FastDOLz/msha-mine-safety-violations-by-operator

MSHA Mine Safety Violations by Operator

Canonical version: The authoritative, most current version of this dataset lives at https://fastdol.com/datasets/msha-mine-safety-violations-by-operator. This Hugging Face copy is a mirror; refer to the canonical page for the latest data and documentation.

Mine safety enforcement records from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), aggregated to the operator/contractor level. Every entity cited in MSHA's enforcement history, with violation counts, severity breakdowns, penalty totals, and cross-agency enforcement indicators.

40,720 operators · 3,076,282 violations · $1.81B in proposed penalties · enforcement spanning 1994–2026.

What this is

MSHA publishes mine safety violations as a flat list of individual citations through its Mine Data Retrieval System. This dataset resolves those citations to the entity actually cited — the operator or contractor — so you can see which companies accumulate violations across multiple mines and over time, rather than reading citations one at a time.

Violations are attributed to the cited party. When a contractor is cited at another operator's mine, the violation is attributed to the contractor; the contractor_violations column counts those cases.

Cross-agency signal

This is the part you won't find in MSHA's raw data. Each operator is matched against other federal enforcement sources, so a mining company's MSHA record sits alongside its OSHA and Wage and Hour Division history:

• 11,114 operators also have OSHA violations on record
• 2,627 also have WHD wage enforcement cases
• The agencies_alltime field shows every agency with activity against the employer (e.g. MSHA|OSHA|WHD)

An operator can look like a routine MSHA filer and still be stacking enforcement across several agencies once the records are joined. Among the 40,720 operators, 1,416 appear across MSHA, OSHA, and WHD together.

Columns

Column	Description
employer_id	Stable FastDOL entity UUID (blank where the operator did not resolve to a profile)
operator_name	Cited operator or contractor name
state	Primary state
naics_code, naics_description	Industry classification where available
parent_name	Parent company where a corporate rollup is known
total_violations	Total MSHA violations
total_events	Distinct enforcement events
mines_cited_at	Number of distinct mines where the entity was cited
penalties_proposed_total	Total proposed penalties (USD)
penalties_paid_total	Total paid penalties (USD)
ss_violations	Significant and Substantial (S&S) designations
high_negligence_count	Violations classified high negligence
reckless_disregard_count	Violations classified reckless disregard
contractor_violations	Violations where the cited party was a contractor
earliest_violation, latest_violation	Date range of cited violations
states_active	Pipe-delimited states with activity
mine_names	Pipe-delimited mines associated with the entity
osha_violations, osha_penalties	Same employer's OSHA record (0 where no match)
whd_cases, whd_backwages_total	Same employer's WHD record (0 where no match)
agencies_alltime	Pipe-delimited list of agencies with recorded activity

Source and methodology

Violation data comes from MSHA's Mine Data Retrieval System (U.S. Department of Labor), updated weekly. Cross-agency indicators are derived from FastDOL's entity resolution pipeline, which resolves 20 data sources across 13 federal agencies into roughly 2.25 million U.S. employer profiles.

One methodology note worth reading before you rely on the joins: MSHA entity resolution uses normalized name plus state only, because MSHA records do not carry ZIP codes. This is a looser key than FastDOL's standard name + state + ZIP match, so the cross-agency joins on this dataset carry somewhat higher match uncertainty than the rest of the platform. Treat OSHA/WHD links as strong signal, not a guarantee.

License

Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the data, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit to FastDOL. Derived from U.S. federal government records; FastDOL does not warrant the accuracy of the underlying agency records, so verify against the source for any consequential use.

Citation

Turner, B. (2026). MSHA Mine Safety Violations by Operator (Version 1.0) [Data set]. FastDOL. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20572372 Canonical source: https://fastdol.com/datasets/msha-mine-safety-violations-by-operator