 |
| Families of Turkish coal miners in Soma |
The words of an old
song have been running through my head for the last few days. Maybe you
remember the Bee Gees. I guess they had a little something for everyone, since
their musical career spanned five decades. The song I’m remembering, though,
was their first major hit, released in 1967. It’s a fictional monologue by a
coal-miner trapped underground, showing a picture of his wife to his mate while
they wait and hope for rescuers to arrive:
In the event of
something happening to me,
there is something
I would like you all to see.
It's just a
photograph of someone that I knew.
Have you seen my
wife, Mr Jones?
Do you know what
it's like on the outside?
Don't go talking
too loud, you'll cause a landslide, Mr Jones.
I keep straining my
ears to hear a sound.
Maybe someone is
digging underground,
or have they given
up and all gone home to bed,
thinking those who
once existed must be dead.
Despite
the song’s title, Wikipedia assures
me there was no mining disaster in New York in 1941 – though there apparently
was one in Pennsylvania that year, and there had been one in New York State two
years earlier. The Bee Gees were perhaps inspired by a tragic accident in the Welsh
coal-mining town of Aberfan. In 1966, 144 people including 116 children were
killed when a mountain of debris from the mine collapsed, burying a village
primary school under 40,000 cubic metres of rock and shale. Very definitely,
however, a mining disaster has taken place in Turkey in the town of Soma,
Manisa, where almost 800 miners were underground when an explosion occurred. So
far 300 have been confirmed killed – with that death toll likely to rise.
Unlike the Bee Gees’ miners, who had
some hope of survival, so long as rescuers arrived before their pocket of air
was exhausted, the Turkish miners were mostly doomed from the beginning. Some
of them were working 420 metres below ground when the explosion occurred. The
horror of what happened down there in a hell of pitch blackness, burning coal
and an atmosphere of deadly poisonous methane gas can scarcely be imagined by
those of us for whom an electricity outage above ground is a scary experience.
The other aspect of the tragedy, of
course, is the shocking bereavement for hundreds, perhaps thousands of Soma
townspeople who have, at one blow, lost husbands, fathers, sons, neighbours,
friends and workmates. What makes it worse is that miners and union
representatives had apparently been expressing concerns about safety in the
mine for some time – with little response from company management.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan
reportedly cancelled a trip to Albania to visit the stricken town and express
his sympathy. He also apparently urged people to refrain from using the tragedy
as a political football. Some hope! Already there have been demonstrations
across the country, adding fuel to the fire of political unrest that has been
growing against the government for the past year, with some protesters adding
‘murderer’ to the list of accusations they are levelling against Mr Erdoğan.
How fair is it to blame the AK Party
government for the disaster in Soma? First of all, it must be accepted that the
Soma mine is operated by a private company, not the Turkish state. On the other
hand, say opponents, that is the heart of the problem – the privatization of
former state activities results in the application of bottom-line accounting
and principles of short-term profit such that worker safety and conditions of
employment figure very low on a list of management priorities.
Well, I have no personal experience
of coal mining, thank God, but I have been working in the private education
sector in this country for some years, and I have seen how owners and managers
of educational institutions treat teachers. With no union or professional
organisation to represent their interests, teachers often work in a state of
fear, knowing that their employment can be terminated without redress, and that
any comments they make about pay or working conditions can be a reason for
termination. If employers can treat university-educated professionals in this
way, it is easy to imagine that the lot of a coal-miner will be little removed
from servitude. Clearly, whatever social and economic gains have been made in
Turkey in the first years of the 21st century, there is a crying
need for improvement in workplace conditions, and the right of employees to
collective bargaining is fundamental to this.
To be fair, however, these problems
are not confined to Turkey. In 2010, 29 coal miners died in a similar tragedy
in New Zealand, again in a mine operated by a private company. A Royal
Commission found that government oversight of safety regulations had been
inadequate and that company management had been aware of dangers such as high
levels of methane gas. As a result, the company was ordered to pay compensation
to the bereaved families, but it was unable to do so, since it went bankrupt.
The CEO was absolved of blame on the grounds of insufficient evidence. I would
have thought that, in these days of grossly overpaid CEOs, one of the few
justifications for their obscene pay-packets would be strict liability in such
circumstances – but who am I?
Anyway, I thought it was a little
unfair that reports in NZ
news media on the Soma disaster concluded with the words, ‘Mining
accidents are common in Turkey, which is plagued by poor safety conditions.’ There is a website called the Coal Mining History Resource Centre which publishes a list of
recent fatal mining disasters. According to CMHRC, apart from the New
Zealand explosions, three of the worst in the past ten years occurred in the
United States.
