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The Journal editorial page accused ProPublica of misleading readers in a story that hadn’t yet been published.
We set a deadline of the following Tuesday at noon for a response.
Fifteen minutes later, McCabe called the reporters. It was an unusual moment in our dealings with the high court’s press office, the first time any of its public information officers had spoken directly with the ProPublica journalists in the many months we have spent looking into the justices’ ethics and conduct. When we sent detailed questions to the court for our stories on Justice Clarence Thomas, McCabe responded with an email that said they had been passed on to the justice. There was no further word from her before those stories appeared, not even a statement that Thomas would have no comment.
The conversation about Alito was brisk and professional. McCabe said she had noticed a formatting issue with an email, and the reporters agreed to resend the 18 questions in a Word document. Kaplan and Elliott told McCabe they understood that this was a busy time at the court and that they were willing to extend the deadline if Alito needed more time.
Monday was a federal holiday, Juneteenth. On Tuesday, McCabe called the reporters to tell them Alito would not respond to our requests for comment but said we should not write that he declined to comment. (In the story, we wrote that she told us he “would not be commenting.”)
She asked when the story was likely to be published. Certainly not today, the reporters replied. Perhaps as soon as Wednesday.
Six hours later, The Wall Street Journal editorial page posted an essay by Alito in which he used our questions to guess at the points in our unpublished story and rebut them in advance. His piece, headlined “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Readers,” was hard to follow for anyone outside ProPublica since it shot down allegations (notably the purported consumption of expensive wine) that had not yet been made.
In the hours after Alito’s response appeared, editors and reporters worked quickly to complete work on our investigative story. We did additional reporting to put Alito’s claims in context. The justice wrote in the Journal, “My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions,” and that none of those conversations involved “any case or issue before the Court.” He said he did not know of Singer’s involvement in a case about a long-standing dispute involving Argentina because the fund that was a party to the suit was called NML Capital and the billionaire’s name did not appear in Supreme Court briefs.
Alex Mierjeski, another reporter on the team, quickly pulled together a long list of prominent stories from the Journal, The New York Times and The Financial Times that identified Singer as the head of the hedge fund seeking to earn handsome profits by suing Argentina in U.S. courts. (The Supreme Court, with Alito joining the 7-1 majority, backed Singer’s arguments on a key legal issue, and Argentina ultimately paid the hedge fund $2.4 billion to settle the dispute.)
It does not appear that the editors at the Journal made much of an effort to fact-check Alito’s assertions.
If Alito had sent his response to us, we’d have asked some more questions. For example, Alito wrote that Supreme Court justices “commonly interpreted” the requirement to disclose gifts as not applying to “accommodations and transportation for social events.” We would have asked whether he meant to say it was common practice for justices to accept free vacations and private jet flights without disclosing them.
We also would have asked Alito more about his interpretation of the Watergate-era disclosure law that requires justices and many other federal officials to publicly report most gifts. The statute has a narrow “personal hospitality” exemption that allows federal officials to avoid disclosing “food, lodging, or entertainment” provided by a host on his own property. Seven ethics law experts, including former government ethics lawyers from both Republican and Democratic administrations, have told ProPublica that the exemption does not apply to private jet flights — and never has. Such flights, they said, are clearly not forms of food, lodging or entertainment. We had already combed through judicial disclosures, so we knew that several federal judges have disclosed gifts of private jet flights.
We might also have sent Alito some of the contemporaneous stories about Singer’s dispute with Argentina that were readily available online. Given Alito’s previous ties to the Journal’s editorial page — he granted it an exclusive interview this year complaining about negative coverage of the court — it’s probable that the stories we sent him would have included the page’s 2013 piece titled “Deadbeats Down South” that approvingly noted that “a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management” was holding out for a better deal from Argentina. We would have asked how his office checks for conflicts and whether he is concerned it didn’t catch Singer’s widely publicized connection to the case.
The Journal’s editorial page is entirely separate from its newsroom. Journalists were nonetheless sharply critical of the decision to help the subject of another news organization’s investigation “pre-but” the findings.
“This is a terrible look for @WSJ,” tweeted John Carreyrou, a former investigative reporter at the Journal whose award-winning articles on Theranos lead to the indictment and criminal conviction of its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. “Let’s see how it feels when another news organization front runs a sensitive story it’s working on with a preemptive comment from the story subject.”
Bill Grueskin, a former senior editor at the Journal and a professor of journalism at Columbia, told the Times that “Justice Alito could have issued this as a statement on the SCOTUS website. But the fact that he chose The Journal — and that the editorial page was willing to serve as his loyal factotum — says a great deal about the relationship between the two parties.”
Even Fox News got in the game. “Alito must be congratulating himself on his preemptive strike, but given that the nonprofit news agency sent him questions last week, was that really fair? And should the Journal, which has criticized ProPublica as a left-wing outfit, have played along with this? The paper included an editor’s note that ProPublica had sent the justice the questions, but did not mention that its story had not yet run,” the cable news outfit’s media watcher Howard Kurtz wrote.
There are lessons for ProPublica in this experience. Our reporters are likely to be a bit more skeptical when a spokesperson asks about the timing of a story’s publication.
But one thing is not changing. Regardless of the consequences, we will continue to give everyone mentioned in our stories a chance to respond before publication to what we’re planning to say about them.
Our practice, known internally as “no surprises,” is a matter of both accuracy and fairness. As editors, we have seen numerous instances over the years in which responses to our detailed questions have changed stories. Some have been substantially rewritten and rethought in light of the new information provided by subjects of stories. On rare occasions, we’ve killed stories after learning new facts.
We leave it to the PR professionals to assess whether pre-buttals are an effective strategy. Alito’s assertion that the private flight to Alaska was of no value because the seat was empty anyway became the subject of considerable online amusement.
And the readership of our story has been robust: 2 million page views and counting. It’s possible that Alito has won the argument with the audience he cares the most about. But it seems equally plausible that he drew even more attention to the very story he was trying to knock down.
Alito’s behavior underscores that the “no surprises” approach involves taking a risk, allowing subjects to “spit in our soup,” as Paul Steiger, the former Journal editor who founded ProPublica, liked to say.
Nevertheless, following our practice, we asked the Journal editorial page, Alito and McCabe for comment before this column appeared. We did not immediately hear back from them.
