Down Solid: The Origins and Development of the Black Lung Insurgency

Abstract

"ZG N*eZGFTER more than a century of industrial development, a significant national commitment to protecting American workers from recognized occupational health and safety hazards was first undertaken with the enactments of the federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (CMHSA) >se4A5 of 1969 and the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Much as was the case for the pioneering nineteenth-century British mine safety legislation, for which George Rosen found that "trade-unionism was an important factor in the incessant agitation for government regulation" (1), this analysis of the determinants ofthe CMHSA and related reforms reveals the importance of miners' agitation on their own behalf The thesis of this paper is that a militant grassroots movement, the black lung insurgency, represented a substantial and, at certain critical junctures, decisive force in the initiation of recent public and private efforts to ameliorate working conditions in U.S. coal mines. Considering mine workers as primarily active participants in the making of health policy, not merely the passive beneficiaries or victims of policy, I will examine the sources, salient characteristics, and major implications of the massive insurgency related to the problem of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), or "black lung," which emerged in the Appalachian coal fields in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The black lung movement was not an isolated outburst of activity but rather the continuation and transformation of a long tradition of health-protective collective action by American miners. After placing this tradition in the historical context of the development of the means of producing coal and of the toll in workers' lives and health which ensued therefrom, I will review U.S. coal miners' traditions of activism on health and safety issues, with an emphasis on the evolution