"Voluntary compliance"

In his most recent editorial, the New York Observer's Joe Conason decries the non-existent enforcement of mining safety regulations under Bush Administration guidelines and budget cuts, and explains why the Sago tragedy should remain in the media's spotlight a good deal longer. Mr. Conason writes:

The sad but safe assumption about the Sago miners is that when their funerals are over, we will forget about them, their mourning families, and the working conditions that still threaten so many like them. We will forget and, with occasional exceptions in the pages of liberal magazines and daily newspapers, we won't be reminded until the next mesmerizing catastrophe shows up on the cable channels.

(...)

Unfortunately the hard truth is that under this government, the scant measures we undertake as a nation to protect miners and other workers in dangerous industries are growing smaller. The budgets of federal regulatory agencies are cut. The officials appointed to run those agencies tend to be former industry executives who display no enthusiasm for enforcing safety regulations. They prefer "voluntary compliance."

Conason then gives an appalling example of the deadly failure of "voluntary compliance" to address violations at Sago, due primarily to an absence of penalties that might have served as an incentive (as if anything beyond worker safety should have been needed) for corrective action by the mine's owners:

During the last three months of 2005, including an inspection that took place less than two weeks before the explosion, federal inspectors found 46 safety violations at Sago, including 18 deemed "significant and substantial." The proposed fines for those infractions came to $2,286. When a 62-year-old miner died at another mine owned by ICG last year due to the company's failure to fix a safety violation, the resulting fine was only $400.

When are the President's apologists in the middle and working classes going to finally realize just how dangerous this Administration and its chummy country club attitude is to their financial and even physical safety?! It's time for Conservatives to begin sharing some of the load we Liberals have been shouldering alone for over 5 years, and start seeing the Bush business model for the elitist monster it is.

We need to demand real responsibility of our leaders in Washington, and must call for an end to the lackadaisical dismissal of workers' rights and protection that has become a trademark of our supposedly "booming" economy. If a refusal by Sago's owners to correct known violations led to the terrible events of last week, then those individuals are criminally responsible in no small way for the miners' deaths.

And we should insist that they, and all those complicit in the Sago situation, be held accountable. That includes a government that has steadily let this and other industries literally get away with murder at our expense, and has openly pledged to do more of the same for the next three years.

Mr. Conason is right to hope that the media will not let this story become a forgotten "flavor of the week." As he concludes,

Print journalists will do the job, but their impact is minimal compared with television, which must prod us when we begin to forget. Are CNN's Anderson Cooper and the other correspondents who hovered around Sago merely empathetic voyeurs? Quite literally, we shall see.