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Monday's order for Louisiana effectively leaves the lower court’s decision that ordered the state to redraw its map in effect — for now. (photo: Miriam Zuhaib/AP)
The high court’s action is a consequence of its recent decision affirming a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
Litigation over the map will now continue in a lower court.
Last summer, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Louisiana’s appeal after a district judge ruled that the state’s congressional lines likely diluted the power of Black voters in the state. The Supreme Court also imposed a stay of the judge’s order while the justices weighed a similar redistricting case in Alabama.
But on Monday, the Supreme Court reversed course, lifting its stay and dismissing its decision to hear the Louisiana appeal, saying it took the case prematurely.
The court’s decision on Monday is the first big domino to fall after the court issued its decision in the Alabama case — Allen v. Milligan — earlier this month. In that decision, the court reaffirmed a provision of the Voting Rights Act that allows minority voters to challenge voting maps that hinder their collective ability to elect their chosen candidates.
In the Allen decision, the court effectively found that the state’s congressional lines likely violated the landmark piece of civil rights legislation. Even though Black people make up roughly a quarter of Alabama’s population, just one of the state’s seven congressional districts is majority Black — which the challengers attributed to racial gerrymandering.
Monday’s order for Louisiana effectively leaves the lower court’s decision that ordered the state to redraw its map in effect — for now. The case will head to the 5th Circuit of Appeals, a famously conservative appeals court that legal experts are already speculating would likely look skeptically on allegations of racial vote dilution, despite the high court’s recent decision.
In sending the case back to the appellate level, the Supreme Court wrote that the case should continue “in the ordinary course and in advance of the 2024 congressional elections in Louisiana.”
Louisiana currently has one majority Black seat out of its six districts. Louisiana is approximately one-third Black.
Several other states — like Georgia and Texas — will likely also be affected by the Allen decision. Other successful dilution challenges across the South could ultimately result in a boost for Democrats as they try to retake the House majority.
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Some 2.7 million immigrants made up 26% of Florida's labor force in 2018, according to a census analysis. More than 300,000 worked in the construction sector. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
An undocumented immigrant who built a business and a life in Tampa is one of many who have left. "They don't want us here," he said.
“That is what has hurt me the most, my girls, who no longer have toys,” said Guerra, who is from El Salvador and who, until a few weeks ago, had a home, a yard and a business with his family in Tampa.
Their life as they knew it changed, according to Guerra, when Gov. Ron DeSantis, signed SB 1718, the immigration law that goes into effect on July 1. The law imposes strict restrictions and penalties to deter the employment of undocumented workers in the state.
Of the 10 people who lived in the Guerra house, only three children were U.S. citizens. The others didn't have legal immigration status. They left Tampa on May 30, from the same street where, a month earlier, Guerra had seen the belongings left behind by other immigrants and joked in a popular TikTok video that he would be next.
“After a month, I had to leave," Guerra told Noticias Telemundo from Maryland, where he moved with his family.
Guerra is not the only one. In various cities across the state, such as the farming community of Immokalee, many immigrants say they have at least one acquaintance, friend or neighbor who left after the law was passed. Some have posted of their exile on social networks.
‘They don’t want us here’
Guerra, a construction worker, came to the U.S. more than 20 years ago. Together with his partner, his sister-in-law and his stepdaughter — who's a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ( DACA) program — they worked polishing and putting the finishing touches on walls and ceilings in houses across the Tampa area.
Guerra has been in Tampa for six years, where he built a clientele and bought his tools. Leaving some of them behind when he left the state cost him more than $2,000 in losses, he said. In Maryland, neither he nor his family has been able to get a job.
"I was well, well, well situated in Florida. I was doing well financially, stable with work. There was no problem. Now it's the opposite," he said.
Some 2.7 million immigrants made up 26% of Florida’s labor force in 2018, according to a census analysis. More than 300,000 worked in the construction sector, like Guerra and his family.
Guerra said neighbors started to leave when the Legislature first introduced the immigration bill. By the time the Legislature voted on the law and DeSantis signed it, there were no workers on one of the projects he was working on.
“So the time came to make a decision: “I told my wife ‘no way, she’s going to have to go because they don’t want us here’”.
'Leaving your life'
Guerra packed what he had into two trucks and a car. In Maryland they live with a relative and have settled in as best they can. His two daughters, age 3 and 8, have to sleep with the adults.
“There (in Florida) they had their little bed, in the shape of a house, their rooms and now, well imagine,” he said with sadness.
His young daughter asks to go home and cries for her toys, he said.
Nearly 100 miles from Tampa, where Guerra lived with his family, a 25-year-old undocumented immigrant rented an apartment with her boyfriend in the city of Ocala.
Maria Fernanda, whose last name has been withheld because of her immigration status, arrived with a visa four years ago from Colombia. The visa was for a temporary stay that was extended by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Florida was “one of my favorite states,” Maria Fernanda said, until she feared what could happen when the law took effect. Her boyfriend is also undocumented, and before DeSantis’ law was passed, they decided to leave for New York.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to go through that fear or that need to see a policeman that can deport me or that they can stop me or ask me for my documents,’” Maria Fernanda said.
They left without saying goodbye to their acquaintances and left their belongings behind, but not their cats, Loki and Alicia. She documented her journey in a series of videos that she shared on TikTok. Most of the commenters, she said, have thanked her for not abandoning her pets.
“Where I go, they go, and where I have a roof, they will have a roof," she said.
Her boyfriend got a job in Delaware and she stayed in New York for work. The separation hurts; they must drive more than four hours to see each other and share the time with their cats.
“It is sad that couples, families are separated, that sometimes they abandon animals on the street because they cannot take them. They leave their things lying around, their houses abandoned," she said. "That is sad because it's leaving your life."
Gauging the exodus
It's difficult to know the number of immigrants who have left the state. Local communities and leaders base counts on what they hear by word of mouth: a neighbor who left his house, a worker who never came to work.
“This is happening at such a fast level that we don’t have a concrete number,” Rosa Elera, of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, told Noticias Telemundo.
The Florida Policy Institute has stated the legislation could cost Florida’s economy $12.6 billion in one year. Six industries, including construction, agriculture and services, employ an estimated 391,000 undocumented workers, or about 10% of workers in those sectors.
Elera said people are frightened and confused by the law.
Even though the law hasn't yet taken effect, the Florida Immigration Coalition has already received complaints that some clinics have been asking patients about their immigration status, even though only hospitals that accept Medicaid are required to ask about immigration status, and patients may decline to answer the question, Elera said.
