After the federal government betrayed them by refusing to implement a vital office well being rule, a bunch of coal miners traveled to DC to place Trump on discover.
Protesters on the coal miners’ rally in Washington on October 14, 2025.
(Chelsea Barnes)
Final Tuesday, a small group of retired coal miners gathered in entrance of the headquarters of the Division of Labor with a reasonably bold purpose: to get Donald Trump’s consideration.
Because of the ongoing authorities shutdown, the streets of downtown Washington, DC, have been removed from bustling, however just a few passersby nonetheless stopped to see on the 80 or so camo-clad demonstrators and browse the indicators they bore: “Silica Kills,” Stand With Us! Implement the Silica Rule!,” “Coal Miners Lives Matter.” The protest was an act of each proud dedication and brutal desperation. A hard-won federal rule limiting miners’ publicity to respirable crystalline silica was meant to enter impact on April 14, however the Trump administration has refused to enforce it. The Mine Security and Well being Administration (MSHA), which is nestled inside Trump’s Labor Division and is now led by a former coal business government, voluntarily allowed this to occur.
As I reported for In These Occasions, the rule would have minimize the allowable publicity degree of the lethal mud—20 times more toxic than coal mud and a serious reason for black lung illness amongst coal miners—in half. The Division of Labor had estimated in 2024 that, with correct implementation and enforcement, the rule would save 1000’s of lives. As an alternative, coal miners throughout Appalachia proceed to undergo from its absence. United Mine Staff of America (UMWA) Worldwide President Cecil E. Roberts characterised the delay as “a loss of life sentence for extra miners.”
Former Performing Secretary of Labor Julie Su agrees. “We strengthened respiratory safety requirements for miners towards all airborne hazards — not simply silica mud,” she wrote just lately. “Trump’s DOL is not enforcing this rule, and due to that, workers will die. This isn’t simply merciless to miners. If Trump’s DOL reverses protections on one of the vital harmful jobs, what protections are they keen to implement?”
There isn’t any good cause for the delay, even considering varied coal and development business lobbyists’ insistence that the rule is simply too onerous to comply with. This isn’t a brand new drawback, as they’re effectively conscious, and this silica commonplace isn’t significantly radical. Miners and public well being specialists have argued that the brand new 50-microgram threshold it units continues to be far too excessive, and have expressed concerns that the rule’s present kind will permit mine operators far an excessive amount of leeway when it comes to inspections and engineering controls. It’s additionally about 50 years too late.
Again in 1974, the Nationwide Institute for Occupational Security and Well being started sounding the alarm on silica and the dire menace it posed to the nation’s coal miners. It nonetheless took till now for even a watered-down regulation to make it (virtually) out of the gate—that’s, till Trump’s Division of Labor stopped it in its tracks.
Present Concern
This difficulty isn’t distinctive to coal miners. The hazard that silica poses to the human physique has been felt far past Appalachia and throughout quite a few industries, from development and steel/non-metal mining to countertop set up and long-haul trucking. Silica publicity can result in an array of great respiratory illnesses, together with lung most cancers, emphysema, silicosis, and continual obstructive pulmonary illness, in addition to essentially the most extreme type of black lung: progressive huge fibrosis. Coal miners do have a number of unfair disadvantages right here, although. The present allowable degree of publicity for each different kind of employee within the nation is about to 50 micrograms per cubic meter throughout a 10-hour shift; for coal miners, that quantity is doubled. In Central Appalachia, thinned-out coal seams and technological advances in heavy equipment have compelled miners to dig by increasingly more rock in pursuit of coal—and that rock is laden with silica particles, that are launched into the air with each hammer blow. Taken collectively, that signifies that many coal miners (significantly those that work underground) are uncovered to a lot larger ranges of silica than anybody else in America. Because of this, extra of them are getting sicker, sooner. Black lung is not an “previous man’s illness”—now, it’s coming for the younger too.
“Sadly we’ve seen miners who’ve difficult black lung, or progressive huge fibrosis, with lower than 10 years of coal mining expertise,” Dr. Leonard Go ,pulmonologist and assistant director of the Mining and Training Analysis Middle on the College of Illinois Chicago Faculty of Public Well being, informed The Nation after the rally. “That could possibly be folks of their 20s, people who find themselves younger sufficient to be fascinated about lung transplants— exchanging one illness for an additional. And to get a lung transplant, it’s important to have what’s known as end-stage lung illness; in a method, it’s sort of like having died. You wouldn’t reside to 70, 80 years previous with that lung illness should you’re getting transplanted in your 40s.”
That harsh actuality is precisely what miners and occupational well being specialists have been attempting to keep away from for many years. Whereas this new silica rule is simply a step in the correct route, the truth that it’s been left to languish has imbued those that fought for it with a renewed sense of goal. They’ve labored too laborious for too lengthy to see it crumble now, and this newest betrayal is sort of an excessive amount of to bear, particularly coming because it does from an administration that has bought itself as “pro-coal” and dedicated to “the American employee.” On the opposite facet of the DOL constructing, an unlimited banner of Trump’s face stared blankly into area because the miners spoke haltingly about their agonizing plight. A few of the older ladies held coloration photographs of their late husbands, who they’d needed to watch die from the dreaded illness.
