[r0p3]

> You don't want to kill your workers. If you do, soon there will be no workers to mine your coal, or man your rigs or whatever you need them for. The ones that work for you now will die out and the new batch will see the death rate and go do something else, flip burgers or fix cars or whatever.

I think this underestimates how desperate people were (are) for jobs that pay enough to raise a family on. I.e. there is almost always desperate surplus labor at the bottom.

Just my anecdotal experience.

[MarkMc]

From Steven Pinker's great book "Enlightenment Now":

The miner, it was said, “went down to work as to an open grave, not knowing when it might close on him.” . . . Unprotected powershafts maimed and killed hoopskirted workers. . . . The circus stuntman and test pilot today enjoy greater life assurance than did the [railroad] brakeman of yesterday, whose work called for precarious leaps between bucking freight cars at the command of the locomotive’s whistle. . . . Also subject to sudden death . . . were the train couplers, whose omnipresent hazard was loss of hands and fingers in the primitive link-and-pin devices. . . . Whether a worker was mutilated by a buzz saw, crushed by a beam, interred in a mine, or fell down a shaft, it was always “his own bad luck.”

A railroad superintendent, justifying his refusal to put a roof over a loading platform, explained that “men are cheaper than shingles...There’s a dozen waiting when one drops out.”

[pwg]

Another aspect unstated in the article is that in the parts of Appalachia being referenced in the article, and during the time frames given, often coal mining was one of very few jobs even available to the residents to begin with. When your majority work choices amount to: "coal miner", "logger", or "unemployed" one does not have a lot of options.

The Appalachian mountain coal mining areas are rough country, and until relatively recently (last 20 some years or so) there were not many job options available (beyond mining or other hard labor jobs) for the families that live in those areas. Even today in 2018, while better, the job opportunities pale in comparison to the opportunities in major metropolitan cities.

Source: Maternal grandparents are from VA portion of Appalachian mountain chain, grandfather was a coal miner, although luckily he did not succumb to black lung disease. Large extended family still lives there.