“Primary doctors or clinics or emergency centers that do not receive Medicaid do not have to be asking the immigration status of a patient,” she said.
Guerra said he believed the environment changed after the law was passed. “Many Americans didn’t even greet you anymore, they looked down on you, so to speak,” he said. “That was what most led me to make the decision to come to Maryland."
Fear of leaving and returning
In Immokalee, Berta, an undocumented Guatemalan mother, picks tomatoes, chiles, squash and eggplants in the searing heat. About 40,000 farmworkers, many of them undocumented, work every season harvesting a variety of fruits and vegetables.
But for the first time in more than 18 years, Berta, 52, said she's afraid of living in the U.S.
“We are used to working here without anyone scaring us," she said. Now, “when I see police I am afraid that they will stop us, detain us and call the immigration authorities.”
Many of her acquaintances, she notes, have gone to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington.
When the harvest in Florida ends, Berta travels to other states to pick crops, but this year she wonders if she'll be able to come back.
Not everyone who fears the law can flee the state. Rosa Bartolo, 22, is an asylum seeker. Although she obtained a work permit, her husband and 15 other family members who live in Florida are undocumented.
Although the Guatemalan family has thought of leaving, they're staying because they know only farming and they speak only their Indigenous language, Akateko Maya.
Starting from scratch in another state for them “is more difficult because you don’t speak Spanish, you don’t speak English, it’s much more difficult. People see you badly, as a strange thing," she said.
'Like a rat'
When asked if he would return to Florida, Guerra said it's not in his plans, because he feels "damaged."
"It hurt, it hurt to have to throw everything out," he said. "It's a humiliation what they did, to take you out, like a rat."
In Maryland, he said, people treat him differently, better. Seven years ago he got his driver’s license in that state and in Florida, when the legislation takes effect, an undocumented immigrant won't be able to use a valid driver's license. “Thank God here you can breathe peace and tranquility,” he said.
María Fernanda is not afraid in New York. “I don’t feel that anyone who sees me and sees me as a Latina is going to stop me and say: ‘Hey, show me your documents.’ Here, where I am, I don’t feel persecuted because of my race."
Meanwhile, Guerra takes comfort in knowing that before he left Florida he could give away some of his family's belongings to other immigrants in need. A young Cuban recently arrived in the country, he said, and took almost everything.
“’Thank God,’ (the young man) told me, ‘I was sleeping on the floor and look, now I have beds,’” Guerra said. “Starting from scratch is very sad.”
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A man signs a memorial poster for Roger Kieca on June 9 outside the sprawling Amazon warehouse complex in Joliet, Illinois. (photo: Sarah Lazare/In These Times)
A 911 call, obtained through a FOIA, only cites dehydration as the possible cause of the fatal medical emergency.
Amazon has repeatedly denied that workplace conditions had anything to do with the death of the 59-year-old, and stated that the tragedy was “due to a non-work related medical incident.”
“There is no evidence that this unfortunate incident was related to tasks the employee was performing as part of his standard work in our climate-controlled facility that did not exceed 77 degrees,” Maureen Lynch Vogel, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote in an email on June 4, two days after Kieca’s death.
But the death at the facility, which is known as MDW2, has raised the concerns of at least one city official. “I find it incredibly hard to believe that the circumstances of [Kieca’s] work had nothing to do with the circumstances of his death,” Joliet City Council member Cesar Guerrero tells In These Times and Workday Magazine. “I didn’t know Roger or the conditions under which he worked specifically, but I have known plenty of people who have worked at Amazon — friends, family members — and every single one of them has had some horror story or another.”
Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a workers’ rights nonprofit that is affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, is also asking questions about Kieca’s death and has tried to raise the alarm about Amazon’s history of worker safety issues. In a statement, the organization wrote, “We are asking the relevant authorities to seek greater oversight of industry practices with regard to emergency medical services to ensure that all warehouse workers across Will County are kept safe.”
New information collected by In These Times and Workday Magazine also raises questions about the circumstances surrounding Kieca’s death. An audio recording of a 911 call placed by another Amazon employee, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, shows that the individual making the call believed the cause of Kieca’s medical distress was possibly “dehydration” — the only potential cause cited by the caller. This recording appears to contradict Amazon’s narrative that the cause of death was not related to conditions in and around the warehouse, and raises questions about whether his death could have been prevented.
Kieca was an Air Force veteran nicknamed “Santa” by coworkers because of his white beard and jolly demeanor. He worked as an electric pallet jack operator at Amazon’s MDW2 cross-dock warehouse that allows the company to ship in bulk and is known for the rapid movement of goods.
Amazon told In These Times and Workday Magazine that, after Kieca suffered a medical incident, he was first brought to AmCare, Amazon’s in-house first-aid clinic. After his symptoms changed, Amazon says it called 911 (when asked, the company would not reveal what his initial symptoms were or how they changed, citing unspecified privacy issues). The company did not specify who at Amazon made the call, but said the call came from someone with the company.
In the audio recording of the call, which was made at 1:19 p.m. on June 2, a woman can be heard requesting an ambulance. She explained that Kieca was within the “medical facility,” where he was unconscious but breathing, and had medical staff with him.
The dispatcher asked, “Do you know what caused this?” After getting no response, he repeated, “Ma’am, do you know what caused this?”
She replied: “Not sure. Dehydration.” Less than two minutes later in the recording, emergency responders can be heard saying that Kieca had gone into cardiac arrest.
The Joliet Fire Department confirmed that it responded to a male in cardiac arrest at the MDW2 facility, but offered little information.
“The employees of the warehouse had used an AED [automated external defibrillator] on the patient and the patient had temporarily regained a pulse. The patient did not sustain the pulse while being transported to the hospital,” says Joliet fire chief Jeffery Carey.
Kieca died on the way to the hospital.
Tommy Carden is an organizer with WWJ. He says, “From day one, Amazon has tried to make it seem like it wasn’t their fault, it’s all preexisting conditions, it’s all non-work related. And now we’re learning someone thought it was … dehydration.”
If dehydration put stress on Kieca’s system and contributed to the heart attack, Carden says, this raises questions about the safety of Amazon workers, especially as temperatures rise during the summer months. (Severe dehydration can be a contributing factor to cardiac arrest.)
