This is supposed to be the 21st century, isn't it?  You sure wouldn't know it when you read the labor news.  It seems like two steps forward in the 20th century and three steps back for workers now

Black lung disease is on the rise among coal miners.  Instead of decreasing in the 21st century, it's increasing.

It's especially ironic since President Obama has thrown his lot in with those who believe in the myth of "clean coal."

David Macaray at Counterpunch explains about black lung increase.

"NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health), which functions more or less as OSHA’s “research arm,” reported that, in 2005-2006, approximately 9-percent of workers with a minimum of 25 years of service tested positive for black lung.  This represented a startling 5-percent increase in incidence rates from the late 1990s. 

"As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease.  In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents.

"What was most alarming about NIOSH’s findings was the number of younger miners—those in their thirties and forties—found to be suffering from black lung.  That these younger miners didn’t begin their careers until after passage of the landmark 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act (which established strict coal-dust standards)—the law designed to prevent black lung—shows that something is very wrong. 

"Black lung disease is the common name for coal worker’s pneumoconiosis. Caused by the prolonged inhalation of coal dust, pneumoconiosis can lead to other serious related ailments, including chronic bronchitis, emphysema, fibrosis and tuberculosis.  The disease cannot be cured or reversed, and death by black lung is horrible and excruciating.  As the lung tissue continues to harden, the sufferer experiences shortness of breath and pain.  Dying of black lung is death by gradual suffocation.

"There are several theories for the rise of black lung:  Miners are being forced to work longer hours, thus exposing themselves to more dust at a given stretch; more efficient machinery is being used, creating finer and greater volumes of dust; and with the demand for coal and the price of energy rising dramatically, mines thought to have been “panned out” are being reopened.  These mines have smaller seams of coal which require cutting through more rock to get to, which, in turn, creates more deadly dust (respirable crystalline silica).

"Several months ago, in a telephone conversation with Phil Smith, Communications Director of the UMW (United Mine Workers), I asked why so few coal miners belonged to his union....

"Smith’s answer was stunning.  'They’re afraid,' he said.  Afraid?  These men who tunnel two miles into a rock and then set up shop inside a claustrophobic space the size of a large closet—these men who risk life and limb on a daily basis doing things most people would consider so wildly hazardous as to be insane—are “afraid”?

:Smith said the mine owners have become so powerful and well coordinated, they practically dictate the industry’s terms of employment .  They do this through fear and intimidation.  Miners who attempt to organize their fellow workers, or who express a casual interest in joining the UMW, are routinely fired and black-balled.  In a tightly-knit industry like mining, when you get your name put on a list of "union activists,” you risk never working again.

"A miner in a union mine who voices a concern over too much overtime or excessive dust gets heard; a miner grousing about a safety issue in a non-union mine risks being told to shut up or, worse, being fired and black-balled.  Simple as that."

And to be jobless in the United States, where unemployment is in double digits, is another terrible burden in the lives of tens of millions of already struggling regular people.

Yet, as the Obama administration and its recent budget cavalierly expect us to live with massive unemployment, we get this awful news from the Department of Labor that Dave Lindorf writes about at The Public Record: 

"But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we “minsunderestimated,” as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.  The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that because of a “modeling error,” it misstated the number of jobs lost between March 2008 and March 2009 by 17 percent. In hard numbers, that is to say, the BLS was reporting that a record 4.8 million jobs were lost during those 12 months of economic collapse, when in fact the job loss total was actually 5.6 million.

"They missed 824,000 lost jobs! Just to give you an idea of how many people that is, we’re talking about 10 percent of the population of the city of New York, and more people than the entire population of San Francisco.

"And it gets worse.  The same broken model was used for the next year, so that while we’ve been getting all those soothing words about how job losses are slowing, and about how the economy is going to start coming back, in fact, the number of jobs supposedly created or added during the past nine months has actually been overstated by almost one million! That would be the entire population of the cities of Seattle and Miami combined.

"Thanks to political pressures dating back to the Reagan administration, and continued through the Clinton and Bush years, that figure has carefully excluded people who have been jobless for over a year, people who say to Labor Department pollsters that they have “given up” looking for work, and people who are working at a part-time job because they can no longer find full-time employment.

"By any fair standard, all these people are unemployed too, but we just erase them from the books. If we counted all these people, as the Labor Department used to do back in the 1970s and earlier, the real unemployment rate would be over 18 percent today in America."