Everyone’s patting either themselves or Jon Stewart on the back for the passage of a 9-11 health care and victim’s compensation fund late in the lame duck session. And looking at the particulars, the bill is worth supporting. Despite a few scattered claims about the distributive justice aspects of the bill, it basically says that [...]

After the explosion that rocked a West Virginia mine, killing 29 workers, Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors have stepped up their efforts, using the regulatory tools already available to them to expand their enforcement activities. A reform bill making its way through Congress would expand the mine regulator’s authority, but what’s already changed is [...]

With all the attention on the BP oil disaster, we’ve forgotten a bit about the other corporate malefactor in the energy space – Massey Energy, and their disregard for the safety of their workers in exchange for relentless effort at running coal. Yesterday, the House Education and Labor Committee held a field hearing in Beckley, [...]

Remember that energy production company disaster that caused a lot of employee deaths? No, not the one in the Gulf of Mexico, the other one, in West Virginia, at the Upper Big Branch mine owned by Massey Energy. Turns out the negligence involved there by the employer may have been so great that the Justice [...]

NPR has an explosive report of an FBI investigation into bribery at the Mine Safety and Health Administration: NPR News has learned that the Mine Safety and Health Administration is one subject of a federal criminal investigation surrounding the explosion of the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia three weeks ago — a disaster [...]

I don’t remember the President’s predecessor making a statement with this kind of moral force about worker safety. This was released Saturday night, after the four missing miners in Montcoal, WV, were found dead: It is with a heavy heart that we learn the news that the last four missing miners did not survive the [...]