That mining "accident"

I put it in quotes because it was an accident that was inevitable. Today I'm blogging an article called "Criminal Negligence Killed the Sago Miners" published by Common Dreams. Here's part of what it says:

Administration officials could learn a lot about improving mine safety by talking with any miner for just a few minutes. But the most crucial step to prevent tragedies like Sago has little to do with the specifics of mining -- it involves changing the cost-benefit analysis made by corporate executives in workplace safety decisions.

Consider the decisions by managers of the Sago mine, which received more than 200 citations last year from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal agency charged with enforcing safety compliance. These were not minor infractions; in the last quarter of 2005, inspectors cited 18 “serious and substantial” violations capable of causing major injuries or deaths. Not surprisingly, Sago's accident rate tripled the national average and more than a dozen serious roof falls -- in which huge slabs of the mine roof simply collapsed -- were recorded last year. Many citations were for violating ventilation standards that exist specifically to prevent explosions like that which doomed Sago's victims.“

This mine [Sago] should have been closed… the record is very clear,” says Jack Spadaro, former director of the National Mine Safety and Health Academy.

Instead, MSHA continued issuing fines and the managers at then-owner Anker Mining Co. simply wrote them off as a cost of doing business on the cheap. It made perfect sense for the corporation's bottom line; the fines for those 205 violations total about $25,000. This was a pittance to Anker, never mind International Coal Group (ICG), which bought the Sago mine last November. ICG's most recent quarterly earnings were $158 million, meaning the average fine levied in 2005 -- about $150 -- equals a few seconds of income. Such "enforcement" has a deterrent effect akin to punishing drunk driving with fines of a few nickels.

Later the author tells us the following:

When Rep. Owens introduced the Wrongful Death Accountability Act last year, to make corporate manslaughter a felony offense and double the maximum pnishment for lying to federal safety inspectors, Republicans quickly killed the bill on a party-line vote.

Typical of Republicans to value a coporation's bottom line over the lives of human beings.

Then the author makes this point:

Perhaps the outrage over Sago will prove the impetus to save the lives of other Americans. It's not just to protect those toiling in mines. More U.S. workers are killed in workplace accidents in an average day than died in the Sago mine -- most of them in equally preventable events.

Nothing but outrage on a massive level will improve industrial safety. And I doubt that the average American cares enough.