“If AmCare misinterpreted a heart attack and thought it was dehydration,” he adds, “that’s also really problematic, because it means they could have wasted precious time that was needed to get Roger the true medical care that was needed.”
According to the Cleveland Clinic, “Time is critical in treating a heart attack, and a delay of even a few minutes can result in permanent heart damage or death.”
Either way, Carden says, the 911 call raises questions about why Amazon is so confident Kieca’s death had nothing to do with his workplace environment.
Asked to comment on the 911 call and WWJ’s reaction, Amazon would only say that the company had already provided information on “this non-work-related incident.”
Not work related?
Amazon’s Vogel repeatedly said Kieca’s death was not work related, and that the company has made counseling services available to the warehouse employees.
But, Carden says, “We’ve heard from many workers at MDW2 about temperature issues not just this week, but for years, especially at the docks. Based on what we’ve heard from workers, we simply don’t believe it’s true that the temperature does not rise above 77 degrees.”
Three workers at the MDW2 facility, speaking on condition of anonymity due to concerns about retaliation, said the area near the docks, where Kieca normally worked, is exposed to outdoor temperatures and can get extremely hot in the summer, especially the trailers outside.
“Those trailers are sitting outside in the sun, there’s nothing covering them, those trailers are not air conditioned,” one of the workers said. “That’s like an Easy-Bake Oven.”
“In all honesty, that warehouse during the summer is hotter than it is outside,” another worker said. “That man [Kieca] worked in the trailer. We are also in the trailers stacking. The fans they give us don’t reach all the way inside either.”
Amazon said Kieca was not in the trailers at the time of the incident, but was working as a trainer in a climate-controlled outbound buffer near the dock.
The company also said that employees at the facility have access to 60 water coolers and are encouraged to take water breaks, but WWJ representative Andrew Herrera says workers regularly report facing demerits or being let go because of strict quotas that mean they don’t always have time to take water breaks.
Asked to respond, Amazon’s Vogel wrote: “Employees are allowed and encouraged to take short breaks whenever they need to for water, to use the restroom, or to speak with a manager or HR.”
Herrera says, “All official policies, availability of water stations, or other supposed accommodations are meaningless window dressing if workers do not believe that they can use those resources without reprimand.”
Amazon has been widely criticized by lawmakers in states including New York, California and Connecticut for its strict quota system not allowing employees to take breaks when they need them.
Carey, the fire chief, said there is nothing in the emergency medical service (EMS) report to confirm that Kieca’s incident was caused by excessive heat or the work he was doing. “We do not determine cause of death. That information is determined by the coroner,” he said.
Reached by phone, the Will County Coroner’s Office declined to comment.
A spokesperson for State Rep. Lawrence Walsh, Jr. (D-Joliet) said the lawmaker’s office was told that when Kieca’s body arrived at the hospital, a doctor determined the death to be by natural causes, so his remains were never under the coroner’s jurisdiction.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has already closed its investigation into Kieca’s death. An OSHA spokesperson said the death was determined to be by natural causes and not heat-related.
But, according to Carden, the 911 call raises new questions. “This revelation,” he says, “warrants a re-opening of the inspection into Roger’s death, with consideration of employee hydration and water breaks at MDW2 and the role that AmCare plays in delaying and preventing appropriate medical treatment for workers.”
A recording of another 911 call from the neighboring MDW4 Amazon fulfillment center, obtained through a FOIA request, shows that Kieca was not the only Amazon worker in Joliet reportedly suffering from dehydration that day. Around seven hours later, a woman who appears to be from AmCare called 911 to seek help for a 29-year-old man.
“I have an associate that is here at Amazon. He came in feeling severely dehydrated, dizzy, and just kind of, like, out of it. We’ve been giving him water, ice packs,” states the woman in the call, made at 8:24 p.m. on June 2.
When asked if there is a “certain door” the ambulance should go to, the caller from Amazon states, “It would be the main entrance door. They are very familiar with the entrance. They come here quite often, sadly to say.”
Asked to comment on this other June 2 incident and the 911 caller’s statement that ambulances are often called to the warehouse, Amazon would only say that the company had already provided information on “this non-work-related incident,” presumably referring to Kieca’s death.
Unclear timeline
It remains unclear how much time passed between Kieca’s initial medical incident, when he was sent to AmCare, and when Amazon called the ambulance. This lack of information is frustrating for one of Kieca’s former coworkers, who requested anonymity over concerns about retaliation. “I want to know what happened during those valuable minutes between when they found him and when they called 911,” said the individual.
The company claims that Kieca did not want outside medical treatment, but In These Times and Workday Magazine were unable to confirm this assertion about his preferences. Amazon declined repeated requests for information about critical details, including the precise timeline of the incident, the symptoms Kieca displayed and how they changed, and how long he was in AmCare before the 911 call.
The company cited privacy issues, but did not respond to a request to outline its specific privacy concerns, which is confusing given that it voluntarily shared other personal medical details about Kieca, including: that he allegedly did not want outside treatment, that he allegedly was not in a collapsed state when he was found, and that his death allegedly did not relate to his workplace.
Warehouse Workers for Justice is “calling on Amazon to share greater details around how it plans to minimize response time for medical emergencies,” the organization said in a statement.
AmCare, which is staffed by emergency medical technicians and athletic trainers, has been criticized by OSHA for allegedly failing to refer workers to doctors or hospitals when needed. A 2019 investigation by The Intercept and Type Investigations found that “AmCare employees nationwide were pressured to sweep injuries and medical issues under the rug at the expense of employee health.”
“In various instances,” the report states, “OSHA investigators found that Amcare medical staff decided to treat the employees in-house, rather than referring them to doctors or hospitals.”
OSHA’s past criticisms of AmCare were unrelated to the agency’s investigation into Kieca’s death.
One worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, expressed concern that AmCare at the Joliet warehouse complex does not provide care that proactively protects worker health. The Amazon employee, who once suffered a broken foot at the MDW2 facility, told In These Times and Workday Magazine that AmCare staff did not diagnose the injury or recommend an X-ray, but only told the worker to elevate the foot and put ice on it.
“When something happens to you, they’re not going to offer any type of suggestions,” the worker says of AmCare. “You have to be your own doctor.”
Amazon did not respond directly to the worker’s claim, but said that employees can seek outside medical treatment if they want to, and workers who need care beyond first aid are encouraged to seek it offsite.
