3) Given only the facts described in the case above,

should the MSHA be held morally responsible for the

death of the 29 miners?

The U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health

Administration (MSHA) works to prevent death, illness, and
injury from mining and promote safe and healthful workplaces
for U.S. miners. This federal agency is supposed to develop
and enforce safety and health rules for all U.S mines
regardless of size, number of employees, commodity mined,
or method of extraction. MHSA is also supposed to provide
technical, educational and other types of assistance to mine
operators with working cooperatively with industry, labor and
other federal and state agencies to improve safety and health
conditions for all miners in the United States.

Unfortunately, MSHA had some problems within the agency

itself. The first problem is that the agency did not have
enough staff to efficiently run the operations and to continue
working to prevent and reduce injuries, illnesses and death in
the mining industry. In fact, to put strong enforcement as well
as active outreach, education and training, and technical
support to the mining industry, to protect miners as the
primary objective, it needs many staffs and workers. For
example, because there were only a few numbers of
inspectors in the agency, just to do an inspection of the mines
owned by the Massey Energy Company, the existed inspectors
were overworked. The second problem is there seemed no
enough control over the few workers. More than half of the
inspectors failed to attend required training courses, the
agency did just let it past because they thought it was
understandable because of what aroused from the first
problem, they were overworked. The agency did not keep
track of their attendance and did not sanction them either.
These two problems are problems within the agency, but it
still contributed to how the agency did its job.

Despite of the problems above, MSHA still did its job in

investigating and doing inspection towards Massey Energy
Company. However, when an MSHA inspector comes onto a
Massey mine property, the workers in the mine were all
indirectly told by an announcement via radio from the guard
gates to correct any deficiencies or direct the inspectors
attention away from any deficiencies. Moreover, the only
people who were allowed to accompany the MSHA inspectors
are Massey company people, so no coal miner at the mine can
point out areas of concern to the MSHA inspectors. This made
the MSHA inspectors could not really see what was really
happening at the mine, even though they may have put all
 the best effort the had but the resources where they get the
information from were not trustworthy and did not point the
actual concerns.

From that, we think that MSHA should not be fully held

responsible for the death of the 29 miners. Although MSHA
has the authority to close down the mine and actually had
closed some sections of the mine, it had not been able to and
never forced to closed the entire mine to shut own in order to
force it to make significant changes. It was because Massey
Energy Company always had challenged several of citations
and corrected enough of the significant and substantial
violations given by MSHA and again Massey Energy Company
did not let MSHA to see what was really happening.

4) The miners seem to have had some idea of the risks of

working in the Upper Big Branch Mine. Should they be
held at least partially responsible for their own deaths?

It can be said that these miners held responsible for their own
deaths because they actually knew that they would face the
great risks by working in the Upper Big Branch Mine or maybe
they just realized when they have started working for the
company. Because Upper Big Branch Mine, especially CEO
Blankenship, was aggressively anti-union with only 79 out of
5,851 workers were still unionized in 2009. For the un-
unionized workers, although they knew the risks it was not like
they had any other option beside continuing to work and to
obey their superiors and ignoring the risks. They have no right
to refuse to do work they think is unsafe. Being threaten that
they would lose their job if they refused to work, they had no
other option but to continue working and operating even with
a lack of air or in unsafe condition, because in the end they all
need the job to make a living.

So, rather saying the miners are responsible for their own
deaths. It is more wisely said that they are the victims of all of
this with the caged pressure feeling. The company kind of
created a cage for the miners.