[Update: Looking back at this, and then at the post on MyDD, AmericaBlog, and the New York Times, I’m kinda outraged. I mean, the research for this post – looking up actual mine deaths – took me like five minutes. I spent longer making the graphs legible. How freaking wrong is it to do an article or post on mine safety, and not like look at, say, mine safety? Particularly if you’re the newspaper of record or an A-List blogger?]
Here’s a post that’s going to get me in trouble with my left blog friends. I wrote this a few weeks ago, and put it aside; it didn’t seem topical any more, and I’m getting tired of hammering mainstream Democratic issues. I wrote it hoping it might suggest some constructive paths, but knowing full well that we’re going to have to climb a tall wall of disbelief to get there.
Today, the New York Times and MyDD, among others, are leading with stories on mine safety and Administration policy.I’m a fan of regulation. My dad was in high-rise construction. On jobs he ran over a thirty-year career, maybe a dozen men were killed. He never felt it was a trade worth making, and safety was a primary focus of his attention as a boss. And for one of my first jobs I worked one summer as the guy who had to go up on the high iron and convince the steelworkers to use their newly-required safety equipment. The assumption was, I think, that as the boss’ son I wouldn’t get hung by my feet twenty-two stories in the air. They didn’t think they needed any equipment to be safe.
But now that they use it, heavy construction is far safer than it was in the 1960’s.
The air in Southern California when I grew up – in the sixties – was brown and stinging all summer long. There were 10.4 million registered vehicles in Los Angeles County & Orange County in 2004. There were probably about 4 million (based on the number statewide) in 1970. And the air quality is much better today.
Why?
It wasn’t the consumers pushing for it, or the enlightened manufacturers of cars (or factory owners) doing to be be crunchy. It was regulation.
Cars today are vastly safer than they were in 1970. Market forces?
Not so much, regulation.
So in the news recently are the mining tragedies that have killed 21 miners so far this year. And a lot of coverage has focused on the lower fines, and perceived lax enforcement by an industry-friendly Administration.
So I started a post on the importance of re-regulating the industry, and toughening regulation to save miner’s lives.
And I went to the Mine Safety & Health Administration to trend out the pattern of deaths.
And got the data that made up this somewhat surprising graph:
If I extend it through 2006, and annualize the 21 deaths reported through Frb 21, here’s the graph I get:
Will we see 240 deaths in mines this year? Not likely. But even if we do, go ahead and note the gold average line on both graphs. On the left, a Democratic MSHA. The right half? A Republican one.
Dammit. The facts just didn’t support my position. And they don’t support the New York Times’, or Scott Shields’.
What’s the deal?
I did some more digging, and found an interesting article on safety from the California:
The Division of Safety and Occupational Health (division), within the Department of Industrial Relations, is responsible for enforcing California’s health and safety standards. In the spring of 2004, approximately two years after Skyway construction started, it began an informal partnership with KFM allowing the division to conduct periodic compliance assistance inspections. These inspections represented additional access to the site beyond what the division normally would have under state law. To obtain this additional access, the division agreed that no citations would be issued if KFM promptly corrected unsafe conditions or procedures identified during these compliance assistance inspections.
KFM’s reported injury rates for the Skyway were approximately one-fourth the average injury rate of prime contractors on other large Bay Area bridge projects and approximately one-fourth to slightly more than one-third the state and national rates for construction. However, the division does not have a process to verify the reasonable accuracy of employers’ annual injury reports from which injury rates are calculated, because according to the division’s acting chief, the division believes that with its finite resources it must focus on higher priorities. As of September 2005, KFM has recorded 23 injuries in its annual injury reports. Based on evidence available to us, there are indications of 15 alleged workplace injuries and an alleged illness that potentially meet recording criteria. Because there were conflicting positions presented to us by the sources we reviewed and because we are not the entity to make the determination of whether injuries or illnesses are recordable, we notified the division of our concerns and it informed us that it opened a formal investigation into the matter. KFM has a safety program that includes elements identified by safety experts as necessary to promote a safe worksite, but experts note that one element in its safety program—the use of financial or other incentives as rewards for a safe workplace—may lead to the underreporting of injuries.
So basically, instead of periodic or post-incident inspections, citing and fining the contractor when violations occur, the inspectors visit on their own schedule, identify problems, and if the contractor fixes them, no further action is taken.
Now if you credit the 15 possible injuries to the 23 reported ones, you still have an accident rate less than half the typical construction project.
I don’t know if the MHSA is doing anything like this (I assume they’d be publicizing it if they were, and I’ve looked). But I do know that people manage to their metrics, and if our metrics are high fines, we’ll get high fines. If they are low deaths…well, let’s just say that fines alone are not be the metric we ought to be looking at.
And there’s a good post-millenium Democratic issue – how do we take the regulations that got us from the polluted, deadly 50’s to today and make them smarter? How do we make them effective, not at fining or delaying or harassing industry, but at meeting the goals we set when we established the regulations in the first place?
