Union Mines Are Safer: Ask Tim Miller, Whose 10 Co-Workers Died in Mine Blast

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/05/04/union-mines-are-safer-ask-tim-miller-whose-10-co-workers-died-in-mine-blast/


Berry Craig

Berry Craig is a professor of history at the West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah, a member of AFT Local 6010 and the author of "True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon & Burgoo" and "Hidden History of Kentucky in the Civil War."

by Berry Craig, May 4, 2010

Tim Miller doesn’t buy the coal industry’s claims that nonunion mines are as safe as union mines.

He survived a 1989 methane gas explosion and fire that killed 10 other miners at the nonunion William Station No. Nine Mine in his native western Kentucky. Miller helped recover the bodies.

All 10 men were more than fellow miners. “They were my good friends,” says Miller, now an international representative for the Mine Workers (UMWA).

From 1979 to 1997, Miller dug coal 1,000 feet underground at the mine and can’t forget the human toll: 28 fatalities in 18 years.

We finally organized that mine in 1997. It was bankrupt then. But it lasted almost seven more years under the UMWA banner. There wasn’t a single death from the time we organized the mine until it closed.

Pyro Mining Co. owned the mine, and so the deadly explosion is sometimes called the Pyro Mine Disaster. “I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life,” says Miller, 50.

His office is in Madisonville, the Hopkins County seat. His desk is about 27 miles from the Pyro mine site and about 10 miles from the Dotiki Mine in Webster County, where two miners died last month in a roof fall. “Dotiki is also nonunion,” Miller says.

FULL story at link.

[Omaha Steve]

1. Kick

[Brickbat]

2. One main reason is because a union gives a person support, training and courage to say "No, I will

not go down that hole, because it's not safe." It makes me sick to think that those miners knew the hole was unsafe, but did it anyway, because they were afraid of losing their jobs.

They were afraid of losing their jobs more than they were afraid of dying. That's what "broken" is, right there.