President Trump has been a cheerleader for coal miners. But these miners say his administration is failing to enforce limits on a lethal workplace hazard
As opposed to before, when we’d grow them new lungs at the clone store and slap them in before sending them back down?
Had enforced regulations about respirators and dust levels and money for the limited treatment we can do
Should all be automated. But I get your drift.
I thought that’s what they voted for?
I’ve said this until I was blue in the face. The closure of NIOSH in Morgantown, the place that arguably led the charge for discovering black lung’s cause and combatting it, and continually working on particulate science, was the absolute biggest slap in the face to this state that could have happened. The biggest ally miners had in the the twilights of their careers is gone, and in it’s place, you get a “good job, bro” and kicked out the door by the mine barons. Any shot you have at recompense dies when they declare bankruptcy with yet another shell company; the holding ponds they’re responsible for? Not their problem. The recovery costs of the natural environment? State’s cost now. Yet all those profits go right into ol’ Jimothy Justice’s pockets. Probably amped as fuck that he gets to continue his racket, and ALSO vote on the policies that regulate the industry. How fun that is!
Fucks sake.
I have been saying this for nearly 10 years. How the fuck does Trump do it? Trump has had a lifetime of being a conman, of failing at business, of screwing over his partners and his employees at every turn. Yet for all this he STILL has people who crawl and cower towards him and still act like he is the pinnacle of business success when he is the pinnacle of business failure. His father, Fred Trump, was a grade A asshole (Woody Guthrie even mentioned him in one of his songs) but he actually WAS good at business. All risks that he took were calculated and he planned out his real estate plans very carefully and he absolutely took into account what advisors had to say. He was a terrible boss, yes, and an incredibly racist man, but he still consistently made money off his investments while Trump never did. Even in the 90s when Trump was increasingly becoming a joke there were still people that thought of his as highly successful when he had just gone through a string of embarrassing failures.
Just how does he do it?
Coal is a dead industry being propped up by the kickbacks used to buy senators. People who work in that industry should have already been planning a move over to the clean energy sector.
Instead you vote for an orange cancer that cuts your job, cuts your insurance, and makes sure you can’t move over to the clean industries by taking away their funding…
Correct
That face eating leopard be looking like Mr Creosote right about now.
Of course they are cast aside. They cost money with no benefit for Trump. Money he would like to spend on his billionaire cronies instead.
Proper medical care for 100 normal people or one more yacht for a rich guy? Guess what he’ll choose.
1000% this. These workers are the dumbest motherfuckers who vote against their own interest and go full pikachuface.jpg when he doesnt support them. What do you expect of a tyrant? Love and support? These troglodytes are fucking cattle to be slaughtered in their eyes of the capitalist elite.
Room temp IQs with the stupidest takes again. Need that “fell for it again” meme.
Can someone explain to me why in 2025 people are still ending up with black lung? Don’t they wear respirators on the job to prevent inhalation of silica dust?
The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion. Wearing your respirator and other PPE will go a long way towards mitigating these risks, but they’re not the most pleasant things to wear for hours on end. He told me that lots of younger guys would come in, start working and see all the old guys at it with their respirators on, but they’d opt not to wear them whenever they thought they could get away with it, since they didn’t personally know people who developed black lung in the field. That’s just what he had told me, so I couldn’t say how accurate it really is, but given the attitudes I’ve seen from guys in other fields towards wearing all their PPE, it wouldn’t really surprise me if it were largely true.
The head of Health and Safety at my previous job used to work at a mine, and he said that gains in PPE were basically a victim of their own success, in his opinion.
Sounds a lot like the general population when it comes to vaccine efficacy, too. I cannot tell you how many people have told me, since about the 90s, when the denialism really started to get underway, that “I didn’t vaccinate my kids and they never got sick!”
/facepalm
I remember talking to my retired grandmother, who worked her entire life as a nurse, about these experiences while she was still alive, and she had zero fucking patience for that shit, since she was of a generation that saw the effects of many of these diseases. It positively enraged her, if you want to be honest. And she was very right to be mad.
This PPE thing is rather exasperating to hear about, too, but at least people are not putting others, including their own children, at risk, I guess…
You beat me to it. People flocked to that stuff when everyone knew someone who had been afflicted with a preventable malady, but once many of those problems are solved you eventually have a group of people who grew up not knowing anyone who had them and it is easy for them to question why the regulations that prevented them in the first place are needed.
I mean I heard of things like tuberculosis, and measles and other diseases as a kid, but I never knew anyone who had them… because where I was living everyone was aggressively vaccinated for them and it was seen as a disease of the past. We even had widespread smallpox vaccines even though smallpox was literally extinct in the wild almost a decade before I was born.
Over the past few years, mine owners cut on safety while Republicans blocked regulatory enforcement funding.
From what I’ve read, that has meant more time on the job, increasing potential exposure. But I still haven’t seen anything related to respirators. Do they not wear them? Are they not provided? Do they not work? Are workers not being washed down to prevent dust inhalation before leaving their shift?
They are probably a pain in the ass to wear and the company has no incentive to encourage/mandate use… because just protection people from getting terminal illness for profit isn’t a good enough reason…
Have you ever tried getting certain folks to wear a mask?
