the new information, and appeared to be credible sources where some newspapers such as USA today actually went to press with wrong headlines and storylines. It was only the third time since 1972, the newsmedia had bad sources that wrongfully reported a life or death story.

In the 1972 attack in Munich on the Israeli athletes, Sports reporter Jim McKay made a reporting mistake based on bad sources. In the 1981, in the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan by a mentally ill man, Reagan's press secretary James Brady was wrongfully reported to have been killed by his head wound. However it later turned out that Brady was very seriously wounded and left injured and disabled by his serious wound. The bad sources that misled USA Today to others to go to print with a wrong story and headlines must be blamed on the mining company withholding information.

Conservatives on some Websites used this error to again attack the newsmedia, yet some Websites themselves printed the wrong story based on the correct information that the mine company refused to issue until hours later. Many of the same Websites and their conservative supporters were able to bully CBS into firing some news executives over a story about Bush's National Guard service claiming that the form of type was not used in 1971, yet new information proves that since 1969 that form of type was available.

While the awful handling of information by the company did not contribute to any deaths of the miners, it did still contribute to added emotional suffering for the families who were waiting for word on their loved ones.

While the current mine company run by CEO Ben Hatfield is supposedly better than the previous company, still the fact that this nonunion mine has three times the accident injuries and deaths of most comparable union mines is a very important factor. This company should run a union mine with better safety conditions and better wages. Some like Dan Kane of the United Mine Workers offers a strong case of the safety and wage advantages of union mines. A worker who has safety concerns can make a complaint without a fear of job loss through their safety representative, and this is more likely to result in a safety remedy to a life-threatening problem than in nonunion mines where workers live in fear of being fired if they complain about a serious safety problem.

Unionization of mines is an important goal towards securing better safety, wage, health care and retirement benefits for mine workers.