Criminal mine owners protested

A “picketline for justice” went up on Jan. 12 around the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue where Wilbur L. Ross & Co. has its New York offices. According to the flyer for the event, put out by the International Action Center, Million Worker March, and NY Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, “Billionaire Wilbur Ross controls the International Coal Group (ICG)” that owns the mine in Sago, W. Va., where a dozen mineworkers died earlier this month. The organizers’ intent, in addition to showing solidarity with mine workers everywhere, was to expose this individual who the media has not denounced as a criminal—in contrast to the multitudes of poor people and political prisoners incarcerated in the U.S. prison-industrial complex.

The flyer, headlined “Twelve miners didn’t have to die: Corporate greed and Bush cutbacks killed them,” was received by hundreds of rush-hour commuters in midtown Manhattan. It continues, “ICG pocketed nearly $16 million in profits from this coal mine that racked up 208 safety violations in 2005 alone, including 19 roof-falls.” Apparently the investors did not see fit to use these profits to improve the conditions for the workers who made them rich. Meanwhile, a series of cuts in funding and personnel for the Mine Safety and Health Admin i stra tion made it easier for the company to get away with this deadly neglect.

The first people to get the picket line going were two activists from Montclair, N.J. One of the women told Workers World, “This is another show of what the administration’s cutbacks are doing. They don’t care about the people—the workers.” A regular participant in weekly peace vigils in her town, she added, “Bush says he’s making us safer, but what happened in the hurricanes and in this incident tell you how safe we are” when billions of dollars are diverted into the war machine. Her picket sign read, “Bush cutbacks killed in New Orleans and West Virginia.”

A man rushing home stopped long enough to thank the picketers for being there and to take a copy of Workers World. He had lived in West Virginia and he said, “I see how the mine companies treat the people there.” His view was that the educational level is kept low purposely so that people have no other option but to work in the mines.

From the bakery at the foot of the office building came two Black women, speaking to each other in French. They engaged in a discussion with one of the picketers, and summarized the problem in three words: “It’s our government.”

Another very supportive passerby turned out to be from a long line of miners—not in West Virginia but in Bolivia, where the predominantly Indigenous mineworkers have new hope for better conditions under the administration of anti-imperialist President-elect Evo Morales.

Speakers wrapped up the event by calling for more demonstrations at these and other offices of the “vulture capitalists” behind the scenes of this industrial disaster in a non-union workplace. Readers can check on-line at www.peoplesvideo.org for the full text of the flyer and for footage of the picketers.