Trump Has Handed Coal Miners a “Death Sentence.” But They’re Not Going Without a Fight.

Last Tuesday, a small group of retired coal miners gathered in front of the headquarters of the Department of Labor with a rather ambitious goal: to get Donald Trump’s attention.

Due to the ongoing government shutdown, the streets of downtown Washington, DC, were far from bustling, but a few passersby still stopped to peer at the 80 or so camo-clad demonstrators and read the signs they bore: “Silica Kills,” Stand With Us! Enforce the Silica Rule!,” “Coal Miners Lives Matter.” The protest was an act of both proud determination and brutal desperation. A hard-won federal rule limiting miners’ exposure to respirable crystalline silica was meant to go into effect on April 14, but the Trump administration has refused to enforce it. The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which is nestled within Trump’s Labor Department and is now led by a former coal industry executive, voluntarily allowed this to happen.

As I reported for In These Times, the rule would have cut the allowable exposure level of the deadly dust—20 times more toxic than coal dust and a major cause of black lung disease among coal miners—in half. The Department of Labor had estimated in 2024 that, with proper implementation and enforcement, the rule would save thousands of lives. Instead, coal miners across Appalachia continue to suffer from its absence. United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) International President Cecil E. Roberts characterized the delay as “a death sentence for more miners.”

Former Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su agrees. “We strengthened respiratory protection standards for miners against all airborne hazards — not just silica dust,” she wrote recently. “Trump’s DOL is not enforcing this rule, and because of that, workers will die. This isn’t just cruel to miners. If Trump’s DOL reverses protections on one of the most dangerous jobs, what protections are they willing to enforce?”

There is no good reason for the delay, even taking into account various coal and construction industry lobbyists’ insistence that the rule is too onerous to follow. This is not a new problem, as they are well aware, and this silica standard is not particularly radical. Miners and public health experts have argued that the new 50-microgram threshold it sets is still far too high, and have expressed concerns that the rule’s current form will allow mine operators far too much leeway in terms of inspections and engineering controls. It’s also about 50 years too late.

Back in 1974, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health began sounding the alarm on silica and the dire threat it posed to the nation’s coal miners. It still took until now for even a watered-down regulation to make it (almost) out of the gate—that is, until Trump’s Department of Labor stopped it in its tracks.

This issue is not unique to coal miners. The danger that silica poses to the human body has been felt far beyond Appalachia and across numerous industries, from construction and metal/non-metal mining to countertop installation and long-haul trucking. Silica exposure can lead to an array of serious respiratory ailments, including lung cancer, emphysema, silicosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as well as the most severe form of black lung: progressive massive fibrosis. Coal miners do have several unfair disadvantages here, though. The current allowable level of exposure for every other type of worker in the country is set to 50 micrograms per cubic meter during a 10-hour shift; for coal miners, that number is doubled. In Central Appalachia, thinned-out coal seams and technological advances in heavy machinery have forced miners to dig through more and more rock in pursuit of coal—and that rock is laden with silica particles, which are released into the air with every hammer blow. Taken together, that means that many coal miners (particularly those who work underground) are exposed to much higher levels of silica than anyone else in America. As a result, more of them are getting sicker, faster. Black lung is no longer an “old man’s disease”—now, it’s coming for the young too.

“Unfortunately we’ve seen miners who have complicated black lung, or progressive massive fibrosis, with less than 10 years of coal mining experience,” Dr. Leonard Go ,pulmonologist and assistant director of the Mining and Education Research Center at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health, told The Nation after the rally. “That could be people in their 20s, people who are young enough to be thinking about lung transplants— exchanging one disease for another. And to get a lung transplant, you have to have what’s referred to as end-stage lung disease; in a way, it’s kind of like having died. You would not live to 70, 80 years old with that lung disease if you’re getting transplanted in your 40s.”

That harsh reality is exactly what miners and occupational health experts have been trying to avoid for decades. While this new silica rule is only a step in the right direction, the fact that it’s been left to languish has imbued those who fought for it with a renewed sense of purpose. They’ve worked too hard for too long to see it fall apart now, and this latest betrayal is nearly too much to bear, especially coming as it does from an administration that has sold itself as “pro-coal” and committed to “the American worker.” On the other side of the DOL building, an enormous banner of Trump’s face stared blankly into space as the miners spoke haltingly about their agonizing plight. Some of the older women held color photos of their late husbands, who they had had to watch die from the dreaded disease.

There were many widows in attendance, but there was at least one retired miner there representing the industry’s strong but small female minority. 77-year-old Brenda Ellis spent 24 years working underground in the mines in her native Wyoming County, West Virginia. Nine years ago, she started to realize that something was wrong. “I was out of breath, I had no energy, gained all this weight and it just keeps on piling on,” she told me, wrinkling her nose. It took her six years to get diagnosed properly and access her black lung benefits. She’ll be starting oxygen soon, and will have to wheel around a tank of her own. That day, she was in DC representing her union, UMWA Local 1713 in Pineville, West Virginia, where she is the recording secretary and a fervent voice in the fight against black lung. She steadied herself on my arm, and looked up at me with a mischievous glint in her blue eyes. “I guess I’ll take it easy the day after I die!”