Good Air, Bad Air

In an article yesterday, Laura pointed out some memos from Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship that surfaced as part of a law suit back in 2006. The first of these is extremely sharp and to the point.

To: All Deep Mine Superintendents
From: Don Blankenship
Date: October 19, 2005
Subject: RUNNING COAL
If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. – build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.

A week later, Blankenship was back with another memo.

To: All Deep Mine Superintendents
From: Don Blankenship
Date: October 25, 2005
Subject: MEMBERSHIP
By now you should know that safety and S-1 is our first responsibility. Productivity and P-2 is second. It has been the culture of our Company for a long time.

Last week I sent each of you a memo on running coal. Some of your may have interpreted that memo to imply that safety and S-1 are secondary. I would question the membership of anyone who thought that I consider safety to be a secondary responsibility.

The point is that each of you is responsible for coal producing sections, and our goal is to keep them running coal. If you have construction jobs at your mine that need to be done to keep it safe or productive, make every effort to do those jobs without taking members and equipment from the coal producing sections that pay the bills.

In the second memo, what Blankenship says boils down to “anyone who says I don’t put safety first will be looking for another job” (“members” is his quaint way of saying “employee”). To understand why Blankenship, a week after issuing the first memo, would feel the need to issue the second, you need a little insight into how an underground mine works.

Continued>>>>
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/4/7/854807/-Good-Air,-Bad-Air