President Donald Trump’s administration desires you to get a job—within the mines.
The Division of Labor posted a hyperlink on X on Monday promoting job openings for coal miners almost per week after Trump signed an government order clearing the way in which for extra “beautiful, clean coal” manufacturing on public lands.
Naturally, this didn’t sit nicely with the general public, given frequent data of how mining jobs considerably influence human well being.
“Make Black Lung great again,” one person replied on X.
“why do you think Americans want to work in coal mines again?” one other wrote. “are you fvcking crazy?”
After all, for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, that is simply one other day within the books. Her earlier contributions to American employees embody advocating to chop packages geared toward preventing baby labor. And her division’s X put up fortunately marketed that folks might “jump start” their careers by diving into the mines.
Whereas coal made up for lower than a fifth of America’s vitality manufacturing in 2023, it’s not simply the push for environmentally taxing fossil fuels that has individuals up in arms. Reasonably, the Trump administration’s newest strikes have sparked huge security issues for present and future miners.
Seemingly because of Trump’s race to make fossil-fuel billionaires joyful, the federal government’s Mine Security and Well being Administration introduced on April 8—the similar day that Trump signed the order—that it might briefly pause a long-in-the-works security rule to extend miners’ protections from silica mud. As a substitute of going into impact on April 14, miners will now have to attend till at the least August earlier than they see higher protections towards diseases like black lung.
The company cited “unforeseen [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] restructuring” and “other technical reasons.”
Traditionally, miners are subjected to plenty of life-threatening security hazards on the job together with pneumoconiosis, which may come from inhaling silica on the job.
“While we’re appreciative of the executive action, there are a lot of things that are being pulled back that are going to protect the health and safety of our miners, which is our main priority,” Erin Bates, a spokesperson for the United Mine Employees of America labor union, instructed Every day Kos. “Every single day this rule is delayed is another day that our nation’s miners are exposed to silica dust, which leads to and has been proven to lead to a number of lung diseases.”
Not solely is the administration pushing for newbies to leap head first right into a harmful work atmosphere, however because of Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration’s vicious firings of federal employees, there are fewer individuals to observe miners’ well being.
Two-thirds of NIOSH, a key company defending and monitoring miners’ well being, is anticipated to fade within the coming weeks. Amongst many different duties, NIOSH runs the Coal Employees’ Well being Surveillance Program, which offers a sort of free well being care to miners and helps to observe their ongoing lung well being.
A NIOSH facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, was among the many hardest hit from these cuts, with the Trump administration shedding almost 200 employees.
In keeping with MSHA’s spokesperson, Morgantown helped lead respiratory analysis.
“Without those resources, it’s going to be harder to monitor and control the dust levels in those mines, leaving a high risk for Black Lung,” Bates instructed Every day Kos.
Trump’s push for extra coal and vitality manufacturing could tie into his race towards China relating to synthetic intelligence. Final week, AI business leaders met earlier than Congress final week to beg for extra vitality, with one former Google CEO saying, “We need energy in all forms. … Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”
And Trump’s coal-focused government order particularly talked about AI, saying that home coal “will be critical to meeting the rise in electricity demand due to … the construction of artificial intelligence data processing centers.”
In different phrases, the price of large enterprise is excessive, and it’s doable that the president is making an attempt to spice up large business—employees’ well being be damned.