“We take the safety and well-being of our employees extremely seriously. Claims that we intentionally or systemically delay care to keep injured employees on the job are wrong,” said Vogel.
Safety record
The June 2 tragedy is only the latest in a series of widely-reported fatalities and injuries at Amazon warehouses in recent years.
In 2017, another Amazon employee in Joliet died of a heart attack while on the job. The 57-year-old worked at the MDW4 fulfillment center, next door to the MDW2 facility. His widow later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Amazon alleging the company needlessly delayed emergency care, but last year, a judge granted summary judgment in favor of the company.
Last July, a 42-year-old Amazon warehouse worker also died of a heart attack at the company’s EWR9 fulfillment center in Carteret, New Jersey during the Prime Day sales rush. Workers alleged sweltering conditions inside the warehouse at the time, but an OSHA investigation determined the cause to be “myocardial fibrosis unrelated to work.” Amazon upgraded the facility’s air conditioning system soon after the incident.
Another employee at a New Jersey Amazon warehouse died last summer after suffering an accident on the job. Those and other deaths prompted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York to launch an ongoing federal investigation into workplace safety at Amazon facilities nationwide.
The Department of Justice’s civil division is also probing whether the company tried to fraudulently hide the true number of workplace injuries. Last December, OSHA hit Amazon with 14 citations for failing to properly record injuries and illnesses.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), is now also launching an investigation into health and safety conditions at Amazon warehouses. “The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year,” Sanders wrote in a June 20 letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
A recent report by the union-supported Strategic Organizing Center found that while Amazon employed 36% of all U.S. warehouse workers in 2022, the company was responsible for 53% of all serious injuries in the industry. Meanwhile, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health placed Amazon on its 2023 “Dirty Dozen” list of unsafe employers.
So far this year, OSHA has cited Amazon four times for safety violations at seven different facilities across the country (three of the citations targeted more than one facility). OSHA investigators say the company has exposed warehouse workers to a high risk of low back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders by demanding they work at a rapid pace.
Last month, a 20-year-old worker died after suffering a head injury at an Amazon fulfillment center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That incident is currently being investigated by OSHA.
“We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously, and we don’t believe the government’s allegations reflect the reality of safety at our sites,” Vogel said on behalf of Amazon. “We’ve cooperated with the government through its investigation and have demonstrated how we work to mitigate risks and keep our people safe, and our publicly available data show we reduced injury rates in the U.S. 23% between 2019 and 2022. We also know there will always be more to do, and we’ll continue working to get better every day.”
Local organizing
Kieca’s death is not the first time concerns have been raised about conditions at Amazon’s Joliet warehouses. Partnering with WWJ, workers at the MDW2 facility staged two brief walkouts last October and November calling for stronger health and safety policies, in addition to pay raises.
“A significant portion of our population in Joliet work in warehouses, even besides Amazon,” said Cesar Escutia, a Joliet township trustee and former MDW2 worker who helped lead last year’s walkouts. “Amazon is a huge company. I feel like they could be the forerunners to really reinvent workplace safety when it comes to warehouses. They have every resource at their disposal to set the standards for working conditions so that people can do these jobs with dignity and go home safely. And they simply aren’t doing that.”
At the 11:15 a.m. lunch break on June 9, around 20 workers and organizers gathered outside the Joliet Amazon warehouse complex to commemorate Kieca. A speaker played gospel and R&B music, as workers signed a large poster, affixed to a chain link fence topped with barbed wire, memorializing their coworker. The crowd, confined to a small patch of grass by Amazon managers, released red and white balloons under a blazing sun to declarations of, “Long live Roger!”
“We are here to remember a life that was taken away suddenly,” said Maria Alfaro, organizing director for WWJ.
“While Amazon has said he died of natural causes,” she added, speaking through a microphone, to the crowd that had formed a semi-circle facing her, “we would like to know what happened to him.”
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Hannah Geitner distributes assignments to her class at Stege elementary school in Richmond, California. (photo: Felix Uribe Jr/Guardian UK)
Thousands of kids in my hometown hear, see or witness shootings near their schools each year. Why aren’t we doing more to help them cope?
Behind the heavy doors of Hannah Geitner’s fifth-grade classroom, 26 students were seated at small tables and on a cozy green rug. It was sunny and warm out, but inside, it was impossible to tell; the room’s windows had yellowed over the years.
I was there to talk to the 10- and 11-year-olds about gun violence, a topic I suspected many of them had been personally affected by.
“How many of you have heard a real gunshot by your house?” I asked. Twenty-four arms went up in the air.
“How many of you know someone – a family member or friend – who has been shot?” Eighteen students raised their hands.
For more than six months, I had been researching gun violence near elementary schools in my hometown of Richmond. By analyzing police department data, I found that 41% of the 2,300 shots fired in the city over the past decade happened within a half-mile, or about a 10-minute walk, of one of the city’s 33 K-12 public schools. More than 80% of the shootings that took place near schools occurred within a half-mile of an elementary school. Stege elementary has seen an average of six shootings nearby each year since the beginning of 2013.
Some of those shootings were homicides, some were armed robberies, some happened during the school day and some outside of it. The campuses with the most incidents nearby were those in neighborhoods with lower median incomes than the rest of the city, census data showed. This means that for the past decade, thousands of Richmond kids, many of whom are Black and Latino, were exposed to a violent incident before they turned 13.
Chronic exposure to gun violence like what some young kids in Richmond face can create a “war-zone” mentality among affected youth, James Garbarino, a psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in child and adolescent development, argues in a 2022 New England journal of medicine article, resulting in a world view in which community violence is normal.
Yet few American school districts, including Richmond’s, have consistent programming for K-12 students to help them navigate the emotions, stress and anxiety that come with being exposed to day-to-day gun violence. Most efforts in schools are centered on mass shootings, and the few initiatives focused on community gun violence that do exist are tailored towards high schoolers.
When I asked Geitner’s fifth graders how many had had someone at school – other than Geitner herself – talk to them about guns and violence, some of the kids raised their hands and began pointing to their peers.
But when I clarified that I meant teachers and school staff, all of the hands came down.
After the class conversation, Geitner said she believed all of the children in her class had been exposed to gun violence, either near campus or near their homes.
