A single line in the proposed annual appropriations The invoice for the US Department of Labor and other agencies, if Congress approves it this year, the implementation of a newly concluded Rule Limiting the amount of silica dust to which miners are exposed when working underground.
The inclusion of this wording, say supporters, is a direct insult and a betrayal to the country’s miners, who are now being diagnosed with the complicated condition pneumoconiosis more frequently and at younger ages than ever before.
A subcommittee voted for the move will refer the bill to the full House Appropriations Committee on Thursday, where it will be voted on July 10 before being sent to the full House. As currently written, the bill specifically prohibits the employ of any funds going to the Department of Labor or the Mine Safety and Health Administration in fiscal year 2025 to implement the first MSHA rule of its kind.
“To include this in a draft budget shows how deeply dubious [some politicians] It’s about protecting workers,” said Quenton King, a federal legislation specialist with the nonprofit environmental group Voices from the Appalachians. “The [federal Mine Safety and Health Act] gives MSHA the right to do so. Stopping it now would be a terrible travesty for the thousands of miners who mine coal every day and suffer irreversible harm as a result.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 20% of miners in Central Appalachia suffer from pneumoconiosis – the highest rate recognized for the disease in more than 25 years. One in 20 of these miners lives with the most severe form of the disease, and deaths related to pneumoconiosis are steadily increasing in Central Appalachia faster than in the rest of the country.
The disease is also being diagnosed more frequently among younger miners in the region than among their predecessors, due to the lack of easily accessible coal and the increasing amount of siliceous sandstone they must dig through to reach the remains.
The federal regulation to limit the exposure of miners to silica dust was completed in April and most of it began to come into effect in JuneThe new regulation – originally proposed in July 2023 – introduces for the first time a separate exposure limit for Quartz dust in mines lowers the maximum exposure limit to 50 micrograms per cubic metre per shift and sets an ‘action limit’ when exposure is 25 micrograms per cubic metre per shift. It also sets out uniform exposure monitoring and control requirements for mine operators.
The implementation of this regulation comes more than five decades after other industries adopted similar standards to enforce exposure limits for silica, based on extensive evidence.
“The government has failed to protect miners for 50 years. And it may have been even longer, because we have known that miners in this country have been dying of silicosis since the 19th century, when the legendary John Henry died drilling rock in southern West Virginia,” says Sam Petsonk, a labor lawyer who has represented numerous patients with silicosis.
“It is already inexcusable that we have waited so long to implement this rule and now [Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., who chairs the House subcommittee that advanced the bill] to sneak an amendment into his budget bill to block the implementation of these protections? Well, that is unconscionable, unsustainable and, frankly, an insult to the mining communities that suffer as a result,” Petsonk continued.
While Aderholt and others, mostly Republicans, are trying to stop the rule protecting miners, policies are incentivizing coal companies in several states to conduct their mining in thin-layer mines, where silicosis-containing minerals are more common and therefore pose a higher risk to the workers who mine them.
West Virginia is one of these statesSince 1997 under the lean seam severance taxReduced severance tax rates apply to all new underground mining operations that produce coal from seams 45 inches or less wide.
“What this means is that we are incentivizing coal companies through public subsidies to mine mineral deposits that would otherwise be uneconomical to mine. That is why these miners are digging up several meters of sandstone to get to this coal, and that is making them increasingly sick,” Petsonk said. “We have made a political decision here to distort the market. To say that we are not going to implement a rule that has long been scientifically proven to protect against silicosis – that is criminal.”
It is unclear how successful the proposed budget bill will be in the House or Senate, where it will eventually come to a vote. Throughout the legislative process, lawmakers will have the opportunity to amend the bill to remove or change language that limits how the funds can be used.
King said advocates will have a lot of work to do leading up to those votes. Most of the lawmakers who will vote on the bill in committees and on the floor of Congress don’t represent communities as affected by the effects of coal mining as the central Appalachians. They aren’t familiar with pneumoconiosis, King said, and the devastating effects it causes in miners’ bodies and on both sides of the body. their families and their own lives.
“We will work on this and develop strategies to protect the people affected – miners and their families – from [lawmakers] to show them what it looks like,” King said. “Most of the people on the labor committee who voted for it, [Thursday] “The people pushing this bill are not in Appalachia; they are voting on things they don’t understand. It’s going to take a lot of education to show why this is bad and what pneumoconiosis really is.”