If you’re not going to wear a mask, then don’t come crying when you get sick. 🤷♂️
But seriously — is this why they are still getting black lung???
Dude it’s so fucking hard sometimes to stick to systemic analysis, these people make it so fucking hard. Like yes, there has been a steady growth in the number of black lung victims in recent years due to safety rollbacks by Republicans, lax training and ppe by business owners (supported by republicans), and in general a growing disregard for health and safety due to a variety of socioeconomic, educational factors, all brought about by Republicans.
But Jesus Christ, it’s 2025. We knew what caused black lung centuries ago. Like fuck antivaxxers, but at least there is active bullshit linking vaccines to autism. There is a lie to believe, even if its a lie. But these fuckheads thought, what, masks caused asthma? Coal has magic medicinal properties? Its so fucking stupid. No one sold you on black lung, you just fucking did that. How fucking stupid.
The ‘study’ linking vaccines to autism was not a study. It was literally a paragraph in a paper that basically said ‘some parents think they saw autism like symptoms emerge a few weeks after they got the vaccine’. That was it. It was a hunch and speculation from the get-go. On top of that, Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind it all, did that ‘study’ on purpose because he wanted to push his own quack medicine against those specific vaccines. It was a moneymaking fraud scheme from the beginning.
It should be the companies responsibility to keep the employees safe…I would suggest forced liability because companies can’t be bothered to care
Honestly don’t know, I was making a very timely covid related joke.
You mean a face diaper? Haw haw! *cough, hack*
What, the anti-worker leader of the anti-worker party is anti-worker? Who would have guessed?
These coal miners didn’t read the fine print: the administration is a cheerleader for coal mining BUSINESSES, not for coal miners. Coal miners, especially sick ones, are just a sunk cost to them.
As the son of a 30-year coal miner, not reading the fine print is a prerequisite to mining. If they were worried about the finer details the majority of them wouldn’t be there to begin with.
I won’t stand for this coal miner slander, they used to be militant unionists agitating for workers’ rights. They were thoroughly crushed and defeated, but not before making major material gains. Efforts have since been made by those in power to make the Appalachian people forget their history, and all that remains of that movement are traumatized and chronically ill elderly folk.
It’s a whole 'nother generation and breed of miner, my friend. Those miners understood the power of collective action and the power they held within the nation as a major contributor to the economy and what essentially made the country move.
Today’s miners, meaning in the last 40-60 years, have been coasting on the battles hard-fought by their fathers and grandfathers. Do you think the miners of today would have fought for unionization or medical benefits? I sincerely doubt it. No, today’s mining culture is a far cry from those who died at Blair Mountain and fought against Pinkertons.
Print fine like the silica dust
Ay, I am so sorry, but you are so right.
That’s fucked up that guys are still digging coal and getting black lung, there’s no way that shit is cheaper than solar or wind
I had a great-grandfather that died of black lung. I thought that was wild to hear about when I was a kid, and I’m Gen X. The fact that it’s still happening is crazy.
They actually consider working the mines to be their cultural heritage. The number these mining companies have done on these families’ heads is astounding.
Meanwhile, I know the goal of companies is to fully automate all of mining.
That’s not all that weird all things considered, just look at anyone named Smith, Miller, or Stewart all of them are names based on their ancestors jobs. That only really happens when your job is your heritage and I’d say that takes about 3-4 generations minimum. Mind you doesn’t make it any less fucked up that they prostate themselves to that shit work.
They didn’t want re-training.
I remember all the alt-right asshats trolling journalists that lost their jobs to “learn to code”. I think that originated in the idea of trying to retrain miners…
Ah, but the cost of the miner with black lung is increasingly handled by that individual or their family.
If you are a coal miner and you think that a man that lives in a gilded apartment can relate to you and has your best interests at heart you are going to be sadly disappointed.
Not with that attitude!
The plan is to cast everyone aside to die once their capital has been extracted. The ones who survive must still have some capital left to extract.
“I voted for him because he speaks his mind (and hates ******** just as much as I do)”.
Was this during Covid?
You say that like this shit still ain’t around
Fair. I guess I mean what was (hopefully?) peak Covid.
Around the time when these goofs were dying in droves and still insisting on their death beds it was a conspiracy against their blessed Orange Jesus and “his” stock market numbers. That it was “just” the flu. When they were going full Karen over social distancing, lockdowns, wearing masks, and a vaccine that constituted a moonshot that made medical history.
When they were mocking the idea of flattening the curve. Or tracking Covid numbers at all…
No, no, no, I voted for other people to be cast aside to die!
Is it just Trump though?
For years, coal miners have always gotten the shit end of the stick.
I mean, Republicans cast everybody aside. Soldiers are sent to die for them. Hell, it took decades for the combination efforts of those involved with 9/11 from policemen, firefighters, EMTs .etc to get things done for them, all dragged by Republicans.
Everyone is expendable under Republican rule because the only kind of people who matter to them are corporate executives.
Its a lot worse than it was several years back. Mine owners cut safety, Trump stopped the regulatory effort to do something about it, and cut treatment funding.
The regulatory effort created by and championed by
