It's sickening enough that when workers are injured or even killed on the job, the companies responsible for dangerous conditions rarely face any penalty beyond a fine. But an investigation by NPR and Mine Safety and Health News finds that, in the mining industry at least, many companies
don't even pay their fines, yet continue operating and endangering workers without interference by the government.
Among the findings:
- 2,700 mining company owners failed to pay nearly $70 million in delinquent penalties.
- The top nine delinquents owe more than $1 million each.
- Mines that don't pay their penalties are more dangerous than mines that do, with injury rates 50 percent higher.
- Delinquent mines reported close to 4,000 injuries in the years they failed to pay, including accidents that killed 25 workers and left 58 others with permanent disabilities.
- Delinquent mines continued to violate the law, with more than 130,000 violations, while they failed to pay mine safety fines.
Most mine operators pay their penalties, our investigation found. Delinquents account for just 7 percent of the nation's coal, metals and mineral mining companies. But that small subset of the industry is more dangerous than the rest, federal data show.
This isn't small stuff. One man, Ralph Napier Sr., was the co-owner of a mine where five men were killed in a 2006 explosion. The mine still owes $500,000 in penalties from that disaster, while eight of Napier's other mines account for $2.4 million in delinquent fines. During the time those fines haven't been paid, Napier's mines have done tens of millions of dollars in business, and Napier was allowed to register a new mining company in Kentucky this year.
The disrespect for law and human life is so clear in these cases, where you have the same companies that owe millions in fines for safety violations continuing to account for higher rates of mining injuries than the companies that pay their fines on time. These delinquent operators like Ralph Napier Sr. don't care about following safety laws to keep their workers safe, and they don't care about paying what they owe for the laws they've broken. If someone who wasn't rich showed this kind of contempt for the law, it goes without saying they wouldn't just get to keep on doing what they'd been doing all along. As a miner's widow said:
"You get a speeding ticket ... and you don't pay and they'll want to put you in jail," Middleton added. "But this man — it's people's lives and injuries, and then they just keep letting him keep doing it and doing it."
1:26 PM PT: Here's a piece of good news that shows how extreme the case has to be for a mine owner to face anything like regular-people justice:
Don Blankenship, the longtime chief executive of Massey Energy, was indicted today on charges that he violated federal mine safety laws at the company’s Upper Big Branch Mine prior to an April 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners.
U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin this afternoon informed representatives of the families of the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster victims that a four-count indictment had been handed up by a federal grand jury charging Blankenship.