Black lung disease has been listed as the cause, or a contributing factor, in 76,000 deaths in the United States since 1968.
Despite more than 40 years working in the American coal-mining industry, that number still shocked Joe Main when he was appointed as the assistant secretary of labor for Mine Safety and Health in 2009.
From that point, he and his team have worked diligently to improve working conditions, champion workers’ rights, and liaise with mining companies to make mining in the U.S. a safer and healthier occupation.
“We knew that miners needed to have a place in mine safety and we launched a number of efforts to improve both education of miners on their rights and to enforce their rights they had under the Mine Act,” said Main, speaking at the 36th International Conference of Safety in Mines Research Institutes.
Held Oct. 25 to 27 in Sudbury, the conference welcomed close to 200 delegates from around the world, who arrived for three days of workshops and lectures.
In his presentation, Main shared the challenges and successes his organization has experienced while trying to effect change in the industry. It started by identifying and retooling the regulations that “would significantly affect the improvement of the miners’ safety and health.”
The group cracked down on chronic violators, using data to track their violations, and beefed up training for workers.
“We actually issued, for the first time, a handbook for miner representatives on their rights under the Mine Act,” Main said. “So, not only the miners, but those who represent miners, would have a clear picture of the rights as they had to enforce the law.”
The work has paid off: the number of chronic violators has fallen from 51 to one; the number of violations of the most serious infractions has dropped by 40 per cent; and the U.S. documented 16 deaths in coal mining in 2014, the lowest number of deaths recorded in the history of U.S. coal mining.
The organization is now introducing technology to further enhance workers’ health and safety: in 2016 it will introduce a device for continuous personal dust monitoring, which will combat black lung disease.
“It is a remarkable tool that’s going to, for the first time, allow miners during the shift to see how much dust they’re exposed to as the shift goes on,” Main said. “It’s a real-time monitor that’s going to have a major impact in ending this disease.”
Consultant Jim Joy, of Jim Joy & Associates Pty, said much of the problem of health and safety stems from the fact that the industry is only now starting to realize that mining is a people-intensive business, and human behaviour must be taken into account when researching how to make mines safer and healthier.
For example, do mines depend too much on a person to be totally attentive while working a 12-hour shift, when factors like fatigue and stress come into play? he asks. Joy believes mines can be designed to better use technology so that the environment is more “forgiving” and takes human behaviour into account.
“There’s an opportunity there to use that understanding of interface issues, especially with new technology, where the consequences financially to a company of getting it wrong are so large that they offer greater opportunities for understanding the human,” Joy said.
Mine operators have evolved in their approach to risk management, so that, rather than fulfilling a requirement of a regulator, they now see it as a standard way to do business.
“Regulations are the minimum requirement, but they far exceed, in many cases, what regulators ask,” Joy said.
As the international president for the United Steel Workers (USW) union, Leo Gerard believes standardized training — for workers, all the way through management — can go a long way to improving health and safety. Standardized training was one of the ideas to come out of Ontario’s recent mining review, Gerard noted.
“How much training do we do, how do you certify if people have had safety training, and how do we do that in a very professional way?” he asked. “How do we do it so we have a consistent level of standards?”
Gerard pointed to work the USW has done in other industries as an example for mining. With International Paper, the USW has an annual meeting, which lasts a week, with representatives present from all 93 facilities across North America to talk about standardized health and safety training. A similar process is underway with Goodyear.
At steel producer ArcelorMittal, a global health and safety committee has been formed, which has representation from its branches in Europe, Brazil, the U.S. and Canada. Committee reps travel country to country, visiting two facilities a year, return with recommendations, and develop best practices based on what they learned from the other facilities.
“That is tremendous progress in the sense of trying to make health and safety best practices standardized and globalizing that,” Gerard said. “We’re tremendously proud of that step in the right direction.”
Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani has a strong belief that “safety is about a personal connection.” Managers and supervisors have to care about their workers in order to enact positive change.
“Managers who don’t care about people cannot lead an organization to achieve outstanding performance in all facets of the business.”
Assets are things like the mine, the trucks, and the structures, he said, but people are the business. Ensuring workers are able to say no and are supported by the company, at any level, is “the most fundamental principle to build a safe culture in the workplace.”
Cutifani focuses on five critical areas at Anglo American: managerial leadership, planning of the work, hazard and risk management, incident management, and the role of the front-line supervisor.
He believes the mining industry should share information and resources when it comes to health and safety.
“No one’s a competitor in safety, environment, or sustainable working practices across the industry. We need to collaborate and work together as an industry and share everything we have to make it a better industry.”