Let’s track deaths and injuries and pollution instead of violations. And let’s fight for policies that lower them – rather than those that track revenue from violations.
Hey, when regulations are intelligent, realistic and fact-based, they produce improvements at least in certain sectors.
AL, what’s the basis for this claim wrt reduced pollution from cars in LA?:
“It wasn’t the consumers pushing for it, or the enlightened manufacturers of cars (or factory owners) doing to be be crunchy. It was regulation.”
The consumer is also the voter – the voter who communicated to politicians that there was too much air pollution in LA and that the air had to be cleaned up. As a direct consequence, regulations were created.
You wrote:
“Cars today are vastly safer than they were in 1970. Market forces?
Not so much, regulation.”
Any evidence to support this claim? In a democracy, significant regulations are produced by market forces: voters’ choices. This is related to the point conservatives often make about the leftwing program: they can’t win elections so they try to get their programs in place through courts. In the 60’s, there were “more regulation” programs that people would vote for. That is less true today.
My point isn’t that regulation is necessarily a bad thing. Speed limits, age limits on alcohol consumption, occupational health and safety rules are often very sensible and good. But your words seem to suggest that regulations are a sort of totem, that they exist separate from the voters’ will, that we should do more than simply note and comply with them – that we should honor them. Perhaps that is just my over-sensitivity as a Canadian, a person who lives in a country where the government regulates the price of cheese, and offers different prices to companies that make fresh pizza vs. companies that make frozen pizza. Really. They can even explain the difference in pricing to you.
“How do we make them effective, not at fining or delaying or harassing industry, but at meeting the goals we set when we established the regulations in the first place?”
You’re right in that it would be a good issue for Democrats. But they will never approach it from that angle. The Enviros are too powerful in the party, and unfortunately they _are_ intent on fining, delaying, and harrassing industry, in all ways possible.
The majority of Americans are interested in environmental and regulation policies that are smart, make the world safer and cleaner, but also are in harmony with our economy as much as possible. Today’s activist Left at its core is ultimately interested in upsetting our capitalist economy, and regulation and environmentalism is the tool to do it. This is essentially the inverse of what what most Americans want out of government.
Now this wouldnt be that big a deal (after all there are certainly Conservatives interested in using popular planks like tax reform to intentionally create unpopular affects like starving federal spending radically), but todays Democratic party is powererfully beholden to its special interests like never before. And if there is one plank that unifies all the Democratic sects (aside from abortion), it is environmentalism. The day a high-profile Democrat comes out with a new plan for building safer nuclear plants or the like, i will sit up and take notice. Until then their policy will be at best equal parts look out for the worker-screw the corporation.
AL,
Nice job. I would add two things for you to consider. Next time, look at the incident rate instead of total deaths. This will eliminate fluctuations due to mining employment levels in the US.
That said, I don’t think you will find any difference in your analysis. Mining accidents have been trending downward for the 20 years I have been in the industry. It is not a reflection of outside monitoring, but a change in how management views safety. I personally believe that pressure from several sources have changed management’s prospective (outside monitoring, economics, social awareness, etc.).
I remember visiting with our divisional president one time and he mentioned that the first stats he looked at when visiting a site were their safety numbers. He believed that if local management was watching all the little details that made for a safe operation, they were watching all the details that made for an economic operation.
Mining safety decisions are not typically based on who is in the white house but rather on who has to contact the widow. If you want to see a different model – look south. They are where we were 50 years ago in both safety and environmental awareness.
Cheers.
Ben –
You’re absolutely right; I thought the best metric would be deaths/miner-year, but couldn’t find the stats on years worked. Interesting points re management.
Patrick, your point about regulation via legislation vs. litigation is well-taken. But litigation requires laws, and those laws got passed at some point.
A.L.
California has been famous for a long time for having the toughest vehcile emission laws in the USA, so yeah, it’s fair to credit regulation with improvement. Heck, because manufacturers prefer standardization, California’s laws have almost certainly helped to make the air clear outside the state.
I do take issue with Patrick re: “the voter is also the consumer, so no difference.” To say that legislation = voter’s choices = market forces blatantly ignores about the last 30 years of social science, starting with Public Choice Economics and working its way outward.
Legislation = legislator’s choices, which are sometimes influenced by voters’ choices and very often by other things.
The question of what makes for good legislation and good law/ regulation, however, remains a worthy and valuable question to ponder regardless.
While I think the trend is right, the problem with deaths per year is that there are certainly fewer miners underground each year due to regulations and mechanization. Safety and environmental regulations increase labor costs, which in turn increase the reliance on technology. A smaller workforce also probably encourages retention of a higher quality worker.
If someone wants to look critically at mining deaths, you need to focus on the practice of robbing the pillar. After the mine area has been excavated, miners will retreat toward the entrance, removing the supporting coal pillars. Its dangerous and the retreat miners are paid at a higher scale for the risk. UMWA seems to be ambivalent about it.