Several of the children who didn’t raise their hands at the beginning of my visit, I later realized, were still learning English. Three of them, two from Nicaragua and one from El Salvador, told me through another student that they had all heard gunfire when living in Central America. One of the students from Nicaragua said that he’d also heard gunshots since being in the US, and had been upset after gunfire had interrupted his sleep.
“I would love to know the right thing to say to a fifth grader who saw a shooting last night,” said Geitner. “You drive around and there are memorials all over the place. I have kids who come with the lanyards, T-shirts and buttons of loved ones [who’ve been killed]. It’s wild to think about how much violence and death they’ve all known.”
A city grappling with violence
Located about 18 miles north of San Francisco, Richmond is known for its struggles with gun violence and the programs that have become nationally renowned for fighting it.
The city’s Black population boomed during the second world war, when its shipyards built many of the US’s warships and attracted people from southern states. But in the decades after, it was hit hard by economic challenges, housing segregation, and the crack epidemic. Now, it’s a city where low-income Black and Latino residents are less likely to have access to healthy foods and more likely to live in neighborhoods affected by pollution caused by hazardous waste sites and factory emissions.
Richmond also developed a reputation as one of the most dangerous in the US: with fewer than 100,000 residents, homicides reached a high of 61 in 1991. The rate fluctuated when I was growing up there in the early 2000s and 2010s, reaching a low in 2001 and a decade high in 2007, when 47 people were killed. Over the next several years, a number of pioneering community programs were founded that helped lead to a dramatic reduction in homicides over the next decade. But though lower than in years before, gun violence has not been eliminated. Eighteen people were killed in 2021 and 2022, the majority of them with guns.
Geitner, an energetic, raspy-voiced millennial with dark blond hair, moved to Richmond from a small town near Syracuse, New York, to work at Stege through Teach for America, a national nonprofit that sends young educators to the US’s most underserved schools. She arrived in California hardly knowing anyone. The school quickly became her home, and the kids and their caregivers her family. When she finished the program, she took a permanent job at Stege as a special education teacher, helping kids in all grades with math and reading. Last year, she taught fourth grade, and in the 2022 school year she began teaching fifth graders.
Geitner recalled a day last year when one of her fourth-grade students wasn’t acting like himself. “He talks a lot, is super outgoing, loves to tell you everything about everything. He takes his education so seriously, but something was off and I saw him outside at recess and he wasn’t playing.”
She asked the boy if he wanted to talk, and at first he hesitated, but once the other kids left the classroom he stayed back. Eventually, he opened up: the night before, he and his older brother – a high school senior at the time – had been robbed at gunpoint after buying snacks from a mini-mart near their home. The assailant had made them empty their backpacks.
“He was in fourth grade so he only had paper in his bag, and they gave them all the money and he had no idea how to process it,” Geitner recalled.
The next day, the boy brought a BB gun to school. “He got nervous and put it in his younger cousin’s backpack before school started, so there was a first grader with a gun in the backpack. Eventually it came out that it was him who brought it.”
When Geitner later asked the boy why he had brought the BB gun, he said that he no longer felt safe.
The struggle to learn
The incident made clear the emotional ramifications of gun violence. Often, though, the clues are more subtle, several Stege teachers said.
“If something happened in the neighborhood, students come to school upset. Even a pencil breaking sets them off,” said Sonia Perez, a first-grade teacher and Richmond native. “And sometimes their responses, because they’re coming with trauma, are preventing them from learning because their minds are somewhere else.”
Michaela, a student in Geitner’s fifth-grade class, said she often thought about gun violence. She’s heard gunshots in each apartment complex she’s lived in, and several of her cousins and uncles have been shot or killed. These memories, and fears such shootings may happen again, could make her “extra sensitive” at times, she said, and in those moments, she didn’t want to participate in class or be talked to or touched.
“In my head I be knowing that I’m wrong, so I be feeling bad, but at the same time I’m mad. I be saying to myself that I want to give up on school because it feels like it’s too much to do. Sometimes I wanna hit somebody or throw something.”
Before Geitner became her teacher, Michaela would ready herself on these “extra sensitive” days to be sent to the principal’s office or for the teacher to call her mom. Instead, Michaela said, Geitner lets students go for a walk or run outside or have a moment to themselves. They can even nap if they need to.
“All behavior is a form of communication, Geinter said. “If Michaela comes in and is a little grumpy, I know she’s not mad at me so it has to be something else. I don’t think disciplining her is going to solve the problem. If you’re grumpy, or you can’t sleep, or you have hard feelings, you can’t learn.”
Perez, the first-grade teacher, said she also offered the students strategies. “We have a break spot – they have noise cancellation headphones and a sound machine that relaxes them.” But those techniques weren’t getting at the deeper issues they face. “We’re just putting a bandage on it for that moment and we’re not actually targeting how they feel.”
The impacts of exposure
Across the US, Black youth are nine times more likely than their white peers to have a gun homicide happen near their home each year, according to a June 2022 study by the University of California, Davis. Latino youth are seven times more likely to have this experience than white children.
It’s a disparity that can be seen in Richmond. Less than a half-mile away from Stege is the border of El Cerrito, a middle-class, majority white and Asian city. Yet residents of El Cerrito face far less gun violence: in 2018, the most recent year for which police have full crime data, there were 107 shootings, two of which were homicides. The same year in Richmond, there were 1,137 shootings, more than 90 of which were homicides.
Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, the assistant professor at UC Davis’s violence prevention research program who led the study, said repeated exposure to gun violence could lead to persistent fear and depression, feelings that can lead kids to detach from their schools and local communities and carry weapons to feel protected.
Kravitz-Wirtz is part of a growing chorus of researchers imploring their peers to broaden their ideas about gun violence exposure. It’s not just about seeing or hearing gunshots, she said, but also about bearing witness to the ways that day-to-day gun violence changes communities.
Seeing a vigil near campus, seeing their parents become hesitant to let them play outside or having a police officer suddenly sitting outside their campus is a type of exposure that affects more students than the sound of gunfire does, Kravitz-Wirtz said.
“We like to emphasize that the experiences [with gun violence] that people have directly are just the tip of the iceberg and that’s most visible,” Kravitz-Wirtz said. “But in terms of impacting a larger number of kids, it’s the secondary layer of exposure that [is] more far-reaching.”
