Category Archives: Labor

Update IV: Mining Men

Business, Gender, Labor, Law, Regulation

The Upper Big Branch South Mine near Montcoal, W.Va., is where “a methane explosion killed 25 miners and left four more missing and thought dead. The mine, operated by a subsidiary of Massey Energy Co., had been cited for several violations relating to proper ventilation.” This is “the worst mining disaster in over 20 years,” reports the Hill.

A suspect source, the United Mine Workers, “said that the mine had been the subject of 450 safety violations and that the company has paid over $1 million in fines last year.”

Regulation generally works to the detriment of those it is intended to help, since a less-than-honorable company will find the fine cheaper than the fixes needed to bring the mine up to par.

Update I (April 6): Coal-mining accidents always remind me—but not other media member, it seems—that men do society’s most dangerous jobs. Poor men, especially, go underground to make a living; have done so for generations.
Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 classic How Green Was My Valley (your children should have read it) depicts this reality in an achingly beautiful way. The book haunted me for years after I had read it, as a kid. “Margaret’s Museum” achieves a good deal on celluloid.

Update II: The following is from an 1935 article, “The World’s Most Dangerous Jobs.” Since then working conditions have improved for men because of advancement is technology, among other reasons. I also believe that workers in the fishing, timber and electrical power-line fields have overtaken miners as far as death on the job goes:

“‘COME quick! There’s a man hurt!’ Almost ten times every minute, more than 4,000 times each working day, that cry resounds somewhere among America’s great mass of industrial workers.”

“Once every ten minutes that cry means death for another working man. In 1933 it sounded the death knell of 46 men a day. These dying, injured, and maimed men were following ordinary jobs in most cases. They were not stunting aviators, daredevil race drivers, or human flies. Who then has the most dangerous job?”

With an accident frequency rate of 65.28 per million man-hours of exposure, say the Safety Council figures, the coal miner works at the world’s most dangerous job.
There are approximately a million miners in this country. While these men are working just one hour of one working day, more than 65 of them will be injured at their work.
The miner then has the world’s most dangerous job.
Second to mining, is lumbering. This occupation has an accident frequency rate of 59.67 per million man-hours of work. Third in the list of most dangerous occupations is the construction industry with a rate of 55.66.
And what is the safest job? At the top of the list of some thirty industries, accounted for in the figures of the National Safety Council, stands tobacco processing with a frequency rate of only 1.43, the safest occupation in this country!
For many years coal mining has led all other employments in the annual number of fatal and permanent injuries suffered in accidents.

Update III: “Mining Safety Reexamined After Another Deadly Disaster in W.Va.”

Update IV (April 7): What I know about rescue protocol in mining accidents is dangerous, but not nearly as hazardous as the slow speed with which the rescue at the Upper Big Branch Mine is proceeding.

They’ve drilled one hole “to release enough methane gas so searchers can enter the mine.”

How many more holes must they bore before they’ll allow searches to brave the Pit?

Presently they appear to be endlessly testing air samples. Can you imagine the time lost sending samples to the feds? Even if they do it on location, which is what I presume is happening, from the vantage point of the relatives this rescue must looks like a Ninny-State operation.

Maybe the authorities involved have decided it is no longer a rescue, but a recovery operation. How I hope this is not the case.

Poor, poor people. But for the grace…

The Cost Of Manna From Mount Olympus

Business, Economy, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

Nancy can be seen in media photo opportunities smooching a gold-embossed copy of the bankrupting healthcare bill. You can’t expect the little woman to grasp that the regulation and confiscation of private property, what’s left of it, has costs.

Caterpillar, “the world’s largest maker of construction and earth-moving equipment, said Wednesday that the new healthcare legislation in the U.S. will cause the company to take a $100 million tax charge in the current quarter,” reported Fox News.

Caterpillar said the additional expense and higher taxes to come could damage the recovery efforts that began after the company lost 75% of its profit in 2009.

According to the Charleston Gazette, “In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies – Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy – said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.”

“With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.”

