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	Workers Vanguard No. 1091	3 June 2016

2010 West Virginia Mine Disaster

Killer Capitalist Sentenced to Country Club

On May 12, some six years after a fiery explosion at Upper Big Branch (UBB) mine in West Virginia snuffed out the lives of 29 miners, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship walked into prison to serve a one-year sentence for conspiracy to willfully violate mine safety standards. Blankenship was acquitted of securities fraud and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which could have carried a sentence of 30 years. To the bosses and their courts, lying to Wall St. is a far greater crime than causing the death of nearly 30 miners. In fact, Blankenship will be spending his time at a “Club Fed”—a privately run minimum security facility in California that boasts an unfenced, campus-like environment with a sports complex and a music department.

The 5 April 2010 disaster at UBB was capitalist industrial murder. In the month preceding it, the mine logged 50 safety violations, many related to ventilation. Of those who died that day, 71 percent had signs of incurable black lung disease. Three separate investigations afterward concluded that the deadly combination of methane gas and highly combustible coal dust was the cause of the explosion. Survivors reported that workers who tried to get dangerous conditions addressed were ignored, threatened or told to tamper with the monitoring equipment. A union safety committee could have stopped work at UBB. But there was no union at UBB.

For coal operators like Massey Energy, accumulating violations and fines is just part of the cost of doing business—and cheaper than installing necessary ventilation and safety equipment. Every cited violation is challenged, and until it is settled, the company pays nothing while the government’s limp Mine Safety and Health Administration investigates. This agency does not exist to protect workers but to lull them into believing that government agencies can be relied on to defend their interests. As Blankenship’s sentence demonstrates, the capitalist government, including its courts and agencies, exists to defend the interests of the bosses against working people.

UBB was Massey Energy’s premier money-making mine, and Blankenship made it his personal business to keep out the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). In face-to-face meetings he bullied workers and threatened to close the mine; the UMWA was defeated three times, despite the fact that 70 percent of the workers had signed union cards.

Blankenship is a notorious overlord in a notoriously brutal industry. As a district manager in the 1980s, he was an architect of a vicious, union-busting strategy to push the UMWA into bargaining separately with each subsidiary; isolated strikes were then defeated with a combination of state troopers and bought-and-paid-for judges as well as armies of mercenaries, attack dogs and scabs. Entire mining communities were put under siege during months-long strikes. While he was CEO of Massey Energy, 52 miners were killed.

The UMWA bureaucracy, both under the leadership of current AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka and today under Cecil Roberts, did not respond to these attacks with the historic weapons of the union: solid picket lines and the strategy of “one out all out” until an industry-wide settlement is reached. Instead, they pursued the losing scheme of selective strikes, individual acts of civil disobedience and lawsuits. At the same time, the UMWA leadership did not defend union militants singled out by the government for victimization.

In 1987, the UMWA tops deserted four Kentucky miners, including Donnie Thornsbury, a local president, who were framed up for the shooting death of a scab. They received sentences of 35 to 45 years, and Thornsbury remained in prison until 2010. Likewise, in 1993, Jerry Dale Lowe, a safety committeeman from Logan County, West Virginia, was abandoned to face eleven years without possibility of parole for “interfering with interstate commerce.” Contrast these vindictive sentences to the slap on the wrist given to Blankenship!

The grieving families of the 29 UBB miners, along with those of the 23 other victims killed in Massey mines under Blankenship’s control, will not see justice in the capitalist courts. Something approaching justice for Blankenship could only come from a workers tribunal. What’s desperately needed is the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership in the union, which must be part of a fight to build a revolutionary workers party that can lead the assault on this bloodthirsty capitalist system.