Weak enforcement and false dust samples allow black lung disease to resurge

Evidence

Coal mining not only involves health risks from coal dust but also poses grave danger to miners’ very lives. The Center for Public Integrity revealed that the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and the U.S. Department of Labor report an alarming resurgence in black-lung disease, which results from inhaling coal dust (Berkes, 2012). With regulations poorly enforced and mining companies providing false mine-dust samples, miners continue to contract this suffocating lung disease in hazardous working conditions. Despite substantial evidence of violations of safety standards there have been few prosecutions or convictions for illegal practices. … Professor R. Larry Grayson of Penn State University, an authority on the health risks of mining, prescribed a consequential corrective: “We have to get these people with consequence so high they won’t do it” (Berkes, 2012).

However, with disengaged moral restraint and scant oversight, legal sanctions are readily circumventable.

— Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1810

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s prior material on how institutional failures (FOIA exemptions, noise regulation) persist through weak enforcement.