The WSJ reports that,

“AT&T Inc. plans to take a noncash $1 billion charge in the first quarter in anticipating the impact of changes brought by the nation’s health-care overhaul.”

The Dallas-based telecommunications giant is the latest—and largest—company to take a charge to account for the increased costs under the new health-care plan. Specifically, the legislation prevents corporations from deducting tax-free subsidies they receive from the government for providing retirees with prescription-drug benefits.

The company will evaluate prospective changes to its active and retiree health-care benefits, according to a filing with Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

The size of AT&T’s charge is notable. The company employs more union workers than all of the U.S. auto makers combined, and has to support a sizeable retiree base

I FULLY EXPECT to hear shortly from our insurance company as soon as it has figured out how to nudge us over onto ObamaCare.

Yelling About Yellen (The New BO Appointee)

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Labor

In an economy of high unemployment and inflation, Barack Obama has gone and appointed as vice chair of the Federal Reserve a woman called Janet Yellen, by whose “economic” model inflation is the result of “too many people working and too much economic prosperity.” Or at least, that’s how Larry Kudlow distills the theory.

That such an economic theory exists attests to the degree to which economics and politics have become intertwined. Certainly, “Keynes’s political creed guaranteed a hand-in-glove relationship between the state and its stooge economists. Most of what Keynes advocated entails giving the state enormous confiscatory powers.”

Is “the Phillips-curve model,” Yellen’s preferred theory, an extension of Keynesianism, or is it just some form of free floating statism? I have no idea. But since most economists are servants of the state in-waiting, following the Phillips Curve—which posits “a consistent inverse relationship: when unemployment is high, wages increase slowly; when unemployment is low, wages rise rapidly”—has given rise to “a menu of policy options.” Examples, courtesy of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, are:

with an unemployment rate of 6 percent, the government might stimulate the economy to lower unemployment to 5 percent. Figure 1 indicates that the cost, in terms of higher inflation, would be a little more than half a percentage point. But if the government initially faced lower rates of unemployment, the costs would be considerably higher: a reduction in unemployment from 5 to 4 percent would imply more than twice as big an increase in the rate of inflation—about one and a quarter percentage points.

OF COURSE, the unquestioned premise of these phillipic prescriptions is that “stimulus” does indeed lower said unemployment rates. Only in The Oink Sectors.

The Pigs Outnumber The Productive

Debt, Democrats, Elections, Labor, Republicans, Socialism, The State, Welfare

The Wall Street Journal called it his finest hour. When Jim Bunning “dared to put a hold on a $10 billion spending bill to extend jobless insurance and fund transportation projects,” the a Republican from Kentucky was pilloried.

Read the emotional histrionics from the mindless mainstreamers here:

JON STEWART, HOST, “THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART”: Talking about Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning`s ongoing effort to single-handedly (EXPLETIVE DELETED) the extension of unemployment benefits for 1.1 million Americans.

ALI VELSHI, CNN REPORTER: I bet you Senator Jim Bunning has someplace warm to sleep tonight. But the Republican from Kentucky is almost single- handedly responsible for cutting a vital financial lifeline to more than a million down-and-out Americans.

ED SCHULTZ, HOST, “THE ED SHOW”: Is this the most heartless thing you have seen the Republicans do?

The whole affair is not even about the fact the “the president of the United States and the Democratic majority in the Senate” lied about their intention to abide by the new pay-go bill that they passed, … which “says specifically … that we should pay for everything that we spend on the floor of the U.S. Senate.”

Anyone with a brain cell knows that the pay-go promise is a lie, plain and simple, whether Democrats or Republicans commit to it. They all lie.

The lesson from Jim Bunning’s relatively minor, days-long standoff—a position not even the crooked Chris Matthews could condemn in its entirety —is this:

The welfare state is intractable. The pigs outnumber—or are stronger electorally than—the productive. The first are feeding off the second and will not let up. Try to put distance between the state’s dependents and their Big Teat, and they’ll tear you to pieces.