‘An underground community’
WAYNESBURG – Secretary Thomas E. Perez of the U.S. Department of Labor came to Greene County Monday and made his first tour of an underground coal mine.
Perez visited Cumberland Coal Resources’ Cumberland Mine near Oak Forest accompanied by Joe Main, a Greene County native and assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health.
Perez toured the mine, which employs about 750 people, and met with miners, United Mine Worker officials and representatives of Cumberland and its parent company Alpha Natural Resources.
In a meeting with reporters afterwards, Perez praised the partnership he observed between the company and the workforce, as well as the mine’s acceptance of the belief that safety and productivity are not mutually exclusive.
“The partnership between Alpha and the United Mine Workers is real and it creates a win-win situation,” he said. About 50 more people now work at the mine than did a year ago, Perez said.
“That’s because everybody understands we’re all in this together, working together to increase productivity and never compromising safety,” he said. “People who say unions and companies don’t work well together, well, those who say that haven’t studied the business model here.”
Perez said he also observed that the company and workforce rejected what he called “false choices.”
“There often is that false choice, between you either focus on safety or you focus on productivity. That is a categorically false choice,” he said.
Both miners and mine managers he spoke with said the same thing, he said. “We are at our most productive when we are safest, and safety and productivity and profitability go hand and hand and hand.”
Perez said he asked miners he met on the tour what they liked most about their job “and to a person, I heard about the sense of camaraderie, the sense of brotherhood that’s here,” he said.
“This is an underground city, really more than an underground city, an underground community, a community where folks look out for each other,” he said.
Miners also spoke of changes that have resulted from the introduction of new mining technologies that have made their workplace safer and more productive. “They demonstrated you can make technology your ally,” he said.
Perez also praised Main’s work as head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. “Main Street values at the Department of Labor mean Joe Main, and that is commitment to excellence, commitment to integrity, commitment to safety,” he said.
He spoke of Main’s work to build an enforcement agency that listens to everyone, workers and management, and gets everybody to understand they can have both safety and profitability.
The introduction of the new coal dust standards is an example, he said. In most recent data after the new standards were introduced, about 99 percent of the tests were in compliance, he said. Some had said that would never happen, he added.
Main, who spoke briefly, said he had learned much of what he knows about mining and mine safety from people like those who work at Cumberland.
“One of the things I wanted to bring to MSHA when I came was that kind of partnership, working for a common goal,” Main said. “I think if you look back over the last few years, there are a lot of folks in this very room who helped us make a number of achievements.”
When asked what MSHA could do to help the coal industry, Paul Vining, president of Alpha, said in regard to safety, “we’re aligned in the same direction.” With good communications and “total transparency” and collaboration on technology and mine operations, he said, everyone will be better off.
Perez spoke briefly about the challenges facing the coal industry in relation to the low prices of natural gas and oil and the global economy. He failed to mention the subject of the administration’s increased regulations on coal-fired power plants.
“This was not the place for that,” said Ed Begovich, UMW District 2 international representatives, following Perez’s press conference. The union works through other channels to address those issues, he said.
“This was the place to introduce him to our miners and mining and give him first-hand knowledge about what is going on in our mines here in Greene County,” he said. Begovich said he was impressed the secretary had visited the mine to talk to the workers and company officials.