There have been many widows in attendance, however there was at the least one retired miner there representing the business’s sturdy however small feminine minority. 77-year-old Brenda Ellis spent 24 years working underground within the mines in her native Wyoming County, West Virginia. 9 years in the past, she began to appreciate that one thing was unsuitable. “I used to be out of breath, I had no power, gained all this weight and it simply retains on piling on,” she informed me, wrinkling her nostril. It took her six years to get identified correctly and entry her black lung advantages. She’ll be beginning oxygen quickly, and must wheel round a tank of her personal. That day, she was in DC representing her union, UMWA Native 1713 in Pineville, West Virginia, the place she is the recording secretary and a fervent voice within the combat towards black lung. She steadied herself on my arm, and seemed up at me with a mischievous glint in her blue eyes. “I suppose I’ll take it simple the day after I die!”
Ellis and a lot of the different miners had traveled lengthy distances from their properties in varied pockets of Appalachia so as to be there; they got here by bus and by automotive, joined by union officers, advocates from the nonprofit Appalachian Voices and BlueGreen Alliance, members of the Steelworkers, and relations. Numerous them have been aged and sported the telltale indicators of extreme lung illness: nasal cannulas and oxygen tanks. Some spoke in a gasping wheeze, straining for every breath. Others relied on mobility aids like canes and wheelchairs to search out their positions, their lungs unable to energy them for quite a lot of steps at a time. Hidden beneath their skull-adorned “Black Lung Kills” T-shirts have been layers of broken lung tissue that had been pocked and scarred by poisonous mud. Black lung illness—recognized formally as coal employees’ pneumoconiosis (CWP), and by the previous timers as miners’ bronchial asthma—is a satan they knew very, very effectively, and so they’d made the troublesome trek as much as Washington to try to cease it from claiming a complete new era of miners.
“We’re bored with seeing 28-year-olds with difficult black lung,” Vonda Robinson, Vice President of the Nationwide Black Lung Affiliation, informed the gang. Her husband, John, is a retired miner who’s been combating black lung for years and is in want of a lung transplant. “We noticed a 35-year-old die final week. These individuals are not going to see their kids develop up…. We’re asking President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Congressman Griffith to get this finished. We want your Republican help to get this handed as a result of, with out this, it’s an early loss of life sentence for our miners. They usually deserve to have the ability to breathe, they deserve to have the ability to go house to their households. We’re right here to make America wholesome once more, too. We want that for our miners. We want your assist with this rule.”
By calling on Trump by title, Robinson and the opposite audio system emphasised the outsize position that coal has performed within the president’s rigorously crafted public mythos (in addition to that of his underling Vice President JD Vance, a self-styled son of Appalachia who has not mentioned a single phrase concerning the black lung disaster). In 2016, Trump was balancing a miner’s helmet atop his ramshackle coif and grandly proclaiming, “Trump digs coal!” at a marketing campaign rally in West Virginia; almost a decade later, the coal business is in a loss of life spiral and the nation’s 33,000 remaining coal miners are staring down the barrel of a brutal early loss of life except his administration takes motion on one easy obligation. Trump didn’t “carry again coal” the way in which he promised throughout his first time period, and whereas many voters in Appalachia’s coal country nonetheless gave him a second likelihood, it’s grow to be obvious that every one of his guarantees have been price about as a lot as a truckload of coal mud.
“I’ve been arising right here for 20-some years to get this silica rule and get it enforced,” Gary Hairston, president of the Nationwide Black Lung Affiliation, said through the rally, his breath catching in his throat after each few phrases. “Congress y’all ain’t doing nothing for us. We want you all to face up for us coal miners. You’ve got us stand beside you once you run for election, and now we’d like your assist. We want your assist proper now. We want the silica rule. We want it enforced.”
Brian Sanson, the UMWA’s worldwide secretary-treasurer, was much more frank. Underneath the brand new regime, MSHA has not solely stonewalled the union on communications, it has additionally canceled long-standing grants for miners’ well being and security schooling (reread the title of the company, then learn that once more). In Sanson’s estimation, Trump’s claims of caring about coal miners are pure bunk. “This administration loves coal firms—I feel there’s a distinction.”
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“Look, that is from the highest down,” he defined to The Nation. “It is a systematic most cancers in our authorities that must be purged. It’s an absence of enforcement, it’s an absence of security guidelines and laws. Staff’ well being and security has positively passed by the wayside beneath this administration.”
For now, Sanson and everybody else there that morning are hoping that they’ll be capable of catch the president’s consideration and remind him of what he owes them.
“We petition the president of the US, the director of MSHA, and the secretary of labor to face and combat for the folks of Appalachia,” boomed UMWA’s president, sixth-generation coal miner Cecil Roberts, in his well-practiced preacher’s roar. “We wish illustration, we would like healthcare, we wish to finish this plague that’s happening within the coalfields of the US. Let’s raise these up in the present day who’re affected by pneumoconiosis, these on oxygen, these in wheelchairs. We ask our authorities to see us, see us and do one thing for us. Let’s cease the killing in Appalachia. All we would like is justice. We wish equity. And we would like it proper now.”
This coal miners’ gathering, like so many others, ended with a sermon and a prayer—to the president, to Congress, and to anyone else on the market who was listening. “We declare that you’ve got an ethical crucial to make this occur,” the Rev. Brad Davis, a pastor who serves coalfield communities in McDowell County, West Virginia, thundered because the rally got here to an finish. “Then and solely then will we echo the late, grea tHazel Dickens, “Black lung, black lung, you’re simply biding your time. Quickly your entire struggling will probably be much less.”
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