Stripping Miners of Safety Protections
A West Virginia proposal to help the coal industry by paring back safety regulations may actually protect neither miners or their jobs.
Updated March 15 at 3:31 p.m.
When is a mine-safety agency not really a mine-safety agency? Soon, if a bill under consideration in the West Virginia Legislature passes. The proposal would prevent state regulators from writing policies, downgrading their work to drafting suggested guidelines; strip them of the ability to issue citations and fines; and demote safety inspections to offering “safety compliance assistance.”
Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, an expert reporter who’s set the standard on the mining beat for years, writes:
Those and other significant changes in would produce a wholesale elimination of most enforcement of longstanding laws and rules put in place over many years — as a result of hundreds of deaths —