While schools are typically quick to arrange mental health services and interventions following a mass shooting, many kids who are chronically exposed to community gun violence struggle to access such services, according to Garbarino, the Loyola professor. And yet, he told the Guardian, intervention during elementary school could go a long way. “Elementary school is a time when [children] are vulnerable and they are also malleable to prevention. It’s a context that’s ripe for intervention and preventive programs,” he said.
Districts’ lack of sustained programming in elementary schools was not due to a lack of available information, but rather was a failure by government officials and school leadership across the US, said Dr David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
“It’s not that people are ignorant, it’s that they choose other decisions,” Schonfeld said.
While conversations about trauma and gun violence had become more common, action was still lagging, he said. “The bottom line is that kids are aware of what’s going on, even if they’re in elementary school. When we don’t talk to children about these things, we don’t help them cope with it.”
‘We need full-time counseling’
Left to fill the gap left by the lack of school programming at elementary schools are community programs, local advocates and individual teachers and school administrators.
Stege has two psychologists who come on campus twice a week, and the West Contra Costa Unified school district (WCCUSD), which Stege is a part of, has a partnership with an outside mental health organization.
The district is considered a “full-service schools district”, where K-12 schools are meant to be hubs for education, family engagement and mental and behavioral health services. The state of California has dedicated more than $3bn in funding for other campuses to follow this model. In 2022, the district received $30m of that money to be spread across 22 campuses, including Stege.
“We know that a shooting near a school is going to impact students’ success academically and socially, but there are ways that we can offset that,” Tony Thurmond, California’s state superintendent of public instruction, told the Guardian. “Even with training, these are difficult things and we have to work to find ways to help children express, be supported and address the fears that they hold.”
Still, teachers at Stege are struggling. They want to see more coordination between local police, the district and Stege staff, so they can be better informed about shootings happening outside of school and be able to look out for signs of trauma.
Rashelle Rew, a fourth-grade teacher in her third year at Stege, recalled two shootings last year at the park across from campus during an after-school program. Students heard the gunshots and were brought into the cafeteria to shelter in place. Since the shootings didn’t happen on school grounds or during official school hours, the district never sent a notice to other staff or families, and it is unclear if district leadership knew about the incident.
Teachers also said they needed more training in what to say to children who have been affected by gun violence. “I’ve had a student come and say his dad threatened to kill his mom. I don’t know if we as teachers always know what to do with that,” said Josh Miller, a 28-year-old second-grade teacher who recently moved to Richmond from Kansas with his wife, who is also a teacher at Stege. “I just try to get a straight answer, try to get the general story and then make sure the child is safe. It would be great to have had training on how to walk kids through that.”
And, some teachers said, the district should work harder to gain the trust of parents. “A lot of our parents went through this district and got fucked over, and I don’t think that’s been acknowledged,” said Geitner. “How can we start repairing these relationships?”
School board trustees emphasized that homicide rates in the city had decreased dramatically in the past 15 years and that the district contracted with non-profits to bring arts and wellness programming to students.
They also pointed at funding shortages, noting the district had gone in and out of solvency in recent years, leading to staffing and program cuts. This school year, the district had a $27m deficit, contributing to high instructor and administrator turnover.
“The resources need to be there all the time,” said Leslie Reckler, a district board trustee who represents schools in both Richmond and El Cerrito. “We need full-time counseling and we are still short of the resources to provide that.”
Reckler and other board trustees said there was some work being done on high school campuses, but that they were not aware of any programs geared at elementary-aged children.
The district does offer annual active shooter trainings, but those sessions are meant to ready teachers for the possibility of an on-campus incident.
“We can do more,” admitted Gayle McLaughlin, a Richmond city councilor and former mayor whose district includes Stege. She said she couldn’t recall having any conversations with education officials about gun violence exposure near elementary schools, but she hoped to have a meeting this fall between district and city leadership about how they could be better coordinated. Nothing was scheduled yet, McLaughlin said.
Dr Kenneth Hurst, the district superintendent, described WCCUSD as a “tough district” where academics have suffered for years and financial solvency has been elusive.
But he’s hopeful that the recent infusion of millions in state grant funding will alleviate that strain so administrators can create and sustain programming to help elementary school kids cope with their trauma.
“They can’t focus on on the learning until we focus on the trauma. That’s what we are trying to do with the community schools,” said Hurst, who has been with the district for two years.
Working towards solutions
Richmond is a unique place to think about solutions to gun violence. For the last four years as a reporter covering gun violence, I’ve been writing about the city’s long and successful history of community organizing. I’ve seen organizations go from local groups to national models in gun violence prevention, honored at the White House and by members of Congress.
In 2016, the Richmond native DeVone Boggan founded the intensive violence intervention program Advance Peace, which deploys services and mentorship to the small number of people involved in most of the city’s violence.
Boggan has come to see that traumatic childhood experiences often shape the lives of people who later become perpetrators of gun violence: “A big part of our work is helping them heal from all of this shit that they’re still negotiating because no one has ever sat with them, talked with them and listened to what’s really going on in their mind,” he said.
Elementary schools, he said, could and should be a crucial point of intervention to divert kids from interpersonal conflicts that can turn deadly. “Why wait until they’re a shooter to provide them with mentoring multiple times a day?”
Advance Peace has since become a national model, replicated in cities across the country. It was recently tapped by high schools in Richmond to work with students who are involved in neighborhood conflicts. And the city’s office of neighborhood safety (ONS), which Boggan used to direct, is working with the district to provide on-campus support to middle and high schools. But, Boggan said, schools were often hesitant to work with violence interrupters, many of whom were previously incarcerated for committing violence themselves.
“That’s the community expertise you’ve got to be able to tap into. And often the only expertise comes from the trenches.”
Sam Vaughn, who currently leads ONS, echoed Boggan’s view: “Every time something firearm related happens at the school, they call on us and it’s an emergency. But what about some prevention?”
Elana Bolds is another longtime Richmond gun violence prevention worker and has loved on generations of Stege students. She runs an active shooter drill for young kids that teaches them how to respond when a neighborhood shooting breaks out in their community.
“The babies, especially the Black boys, had so much anger,” she said. “They may have had a brother or father be shot and ask, ‘What point is there to be a good student if I’m at school and no one’s talking about it?’”
Bolds has recently taken a new job with the district overseeing after-school programs, which she hopes will help her bring inspiring stories about Black and Latino activists and creators to students.
Geitner too believes that success will come from grassroots initiatives like these. “The people at the top, they’re really out of touch with what kids are experiencing,” she said.