The fact is that coal mining is an
extremely nasty business that few would willingly undertake if they had
alternative means of making a living for themselves and their families. According
to CMHRC, at the peak of coal mining in the United Kingdom, between 1900 and
1950, there were 84,331 injuries and deaths in mine accidents. In the same
period in the United States, according to the Mine
Safety and Health Administration of the US Dept of Labour, there were 452 accidents in coalmines involving injury
and death. It is, of course, technologically possible these days to make
conditions underground safer. Reports in the Turkish media are saying that
there are safe-room installations available for miners to take refuge in in the
event of high gas levels or explosions – but they are so expensive that mining
companies do not consider them economically feasible.
 |
| Open-cast coal mine in Alabama, USA |
I recently came across
the fascinating story of a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania called Centralia.
Apparently, back in 1962, a fire started in an exposed vein of anthracite coal
which then began to burn underground. All attempts to extinguish the fire
proved unsuccessful and the town eventually had to be abandoned because of
noxious gases emerging at the surface. Reports say that the fire could burn for
another two hundred and fifty years before the 12 km coal seam is exhausted. In
the mean time, the ghost town of Centralia has been erased from maps, and
roads that used to pass through it have been diverted.
Now, I understand,
when regulations are passed obliging companies to spend money on health and
safety, they either close their mines, or do what seems to be the norm in
developed countries – revert to open-cast or strip mining. The method here
is to use massive digging machines to excavate down to the seam and load the coal
on to trucks without the need for a large labour force of subterranean workers.
Admittedly this process does create a significant amount of environmental
damage – but as yet governments are less responsive to that cost. In the case
of the New Zealand Pike River mine, however, the fact that coal extraction was
taking place in a national park means that strip mining has so far not been
approved.
One report I read about the current
issue said that Turkey meets 40% of its current electricity needs from coal-burning
plants. I’m sure the government recognises that this is undesirable, and in
fact, they are planning to build at least two nuclear power plants to reduce
dependence on coal and imported natural gas. Nuclear energy itself, of course,
has its down side, as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima have shown us.
So what’s the government of a developing economy to do when its industrial base
is expanding and its middle class is growing and demanding higher living
standards (read ‘energy consumption’)? Out of curiosity I checked how the US
and the UK meet their electricity needs and the results were surprising, to me
at least:
In the US, the largest source of
electricity is coal-burning plants (37%), followed by natural gas (30%) and
nuclear energy (19%). In the UK, natural gas (40.4%) nudges out coal (32.3%) as
the major source, with nuclear power supplying 17.6%. According to Wikipedia,
coal-fired power plants are still far and away the largest provider of
electricity in the world. So what’s the answer? If you really feel sorry for
those coal miners, reduce your electricity consumption – but be aware that
those guys will then need alternative means of employment.
Clearly this whole business is not
merely a problem that Turkey alone is facing. In developed and developing
countries alike, the pressure is on to privatise activities that were once
considered the primary responsibility of the state, from education and health,
to public transport, telecommunications and energy supply. I will readily admit
that some of these services are more effectively and efficiently supplied by
private sector owners and managers. I well remember, for example, how long
we used to wait for a telephone connection in days gone by. On the other hand,
I question whether private enterprise can provide satisfactory health and
education to the majority when its first responsibility is always to its
shareholders, and turning a profit is inevitably the number one priority.
Short-term employment contracts, out-sourcing of functions formerly carried out
in-house (such as cleaning and catering), as well as the tendency to look for
cheaper labour in countries with lower standards of living and less stringent
labour protection laws, have created a global environment where concern for
human dignity and rights are given scant attention.
I really would like to think that
things are getting better, but I have serious doubts. I recently had reason to
look up statistics on car
ownership around the world. As you would expect, the USA ranks pretty high,
though its rate of 80% puts it in 3rd place behind billionaire
playgrounds San Marino and Monaco. New Zealand and Australia also feature
pretty well up the list, with 71 and 72%. Northern Europe, again as we might
expect, is less dependent on the private car. Denmark, for example, where the
bicycle is a lifestyle choice, has a 48% rate of car ownership. City-dwelling
Turks, suffering for hours in the gridlock of Istanbul traffic, will perhaps be
surprised to learn that their nation’s rate is a mere twenty percent. If Turks
and the Chinese (current ownership rate 10%) approach even the proportion of
cars owned by Danes, never mind Americans, what hope is there for planet Earth?
So I say to my Turkish neighbours
(and American and New Zealand friends across the oceans could set an example here) – if you
really care for those coal miners, get yourself a bicycle and an Akbil,
start using the Metro and the Metrobus, and give serious thought to reducing
the size of your carbon footprint.
