Notes From the Underground : Soviet Miners in Particular Could Benefit from U.S. Technical Aid

Soviet coal miners are continuing to protest their government’s failure to make good on promises to improve their squalid, materially impoverished and largely hopeless lives. The miners’ recent 24-hour strike prompted some startlingly candid reporting about their plight by state-run television.

These are some of the things that being a coal miner in the Soviet Union means: It means having a life-expectancy only three-quarters that of other Soviet men. The average Soviet coal miner can gloomily anticipate being dead by the age of 48; Soviet men in less hazardous occupations can expect to live to 64 years. The retirement age for miners is 55. Only 5% of them survive to that age.

It means standing a good chance of dying in a work-related accident. Each year, about 800 miners are killed on the job. Such appallingly high tolls are not, of course, unknown in American history. Happily, they are a thing of the past. In 1988, U.S. coal-mining accidents took 55 lives.

And it means that because of illnesses, injuries and overall poor working conditions, miners physically age and deteriorate far faster than other Soviet men. Miners between the ages of 35 and 39, according to the Soviet television report, appear to be physiologically equivalent to men in other occupations aged 55 to 59.

For Soviet miners, even more than for other Soviet citizens, the revolutionary promise of a materially better life, of a “workers’ paradise,� has proven to be an especially dismal lie. Mikhail Shchadov, minister of the coal-mining industry, concedes that hundreds of miners have died because of something as simple as a lack of timber to properly shore up mine shafts. This in a country rich in forests! Men are sent to labor 4,000 feet underground with next to no thought given to providing for their survival.

There have been no independent unions to fight for better conditions in the mines, no Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set standards and order enforcement of safety procedures. There is, though, a self-evident need for changes that could spare and prolong miners’ lives. The United States has offered technical help in a number of areas to the Soviets. Mine-health and -safety programs could easily be added to the list. American miners, mining unions and mining companies have learned the hard way what can be done to reduce hazards underground.

An offer to apply that expertise to improve working conditions in Soviet mines would be a true humanitarian service.