Geitner now has six godchildren in the community. In the four years she’s been in Richmond, she has gone to students’ homes for dinner, taken them to play at their basketball tournaments and made it a point to meet community leaders like Bolds.
As her fifth graders prepared for summer, several said they would like her to be their teacher next year as well. For many of the students, it seems, Geitner has become an ally and source of acceptance they hadn’t experienced in school before.
“Ms Hannah doesn’t let anybody give up,” Michaela told me.
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Campaign posters along La Reforma Avenue last week in Guatemala City. (photo: Daniele Volpe/NYT)
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Coal miners are tested for black lung at a clinic in West Virginia. (photo: David Deal/NPR)
Miners and their advocates have long demanded stricter standards on exposure to silica, a leading cause of an epidemic of black lung. They’re still waiting.
Miners have always been at risk of black lung, but pulmonologists and medical researchers have seen a marked increase in recent years. The disease, while not genetic or contagious, often wends its way through families who work the mines. Hairston’s brother and father have it, too. Now, between frequent trips to the hospital, he fights for the rights and needs of others like them as president of the National Black Lung Association. He worked for decades before his diagnosis, but these days sees younger workers who don’t make it nearly that long.
“These younger coal miners had been in the mine five years and some barely could breathe, they had to take breaths, even at talks,” Hairston said.
Experts point to the increasing prevalence of crystalline silica in the mines as a cause of this change. Silica is often found in quartz, which is embedded deeply within the sandstone that surrounds coal. It is ground to fine dust and kicked into the air by the machines that cut coal from ground, then settles deeply in the lungs, scarring the tissue and making it increasingly difficult to breathe. As mining companies have exhausted high-quality seams of coal, they’ve increasingly turned to inferior veins with larger volumes of other minerals, making silica exposure more likely. Pulmonologists have called the increasing prevalence of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis an epidemic, which they’ve blamed in part on lax regulations, too little protective gear, and lack of safety training for miners. Researchers have found that as many as 1 in 5 miners in Central Appalachia may have black lung, and 1 in 20 have progressive massive fibrosis, the most advanced form of the disease, which is linked directly to silica exposure.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration* oversees mine safety and operates under different rules than the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Under its guidelines, miners can be exposed to twice as much silica dust as workers in any other industry. After decades of protest by coal miners and their families demanding a stricter exposure standard, MSHA has introduced some preventative measures, including increased inspections, miner education, and greater dust sampling. But many workers and their allies find the agency’s response wanting, and they want the acceptable level of silica exposure cut from 100 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 50, bringing it in line with OSHA’s regulation.
“We really try to fight for the silica standard,” Hairston said. “So some of these younger miners won’t go through what we went through.”
Federal mining regulators, along with the Kentucky and West Virginia coal associations, did not respond to requests for comment.
Rumblings of an epidemic, and rising concern about silica exposure, have been underlined by data. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released earlier this year found that not only are cases increasing, but mortality rates from black lung and other lung disease have steadily climbed among miners born after 1939, with mortality highest among the youngest miners. An American Thoracic Society study published last year, which involved many of the same researchers as the CDC study, linked increased silica exposure directly to the increase in black lung cases. A joint investigation by NPR and Frontline five years ago found thousands of instances in which miners were exposed to dangerous levels of silica. Calls for a stricter silica exposure standard followed, but still, nothing.
Black lung patients and their advocates petitioned the Mine Safety and Health Administration for an updated silica rule in 2011, but it took until last year for the agency to propose an updated rule and send it to the Office of Management and Budget for review. By April, mine regulators had promised to deliver a draft of the proposal, which would then go through a lengthy public comment period and possible revisions before approval. But the rule is still with the OMB, and no one’s sure why it’s taking so long.
Celeste Monforton, a former MSHA official and occupational health researcher at George Washington University and Texas State University, worries that further delays could once again punt a decision to a new administration. “The clock is ticking,” she said. “The whole purpose of a proposed rule is to propose something and get that comment, not trying to make some perfect document.”
Monforton says that more rigorous coal dust sampling — including continuous air monitoring and having inspectors spend more than a day at a given location — and preventative measures like increased ventilation could help prevent black lung. “The things that actually control the dust are the most effective way to protect mineworkers,” she said. But, she adds, history has made it difficult to trust mine operators with miners’ welfare, making strict regulations and enforcement necessary. As Lynn Morley Martin, who was secretary of labor under President George H.W. Bush, said in 1991, the coal industry is addicted to cheating.
In yet another example of that, on June 8, a judge sentenced the Black Diamond Coal Company and Walter Perkins, a certified dust examiner, for falsifying coal dust samples at a mine in Floyd County, Kentucky. In an unprecedented move, MSHA fined the company $200,000 and ordered it to pay $400 apiece to former miners to cover black lung screenings that are available at no cost to those still working. Perkins, who lied to investigators about a coal monitor being faulty, is headed to jail for six months.
Chris Williamson, whom President Biden appointed to lead the MSHA in 2022, has stated his intent to pursue stricter standards on silica dust exposure. In addition to holding Black Diamond and other companies accountable for safety violations, the agency announced last year that it would more rigorously enforce inspections, an initiative it called Miner Health Matters. But many miners’ advocates say the agency needs more funding to protect coal miners.
“Once we get the standard passed … we have to see how we can make sure they get funded to hire more inspectors,” Hairston said.
That’s difficult when the agency’s $400 million budget has been in trouble for years. The organization, which oversees workplace safety in the nation’s mining and mineral processing industries, lost 30 percent of its staff between 2013 and 2022, with inspection capabilities taking a big hit and funding for the agency more or less remaining flat. While current safety standards focus on personal protective equipment for miners, advocacy organizations like the Black Lung Associations want to see a safer threshold for dust levels throughout the workplace.
The coal industry has long fought stricter regulations on silica, but when miners seek benefits for their resulting illness, it is loath to pay. It often fights sick coal miners in court for years over their eligibility for health care and other benefits. Past investigations have found that filing for bankruptcy allows many companies to get out of the business without paying their debts to employees and others. Willie Dodson, an organizer with advocacy organization Appalachian Voices, says, once again, that’s cheating.
“It just seems like they don’t want to spend money on the true impacts of their operations,” Dodson said. “It just seems like the coal lobby is just more concerned with the profit of the top dogs than they are for the health and well being of the people actually doing the work.”
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